considers this new opportunity and finds it tempting like a “big buzzing neon sign in the darkness that reads adventureland.” Elaine warns Quentin that After, where the keys and adventure wait, is outside of Fillory. And there, Quentin is not a king. However, Quentin does decide to go to After. Before he leaves, he is given a book called “The Seven Golden Keys,” and Eleanor makes Quentin and Julia two passports, “heavily scribbled over in colored pencil.” Quentin goes to find the key. The key “wasn’t terribly bright, and it wasn’t tarnished. It had the deep matte patina of an authentically old thing.” Julia takes Quentin’s hand before he lifts the key and feels “around in the air.” The key clicks, remains stuck in the air, and Quentin opens a door. When he looks up, he discovers that he has left Fillory and has returned to Earth.

On their first voyage, Quentin and his friends had traveled to Fillory thanks to their friend Penny’s expertise at entering the Neitherlands. They also had used a magic button to enter the Neitherlands. But now, Quentin will have to find an alternate route. He returns to Brakebills without success, at which point Julia takes over. Julia, who did not pass the entrance exam to Brakebills, had instead wandered across America until she found underground houses of people trying desperately to learn magic. Julia, it turns out, has mastered underground magic and her connections lead them to Venice where they find Josh, one of Quentin’s classmates from Brakebills. Unfortunately, Josh has sold the magic button to a dragon, but he introduces them to Poppy, an Australian who studies dragons. Through Poppy’s connections, Quentin is able to meet the dragon.

The dragon refuses to return the magic button to Quentin. However, it does explain to Quentin that “you do not know what a hero is. You think a hero is one who wins. But a hero must be prepared to lose.” Quentin thinks that the dragon is “scoldier” than he would have expected. The dragon goes on to explain that the “Neitherlands are closed. But the first door is still open.” Returned to his friends, Quentin and the others try to figure out what the first door might refer to. It is Julia who realizes that it is a reference to Christopher Plover’s house. They travel there and just as they are about to fall asleep in the house, the four of them wake up in Fillory.

They again board the Muntjac, but this time Eliot is in charge of the ship. A year has passed. Now, Benedict has become a master swordsman like Bingle and Eliot and has taken over Quentin’s quest for the magic keys. Eliot explains that he returned to the broken clockwork tree and did indeed stumble upon a quest of great significance. Quentin is distraught, saying “it was supposed to be me, not you!” However, now Eliot is the hero searching for the Seven Golden Keys of Fillory, a quest granted him by all the Unique Beasts. By the time Eliot had returned to Castle Whitespire, word had arrived that Fillory had begun to decay. They now have five of the keys, but are missing the one that Quentin found on After Island.

Soon after, they land on another island. Quentin sees Ember, the ram god of Fillory, and follows him deep into the forest of the island. When Quentin asks why Ember has not found the golden keys himself, the ram explains that

there are things that a man must do, that a god may not. He who completes a quest does not merely find something. He becomes something.

Quentin reflects on his adventures thus far. Back on Earth, he had thought that he wanted to return to Castle Whitespire more than anything. However, realizing that he has already turned his back on the castle for the chance of adventure, Quentin declares that he wants to be a hero. Ember leaves, and Quentin begins to wander through the island. He finds a castle and storms it with his magical powers. Eliot and his troops also arrive, but Quentin redoubles his efforts so that he can be the hero and realizes that this is what he is meant to be: “the Magician King.” When the attack is over, Quentin finds the hero of the fairy tale, “The Seven Golden Keys,” whose body is dead but soul is alive because of the power of the key. Quentin looks at him and reflects that “he’d crashed through a shared wall into an adjoining story. Enter the Magician King.” The man gives the key to Quentin, saying “you’ve paid for it. You paid the price.” Outside the castle, Quentin learns that Benedict died in the attack.

They give the key to Poppy, thinking that it will take her back to Earth. However, when Quentin looks through the doorway, it appears that Poppy has entered a wasteland. Quentin jumps through the door so that he can save her. It is a portal to the Neitherlands, and they are now buried in snow. Before they die of cold, Quentin and Poppy find Penny. He has joined the Order, a group of magicians that care for the Neitherlands. Penny asks Quentin to

think of the universe as a vast computer. We are end users who have gained admin-level access to the system, and are manipulating it without authorization.

Now, the “rightful administrators” have returned and are trying to remove the magicians’ access. Penny shows Quentin a Neitherlands fountain, at the bottom of which they see a

flat pattern of glowing white lines, like a schematic diagram of circuitry, or a maze with no solution. Among the lines, waste deep in them, stood a silvery figure. It was bald and muscled, and it must have been enormous....The giant was busy. It was at work. It was changing the pattern.

Penny explains that it is a god and wonders how it learned that end users had begun to use magic.

It turns out that the gods were alerted to the magicians because of Julia and her friends. When she had finished her training in the underground network, she joined other underground masters in France where they completed her training and had started to search for “deeper magic.” They decided to study religion and began to search for a god. Though they had searched for a benevolent goddess, whom they called “Our Lady Underground,” they instead called upon Reynard the Fox, who is not the playful trickster they believed him to be, but a monster. Reynard explains that

when you call on a god, all gods hear. Did you know that? And no human has called down a god in two thousand years. The old gods will have heard too.

He proceeds to kill Julia’s friends. Julia agrees to sacrifice herself for their lives. Reynard agrees and proceeds to rape Julia.

However, the Order does not know this. Penny explains that Quentin’s quest to find the golden keys will open a door for magic that is comparable to a hacker’s backdoor into a computer system. Now, Penny explains, Quentin’s quest has ended; the Order will take over. Quentin objects, and Penny points out that

I found the Neitherlands. I found the button. I took us to Fillory. You didn’t do all that, Quentin, I did. And I got my hands bitten off by the Beast. And I came here. And now I’m going to finish this, because I started it.

However, Quentin wins the argument by reminding Penny that he was assigned this quest by Ember.

Penny returns Quentin to the Muntjac. There, Quentin locates the sloth, whom he speaks with. The sloth explains that her name is Abigail and she is a psychopomp that can show Quentin the path to the underworld. She does not know why, but she feels it would be important for Quentin to talk to Benedict. Quentin agrees to go and when he arrives at the gate of Fillory’s underworld, he is told to to give up his passport to enter. Julia joins him, though no one asks her for a passport. When they find Benedict, he cannot see Julia. Julia has the realization that her experience with Reynard has left her without “the part of me that was human, the part of me that could die.” As the dead around them gather, Benedict explains that Quentin will never be able to return because they did not return his passport. He then gives Quentin the last of the golden keys, the one from After; he had kept it because he wanted to be a hero. Before they can leave, Martin Chatwin, the villain of the first novel, challenges Quentin. At that moment, Julia changes. She defeats Martin Chatwin and explains that she has become a “daughter of the goddess now. A dryad. I am partially divine.” The goddess appears and takes Quentin and Julia back to Fillory.

Aboard the Muntjac, they continue to sail the ocean until they are forced to walk through the water to their destination. Finally, they come to a wall on a thin sandy beach. There is a door with seven keyholes of different sizes. A man and a woman are waiting for them. The woman is Elaine, who explains that she cares for all of Fillory’s borders. They insert the keys and turn them, allowing magic and Fillory to continue to exist. Elaine informs them that they can go through the door to “The Far Side of the World.” Fillory is a flat world, and “the Far Side is to Fillory as Fillory is to your Earth.” Bingle, reminding them that he would never see Fillory again, leaves. So does Abigail, the sloth. Quentin is also desperate to go, but Elaine refuses to allow him through because he has no passport. Quentin is furious, but ultimately accepts it as his fate to be happy with Fillory. Julia also wants to go and find the tree that she, as a dryad, is connected to. However, Elaine explains that Julia must be punished for calling on the gods to increase her magical powers. Quentin volunteers to take Julia’s blame, and Elaine allows Julia to enter the Far Side of the World. To balance Julia’s crimes, they take Quentin’s crown. Ember appears and reveals that he must now return to Earth. After all, the hero does not get the reward; Ember explains that “the hero pays the price.”

Josh and Poppy decide to stay in Fillory, taking Quentin’s and Julia’s place as king and queen of Fillory. Quentin is returned to the Neitherlands where “stubborn green shoots were forcing themselves up between the paving stones, cracking the old rock, in spite of everything.”