Torvald is displeased to discover he missed some action, but when it is pointed out to him that he isn’t equipped to fight the non-corporeal, he sullenly accepts that this was no great loss.

  “So are we going in now?” he asks.

  “We still don’t really understand what’s inside,” says Sabreena. “The spirit said a bunch of cryptic shit, but it didn’t really —“

  Torvald groans impatiently. “Look, this is the point, isn’t it? We’re here to go in there. So what if we just shut the fuck up and go already?”

  The other members of the party look at each other uncertainly.

  “He has a point,” Janette says.

  “Cool,” says Torvald, and strides through the doorway.

  “That wasn’t consensus!”

  Alys’s words come too late. Torvald has passed through the black fog.

  The company listen for any sign that Torvald has encountered something, either a shout or a fight or maybe a manly scream, but they can’t even hear the sound of his footfalls. No sound passes through the fog.

  Mack sighs, says, “All right, well, I guess I’m going, too.” He is followed by SyemDyesit, then Janette, then Sabreena.

  Onderrew says, “After you, my lady,” gesturing the way forward to Alys, then follows her through.

  The passage through the fog is blinding, and the fog itself is palpably dense. It passes through the weave of their clothes to roll over their skin, riding each inhale and exhale like smoke. Its touch is feather-soft but unnerving in its consuming embrace.

  And then it is gone, releasing them into an open room. The stick with the light spell cast on it lies on the floor, still active and illuminating the space very well. The room is rectangular, longer to the right and left than it is from the entrance to the far wall, and seems to be made uniformly of roughly hewn yellow-brown stone.

  Besides themselves, it is also apparently empty.

  They begin their investigation by assessing again for obvious signs of traps or presences not their own. Then they spread out, tapping at odd looking bricks on the floor. Mack checks for switches or hidden seams. Torvald projects killer intent to deter anything unseen that might try to pick a fight. Sabreena listens for movement from anyone or anything unfamiliar. Janette looks for signs of whatever might have disturbed the spirit she now has bottled in her inventory. SyemDyesit sniffs out indicators of alchemical compositions or, that failing, unique mold signatures.

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  There are no seams or switches.

  There is no response to killer intent.

  The only sounds are those which have become familiar in the last several days of group travel.

  There is no sign of whatever disturbed the bottled spirit.

  There is a faint scent of mildew, but it not unusual — and any alchemical working done here was undertaken so long ago its evidence is impossible to detect.

  Alys, in going to check the wall to the right of the door, only just perceives something is unusual about how long it takes her to reach it, as though the room is taking too long to cross. But she arrives at the wall with no difficulty and checks it for signs of anything unusual. There is nothing.

  As she turns away from the wall, she notices a door in the corner at the far end of the room. The door definitely wasn’t there before; someone would have seen it.

  “Guys, I found something! There’s a door!”

  “Where?” asks Janette.

  “Over here, far corner.”

  As Alys turns to point the others toward the door, she realizes she can’t see them.

  “Oh — um. Did I… take a turn, somewhere?”

  The others can see Alys, however. From their perspective, she is walking on the surface of the wall at the far end of the room, somewhere near the ceiling. They still cannot see the door.

  “Alys, look up,” says Sabreena, then waves as Alys looks ‘up’ and stares in confusion.

  For the next several minutes, Sabreena tries to help Alys return to the floor on which they entered, first by pulling her away from the wall upon whose surface she is walking, then by trying to reverse her path, hoping to find a hidden spell trigger. When this doesn’t work, SyemDyesit interrupts.

  “I think, perhaps, Alys looks at hidden door, and we look at opposite wall. Sabreena, return to entrance and do not think — just walk to room’s far end.”

  Sabreena does as SyemDyesit suggests, and just as Alys had, she notices the wall seems to take an unusually long time to reach, as though the floor itself stretches and distorts to add multiple yards. As she touches the wall and looks to her left, however, she finds she is standing beside Alys, and their companions appear to be standing high on the wall above them.

  “It worked! Oh, hey, there is a door.”

  Torvald raises a critical brow. “So we just have to ignore each other while we walk across the room, and we’ll be standing on the wall?”

  “Seems so,” says Onderrew. “Who’s next?”

  One at a time, the rest of the party gathers on the wall in front of the door.

  The door appears to be made of wood, and its surface is etched with a pattern like the woven fibers of a burlap sack. Its hinges indicate it ought to open into the room where they stand, but there is no doorknob — other than the hinges, there is nothing to indicate how the door should open. From a visual inspection, no one in the party can find any clue as to how the door is meant to be opened.

  “I bet there was a key on the other side of the room,” says Mack. “Anyone know how we get back there?”

  Before anyone can make a nervous attempt at returning, however, Torvald says, “Come on, dude, you didn’t even try just opening it,” and reaches for the door.

  The moment his hand makes contact with the cloth-like carving, the surface of the door sinks inward. The gravity beneath their feet shifts abruptly, and they all fall forward — not into the door, but through its very surface.