Hall of the five doors

The hall of the five doors is a round stone chamber in the campaign Zincirsiz ("Unchained"), reached by underwater channels and worked passages beneath the Vanishing lake of Elm. It has two old side doors and, facing them, three newer doors bearing inscriptions. The side doors are chained and look as though they have not been opened for a long time. Around the walls stand glass cases with keyholes, holding collections of books and armour, and in the middle, on a low square pillar, lies a written parchment under glass: the Four-line parchment. Large dark round holes open in the walls. There is no place to sit or sleep.¹²³

A hall out of time

The glass mists over more thickly the closer one comes, hiding what lies inside. The holes in the walls, dusty within, proved to be not narrow pipes but winding passages some two to two and a half metres in radius. Fearing that gas might pour from them, the companions gathered water in a vessel as a precaution. All of them felt at one moment that they were being watched from different directions, though no watcher was seen.⁴⁵⁶

No spell can be cast in the hall, and a spell cast outside stops working on entering it and resumes outside. Jonathan River found that a translating spell worked inside when cast from outside through his spectral book; but when he sent the book through the holes in the wall, its magic was blocked as if by a barrier and it vanished. He searched for hourglass sand and found none, and took the place for a station of time that holds things still within it.⁷⁵⁸

The three doors

Read through magic, the inscriptions on the three newer doors mean, from left to right, past, present and future. They can be opened by their handles; where each leads could not be read from them.²

When the companions turned to leave, they found that the entrance behind them had silently caved in and closed; who or what had done it was not seen. Jonathan chose the middle door, the present, as a way out, and refused Max's suggestion to take the parchment, for fear of provoking whatever dwelt there. Passing through, they found themselves entering the same hall again from the entrance side, with the present door before them once more and the collapsed entrance still collapsed.⁹¹⁰

The hall at other times

Through the door of the past, with the feeling of an ordinary doorway, they came into the same kind of hall, where a lord with a noble crest on his fine clothes stood with four or five armed men. The crest belonged to a house far from those parts, though its name could not be made out. The lord, Kuzon, did not know the way out either; he said that his party had entered in the twelfth year after Victory Day, and Jonathan said that his own came from some two hundred and fifty years later. Kuzon's men were dry and bore fresh marks of fighting. The collection had changed: Jonathan saw separate coloured books instead of the single great set of his own time, yet the central parchment was the same.^11121314

Through the present door they met ten or fifteen armed people of a more tribal look, who also knew no way out and gave the date as the twelfth year after Victory Day. Passing again, they met a lone beast, somewhat larger than a bear but leaner, scratching and sniffing at the wall, which they killed. Because the beast was not wet, they reasoned that the doors led to variations of the room. Each passage changed the book sets, cups and other pieces of the collection, but the single parchment at the centre never changed.^15161718

Max carved a spiral by a hole in the wall. When they passed through the door of the future, the spiral was still there, the first set of books they had seen had returned, the beast they had killed lay as very old fragments of bone, and the sound of water came from outside.¹⁹

In another version of the hall, two small creatures, said to be wizards transformed long ago, were trying to break the glass. They had broken one case and aged swiftly; within fifteen or twenty seconds they could no longer stand and fell. Jonathan took from the broken shelf, with protective clothing, an illustrated book of a ritual in an unknown alphabet.²⁰²¹

Beyond the next present door stood a talking stag, larger than usual, with two horns of different shape and colour and a sweet smell. It said that it was a fey, lost as well, that it had smelled the barrier to magic before it came in, that its own powers were cut off inside, and that, since it did not age, it feared being trapped forever. Jonathan asked it to break the glass over the central parchment after the companions went through the future door, and to wait some two hundred and fifty years in the hope that the ageing would not harm it. It agreed.²²²³²⁴

When they came back through the future door, the fey was still waiting. The central glass was broken and its mist gone; the things in the room that could age had aged, while the fey was untouched. Spells still could not be cast. It said that it had waited long, but had not counted the years.²⁵

The way on

In the room whose books matched the set of their own time, Jonathan took the parchment in his hand. A wind rose and covered all sight; Max wanted to make for a door but could not see it. When the wind suddenly ceased, the companions stood in a smaller, rougher room, a quarter the size of the hall, with a single ordinary door and smaller holes in the walls, the parchment still in hand. There they found the Amnesiac sleeper of Elm.²⁶²⁷