Total pages in book: 103
Estimated words: 99201 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 496(@200wpm)___ 397(@250wpm)___ 331(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 99201 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 496(@200wpm)___ 397(@250wpm)___ 331(@300wpm)
I shrug. “You’re the boss.” This remark earns me a dirty look. But I chuckle about it as she turns her attention to the second set of doors.
Immediately, she is disappointed. “There’s no place for a doorknob here.”
And sure enough, when I walk over to the second set of doors, she’s right. There isn’t.
“Look,” she says, pointing to the next set of doors. “These two don’t have a place for a doorknob either.” But then she brightens. “Oh! But these last two have a place for a doorknob!”
She’s just about to shove one of the doorknobs into the hole when I come up behind her and grab her hand just in time. “You don’t just stick them in there, Callistina. We need to think this through.”
She stares at me, looking confused. “What’s there to think through? These doorknobs go to these doors.”
“Well, we don’t even know what’s on the other side. There could be a dragon out there.”
Callistina frowns. “Why on earth would you say that?”
“Say what?”
“A dragon? Why would a dragon be on the other side of these doors?”
“It’s a figure of speech. It could be… a gorgon, or a cyclops, or a kraken for all I know. That’s the whole point. We don’t know.”
“And we’re not going to know unless we open the door.”
“Well, there are two of them. Two doors, two doorknobs. Might it be set up so that we open them both at the same time?”
“Oh.” She exhales. “OK. That makes sense. Here.” She thrusts a ruby-red doorknob at me. “We’ll put them in at the same time. Then we’ll take a look around and make a decision. Though there really is no decision to make. This is the last set of doors and they are the only ones with a place for the doorknobs. So like it or not, we’re going through.”
“Fine.” I can’t really argue with that, so I take the doorknob and face my door.
“On ‘earth,’ we put them in.”
“On what?”
“On ‘earth.’”
“I heard the word that came out of your mouth, Callistina. What I don’t understand is why you’re saying it.”
“Oh.” Her face brightens with a laugh. Her eyes even sparkle a little. “I mean… three. On three. ‘Earth’ is ‘three’ in Vincan culture. Remember? Breath, wind, earth, fire. One, two, three, four.”
“Can we just do it on ‘three,’ please?”
She shrugs. “Whatever. Ready?”
“Ready.”
“Breath,” she says. I roll my eyes. “Wind. Earth.”
I plunge my doorknob into the space where a doorknob lives, making the whole door shimmer. And then…
Callistina lets out a gasp. “What is happening?” But it’s not a frightened gasp. It’s a delighted one.
I understand her excitement immediately because the doors don’t lead to a place—well, they do. They must. But it’s more like they lead to… a person. Because there is movement beyond the doors. Jerking, rolling movement with a view of a great canyon. And off in the distance, mountains as far as the eye can see.
“Oh!” Callistina exclaims. “It’s a horse. Or something that walks like one. Look!” She comes up to me and points to both doors simultaneously. “They go to the same place, but it’s not a place, it’s a person. Rather, a point of view. Two points of view, actually.”
“Well, that’s stupid. Why would one need to be two people?”
“Because”—she looks at me like I’m some sort of simpleton, her words coming out slow, like I’m stupid—“there are two of us?”
I look back at the doors. “Hmm. You might be right. There’s one for you and one for me. But this is my point. This isn’t how doors work. There’s no point-of-view jumping.”
“Isn’t there?”
“Well… I’ve never heard of such a thing and I’m a god.”
“You’ve been out of the loop for a long time, Eros. Perhaps you might try wrapping your head around the idea that you’re missing information. Alternatively, you might just be stupid.” She sneers this last part at me, which I find comforting for some reason. Maybe because she’s been too nice for the past fifteen minutes and it’s really not like her to be both sane and amicable at the same time.
“Fine. Let’s assume you’re correct.” I pan my arms wide to indicate the open doors. “What do we do with this?”
“What do we…” She scoffs. “We walk through them, Eros. That’s what we do.”
“As you have already stated, this one leads to… someone or something riding an animal. Maybe, before we jump into riding a beast we’re not familiar with, we should consider all options.”
“What options? These doors are the only ones that are open.”
I look down the hallway, trying not to be Captain Obvious.
“No,” Callistina says. “We’re not going home. We didn’t even go on a single adventure yet, Eros. You can’t seriously want to go home.”
“Well, I would not mind a little adventure. But I feel like this is a set-up.”