The Antechamber: Book One

In the dim light, a page turns, upsetting the long dormant dust of forgotten years.

"The window, as I have called it," one book reads, "is a curious room crafted completely from an indestructible, green and glass-like substance; the substance is is quite thin, yet it is so remarkably durable that any force I have yet attempted against it has been completely ineffective in breaking it. It was fairly warm in there when Renard and I visited it; perhaps due to the mechanical whirring not unlike clockwork which can be heard, continually for the most part but stopping in short, twenty-second intervals. Renard said he felt the ground shifting, but I think it may have just been the way the floor was rumbling.

"Beyond the glass, which seemed to be shaped into a circular room with a rounded point at one side (perhaps not unlike a drop of water) we saw nothing but a sheer black void that stretched as far as could be seen. No point of reference within that murk was visible, although we admit that our pair of lanterns may not be have been good enough to penetrate the inky darkness. More light will be required to truly see what may be out there."

The page breaks there, and resumes on the next page with a new time marking.

"My earlier assumptions were correct, it seems, though the manner in which we discovered that fact was an interesting one. We did return, some days later, with an increased amount of light fuel and some stronger lights. Being able to see clearly, it was shown to us that the room was in a sort of teardrop shape, as I previously wrote, but some extra features we were not aware of became apparent. Firstly, the source of the metallic grinding was located; a series of immense cogs and gears beneath the transparent floor of the room, spinning the entire room in a slow circle. Though the door remained in its same position, it was exactly as Renard had mentioned on our last trip."

A small diagram fills the space here, detailing an interconnecting series of cogs underneath the outline of a tear-drop shaped room and a small note reading Cyclic window?

"Secondly, a metallic stand was situated in the center of the circular part of the room which we had somehow failed to notice before. The stand was roughly a meter high, roughly hewn from some sort of iron. It had, at its base, a round pedestal with some engravings on it - similar to the symbols from the Library, Renard noted, with some markable differences in the orthography. I am no scholar, but it seems they are more curled and snaking than squarish and crabbed like those leagues of dusty old tomes. Most interestingly to myself, a man of contraptions and puzzles, was the glass box at the top of the stand. It was wrapped in a tight cage of iron like a hand that was trying to keep its contents safe from prying hands like my own. A small hole in the top of the cage seemed like it might hold something about the breadth of a candle. Not wanting to waste time, I went with my first assumption; I filled the glass box with some oil and lit it.

"What happened then, was, frankly astounding.

"The glass box was, as I assumed, a prism, and the room itself a lighthouse of sorts. An immensely bright beam was shot out of the glass box in the center, towards the point of the teardrop, resulting in a wide spread of light outside the boundaries of the room. If I am to guess, I might say that it was a one-hundred and twenty degree angle of an eerie, bluish light which continued as far as I could see in that void. The room itself was lit up, revealing more of that strange script across its rounded walls and ceiling.

"As the room turned, it allowed this light to cover all possible angles in about an hour, including the doorway back to the hallway and its adjoining wall. To give a sense of scale to the size of this wall, it did not end before the light did. I do not know if it is infinite or simply very large; my first guess, arbitrary as it is, is that constructed space ends simply ends beyond the cyclic window.

"Renard and I have yet to discover the point of all this, if indeed there is any. No previously unseen feature was revealed by the beam of light, bright as it was. The symbols themselves moved about the glass as the room turned, but without knowledge of the language, that information is useless. Perhaps, even, the strange observation room has already passed its intended use. I will return to the cyclic window a few more times, to draw some further diagrams and record those etched symbols and their patterns of movement, but I fear it is a mystery that, on the whole, shall remain unsolved.

"Anyone interested in seeing this chamber for themselves may find it in the hallway; room 836."

Many diagrams and calculations and scribbles fill the following pages, finally ending in a transcript of the inscription on the pedestal.