The world on the far side of the door was silent in a way that hurt the ears. Sound existed, but it did not travel unless given deliberate permission. Their footsteps produced noise only when they concentrated on making them real. The sky was a perfect, unchanging late-afternoon blue. The landscape was a wide plaza of white stone surrounded by arched colonnades that led nowhere.
In the exact center stood a second, smaller door—this one an ordinary wooden frame with no wall attached. Through it they could see the same plaza, the same sky, the same door, repeated.
Kael broke the quiet first. “I hate recursive architecture. It is showing off.”
A new figure waited beside the wooden door: not blank, but human, older, wearing the layered robes of a design none of them recognized. His eyes hel
