Through Gates of Garnet and Gold (Wayward Children #10)

Prologue The Places We Go

THE PLACES WE GO

DOORS ARE MAGICAL THINGS. Always. It doesn’t matter whether they connect two familiar, well-known rooms or two entirely undiscovered spaces: to travel from one distinct location into another simply by passing through a portal, whether bound in wood or carved from stone, is a magical act.

Doors are symbols of security. They can be closed; they can be locked; they can be used to keep the inside in and the outside out. A door means captivity, in one context, and freedom, in another. Like all forms of magic, they are constantly changing, transformed by surroundings and by circumstance.

Almost as long as there have been people, there have been doors.

In the beginning, they were sheets of hanging leather or bundles of dried grasses, branches cut from plants with large, broad leaves.

They offered privacy and transition, not security, but they were a beginning, and their creation changed every world that they began on.

For doors were never the creation of a single world, never a close-kept secret or forbidden lore; doors were for everyone, and for everywhere.

Almost as soon as the first door was hung, the first Door opened from one world into another, hungry and questing for something that didn’t have a name.

No one knew about them in those days. Parents didn’t yet tell their children stories about monsters under beds and lurking in the backs of closets, didn’t yet have cause to fear the transition between one place and another.

But the doors were built, and the Doors were open, and everything was changing.

The first Doors were clumsy predators, unpracticed, swinging open for unsuitable victims and sweeping them away on wild adventures that they could never have anticipated.

The ones who survived most often returned to their homes with pockets full of parables and heads full of incredible, indescribable things.

They spread stories and sciences from world to world, speaking with a child’s innocence of the wonders they had seen on the other side of their journeys.

The children who did not return were often seen as a reasonable payment for the glories that the Doors enabled.

Time went on. The Doors became more skilled in their hunting, more targeted with their lures.

Fewer and fewer children returned to their worlds of origin, and for those they left behind, it was impossible to tell whether this was due to contentment or death.

Stories began to spread, stories of wonderful, terrible temptations that would steal children from their homes and families, never to return.

As the stories spread, the targets of the Doors learned caution, learned to avoid an impossible temptation, and more often turned away from the fantastic.

The flow of innovations and epiphanies from the other side slowed to a trickle, until the wonders from beyond the Doors could be dismissed as the imaginings of children, or the inspirations of a budding genius.

A story stopped the stories, a true story which, of necessity, began to fade into fiction as the Doors became less common and less easily seen.

But the exchanges never truly stopped. The Doors might take more care in their manifestation than they had in the beginning, might select their targets with more precision, but they still appeared.

They still stole, they still hunted, and nothing was going to change that, short of a massive upset in the nature of reality itself.

Children still walked through doorways, slipped through missing boards in fences, climbed under strangely shaped archways formed of tree boughs and shadow, and disappeared.

And sometimes those children came back.

Came back to a world that no longer had the vocabulary to describe what had happened to them, that no longer knew how to respect the fact that sometimes time was a ribbon, and ribbons can be tangled, or snarled, or woven into knots; that would treat them as children after they had saved an entire world and become someone entirely different in the process.

They came back for many reasons. They came back because their quests were ended, because they missed their homes and families, because they wanted to be children again, after all the wars were ended.

Or they came back because they had stumbled during a moment of weakness, and fallen through a doorway only halfway seen.

“Be Sure” was the commandment of the Doors, their requirement for passage and their only coin.

As long as their travelers were convinced of the rightness of their journey, it would continue smoothly and uninterrupted.

Let that conviction waver for even a moment, however, and they might find themselves dumped back in the world of their origin, abandoned by the Doors, unable to return to the world they had come to consider home.

It was perhaps inevitable that one of those children, whose certainty had wavered, would eventually begin to gather the others, plucking them from situations they no longer understood, from families who saw their experiences as dreams and their desires as delusions, and bring them together to support one another in their grieving for the Doors.

Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children was school and sanitarium combined, a place to recover from unimaginable wounds, and a place to relearn the world as it was after losing the world as it might have been.

She took all who had returned from their journeys, voluntary or not, and who still wanted to remember the wonders they had seen.

Much like the Doors themselves, Eleanor’s rules were simple and absolute:

No solicitation. No visitors.

No quests.