With that, the guards silently beckoned me to turn. The room was large and dark. Overhead lights illuminated the oracle on her seat and spilled onto the guards, but the rest of the room was invisible. Before me lay large double doors. I could see light fighting to enter around the great doors' edges. As I walked toward the light, the doors began to open slowly, admitting more light. I could see that pottery and artifacts stood on display pedestals all around the room, whose charcoal gray ceiling stood at least forty feet above me. The floor and wall were also charcoal, efficiently swallowing the light the doors no longer contained. My steps were almost silent, as the room’s acoustics were impeccable.
The walk from oracle’s throne to the door was about sixty paces through the square, or cubic, room. My guards seemed neither threatening nor curious. Their faces–Caucasian-featured but negroid in color–seemed content and happy, though not gleeful. They were shorter than I and not particularly muscular. Perhaps they weren’t guards at all. I don’t know why I didn’t talk to them, but I said not another word exiting the room into a wide, beautiful forest of tall, old trees, birds, squirrels, leaves both brown and green, shrubs, and, in the distance before me, the sound of a creek or stream.
I did not know where I was or why, but I was somewhere that I wanted to be.