She rubbed her hands together, warming them. Then she blew on her fingers for good luck. Finding the image of Alon Rhist, she pressed, and again the panel moved inward. “Two down, two to go.” But the next two were the hard ones, the guesses.

Farilane took a deep breath before pressing on the sleeping dragon image. After she had, nothing happened for a second, then it also settled inward. “Don’t do that to me, door!” she admonished. “I’ve spent eighty years and six months getting this far. I don’t like jokes!”

She rubbed her hands again and flexed her fingers. “Last one.” Farilane reached down to the bottom right side, and with another deeper breath, she pressed. The panel with the illustration of the tower and the waterfall retracted like the head of a startled turtle.

Click!

She held her breath and waited.

Nothing.

“A little anti-climactic, don’t you think?” She frowned at the door. Despite her withering glare, to which she added a loud sigh, the door continued to disappoint. With no other option, she gave it a gentle push, hardly more than a touch. The massive pair of doors swung inward.

Each was revealed to be eight inches thick, yet they opened wide without making a sound. Dwarfs: as ingenious as they are disingenuous. I wonder how many soon-to-be-child-slaves were offered up in payment for this bit of work? If there was one consistency in all the literature, it was that dwarfs were sometimes necessary but always evil. There were several cautionary tales illustrating the point. The two most famous were Gronbach and the Treasure of Neith and The Evil Dwarf of the Crescent Forest. Both were copies of copies that Farilane had found in less-than-pristine condition. To preserve the stories and make them more readable, she had re-worked them as The Dwarf and the Dairy Maid and Little Wren and the Big Forest. She made small changes for the sake of coherence and modern language conventions but kept the morals pristine: Dwarfs are ingenious, evil monsters. “So true,” she muttered as she gave the doors one last sneer.

After all the drama and years of research and study, the dangerous raids, infiltrations, and crypt pillaging, Farilane knew exactly what was behind the door: a massive chamber with a tiled floor, fresco-painted walls, and a domed ceiling. At the center, she would find a podium or altar upon which would be a massive tome bound in hide—perhaps animal, but more likely ghazel, dwarven, elven, or even human skin. The pages would have been gilt-edged and detailed with strange markings and drawings, and the entire tome would be sealed with huge metal clamps requiring a key—probably one carved from bone. She even pictured a single shaft of white light streaming straight down to illuminate the book in ethereal brilliance.

She lifted her lamp and stepped inside. As usual, reality disappointed.