Literature
The first portal 1. A world worn thin
Villa Elauria was found on top of a great white cliff that soared straight up as if to challenge the moons themselves. On sweet summer nights, she was a dwelling of shadows, nothing moved in her hundred rooms but a drift of curtain at a window and halfway along the gallery, the gilt hand of the grandfather clock. The waterside gate, always hung with a row of rusting iron implements, creaked softly in the sultry stirring of the air. When the mist rose from the ground and gathered around the silvered lily pond where the frogs sang, counterpointed by the hiss of the crickets, the night smelled wonderfully of briar roses. This was a place and these were hours where magic was borne about easy, sliding along smoothly like shimmering soap bubbles on the clear ice of a frozen lake, if a frozen lake may exit in the most clement part of summer. Later, one would learn, it had to do with how thin the patch of reality was here, a worn area like the elbow of a loved old cardigan, where the linkers