The room, when taken as simply a room, was nothing special. It was unusual in that it was a cylinder, but it was still made of the ‘correct’ material. Wood, nails, drywall etc. It was, in fact, a room. If you had to nitpick you could say the fact that the door was in the floor rather than the wall was the weirdest thing about the room itself. But it was still just a trapdoor. Everyone has seen them before.
Most of what was inside the room wasnt anything that a highly motivated person couldnt get, or make, or have made. Bookshelves which curved with the walls, stained glass windows in the wooden frames, a weird sort of chandelier. None of it was usual, but they werent impossible.
There were a few odd things, but you had to really look to see them. The room itself was a mess of things and furniture that seemed to have been deliberately arranged to make anyone who wasnt used to it disoriented. So you might miss the cage, or the mirror. Or the other door.
The room was not a secret. It was not hidden or private. Everyone knew where it was and – to an extent – what it was. If you wanted you could climb the tower it sat at the top of and enter it. If you werent welcome, you wouldnt stay long, the disorientating aspects of everything quickly making you want to leave. If you were welcome, though, you might see the owner appear. Well, youd never see them appear. Youd have your back turned to one part of the room and when you turned, theyd be there, as if they had been there the whole time. And then you could get down to business.
The owner of the room wasnt someone you just met. If you knew the person, then you knew them. It seems strange to specify, but that was the truth of it. They werent someone you met at the supermarket when your trollies ran into each other at the end of the aisle. They werent a coworker or a family friend. To know them, you already had to have known them. But, like the room, they werent a secret. Their name was known. Their names. Everyone knew them by a different name, and only the ‘correct’ ones would actually garner a reaction. They had several faces too. And most of them no one knew. It wasnt a matter of privacy or secrecy. They didnt truck with secrets, not really. This was something else. Something that only they knew the full history of.
The owner spent little time in the room, spending much of their life out. Whatever that meant depended on who was asking them. The owner didnt have family or coworkers, but they did have a few people who could generously be called friends, or approximations thereof. Each of them had a vastly different relationship with the owner. Take, for example, the young man who was sprawled out on a couch that was obviously too short for someone of his height to sprawl out on. He spoke with the owner, who he saw as an elderly asian woman and knew by the name of Mai, about the nature of reality; a subject the owner was more than able to speak at length about. But then there was the small girl, an eight year old who saw the owner as one of the characters from a video game her older brother played. The girl loved the character, even though in the game he was one of the evil ones. The owner spoke with her about family, about forgiveness and charity.
A different face for all aspects of their life.
Today there was no one in the room. The owner pushed the trapdoor up and entered. They wore a face that no one knew. That people looked at and immediately forgot. It was a mask more than anything and it was the one they wore most of the time. Lately they had not interacted with anyone with any depth. Something was wrong.
They wanted nothing more than to sleep. To rest and to leave the weight at the back of their head for another day. But that wasnt how the world worked. People and things and events didnt wait for anyone and while rest would come, and soon, now was the time for work.
The owner was under one of the huge multi-coloured windows and pulled a retractable desk out of the jumble of items that shared the space. As if with a practiced hand, only the desk moved as they pulled its legs down and sat it on the floor of the room.
Their eyes cast around the room without flickering towards the cage that hung just beside and above the mirror. They did notice that the mirror had lost its covering again and pulled the dull grey blanket back up from the floor and tucked it behind the frame. They ignored the two extra sets of eyes that stared at them as they did so.
The owner rummaged around several drawers and cases in the room. They pulled out things that they then laid on the desk. Paper, writing tools, a small carved green stone. As the items were placed, one by one, very deliberately the window frames shook in a sudden gust of wind from outside. The owner frowned, but didnt stop their search for all the items they needed.
A lit candle, a feather from something much bigger than existed today. Finally, they reached between the cushions of the sofa and pulled out a coin. It was old and looked like it had been left in a river for years, but there was a shine to it. Not a visual shine, it was a dulled silver colour. The shine was something you didnt see. You felt it. The owner felt it.
Six items placed on the desk. The six factions that the owner of the room had to deal with. They would all have felt this. This collecting and placement. None of them would actually do anything about it, of course. It wasnt that the owner was powerful in their own right; but the owner knew things and knowing things was more useful than having things. Right now they knew that a message needed to be sent. They would be exposed, vulnerable.
The other door was one of the bookcases. It moved in a myriad of ways and each opened to a different place. Each of those places would open back into the room. The owner considered these their vacation destinations, but they had made bitter enemies in each of them and they had to constantly struggle against any of them opening their side of the door. So the first thing they did to protect themself was to lock the case. To do this, they opened the case to a space of such blackness that the image of everything in the room felt like it was being sucked in. Everything looked just a smidge out of focus. The owner pulled a small velvet bag out of their satchel and sprinkled a pinch of golden dust into the void. As soon as it was beyond the doorway, into the void itself, it billowed away on some current where it bloomed into an intense golden light. Each particle of the powder glowing as bright as the sun. Instantly there was crazed activity in the void as lifeforms that had been waiting at the doorway scattered, terrified of the light. With the creatures rushing as fast as they could away from the door, the owner closed it until just a fraction of a millimetre of the void was visible. The room came back into focus with the exception of the immediate area around the crack in the door. The best way to lock the door from the other locations, was to leave it open at a safe one. Safe-ish.
The mirror had already been dealt with. For the owner, that was a constant struggle. You cant lock that door. No one could. They just had to keep it covered and hope none of their visitors got too curious. Even so, they double checked the boring blanket that covered it. It rippled in a breeze that wasnt there but the weight of the mirror pinning the blanket to the wall kept it in place. For now.
Which left the cage. Well, it left more than the cage, but of the issues that the owner prioritised, the cage was the only one that could cause issues while they sent their message. It was going to be hard to deal with it while not looking at it. And the inhabitant of the cage knew this.
In a time that felt like three lives ago, he owner had had many friends. They had been actively social. Gone places for the sheer sake of going there. Doing things because someone had asked them to.
But then they had opened their door to somewhere new. It had been their whim, and their whim alone, and they had unleashed something unknowably terrible onto the world. They had fixed everything, put it all to right but it had come at a cost. They had lost their identity. Lost their history. They were left with nothing. Except the cage and the creature that existed within it. One of the many creatures they had let into the world. The creature who had taken their identity and their history. Should the owner dare to look into the eyes of this thing, they would remember everything. The cage would open and it would all begin again. They knew all of this because the creature taunted them with this knowledge. The creature mocked their inability to do anything about it. Told them it was only a matter of time before it would happen again.
The owner took another rug, a rainbow one with lots of threads seemingly woven into it in random, arbitrary ways. Without looking at the creature who was not doing anything aside from hissing at them. The owner threw the rug over the cage and as soon as it was covered, the creature inside started violently throwing itself around, trying to knock the rug loose. For a few moments, the owner watched and made sure that it was on their firmly before sitting down at the desk.
The wind that shook the windows returned with a renewed strength. The owner was able to ignore this as they took the writing implement and touched its nib to the paper. At that moment, everything stopped. The cage, the wind and even the creatures deep into the void. The message was being composed and its words would determine the path of not just the owner, or the factions that stood against them, but each of the realms through the owners door. The creatures that the one in the cage represented. Everything. Everyone. What was written upon that paper would start wars or end hunger.
It has come to my attention, the owner wrote, their eyes closed tight.