2073 words
Of all the decor in Professor’s tower, the spiral staircase was her favourite. It stood freely in the centre of her personal library, thick and solid, positioned to catch the eye before one stepped foot in the room. The steps and railings were ornately carved from the same walnut planks as the bookcases that surrounded them, while the central column was a single mass of perfectly uniform transmuted marble. Around it, the room was lit with torches of gleaming rose gold, and covered with rich green furnishings. The ample salary of a High Arcanium Professor was often wasted on someone with such little time to herself, and she took the opportunity to spare no expense.
As beautiful as the staircase’s form was, the real treat was the Professor’s enchantments. These were delicately carved by her own hand into a column of clay, which was then transmuted into the marble that grounded the staircase. The professor’s “tower”, of course, occupied the 39th floor of the Arcanium’s Tower of Quartz and Bone, a single storey—the staircase led nowhere! The top and bottom were linked: walking down one flight would lead to you emerging from the ceiling above where you started, and vice versa. A renowned research of static portals, her staircase was, in her not-so-humble opinion, one of the highest-quality examples in the entire Arcanium. A masterful application of the fundamentals, the static two-way portal pair, the same that a second-year might attempt to use to accelerate a rotten tomato to terminal velocity. In such a grand environment the effect was striking, and so perfect that it was uncanny.
When guests came over, for social dinners or for small meetings amongst her research partners, she would make a point of introducing them to her masterpiece. The portal connecting the two ends of the enchanted pillar, which were each set a short span into the floor and ceiling, was almost perfectly seamless. Even other academics, for whom this sort of magic was commonplace, were impressed, and without fail each and every guest would try the stairs for themselves, often trying both ways. The room was interesting at every angle, from the atlases plastered on the ceiling to the ornate carpet covering the floor. The Professor had re-designed her library to maximize the experience of her showpiece. It was always a hit.
In the months after its installation, she started to notice a strange pattern. Those guests who took the staircase only in one direction, often older professors who would walk down but not up, would leave her library seeming off. Their amazement at her craftsmanship—and those of the alchemists and wood carvers—would fade away into a sense of unease. After the following dinner, they would very often request to return to her library to take the staircase back the other direction. “Just to get the full experience”, many would say. “I want to know what it feels like going the opposite way”. After completing their second jaunt, they would emerge largely at ease.
This happened often enough to be slightly concerning. Her guests were usually not those to be superstitious. Over the next few years, she started recording who had gone each way, finding that almost every single guest would take her stairs upwards and downwards the same number of times. Her colleagues who visited often almost never took the staircase after the first try. “The novelty wears off quickly, I’m afraid”, one man said. “Though it is beautiful to look at!” There was a faint discomfort in his eyes as he gazed at the stairs through the open doorway. The professor herself delighted in going nowhere. She paced up and down the stairs lost in thought, used it for exercise, and was meticulous in keeping the wood shining like new. The lack of enthusiasm shown by her friends was disappointing.
One night, she heard a frenzy of banging on her dwelling’s door. Stumbling out of bed, she slid open a viewing slit to reveal the manic eyes of the treasurer of one of the arcane literature societies she sponsored, who had been over for dinner a few nights prior. “You have to let me back up!” He cried. There were tears streaming down his face. He looked like he hadn’t slept in days. “I—I need to go back up your stairs, please Madam-” his voice failed, and he slumped against the door. Frantically, she opened the door and he half fell into her entryway. His fingernails were in tatters, and his hands were bloodied from the frantic knocking on her door. With frenzied breath he stood up, and avoiding her completely dashed towards her library and up the stairs, then collapsed weeping on the carpet.
The professor was in shock, and slowly made her way towards the treasurer, curled in the fetal position at the foot of her centrepiece. “Oh mercy, I am returned...” He murmured. His eyes shot open and locked with hers. “You must destroy this infernal trap!” His eyes gleamed in the torchlight. “Turn it off! You know not what you’ve done! It’s beautiful enough without the blasted illusions, or portals, or...”. He glanced back down the stairs, winced away, and started to sob. She came to help him up, but he bolted away at her touch. A look of shame came over his face. “I am so very sorry for intruding, Madam. Please forgive me. And please, do not invite me back again”. He stood up, straightened out his coat, and took off towards her door, pausing to close it behind him, but being careful to not look back. She didn’t sleep again that night.
The next day, the staircase loomed over her home, visible down the hallway from the kitchen where she made her breakfast. Turning off the portals just wasn’t an option, she told herself, and how dare he imply it? Yes, the stairs themselves were beautiful, but the enchantments she had made by hand. What madness had come over him to not trust her own handiwork? As if she wasn’t the premier gatecrafter in the entire Arcanium. In the morning, she tried to set the incident aside, and continue on with the day’s work. Maybe no dinner parties for a bit, while she recovered. Leaving the tower by foot, she glanced back at the 39th floor. The blue torch she had lit flickered in one of her windows. The floors above and below were dark.
But still, doubts lingered. Three days later, she had hardly managed to sleep since the late-night intrusion. Late at night, she stared at her bedroom ceiling, musing over the treasurer’s words. This must be some trick of psychology, she reasoned. Even seasoned mages are so used to some feedback, the infinitesimal skip when one travels through a portal, that one so seamless, so perfect as her own, made them uneasy. Maybe it had something to do with the portals being stacked vertically? Horizontal portal pairs were so commonplace these days, and she thought she was being artistic, using hers on top of each other with a staircase.
Walking down a normal flight of stairs from the 39th floor of the tower, a non-mage would expect to find themselves on a different floor, the professor told the ceiling. And those accustomed to portals would expect to emerge somewhere else entirely. With a start, she realized the mechanism didn’t really matter, the result was that those exploring her staircase did not trust that they emerged into the same room. It would be those most familiar with portals, those who used them most often and frequently travelled long distances through permanent linked gateways, who would fall for the illusion most easily. But she had never felt that way. What if... her mind wandered to theory seminars on alternate worlds, information loss through instantaneous mass transport, portals linking to symmetrical doorways—no, had she made a mistake?
She ran to her study, pulling out the notes she used to craft her perfect portal. Hands trembling, she poured over her journals, scrambling to find her final draft. For hours, she combed over the sprawling annotations littering the final rune pages, even taking a few hours to rest in her chair. Cross-references with past work, continuity between drafts, every character accounted for. Outside the window, the sun had risen and set again.
The professor dashed to the staircase and checked the runes set into the bottom of the column against her notes. Perfect, flawless. She remembered carving each one by hand, just over a year ago. She had been meticulous, triple-checked every curve, every accent. Scrambling up the staircase, she checked the top runes and found them matching too.
As she hauled her strangely heavy body up the last stair, back into her library, she stopped. Something was off. The hair went up on the back of her neck. Before her was the exact image of her library. She could name every work on the shelves, could even see scattered sheets of notes in a path back to her study. She had written this portal herself, and there was no logical reason to doubt that this room before her was the exact same library she had used for decades. Slowly, she crawled backwards down the stairs to the room she started in.
She started to devise tests of the validity of her portals. Apples, thrown down past the top of the stairs and caught in baskets behind her on the ground, came back with essentially untouched genomes, well within the margin of error or her improvized equipment. She hooked a pulse crystal to two lights in a cone, and watched it roll down the stairs over and over counting the red and blue flashes. Fifty-two percent red was just within standard random error. But not perfect. What was wrong with her staircase?
Hands shaking, the professor began to set up a series of mirrors and magnifying lenses that would let her see herself through the top of the portal. A head-on view was not possible, at least not in real-time, but profile would be enough. She walked halfway up the staircase and glanced up at her face. That woman—that couldn’t be her? There was a bag hanging under the woman’s eye, her collar was ruffled, and her hair was haggard and unclean. She dropped back down the stairs before the woman could turn and see her. Oh god, she thought. Where is the gate leading?
Then she stopped. With horror, the professor realized she had no idea how many times she had climbed the staircase. The portals were activated one year, two months, and six days ago, and in that time she had gone up or down nearly every single day. She tried to remember if she had kept track anywhere, but even her memory had its limits. Most days, during her morning exercises, she’d climb a half-dozen flights of the stairwell. That must have been most of her jaunts over the last year. The blood drained from her face. She easily could be as many as a thousand flights above where she started. Without even realizing, she’d left her library behind long ago.
The professor stumbled backwards, then turned towards the staircase. She bolted down the stairs recklessly, throwing herself down two steps at a time, every few seconds looking up to see an identical copy of her library flash by. Each time it was wrong. She dashed through another portal and heard a woman’s screams echo at her from the room below. Stairs rose up in a quick, dreadful spiral ahead of her. With raggedy breath she counted the flights as she went: forty-six, forty-seven, forty-eight... surely, her actual home was somewhere below her. Unless she had miscounted, unless she had actually walked down her stairs more often than up. Unless her home was above her, and she was actually throwing herself even further away at reckless abandon.
The thought gave her pause. She tried to pull herself to a halt, but tripped over her tired, almost numb feet. Her crown bashed into the banister, and she fell head-first, tumbling down the spiral stairs for five and a half more floors before being snagged on the railing and coming to rest. There the professor was found by her worried colleagues, four days later, dead and broken on the third stair of her library, her dress stained with her own blood flowing down from the staircase above her.