It wasn't hard to get inside the mountain itself. The opening had been waiting for us. But once we were inside, things got a lot trickier.
The way was lit with torches that burned violet. They led us down a path that ended abruptly at a stone wall. We saw right away that there were exactly five wooden doors. Each of the doors was painted a different shade of orange (all pretty dulled down by age) with an animal engraved in the center. They weren't tall, as far as doors go. I thought that maybe the dwarves had built them at their own height. Then I noticed that there were words above the center door, etched onto a silver plate.
"What does it say?" asked Deli, squinting through her glasses.
I read the plate aloud:
To find the door, you must be clever,
Else you will be lost forever.
No amount of magic spells,
Will aid you if you seek the wells.
Don't forget the trodden trail,
For those who do, are doomed to fail.
"What does that even mean?" asked Soy.
"I'm not sure," I answered. "Deli?"
Deli was biting her miniature glasses. For a moment, I thought I saw a shimmer from inside her mouth.
"It's some kind of clue. We need to find the right door to get to the wells."
"This is easy," said Soy impatiently, "let's just try each door, one by one, and look inside."
He strode forward to open the door closest to him, second from the left. It was a pale orange door with a carving of an antelope in the center. But, opening doors in a magic mountain willy-nilly seemed like a bad idea, even for Soy.
"Soy! Stop!" I yelled as I lunged towards him.
The moment that Soy turned the wooden knob, the door flew in away from him. He was being pulled in, too, by an invisible force. I reached him just in time to grab his other arm and we fell to the ground. I pressed my feet against the wall to get leverage, desperately trying to keep him from being sucked in.
"Close the door!" yelled Deli from behind us.
Although my heart was racing with fear, I couldn't help but look through the doorway to the other side. It clearly led to another dark cloud, even scarier than the one we had just barely escaped. But something else was different about it, too. Instead of seeing a field of rocks and trees ahead of me, I was looking at a distant wall with holes in it. Warlugs jumped out towards us, then fell back away. This door was in the top of the cloud.
The words "Else you will be lost forever" hit me with a chill. Using all my strength, I pulled Soy until he was free from the doorway. The moment he cleared it, the door slammed shut behind him.
We rested on the dirt floor, both out of breath.
"Soy, what were you thinking??" I asked, surprised at how angry I was. "You can't just go opening strange doors!"
But, when I pointed at the door that almost took my best freind, I didn't see an antelope. Instead, it had the face of a lion. The color was slightly different too.
"Deli," I asked, "did the doors just ..."
"Yes," she stopped me short. "The doors changed."
"Okay, but ... wherever the antelope is, we know never to open that one again, right?" Soy said, still catching his breath.
Deli looked upset, and when I looked around, I understood why. The doors in front of us were now a serpent, a lion, some kind of fish, a spider, and a rhino. No antelope.
