text: You’ve been an absolute mess since you discovered the shimmering doorway after years of searching, and read the word “Sinemagicae” on the other side. There are four other doors, labeled Absquaqua, Sineigne, Anbsqueterra, and Sineaere, each hiding its own secrets. You go back, day after day, sitting in the room with its crystal walls and onyx doors, staring at the letters marking the door you came through; the letters confirming what you always knew about your world. The world you had hoped to escape from when you found the door that lead you here. You had been forced to take Latin in high school, so it didn’t take you long to puzzle it out. Five doors, five worlds, each lacking one of the five elements. The words on the other four doors could be translated to mean Without Water, Without Fire, Without Earth, and Without Air. And you sit on the gleaming floor, bound to the only world without magic. Of course, you try the other doors, but none of them ever open. At least once per day, you make a slow circle around the room, turning each knob hopefully, only to be met with firm resistance when you desperately attempt to push the door open, the magic calling to you, needing you to get there even if it kills you. But every day, you drag your feet back to Sinemagicae and a world that no longer holds any enchantment. Until that day, when you went to brood in the liminal space of crystal and onyx, and for the first time you aren't alone among the mocking doors. At the threshold of your door, you stop when across the room you see what could be a ghost of you: a fellow traveler, slumped on the floor, eyes glued to the door marked “Absquaqua.” It takes you a long time to move again, but when you do, softly closing the door behind you, she jumps up from the floor and turns to face you. She stares at you, mouth agape, before a whisper escapes her lips. “You come from another world?” she asks, familiar tears streaming down her cheeks. You nod, and she wipes her eyes with her fingertips, leaving behind a smear of blue-green makeup below her left eye. “Show me *water*?” Tentatively, you nod again, and push the door open behind you. It would be easy enough to fill a sink or grab some bottled water, but you want her first time to be special. You take her to a small, quiet beach just as the sun is setting. You watch her wide, brown eyes take in the last of the sunlight glistening on the waves, the water painted with every color of the sunset. The tears dripping from her face mingle with the salt of the ocean as she drops to her knees in the surf, gently running her fingers over the tops of the waves. A wide smile takes over her face as she looks up at you in awe and whispers a single word. “Magical.