Fern and Miaren pass four sliding doors made of lantern-yellow rice paper in stark teak grids on their way to the door at the end of the hallway.<br/><br/>This larger portal looms almost the entirety of the hallway's capacious span.  Like the wood of the paper walls, it has a dark hue to its iron hard substance.  Yet while it appears to be wood, the exquisite intricacy of its grain suggests a far greater artifice than mere nature:<br/><br/>Shaped as though the natural sweep and rough of wood's grain, images are embedded in the surface of the door and its frame.  They are not engraved.  They shimmer in suggestions of shade up from the wood itself, as though the pictures grew naturally - as though the tree had been born with visions of smoky battlefields, ecstatic dances and eerie symbols swarming its dreams.  The images spool through the shining flesh of the wood in cryptic miniature.  They sparkle and creep and hide, telling whole tapestries of narrative.  And yet these tiny images, in their wild strands, also form the stencil to illustrate larger images:  A hundred diminutive tableaux combine to the image of an Elven knight; some forty idylls are arrayed into the languid body of a sleeping woman; a genealogy of portraits clusters into the shape of a distant mountain.<br/><br/>The articulate door is a majesty of complexity made nature.  It is both radiant and dusky.  Both solid and suggestive of the phantasmal.  Both bleak and beautiful.  The frame it stands in is no exception, being similarly surfaced with images that layer into images and into images.  These, though, are abstract, not representational.  They form a pattern hypnotically fathomless and enthrallingly complex.<br/><br/>They also do not make a noise as, with the slightest touch of Fern's ear, the doors begin to open slowly.<br/><br/>Through the narrow aperture, a sudden rush of noise and light pours into the hallway from the chamber beyond - a crowd of women in heated discussion, lilting voices working like a whip dance of archaic Elven, as pipers play a low and errant tune, and dishes click with the most delicate of dining.