She sets out with her key to search the Keep for the Oracle. So much for the plot. Each of us carries the child we were in our heart, a child who felt and thought in ways that we as adults no longer do. Fantasy, real fantasy, speaks to that child and to those elements of human experience that are outside the mundane. Timelessness and disconnection are, in their own way, as real as the burning heart and gritty reality and the mundane.
Fantasy is an oil that eases the opening of that gate.
Words are taken literally as law. However the Keep itself is an Elven hall under the hill. Both manifestly and subtly we see how the residents are bent and shaped to its reality. This is a love story but it is also a transition point between one timeless reality and another. One can foresee that Lord Vanion's timeless boredom is only to be replaced by timeless love and domesticity.