Valhallarium to Library

The library is difficult to find, though it has many entrances. Here's a path to remember: start off at the Valhallarium. You're there, perhaps, for the great perennial Feast of Forgiveness, but you've attended so many times that you're a little bored, so you slip off to go to the bathroom. The bathrooms are a great place for idle hours, and you look forward to the respite it will offer from the unbearable welling of noise in the hall: all the waves of tears, the great shaking sobs, the quivering supplications (& dolorous lamentations), the shrieks splintering off from the whole unstoppable chorus to clang into the mind like the pieces of a broken sword...and underneath it all, a soft fluttering sandbank of curiously insectile, forgiving whispers. You've long stopped feeling the urgent nameless need -- on display so rampantly here -- to beg for forgiveness, because you've long been forgiven by the Mothers.

The crucifix-shaped hall has 12 terrible bone-white doors, one for each wall. Typically they are left open for visitors to wander in and out of the hall, but right now they are closed for the ceremony of soft and formless things shuddering to the pitch of universal regret. Escaping through them would cause too much of a disturbance. You slip instead behind one of the many red velvet curtains hanging from the stony walls, the ones the servants go through, and descend to the kitchen on the ground floor. The way is lit by torches inside deep cerulean sconces, and underneath each one are wood-framed sketches of various animals on various missions of gustatory pleasure: little gourmandizing mice at a table made of cheese, eye-intense cats stalking flanks of filet mignon, a pot of honey intoxicating one by one a pleasure party of bumblebees.

The kitchen is a massive, light, airy space, defined by its generous fenestration and a pleasant, continuous flurry of activity by the cooks and bakers. The warmth of fresh-baked rosemary bread is bodied through the air from one of the immense clay ovens. But you don't have time to linger; you're supposed to be at the feast and you don't want to get into an involved theosophical discussion with the cooks about your lack of interest this year. The sweet sillage of lavender honey follows you through another slender door, one that is, strangely enough, right behind one of the clay ovens. You'll recognize this door by a curious symbol grafted onto its face: a triangle bisected by a sort of stylized bow and arrow. You're not sure what it means. Again, the passageway is dark but for licks of lights that seem anachronistic and yet carry a quality of literal timelessness, or of impenetrability, as if the strongest gust would fail to extinguish the flames that burn, perhaps, too brightly.

Down the passageway, up some stairs, past a living quarter or two, and here it is, the bathroom (and bathhouse) of your hopes and dreams, at least for this next hour or so. You’re now somewhere on the third floor, because this is the bathroom you use when you’re painting in the Waterhouse Art Studio, and the Waterhouse Art Studio is on the third floor.

The door across from the one you enter by this specific path opens onto a cramped elevator platform, where you can grab an elevator to go to the library. The doors are behind large Symbolist paintings. The door you need may or may not be behind the painting you expect.