Afterglow Vista

As you step through the invisible boundary into the Enchanted Lands, a beautiful stonework rotunda rises up with the pines and firs toward the glow of sunlight, bathing the pillars in liquid gold. The clearing is round, set amongst the overgrown greenery of ferns, grasses and leafy trees.

Limestone stairs encircle the pillars, allowing approach to the center from all sides though, the archway that faces the long-since tangled path gives the impression of a doorway. It would take some real bushwhacking to approach the enclosure from any other direction where the woods merely stretch onward into thick pacific-northwest forestry.

Situated in the middle of the ornate colonnade is a limestone table surrounded by six seats of the same. They are seemingly masoned from a single piece of rock that comprising the floor of the dais – an impressive piece of stonework. The surface of the round table has been polished smooth, the back of a playing card beautifully etched onto it at each point where there is a corresponding stone chair. Whereupon your last visit there stood an ornate scroll case, now there is nothing and the table is empty.. Around the perimeter of the worktop is an inscription that reads: “Nothing is written in stone.”

Ascending the steps, symbols can be seen enscrolled in the five arches over each space between pillars excepting the entryway. Wind and acid rain have worn them down to remnants of their former detail but a couple are partially discernible: a strange indigenous artwork bird with an object in its claw, and…differently than you remember last time, a series of numbers above one of the archways. An ovoid etched with spiral marks and dots inside, perhaps the points of a triangle or the letter delta now rests on the fragment of one of the broken pillars.

Different than last time….