Hall of Infinite Doors
Your hands chill when they come in contact with the white, milky, frozen material of the door. The knob feels like frost under your fingers, and you turn it quick and step through before it can stick to your warm skin. As you move through, however, you feel a jarring sense of disorientation, as if something fundamental has shifted place. Your senses momentarily swirl, and when you gather yourself again it seems that everything is different.
You find yourself hunched at the back of a shallow cave, watching the outside world with a mixture of sullenness and desperation. You are aware of how bitterly cold it is; the temperature has dropped significantly from what it was in the hallway, and there is a crisp, outdoorsy quality to it that you can smell as well as feel. The scent of autumn swirls around you, present but vague and distant, and you can spot the gnarled skeletons of trees outside, all their leaves brown corpses covering the overgrown earth, their black branches tipped with the season's first collection of frost.
Then you notice yourself. You're not exactly you anymore. The fundamental figures of gender, personality and such remain in place, but your body is radically different. You're much more muscular than you used to be, and you feel a ready strength and endurance like you've never known before. Your skin is tough, tanned and covered almost completely with a coarse layer of hair, while your head hair (and beard, should you be male) is long and matted in one dirty, frizzy tangle. Your clothes are gone, replaced with adornments of crudely-cured animal pelts and furs.
And what's more, there are things in your mind and memory that weren't there before. You know things you didn't, as if an entire extra timeline had passed. You live in a wild and rugged series of hills and caverns in a tempestuous northern land. The rest of your language-less, primitive people live in a cluster of caves grouped together against a massive mountain worshipped by all, and you have just passed through a lean and depressingly short season of warmth and growth now set upon by an early, unseasonable winter. The gatherers have accumulated little for the coming cold, and hunting has been scarce as of late - your only really reliable source of food has been the small silver fish that flit down the mountain stream. Seasons of winters flash through your memory - you know that winter lasts more than half the year, and you know that none of you will survive the season without more food. But the only animals left in the scrabble of evergreens that clump along the base of the mountains are nomadic predators, each dangerous even to a strong and well-fed man...
You find yourself hunched at the back of a shallow cave, watching the outside world with a mixture of sullenness and desperation. You are aware of how bitterly cold it is; the temperature has dropped significantly from what it was in the hallway, and there is a crisp, outdoorsy quality to it that you can smell as well as feel. The scent of autumn swirls around you, present but vague and distant, and you can spot the gnarled skeletons of trees outside, all their leaves brown corpses covering the overgrown earth, their black branches tipped with the season's first collection of frost.
Then you notice yourself. You're not exactly you anymore. The fundamental figures of gender, personality and such remain in place, but your body is radically different. You're much more muscular than you used to be, and you feel a ready strength and endurance like you've never known before. Your skin is tough, tanned and covered almost completely with a coarse layer of hair, while your head hair (and beard, should you be male) is long and matted in one dirty, frizzy tangle. Your clothes are gone, replaced with adornments of crudely-cured animal pelts and furs.
And what's more, there are things in your mind and memory that weren't there before. You know things you didn't, as if an entire extra timeline had passed. You live in a wild and rugged series of hills and caverns in a tempestuous northern land. The rest of your language-less, primitive people live in a cluster of caves grouped together against a massive mountain worshipped by all, and you have just passed through a lean and depressingly short season of warmth and growth now set upon by an early, unseasonable winter. The gatherers have accumulated little for the coming cold, and hunting has been scarce as of late - your only really reliable source of food has been the small silver fish that flit down the mountain stream. Seasons of winters flash through your memory - you know that winter lasts more than half the year, and you know that none of you will survive the season without more food. But the only animals left in the scrabble of evergreens that clump along the base of the mountains are nomadic predators, each dangerous even to a strong and well-fed man...