Door-Keepers

Overview

Door-Keepers are among the Architects of the Flux Maze. Each guards a particular exit and lets travellers through for a toll or a riddle. They are the one fixed thing in the Maze: wherever the corridors go, a Door-Keeper's door is where it was.

Appearance

A Door-Keeper is part of its door. It may be a face worked into the stone of a lintel, its eyes lit with magma-glow; a squat figure that sits in the doorway like a lump of the wall and rises when spoken to; or a pair of stone hands that close across the opening. Its voice is deep and grinding, slow, and carries far down the corridor. The door behind it is always plain and always open.

Habitat and Range

Each keeps one exit and does not leave it. A Maze has few of them, and many travellers never find one.

Behaviour and Temperament

They are patient, formal, and exact. A Door-Keeper names its price, a toll or a riddle, and holds to it. Their prices are strange: a memory, a name told aloud, the last coin in a purse, a song. Riddles are hard, and a wrong answer is answered with silence until the traveller tries again or goes away. They do not bargain and are not cruel; they simply do not move.

Abilities

A Door-Keeper holds its exit against the Maze's shifting and against force. It can also close the door completely.

Life Cycle

Some believe each Door-Keeper was once a traveller who reached the door and stayed to keep it. Nothing confirms this.

Uses and Dangers

To a traveller who can pay, a Door-Keeper is the surest way out of the Maze. To one who cannot, it is the cruellest: the exit is in plain sight and will not open.

Lore and Belief

Riddles said to come from Door-Keepers are told in taverns, and the answers argued over. People who have paid a Door-Keeper a memory sometimes say they cannot remember what they gave.

A tale goes round of the thief who paid a Door-Keeper with a memory he had stolen from another man, and of the trouble that followed both of them out.

Where It Appears

• The Flux Maze