Season Doors

A seed has been let go in the wrong season, and the wind takes it the long way round: through the doors to another season, from a snowfield to a meadow, a birch wood with poppies, a garden with a drawbridge and a red canyon, and back to the snow under the pines. Whatever the seed passes close to wakes (snowdrops, frost, blossom, poppies, birch catkins, dandelion clocks, leaves ready to let go), plays a note, the higher the higher, and gives the wind something to carry. A door opens for a wind carrying enough. One that stays shut lets the season go round again, and asks less each time. Nothing ends the journey but the seed set down in the snow.

The doors are the ones on the wall: the red fire door in the snowfield, the doorway cut into the glacier, the light switch plate in the meadow and the domino in the red canyon. What they are for: taking seeds the long way round, so that a seed let go out of season is still in the snow in time for the spring (many real seeds need a winter before they will come up). The wind that does it is not the Draught, which comes in under doors; this one goes through them. The blue door lying flat where the stream meets the sand is not in the game, and still doesn’t open. The lore is the codex’s own, around a game that is real.