There is a door.

It stands alone, without any walls to support it, without any rooms to divide from one another. Its frame is made of ragged petrified wood, and the rest of stone so perfectly polished, so delicately and finely carved as to be a work of art. Its handles are two palm-sized diamonds that catch the pallid light of the suns in a soft kaleidoscope amidst the ceaseless dawn and dusk.

There is a door. 

It is not far from the only building within a hundred miles, or perhaps in the entire world. It resembles a ziggurat, with its flat, narrowing terraces and climbing steep stairways. In place of greenery, however, there are only carefully-tended sand gardens; instead of trailing vines, strands of rough-cut gemstones that sparkle but dimly. No light comes from within, and seldom any sound, for its master knows his own voice well enough, and this land knows no other.

There is a door.

It is on a beach of the finest white, although the word lost its meaning around the time that the last of the ocean disappeared. Dunes stretch almost as far as the eye can see, broken only by the distant mountains, their shadows blacker than black, their peaks like the weathered ribs of the world poking at the heavens, their immensity, their weight so very real as to anchor everything else in place.

There is a door, and A GRACEFUL HAND has opened it, just enough.

It is the threshold from lands unknown unto ruination. It is the gate to a place bathed in the soft light of cooling stars, beautiful in its almost flawless desolation, terminus absolute. And, when seen in reverse, the entry to a high-fated city under the watch of merciless stars; it is the perfect place, and the only place, to best augur what will come next.

So through the door, the lonely path, not out of mind but out of sight...at least for the time being.

A HAND pulls upon the handle, just a little, and there is a satisfying click.

There is no door.

---

Gregor gasped, and it was the most wonderful breath he'd had in years.

The air tasted nothing of disuse, of decay, of a wasteland so complete as to reach down to the atomic level. It was damp - [i]damp![/i] - and alive with a hundred different scents. And the sounds! The roar of the ocean, so close that he wondered when it might start to wash up against his shell. The mutter of living, breathing bodies gathering closer to where he lay; not running and screaming, not gasping out their last, but [i]persisting[/i].

And the moon above...shattered, but so luminous as to almost blind (though that could have been something else, perhaps?)

He rose to his feet slowly, towering over the assembled wharf rats like a doomsday monolith: an impossible presence of slowly-shifting rock in the shape of a man. A trickle of white mist seeped from the gaping, lightless hole in its face, and but for that and a sniffle, nobody would have known about the tears streaming down his cheeks.

It was so beautiful, and none of it was dead. He was [i]reduced[/i].

He held up his palm at arm's length toward the leader, a slab of gray around the size of the man's chest. Strange symbols crawled across the skin, never staying the same for very long, never wanting the eye to sit upon them, never quite forming a recognizable pattern. There needn't be any killing today, he wanted to say, why not meet as friends, brothers and sisters?

And with a voice like an old radio playing down a long, dark tunnel he spoke:

"My friend, I have good news: your deaths are not guaranteed today! Come closer, let me see you, let's talk, let's eat! I stand here and everyone still lives, and we have to celebrate!"