The room is painted with cream colored walls, and morning sunlight filtered through the windows, which are many-paned and framed in wood. The sunlight is buttery and warm. I am a little cold except when I'm directly in the sunlight, where it's warm. There are glass-fronted oak bookcases in the room, and a low bed. Outside the window are rosebushes and rolling green lawns.
The forest is very dense. The trees are thick and closely spaced, and their branches are interwoven above to shut out all but the thinnest of light. I'm walking on a paved brick path that winds between the trees so much that it's hard to see what's coming. The brick is pale red, not yellow. The trees come right to the edge of the path, and the air is cool. Birds are audible, and there is a faint pleasant smell of decomposing vegetation.
The path is perhaps six feet wide and not at all worn, though it seems well-maintained and is entirely free of obstructions. It's as if the path were just installed yesterday. It is very easily navigable.
The path ends at a pond, circular and perhaps thirty or forty feet in diameter. The pond is fed by a wide waterfall cascading over a thick wall of vegetation. The noise of the falling water is intense, and the cubic volume of water in the cascade seems intense. Still, the waterfall is only twelve or fifteen feet high, and almost as wide. The water in the pond, strangely, is only slightly disturbed by the waterfall itself. Mostly the pond's surface is still, though the water is opaque and cold. There are a few lillypads floating on the pond, bobbing slightly. Blue sky is visible overhead. It is not immediately apparent where the outflow from the pond is located. The pond seems entirely natural except for the preternatural roundness of it. I suspect that there is a chamber of some sort behind the waterfall, though it's not visible.
The path continues around the edge of the pond and behind the waterfall to the opening of a large rough-hewn stone chamber. There is a crystal flask lying here, with thin and narrow like a vase, but with multiple facets cut into it. It is stoppered like a bottle of perfume. The liquid is visible inside through the translucent crystal, but the true color of the liquid is not immediately apparent. The crystal is a very pale pink-salmon-peach color, and the surfaces of the flask are roughened as if frosted with extremely fine sugar, until it feels like the surface of extraordinarily fine-grit sandpaper.
The key looks like an ordinary key to fit a Schlage lock, like the one that might open the door of my apartment. The key is the color of slightly tarnished bronze. In fact, it must open my apartment. There is a white twist-tie from a loaf of store-bought bread looped and twisted through the hole in the key, as if other keys were once held together with this one in a bunch. There would likely have been two to four other keys.