The room is slightly chilly, with tapestry-hung stone walls and dark wooden paneling, intricately carved with pastoral scenes and foliate designs. There is a large, dark oak four-poster bed against one wall, an iron-bound trunk against the wall to its left, and a heavy wardrobe in a similar but distinctly older fashion to the right. Opposite the front of the bed, below a tall, narrow open window, is a broad table with a carved straight-backed chair. The table is littered with quills, inkpots, sheaves of paper and parchment, and a couple of musty-looking old books.
The forest is very thick and ancient, mainly coniferous trees standing in close-ranked groves, but with the odd oak or maple in the more open areas. But the path is clear, and the morning light it shining brightly through the branches, dappling the path and the undergrowth with coruscating pinpoints of gold.
The path is narrow, but clear, and easy enough to follow. The trees grow thick on either side, and I sometimes have to brush the branches away with my walking stick. The path meanders a bit, and sometimes grows very faint, but is always there. It's fairly well-travelled, not by people, but by the wild things that live in the woods.
The trail leads down to the edge of pool below a cascading, rocky burn. I can hear the falling water before I see the pool, which is clear and deep, its bottom covered with many years' worth of fallen leaves. There are animal tracks all around the pool, deer, raccoons, possums, coyotes, and--could that be a bear track?--all coming to drink from the cold water that runs down the mountain, in sprays of foam and torrents of liquid silver over the rocks. The pool is only fifty feet or so long, and maybe half as wide, spilling over a ledge and further down the glen.
A dipper gourd lies propped against the trunk of a Sycamore tree. It's a fine, deep gourd, with a round body big enough to hold a pint or two, and a long, curved neck that was surely formed to be used this way. It's a rich yellow-brown color, and has a very old feel about it, as if many hands have used it to draw a drink from the pool.
The key is heavy and made of bronze, with an old-fashioned skeleton end, a polished shaft, and and an open ring formed in a trefoil of flowering vines. Who knows what it might open? something very rare and wondrous, to be sure, but I don't know what... perhaps the trunk in my room, or the door to Faerie, by the shore of a deep Welsh lake. It has a warm feel, and I take it with me.