The room is white-yellow with a dimly lit, simply-furnished chandelier of brass that hangs at the top of a sloping, egg-like ceiling. Almond curtains frame an open glass window, fluttering in soft summer breezes that smell of wildflowers and the refreshing tang of a nearby ocean. The open portal of glass and whitewashed wood - six perfect squares lined up two across and three up - swings languidly to and fro just a bit, as if beckoning me outside. I look around and the room is devoid of anything but a big and brown sofa that casts a soft shadow behind itself much like a wavering thought to hide within. There are no corners.
The forest, decided coniferous with a number of deciduous - well, birch and oak - scattered throughout it, is both warm and cool all the while welcoming to my sensibilities. Soft, luxious without being overgrown grass dog my footsteps into the wood while here and there I see pinecones littering the ground - some inexplicably taking root where they lie with incredible vine-like tendrils of newly-born wood and stalk and leaf. The wood seems to offer a darkened twilight - somehow comfortable, somehow deflecting my curiosity in such a manner that it rebounds, ever more amplified until it is less a whisper than a rushing current and yet I feel relaxed. The wood is quiet, although the thought of squirrels and the occasional call of a small, lonely birdling fills my thoughts.
The path, at first a narrow friend of familiar feet, ends in a sputter, some several feet away from the calling wood. The patches of worn earth fall away and soon, only grass remains between me and the forest.
The water is as clear as crystal, the little torrents over rock and occasional root and lying log glistening in the shining sun-moon-light. There is no dirt in this creek, the narrow line of water bedded with round stones and pebbles of various - albeit mostly smallish - size and colour. There would be no effort in stepping over this water at a foot and a half across, and yet it mesmerizes and I am suddenly aware of my thirst. Sparing almost no thought as to its safety, I dip my hand into the water and drink from it, and again; then I sit there for a time and stare at the passing streams.
As I step toward the vessel, I think first that it is an old and aged cup of brass but it quickly becomes a handled goblet of sorts. Intricate, celtic-like, angular designs weave around the rim of the goblet against a nearly-black, brown backing; it is about a centimetre and a half thick, one millimetre from the very edge. The handle stems from the base of the foot-tall creature and follows a doubly-curved passage - like the humps of a camel - to the very rim. The handle itself seems to have the same designs of the rim etched deeply into the left and the right (looking top-down on the goblet with the handle pointing downward, for instance) but on closer examination, I see instead of lines like the weaving of some kind of basket, I see small creatures - chubby genderless childlike creatures and long, twisting vines and bats among other, less describable things - littering the handle against a dark background. The roughly polished brass has dark lines running throughout indicating a sort of tarnish - likely the same thing darkening the intricate etchings - and the rest of the goblet is plain.
The key is yellow, a diamond of stamped, mildly worn metal with a length sticking out of one corner. A simple line outlines the edge of the key, even extending into the length though it ignores the teeth. Could it unlock a chest?