Strange Tales Collection | A Page of a Titleless Fragment, and the Unfinished Sentence Upon It
A single page with no book title and no page number, said to have fallen out of an old book. Upon it is copied a passage about 'five doors,' and a final sentence, left unfinished.
(This is a transcription of an image provided by a reader. The fragment's origin is unknown, and the age of the paper and handwriting are both unverified.)
The contributor says this page fell out of an old book left behind by his grandfather. No title, no page number, the paper already too brittle to leaf through much. On it are characters copied with a brush, very neatly, as if transcribed from something even older. We transcribe it as is.
Learning has five doors. The door of the East is called Sigil; the door of the West is called Curse; the door of the South is called Pact; the door of the North is called Star; the door of the Center is called Wheel.
Five doors, different in name; what lies beyond them is one.
He who enters sees its one, sees not its five; he who masters its five — beware, speak not. To speak is to stir the door.
'Five doors, different in name; what lies beyond them is one' — the five doors have different names, but beyond the doors is the same place. This line left us stunned for a long while.
At the end of the fragment, there is one more line; the brush-strokes suddenly grow faint, as if the writer's hand trembled, or as if he decided, on impulse, not to write it:
The Myriad Dao is flawed —
After that, there is nothing.
We could not trace the source of this passage. We asked a few friends who read classical texts; they say the characters are genuinely old, but the content matches no known canon.
If you know what comes after 'the Myriad Dao is flawed,' please also — as the fragment says — beware, speak not.
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