Tress sits down with a soft sigh. "That's the question. Trying to leave by air just leads to an invisible barrier in the sky. Trying to walk away just turns you around and ends you right back at the house, even if you mark your trail. The house does keep somehow adding new doors and passageways, but nobody has found one that leads anywhere outside of this little world... except for one day when a lot of people showed up and then left just as quickly, but there's no obvious way to follow them. There's someone named Aornis¹ who's looking through books for evidence for how to make something called a Prose Portal, because she thinks we might have somehow been trapped inside a book?"

She shakes her head. "Honestly, there are days that I've come close to just trying to start digging my way out with my bare hands, because it feels like the only thing I haven't tried."


¹ Ping!