"Three Doors" is an illustrated short story zine I created using a combination of collage and ink drawings. The story is told almost entirely through images with the exception of the epilogue. The epilogue is a piece of poetry I wrote for my first solo show and explores a visualization of the concepts of the past, the present, and the future.
“The past is like an endless scroll, forever growing with the stories of every moment. The paper is as solid as stone— but appearing different in the changing light.
The present is like a flower that grows and dies in an instant, to be replaced by a new one every moment. Forever cycling faster than a heartbeat but still carrying weight.
The future is like a pool of water, within which is reflected the great spreading branches of a tree. Its surface is ever-changing, never solid. The forking branches are endless in possibilities and shivering in and out of focus— escaping all attempts to pin them down.
There is a place in the depth of the earth, where the past present and future exist together in three adjacent rooms. The endless scrolls, the flower lifecycle, and the reflected tree. The rooms have a guardian that appears as a female child. If you saw her from a distance you might think she was nine or ten years old, but looking in her eyes you would know this couldn’t be the case.
The guardian is as old as the rooms themselves. Each room is walled with stone— giant blocks that could not be moved by a hundred men together. They each connect to a central room. The central room is round and is lit with torches that never flicker out and a mirrored shaft that runs from the center of the ceiling all the way to the surface.
At the surface, the shaft is disguised as a dried-up water well and is buried deep in a thick and wild forest. Sometimes, however, a person will happen upon the well, and once or twice they have fallen in. Some magic of the rooms prevents them from dying from the fall— else they most certainly would. They always seem to wake sometime later, back at the top, and with no memory of falling in the first place, but leaving with a deeper understanding of the world.
One of these unfortunate individuals was a boy called Athlai….”