This is not really a book. This is a building in the shape of a book... a maze. Each numbered page depicts a room in the Maze. The doors in each room lead to other rooms. For example, the room on page 1 has doors leading to rooms 20, 26, 41, and 21. To go through door number 20, simply turn to page 20.
Your challenge is to find your way from room 1 (after the Prologue) to room 45 and then back to room 1 using the shortest possible path. If you use your head, you should be able to make the journey in only sixteen steps. There are any number of clues in the drawings and in the story to help you choose the right door in each room. Clues in a series of rooms may relate to one another, and may indicate a path. Other clues may refer to a specific door in a single room.
Anything in this book might be a clue.
Not all clues are necessarily trustworthy.
Once you've found the shortest path in and out of the Maze, challenge yourself further. Go back and find the riddle hidden in room 45. The answer to that riddle is concealed somewhere on the shortest path.
Now proceed to the Prologue. Your guide awaits you.
I met them at the gate though I usually wait inside. Preoccupied with their own thoughts, impatient, like so many children, they didn't see who I really was. They never noticed my crown, my pain, the fire in my eyes.
Like all the others they think the Maze was made for them; actually, it is the other way around. They think I am some poet who will lead them through the symbols and spaces of this Underworld. They think I will teach them lessons. They should call me Cerberus. . . . I am the lesson.
The monstrous walls rise up and run away as far as the human eye can see, circling and dividing. Which half is the Maze?
Even I get lost. It changes sometimes slowly, imperceptibly . . . sometimes suddenly. This House is not only made of stone and mortar, wood and paint; it is made of time and mystery, hope and fear. Construction never stops. I take some pride in my role as architect.
They think I will guide them to the center, Perhaps I will. . . .
The sun was very hot.
Together we walked through the gate into ...