The Long Way to a Secret Cave

Rich does not simply teleport to the training site. His group first takes a portal from the Paladin Sanctuary to somewhere in Sweden, then boards a large boat and travels the rest of the way toward Finland through a fjord.

The layered journey helps keep the location hidden. Even with portal technology, the last stretch requires ordinary travel.

Jan’s Training Ground

Jan meets Rich when the party finally reaches the cave. He has prepared the site as a sequence of tests designed around the limitations and possibilities of Rich’s imagination-based abilities.

The cave is not presented as a formal academy. It is a specialized training site where an experienced rook can isolate specific skills and force Rich to master them one at a time.

First Lesson: Precision

The first chamber contains a strangely shaped opening in the wall. Rich must conjure a stone that fits perfectly.

The exercise exposes a basic weakness in his power: imagining something approximately is not enough. Shape, depth, and proportion all matter. When he finally gets the stone exactly right, it snaps into place and opens a hidden stairway deeper into the cave.

Second Lesson: Complex Systems

The next chamber is colder, damp, and musty, with bats and an enormous clock face set into the wall. Behind it are numerous missing gears.

Rich’s power normally limits how many separate objects he can maintain at once. The solution is conceptual rather than brute-force: instead of treating every gear as an individual object, he learns to imagine the entire interconnected mechanism as one complex system.

Once the gears are restored, the clock comes alive and opens another stairway downward.

Third Lesson: Projections

The third stage pushes beyond objects. Jan tells Rich to create a temporary person-like helper—an extension of himself that can move, act, and interact with the world.

Rich initially produces crude, cartoonish figures. The breakthrough comes when he stops thinking only about outward appearance and uses detailed feeling and memory to give the projection definition.

His successful Nadia projection can obey mental commands and physically interact with him, though maintaining it consumes enormous energy.

A Skill That Outlives the Cave

The cave lessons become practical tools rather than isolated exercises. Rich later applies the same mental techniques to create intricate keys, understand complex patterns, and summon a projection of Jan when he desperately needs his teacher’s guidance.

The training therefore prepares Rich for the Corridor not by handing him a solution, but by changing how he thinks.

A Place Built for Long Practice

Jan keeps cots and bedrolls in the cave, suggesting that students may remain there for extended training. The party’s boat can also be hidden inside a section of the cavern where it cannot be seen until someone is nearly on top of it.

The Return Route

On the journey home, Rich’s group returns by boat and eventually reaches a small fishing village containing the portal they need.

The manuscript does not name that village, so the encyclopedia leaves it unnamed rather than turning an incidental waypoint into false canon.

Why the Cave Matters

• It transforms Rich’s imagination from a flashy gift into a disciplined skill.
• It shows how knightly training can be highly individualized.
• It establishes Jan as a teacher as well as a historian.
• It prepares Rich for the key-making and projection work needed later in the Corridor.
• Its hidden travel route expands the network of portals and ordinary roads used together by the knightly world.

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