The gate, he now understood with startling clarity, was quite literally fashioned from the potential itself. Moments later, he stepped onto the platform of the Fifth Gate. There was no enclosing chamber, unlike the contained space of the Fourth Gate. Nor was there an open sky overhead, a feature that had defined the first three platforms. Instead, the Fifth Gate's platform existed directly within the potential-color itself.
The ambient, distant sky of the interior mountain, which had been visible at lower levels, was now completely absent, entirely replaced by this pervasive, vibrant hue. The space around him wasn't merely sky-colored; it was, in its essence, the sky itself. It felt as though the very material of the upper atmosphere, usually found far above the mountain, had been brought down to ground level here on this platform, creating an astonishing inversion of altitude and expectation.
