The wand

At the gate of Dis the journey stops: the devils bar it, Virgil cannot open it, and the poem settles the matter by sending somebody from outside. One arrives who crosses the Styx dryshod, says not a word to the two of them, and opens the gate with a wand.

The game takes nothing away from him and gives you no part in it: you watch, and it is the only point where the journey moves on without you contributing anything. What changes is that the wand stays behind. He lets it fall on the threshold, crooked, like something dropped, with a lamp over it, because on a black ledge a key you cannot see is not a puzzle.

In the game as it stands it is the thing to find rather than the key to a lock: picking it up is what closes the chapter’s step, and no mechanism ever asks for it. Its description says it opens what is shut, and for now somebody else has already opened the door. There is a net written in on purpose too: if you die in the instant between the opening and the pickup, the wand is set down again in front of the gate, because a puzzle with no key on the map is a defect and not a difficulty.