There's a flash as you step through the portal. You stumble as gravity reorients around you - looking behind you, you see that the once-vertical door has become a rough hole in a slanting tent made of uncured hide, covered with strange organic tattoos. All around you are tall, looming buildings,their high peaks and twisted domes pushing into a poisonous-looking sunless sky through which arches - by the gods, is that part of a city hanging there sideways in the midst of the foul, low-lying clouds? Further down the street are many more buildings in innumerable architectural styles and materials, their only unifying trait being the rows of large, upward-sweeping blades that thrust out of so many of the rooftops like raised tiger claws. Buildings of bone and silk leaning against buildings of earth and wood and ivory, connected by high arches to buildings of brick and clay and felt and bamboo and on and on, buildings of four stories or more next to buildings that seem as if they have less than one. The streets are made of a similar variety of substances, all crushed and potholed by the passage of thousands and thousands of feet and wheels. Only now do you begin to really look at the people around you - many seem normal enough, though they look like they've come from more nations than you've ever heard of. Others aren't like anything you've ever seen, things with eight or ten legs, things that glow, shadowy wraiths that drift along without touching the ground, metallic orbs, bipedal animals, things that ooze or hop or slither, and, most disturbing of all - things that look human, but not quite, with something subtly wrong or alien or even sinister about them, things that make you shiver inside, walking down the streets and narrow alleys and arching stairways and steaming sewer entrances and high paths, sometimes appearing and disappearing without warning as they pass through arches and doors, as if they have the ability to step in and out of reality - perhaps something like you did, in coming here.