Overview
Portals are passages connecting Ainomori to other worlds. They are exceedingly rare, and their workings have never been fully explained.
The known facts are few. Portals can bridge different spaces, allowing beings to cross from one world to another. In all of Ainomori’s recorded history, the number of confirmed portal openings can be counted on one hand.
After the Day of Blue Tears, most portals became unstable or sealed entirely.
Known Portals
Of all documented portals, the most significant is the one Rana used in Forest Year 5050 — the passage connecting Ainomori to the human world.
That portal is said to have been opened within the Owl Temple. After the Day of Blue Tears had destroyed most of the forest’s energy, the last trace of power remaining in the temple was used to pry open this rift.
Just enough for an owl who had lost most of her power to pass through.
Just enough. No more, no less. As though someone had calculated it precisely.
The portal collapsed the moment she passed through. It has not reopened since.
Irlan’s Research
Before the Day of Blue Tears, scholars in Irlan had already been conducting long-term research on portals.
Not merely ordinary portals. What they sought to open was a special kind of passage — a Temporal Gate — said to reach somewhere far more distant, far more fundamental. Their goal was not another space, but the “origin” of Ainomori itself.
The scholars believed that in an extremely ancient age, Ainomori had once been in contact with certain beings known as the Founders. Who the Founders were and where they came from is nearly absent from surviving records. The only concept that appears repeatedly is a vague one:
“An ancient covenant.”
Irlan’s scholars sought to fulfill this covenant. They channeled Love Crystal energy into precise mechanical devices and constructed the prototype of a Temporal Gate at a nexus point of Titan’s root system. They believed that if they could re-establish contact with the Founders, they would bring to Ainomori something — even they could not clearly articulate what. Answers? Power? Or simply confirmation?
They failed.
The Temporal Gate did not open. Or, more precisely — it opened for a single instant, then violently recoiled. That surge of energy flowed back along the roots into Titan, becoming the final straw that broke the balance.
This is not to say that the Day of Blue Tears was entirely Irlan’s fault. The catastrophe had deeper causes, some of which remain unknown to this day. But Irlan’s experiment — that attempt to cross a boundary that should not have been crossed — was indeed the final push that triggered the collapse.
What that ancient covenant truly was, no one knows to this day.
Space and Time
A disquieting hypothesis has long circulated among a handful of scholars: portals may connect not merely space.
Ainomori itself already exhibits temporal anomalies. And portals — especially the kind Irlan attempted to open — may have simultaneously pierced the boundaries of both space and time.
If this is true, then “parallel dimensions” and “temporal loops” are no longer merely theory. Ainomori may not be a world that exists along a single timeline. It may exist simultaneously across multiple points in time, like the growth rings of a tree — each ring independent, yet all belonging to the same tree.
This might explain why the origin of the Forest Calendar is so mysterious. Perhaps Forest Year 1 was not “the beginning,” but “yet another beginning.”
But these are all speculation.
Current Status
After the Day of Blue Tears, most known portals in Ainomori fell silent. Some vanished entirely; others became extremely unstable — occasionally flickering without warning to reveal a blurred vision of the other side before instantly closing again.
Since Titan’s awakening, some have claimed to sense energy fluctuations resembling portals near the areas where the root system has begun to glow once more.
Perhaps, as the forest’s power recovers, those passages will one day reopen.
Perhaps some doors are destined to open only at the right time.