The Caves of Ephesus, also called the cave of the sleepers, are caves on the road to Ephesus, outside its walls, where people sleep magically through the centuries. They are also reputed to be a graveyard of beasts such as dragons, and are no longer considered fully safe.
| Type | Place |
| Location | Road to Ephesus |
| Spanish entry | Cuevas de Éfeso |
Description
The caves are passable and interconnected: someone is known to have “appeared through the cave”. Caves are not unique to Ephesus (there are also the caves of Cilicia, and travelers know one can sleep in caves); what sets Ephesus apart is its fame and history of use. “We are not in the caves of Ephesus” is said of a place that offers no such guarantees.
Function
Sleeping there is the slow way across the centuries, the alternative to a chronomancer’s jump. After the Seven Sleepers the site takes its other name and its term of three hundred years. The one condition is that the place “not be disturbed for 300 years”; disturbing the sleeper breaks the sleep. The same abandonment leaves the beasts’ bones undisturbed. People still lie in magical sleep there.
Decline
The caves are “no longer 100% safe”, and a whole company, weighing them against a direct jump, ruled them out (“the caves of Ephesus would not work”). The cause is attributed to earlier events in which someone “took him out of there”, breaking the undisturbed condition and closing that route through time. No replacement is known.
Open questions
- Whether the beast graveyard and the sleepers’ cave are one chamber or two.
- What happens to a sleeper woken early.
- Who guards access, and whether permission or payment is needed.
- What or who was taken out, and why that broke the guarantee.
- A man called Cuevas from another cycle, “the big guy with the hammer”, shares only the name.