Trial and Flame

by Kevin Murphy

  “Freeze it shut, you fool!” Melee yelled.

  Dakkon tried, but the rush of water was simply too fast. Any ice he created was dislodged immediately. He double-casted his thermomancer skill, Hotspot, to create a small bead of cold in an attempt to explosively freeze the ice, but his efforts were in vain. Water began to pour even faster from its ceiling entrance. Melee dove her front half into the basin, shoving her arm down into its drain, attempting to dislodge whatever it was that blocked the water’s path.

  After a moment, Melee’s front half reemerged. “It’s solid stone,” she said as she pulled herself out of the water. She was soaked, and soon they all would be. It had only been seconds, but the water level was already to their ankles. There had only been one source of water before, which shouldn’t have allowed for such a quick filling of the room. When Dakkon looked around again it was obvious why the area was filling so rapidly, he could see that the four corners of the chamber’s ceiling had begun to expel their own spouts of water as well.

  “Maybe we can still solve the puzzle!” Dakkon yelled.

  “But we don’t even know the answer!” Roth called back.

  “Think then!” hollered Dakkon. “Maybe we did what the king did! Maybe we worked too hard for nothing!”

  “What!” yelled Cline.

  “Maybe the long, hard course where we had to do extra work to change the path was the wrong answer! Maybe we need the shortest route for the water to travel!” Dakkon explained.

  “Ok, let’s try that!” Roth replied, trying to be efficient. The water was already to their knees.

  The easiest-to-fill basin was also the eye. Not only was it the tallest one, but using only one halfpipe, it could be filled directly from the central waterfall. Dakkon and Roth tried moving the gray, pivoting halfpipe below the flow of water, but the rush of it had grown much too strong. The force of the water’s increased flow on one end and their weight on the other, caused the smooth stone halfpipe to shatter.

  “Oh no, that’s not good!” yelled Roth. The water was already up to their waists and had already completely covered the house block—the shortest of the drain-bearing basins. There would be no uncovering it now.

  “We need a new solution!” yelled Dakkon, as his ears popped from the pressure changing in the room.

  “Maybe it’s a mechanical trap!” Mina screamed, keeping her voice just loud enough to be heard above the slosh of water.

  “If it is, what do we do!” Cline yelled back.

  “If the room drains itself, naturally—“ began Mina.

  “Just tell us!” Melee roared.

  “Plug the wrong holes with something watertight—anything! Just make sure it’ll hold and keep out the water!” Mina yelled.

  “Got it!” Cline said, as he began rummaging through the bags for anything that they could use to shove down into the holes.

  “Dakkon, you’ll need to do something else!” Mina commanded.

  “What’s that?” Dakkon asked.

  “If this place resets itself, it may not drain until the water gets to a certain level, like a Pythagorean siphon!” yelled Mina.

  “What? It might drain! When?” said Dakkon, showing a sign of relief.

  “Never mind that. It could take a water level even higher than this room!” Mina yelled. “That’s why we’ll need to trick the system. I want you to freeze the floor beneath the water! Make sure no water can get through. If there’s anything else down there that’s detecting water, we need that to stop!”

  Dakkon didn’t see how it could help, but he leapt into action. He immediately began using his thermomancy to freeze the floor beneath the water—but there was a lot of area to cover. Finishing it would take all the time they had left.

  “You try to determine the correct answer while I get this done, and stuff those holes!” Dakkon yelled.

  The water was at neck level, causing everyone to need to swim—going doubly so for Jinx. Cline, Roth, and Melee relegated anything soft and reasonably strong from the bag to being “not essential” and dove beneath the water shoving candles, meat, and anything else they could fit into the submerged drain holes.

  The house, hourglass, crown, and shovel had all been filled. Dakkon finished freezing the ground floor only a moment before, and as a result the whole pool of water they swam in had become frigid. Dakkon would have to worry about the party’s comfort later. The water level had already covered the tallest basins by a meter, and there was only another meter of space remaining until it was game over.

  “How certain are we that it’s the eye?” asked Melee, giving Cline pause before he dove to shove what he could manage down the sword basin’s drain. “What if we’re thinking about it wrong!”

  “I hear you, but there isn’t time!” yelled Dakkon. “If it doesn’t work, maybe we can try again if we’re quick enough!”

  “No, she’s right!” yelled Mina, having come to some sort of realization. “This place is a trap! The castle in the sky is a fortification! They’re both defenses! What they care about is defense!”

  Dakkon stared at Mina and then nodded his head. It was a shot in the dark either way, and any glimmer of light helped their aim. “All right! Fill in that eye!”

  Cline and Melee shoved most of their new, warmer clothing into the eye-basin’s drain as Dakkon dove deeper beneath the water to ensure the drains were properly sealed by freezing them in place. When he reemerged, his party members faces were all pressed against the ceiling as they struggled to take in breaths of air from the last, unfilled sliver of the chamber.

  No one wasted their final breaths to speak before the water fully covered their heads, but once it did—Melee and Roth swam to the center of the room to where the main source of water had come from. They struggled to break apart the sculpture to make a channel they could try to swim through, but their efforts were in vain.

  It didn’t seem fair. They didn’t even understand the rules of the trial that judged them. Dakkon watched as Mina hugged Jinx close to her, and Cline shut his eyes tight, resigning himself to his fate, then—suddenly—they were all pulled in the direction of the second door. The path forward opened up as swiftly as the entrance door had, and they found that they were being carried out by the flow of the water.

  Within seconds, the entire party was pressed against the walkway outside as water rushed over and passed them, plummeting over the cliffside. Were it not for the raised marble sidings on the walkway, several of them would have been pulled down with the rush of water. When it was all over, Cline peeked from behind his tightly-clenched eyelids. For now, at least, they were safe.

  Chapter 18: Trials

  “What the hell!” Roth groaned, wetly, from the pile of people where he’d been deposited.

  The group weakly pulled themselves apart, recuperating the energy they’d need to fully separate. Everyone half-lay, hunched down with matted hair and sopping clothes as the shock from two back-to-back close calls sank in. They were simply happy to be breathing.

  Jinx sprang up first, shaking excess water from his coat, spraying everyone in the face with a fine, wolfy mist. After a moment, Melee burst into a laugh. Not long after that, Cline joined her, and the others smiled too.

  “I can’t believe we made it out,” Dakkon said. “I wonder if it was what we did at the end, or if filling up the whole room was part of—”

  Mina held up her hand to cut him off mid-sentence. “Let’s not talk about that room for a while,” she requested.

  Dakkon shrugged. “Fair enough.”

  “What are we going to do about these wet clothes?” Melee said as she got to her feet and squeezed what water she could from her traveling sack. “Whatever food we have left must be ruined.”

  Dakkon winced at that. Having no food was bad. It meant that if they were there for too long, they’d eventually stop regenerating their health, endurance, and mana. More than that, he really had wanted to keep his maps dry. Rather than pulling them out in a desperate attempt to dry them, he ass
umed that their prolonged dip had already done its work. It would serve as the excuse he’d need to upgrade to a higher quality version.

  “Oh gods, the wind,” Mina said, shivering immediately after a strong gust. “Why’d it have to be a water puzzle in the north?”

  At her words, Dakkon created a zone of heat over his party. “I probably can’t do much for drying us all off at once, but I can at least make things more comfortable.”

  After a moment of basking in the sudden warmth, Mina smiled. “Ahhh,” she said. “That’s an awfully useful skillset to have. Thanks, Dakkon.”

  Dakkon shook his head with a grin. “Don’t mention it,” he said. He hadn’t ever expected thermomancy to be openly praised.

  Over the next few minutes, the party turned their backs to one another—respecting each other’s privacy as best they could along the drafty walkway—and stripped to wring the excess water from their clothes. Being so close to such attractive women, Dakkon found himself tempted by the urge to steal a glance at the disrobed forms of Mina and Melee. After his desire to run away from the unseen predator in the woods, this marked the second time that day in which his base instincts had attempted to steer him wrong.

  Rational thought and esteem helped him to keep his actions wholesome. He doubted any real trouble would come of it—but, were he in their shoes, he couldn’t say for certain he wouldn’t see it as a breach of trust. Plus, a little retaliation from up here might result in an impressive fall. He doubted either of the girls would feel terribly bad about tossing him off a cliff if he’d been caught looking—and honestly, when he thought about it, he wouldn’t have been able to fault them for it.

  Once everyone had redonned their damp clothes and the opportunity to blunder had passed Dakkon by, the group walked cautiously up the open-air walkway which snaked three-quarters of the way around the tower.

  The path soon terminated before the second boxy room where an overhang covered another large door, an inscription, and a carved relief. To the party’s relief, this room didn’t seem to have any form of piping connected to it.

  The word above the door read ‘memory.’ To the door’s left, the relief depicted a row of grouped spears pointing skyward. First one, then two, then three, four, and—finally—five bundled together.

  “I doubt we’ll be able to find any information on just the words ‘memory’ and a carving of some spears,” Mina said. “But, luckily, memory is something I’m more comfortable with.”

  The rest of the group nodded. Not only was Mina’s memory quite good, but they each felt safer with a test of memory rather than needing to blindly guess at an answer.

  “Let’s just hope it’s not a, ‘remember the teachings of our people,’ sort of thing, like the first one seemed to be,” Roth said.

  Mina rolled her eyes at Roth. She pressed her hand against the new door, and it gradually swung outward towards the group. The room they saw was very shallow compared to its outside dimensions. In front of them—on the opposite wall of the small space—there was a raised stone slab which nearly ran the full length of the room. The curved slab looked to be covered with raised bumps. Then, to the left of the stone slab, there appeared to be an entrance into another area.

  “Well, if we’re going in… should we leave anyone behind to see if we can open the room from outside?” Roth asked.

  Dakkon considered the idea only for an instant. “I don’t know, they might end up getting stuck outside for good. I wouldn’t want to risk it.”

  Roth nodded. “Fair enough.”

  They had barely survived the previous trial—they weren’t even sure that they’d properly solved it. Even still, if they wanted to climb the tower then they’d clearly need to take a few risks. From beyond the open door, there came no foreboding sounds and the room’s inscription sounded harmless enough. Together, the party walked into the trial marked ‘memory.’

  Once they were a few steps inside, the door behind them swung closed much as the first room had. Suddenly, a horrible series of clicking noises punctuated by clangs filled the room.

  *clak* *clang* *clak-clak* *clang* *clak-clak-clak* *clang*

  “What the hell is that?” Cline asked, concerned.

  The sound seemed to come from behind the wall in front of them. Mina walked over to the entrance of the next area located to the far left of the room and looked inside. When she turned back to the group, she was noticeably pale-faced despite the lack of light in the chamber.

  “This isn’t a test of memory at all!” Mina objected.

  The rest of the party went over to see what she meant. Rather than a room, there was a two-meter wide hallway that turned once at its end—to the right. The hallway was tiled three-across with pristine, iridescent tile—but what really drew the eye was the nearly-solid wall of thin, plentiful spears which thrust down from the ceiling to the ground and turned out to be the source of the occasional clanging noise.

  “What the hell are we supposed to do about that?” Melee asked as the densely-packed skewers continued to rise and fall.

  *claaak* *clak-clak* *clang* *claaak* *clak-clak-clak* *clang*

  After watching 10 more thrusts, the party decided they’d better closely examine the long, rounded slab that they’d momentarily ignored, before their situation had a chance to deteriorate any further.

  The stone was decorated with a long series of raised bumps which looked like a string of over-simplified braille. Along the entire length, from left to right, there was never a single bump raised directly above or below another. If there was any additional information to be found, the five didn’t know where to look. Worse, the ‘claking’ noise that they’d heard seemed to be counting up to something.

  *claaak-claaak-claaak* *clak-clak* *clang*

  Mina just shook her head as she tried to puzzle out the string of dots. “I don’t really know where to start.”

  No one did. The area they were stuck in was small, and a quick double-check of the room ensured they hadn’t overlooked any small etchings like in the previous trial room.

  Then, after they heard a series of five of the longer ‘claaak’ sounds, the erratic noises suddenly shortened themselves to only the shorter, more-rapid ticking sounds once again.

  *clak* *clang* *clak-clak* *clang*

  “Did the timer just reset?” Dakkon asked.

  Cline went to look down the hallway once again. “There’s still just a wall of pain every couple of seconds,” he relayed.

  “Well, that may still mean we aren’t on a time limit,” Mina said. “That’s certainly not nothing.” Then, Mina placed her finger on each dot as she moved along the length of it. Immediately after touching the final dot, she got excited. “Cline, how many tiles long is that hallway?”

  Cline looked down the hallway and quickly counted. “Looks like its three across and 10 down the hall to where it curves right. The first and last set of three appear to be a bit bigger than the rest.”

  “Excellent! Keep an eye on that hallway. Let me know if you see anything change.”

  “Will do,” Cline said while keeping his eyes locked on the hallway. “What did you find?”

  “Well, there are 50 dots in all,” Mina said. “Since there’s a divisible number of tiles… then perhaps there are five sections of the hallway. My best guess is that these dots are a guide through the spears.”

  “But, it’s just solid spears,” Melee said, as she walked over next to Cline to get a better look. “I don’t see any gaps big enough for a hamster, let alone a person.”

  “Wait for the clicking to start over again,” Mina said. “With any luck, we’ll see the path appear then.”

  “Clever, Mina,” Roth said. “But that means we’ll have to dodge spears 50 times while wading through a maze of death…”

  Rather than answer, Mina shrugged. Dakkon rubbed his forehead apprehensively. Then, the party waited for the moment when the clicks were due to reset.

  *claaak-claaak-claaak-claaak* *clak-clak* *clang*

>   “That’s 42,” Mina said as she walked over to watch the hallway with the others. “It ought to reset soon.”

  “No gaps as of yet,” Cline informed her.

  Then, after a series of five, long *claaaks* and a drop of the spears, the clicking began again with a single *clak*. Spears slammed down from the ceiling over the left and middle tiles, but above the right-most tile there was an area big enough to stand in.

  “Woah,” Dakkon said. “Wicked.”

  “That looks pretty dangerous,” Cline said, nervously. “They expect us to memorize that!”

  “They can expect whatever they want, we’re writing it down,” Mina said. “All of us. Then we’re double and triple checking it.”

  It was a lucky break that pens were no good for plugging up holes, or they’d have had to find another way. After thirty minutes of meticulous scrawling and verification, each party member’s arms were covered in a solution for the puzzle that read like step-by-step instructions. The instructions were kept simple and easy to read. They were recorded as:

  “1. Right

  2. Center

  3. Center

  4. Right

  5. Left

  ….”

  And so on, all the way through 50. Mina even insisted that a small series of three dots be placed beneath each line, with the correct space to stand indicated via a bigger dot, just to make sure that left and right weren’t confused while in the middle of the trap. They were in a game world, so it was entirely possible that they might survive a single rogue strike—but Dakkon had worked in industrial settings; he could see that the force of the spears was the sort capable of puncturing metal sheets without a hint of resistance. At any rate, they weren’t going to count on surviving a skewering, and they certainly didn’t want to try.

  Once they had fully prepared their lists, they were left with a final obstacle: Jinx. For that, Dakkon once again suggested trying to store the wolf within his Equis Medallion, but Mina wouldn’t have it. Until she was certain it was safe, or there were no other options, Jinx wouldn’t be anyone’s guinea pig. Mina’s wolf would have to be carried through the traps, meaning that a firm grasp would be required—and a guide written on the carrier’s arms could prove to be unreliable. To deal with the added complexity, they devised a simple solution: just after each clang, the non-running party members would all yell the next place to stand. The plan seemed good, but they weren’t entirely sure they’d be able to hear the yells while midway through the halls, so they’d need someone to go first to test.