by Andrew Rowe
“Great, now I can finally—”
“...With the left door,” Reika continued. “You can check the other side now.”
I sighed. I’d almost managed to avoid that one.
I headed to the door on the right side of the room.
I went through my usual routine of cutting the door open, then pushed it wide.
This led to another hallway with a door at the end, mirroring the one on the opposite side. Having now seen that innocuous-seeming hallways were even more tricky than I had previously anticipated, I had a reasonable degree of reticence about stepping inside.
Once again, I couldn’t see any obvious traps. Unlike the other hall, however, this one had a series of obvious switches — a set of four — near the far door. They were color coded; blue, yellow, green, and red.
“Any idea what I’m supposed to do with the switches?” I asked Reika.
“Telling you would be cheating. Go on.”
I groaned. Puzzles with colored switches weren’t really my thing.
I stepped into the hall. A stone wall emerged from the floor, blocking the path where I’d just come from, and dimming my available light.
I headed down the hallway cautiously, but the walls didn’t push inward this time. Instead, I heard a very different type of sound coming from the walls. It was easily recognizable — the sound of running water.
I felt the first water splash against my boots a moment later. That was good in some respects — my boots were getting a bit dusty — but on the minus side, I wasn’t big on drowning.
More openings began to appear in the walls, rapidly filling the corridor with water.
I trudged down the hallway, reaching the switches.
I pressed the blue one, thinking that maybe it corresponded to water.
It did, in fact. Water started pouring into the hallway faster.
It was rapidly reaching knee height, and getting cold.
If blue is water, maybe red is fire?
Fire and water had a tendency to cancel each other out, and I knew I could deflect any reasonable amount of flame if I needed to, so I hit that switch next.
No flames emerged from the halls, however. Instead, the water just started getting warmer.
If I’d been visiting this shrine for a hot bath, I might have appreciated the functionality. But drowning in warm water wasn’t much better than drowning in cold water, so I needed to rapidly find a solution.
I pressed the blue switch again, hoping it might turn off whatever I’d triggered before...but nope, it just made the water pour in even faster.
With the water at hip height, I was rapidly running out of options.
It was still getting hotter, too, to the point where it was going to rapidly go from warm and toasty to scalding and skin-stripping.
Yellow and green are the only ones left.
I didn’t know what those might be associated with in the local culture.
Air and stone, maybe?
I decided that there was a good chance that green was stone, and that it would do something to cancel out water...but it was also a pretty significant risk to keep hitting switches that were only making things worse.
And I hated this kind of puzzle.
I hacked a hole in the next door, allowing the water to begin flowing out of the room into the chamber in front of me. That bought me some time, but I didn’t know if flooding the next room would ruin anything inside that I wanted, so I still needed to rapidly stop the water.
I wasn’t going to rely on unlabeled switches. Instead, I trudged back toward the closest holes in the wall where the water was emerging and pressed my arm against the wall.
Reshape, I commanded the stone.
A section of stone from above the hole shifted downward, covering the opening.
I repeated the process with several more holes until the water flow had slowed to a trickle. My body ached from the use of so much stone sorcery, but I trusted my abilities more than hitting colored switches.
With the water draining into the next room, I walked back to the entrance and began to cut the stone wall, making an exit and another path for the water to clear.
I heard an “eep” from Reika as the water began to flow back into the previous room. Fortunately, that chamber was huge, and there was plenty of room for the water to seep into without causing Reika any harm.
I cleared the doorway entirely to make sure I had a safe exit route, then headed back down the hall toward the room I’d opened.
“What’d you find?” Reika shouted.
“Still working on that,” I replied. I reached the doorway near the switches and pried it open.
The next room was shaped like a cube, about fifteen feet across. In the center was a waist-height column with an extremely obvious treasure box on top.
There was some water on the floor from my efforts at draining the hallway, but not a lot.
I could sense metal inside the treasure box, but the container itself was another material. With the container in the way, I couldn’t get enough magnetic force to just pull it out of the room without entering like I’d done with the previous chamber.
I briefly contemplated just changing my sword into a chain and lassoing it, but I was worried that I might trigger any traps on the box in the process. That wasn’t necessarily the worst thing that could happen, but I was hoping to keep the contents of the box intact.
I scanned the room again, searching for monsters and obvious traps. I didn’t see anything at first, until I looked up.
There was a gigantic circular fan on the top of the room. It wasn’t currently operating. The blades were about as wide as my torso and looked very, very sharp.
I could see a few possibilities for the fan. Maybe it was going to blow some sort of horrible poisonous gas into the room. Maybe it was there to disperse some poisonous gas that was going to come out of the floor or walls, but only if I managed to solve a puzzle.
Or maybe it was just going to spin and drop from the ceiling, cutting anyone in the path to bits.
I stepped inside.
I’d been almost right with the third guess.
The fan began to spin. Another stone wall appeared to block the exit. And then the fan began to slowly descend, whirling with killing force.
A series of four more switches emerged from the wall on the right side of the room. Once again, they were blue, yellow, green, and red.
I didn’t even bother with them this time.
I rushed to the center of the room and tried to grab the box. It was stuck to the pedestal.
The fan blades whirled and continued to descend. It wasn’t coming down very fast, but I guessed I’d be getting a haircut in about a minute if I didn’t find a solution.
Upon further examination, the box was stuck to the pillar with an adhesive. It was also locked, with a combination lock.
I didn’t bother with the lock. I cut off the top portion of the pillar entirely, then tucked the box under my numb arm and headed back to the doorway. It was difficult to do anything with that arm, but I’d regained enough use to just hold the box in place.
The whirling blades descended faster.
I’d been planning to just cut my way out of the door and ignore the trap entirely, but with the blades rapidly coming closer, I didn’t know if I could finish that in time.
Instead, I stuck my scabbard upward. Not into the path of the blades themselves — that might have caused the blades to break off with enough force to bounce around the room and hit me. I stabbed right into the center, just barely making contact with the metal.
Then once I was in contact, solving the problem was easy.
Condense.
The entire fan compressed into a huge metal ball. It continued to descend and vibrate dangerously — whatever mechanism was causing it to move was still active — but it didn’t look like it was going to come loose.
I briefly considered taking the whole trap apart and seeing how it worked. A descending fan trap was an interesting ap
plication of mechanical engineering, and one I hadn’t seen before.
But ultimately, I was too tired for that sort of thing, and far more interested in whatever was inside the box.
I cut my way through the stone door. The ball descended until just above the pillar, then finally stopped moving. I was grateful for that, since it would have made a terrible cacophony if they’d impacted with each other.
I headed back down the hall and set the treasure box on the floor.
“Ooh! A box!” Reika knelt down. “What’s inside?”
“I haven’t opened it yet.” I groaned and knelt down with her.
“Hm, there’s a lock on it. That’s another puzzle. Were there any clues in there?”
“Probably,” I replied, then cut the lock off the box.
“That’s...well, I guess that technically works.”
I inspected the lock now that it was on the ground, then carefully touched it. There didn’t seem to be any traps, so I nudged it toward Reika. “You’re welcome to try to solve it if you’d like.”
“Can I?” She picked it up gingerly. “I guess it wouldn’t be cheating, since you already have the box open. Hm, okay...”
I flipped the treasure chest’s lid open. I wasn’t surprised to see it contained another key. I was, however, shocked to see it contained something I might actually find useful — a potion bottle. The bottle was filled with bright red fluid.
I scanned the box for any further traps, but didn’t see any. With that, I gingerly removed the key and the potion from the box.
“Another antidote?” I considered aloud.
Reika turned away from the combination lock to glance in my direction. “Hm? No, the hue is wrong for that. That’s a healing potion.”
I frowned at the bottle. I was impressed that Reika could recognize the type of potion based purely on the coloration, but I still didn’t trust it. And I was a little dubious about trusting her identification skills after she’d failed use the last potion we’d been given properly. “How confident are you that it’s actually a healing potion, and not another trap? Maybe a poison with food dye?”
“I think you’re worrying too much, but you can always open it up and sniff it.”
“And that would tell me what exactly?”
“Well, if it smells like redbane, it’s a red-colored poison. If it smells like lifestrand, it’s a healing potion.”
I raised an eyebrow at her. “I didn’t know you were an alchemist.”
“I’m not. I’ve just read books. Many, many books.”
I gave her an appreciative nod. “Okay. That’s impressive. But what do redbane and lifestrand smell like?”
She seemed to ponder that. “I honestly have no idea. In Into the Spider Spire, Vordren describes redbane as smelling like cinnamon? But I don’t actually know if that’s accurate. That one is fiction.”
“Is your source for the ingredients also fiction?”
She shook her head. “No, I’ve read an actual alchemy book. If it’s got redbane, it’s poison. If it’s got lifestrand, it’s not. They don’t mix. The problem is that Hartigan’s Introduction to Alchemy was focused on brewing the potions, not identifying the ingredients. They referred to a different book for finding and learning the components, and I didn’t have a copy of that.”
I groaned. “Okay.” I knew a little bit about poisons myself, but the local flowers were different from the ones I was used to, so I didn’t have any confidence in my ability to identify things that would be safe here.
I didn’t think that it was likely that just smelling the potion would be dangerous, though. I opened the cap and sniffed. It didn’t smell like cinnamon — more like peppermint, maybe.
I passed it to Reika. “Does this smell like the healing potion you used on me before?”
Reika sniffed at it. “I think so...? Honestly, I didn’t really get a good whiff of the last one before I poured it.”
She handed it back to me. I put the stopper back on the bottle and tucked it away in my pouch.
As much as I wanted to drink it and see if it would help with the lingering injuries on my back and chest, I didn’t feel like it was wise to drink it immediately for a couple reasons.
First, because I still wasn’t confident it was a healing potion. I wanted an expert to look at it.
Second, if it was a healing potion, I wanted to save it for when I truly needed it.
Third, and most importantly, healing spells and potions often made poisons spread. I didn’t know if the potions from Kaldwyn worked the same way as the ones from my homeland, but Arkhen’s healing potions worked like regeneration spells — they accelerated the body’s natural healing process. That same effect often made poisons spread further and faster, and I didn’t want to risk the chance of that happening.
I decided to save it for a life or death situation, or at least until I was confident that I’d neutralized the poison in my body.
With that, I had both keys to a door I had already opened, and I’d finished exploring to a point where even Dawn seemed satisfied.
I briefly backtracked to the room on the left just to see if I’d missed another healing potion hidden in the rubble somewhere, but I didn’t find anything else of interest.
“You ready to go in the central doors?” I asked Reika.
“Sure!”
I pulled them open.
Inside was a circular room with a large fountain in the center. The walls of the chamber were stark white, making them look far fancier than the surrounding portion of the shrine. The waters of the fountain seemed unnaturally clear and blue.
There were a pair of double doors on the other side of the room, but they were made of white wood rather than metal, and had a symbol above them — three spheres together, like what I’d seen on the pedestal in front of Dawnbringer.
I glanced around for traps, but Reika just stepped inside. I winced involuntarily, waiting for some sort of poisonous gas cloud or sharks to fly out of the water, but nothing happened.
“This is a safe room.” Reika turned and waved at me. “Come on.”
I eyed the room dubiously for a few moments before following Reika inside.
Reika went straight to the fountain, dipping her hands in and taking a drink. “Delicious!”
I walked over, watching her for a few moments to see if she collapsed from poisoning. “Are you sure that was wise?”
“Hm? Oh, don’t be such a worrier! This is a safe room. It’s like one of the ones in the spires right before a terrible monster.”
I glanced at the wooden doors. “Meaning there’s something terrible in there.”
“Probably!” She grinned. “But for now, there’s mana water!”
I glanced at the water, then back to Reika. “Mana water?”
“Exactly what it sounds like. Mana water is water infused with gray mana to help refresh the power of your attunement before you face something dangerous.” She frowned. “But I don’t know what it would do to you. You don’t have an attunement.”
“You don’t, either,” I noted. “Are you sure it’s safe for you to be drinking that?”
“Hm. Don’t know. Probably.” She took another drink. “It tastes good.”
I gave her a worried look. “That doesn’t mean it’s not dangerous.”
She shrugged. “I feel fine. You can wait a few minutes and see if I explode if you’re that nervous about it.”
I did wait a few minutes.
Reika did not explode.
She didn’t seem to have any side effects, aside from complaining that now she was hungry.
We split the rest of our rations, but I knew that wouldn’t be much for her. She’d been flying in her dragon form right before we’d been inside, and being in that form took a lot of energy out of her.
I’d left my backpack outside, and that held most of the remaining food. Even that wasn’t enough to keep a dragon satiated for long, though. We’d have to find another large animal soon after getting outside to
feed her properly.
Resting made me nervous, since so many other rooms had held traps, but I eventually accepted that Reika’s explanation was probably accurate.
I took a sip of the mana water. Just a sip, in case it had any dangerous interactions with the mana in my body. It tasted fine, and I didn’t feel any side effects after waiting several minutes. In fact, I thought I felt a little bit better.
The numbness in my right arm was gradually fading. That was probably just the passage of time rather than the mana water, but it was still important.
With that in mind, I decided to wait a bit longer before moving on to the next room. As much as I hated waiting, getting as close to full functionality for my right arm as possible was important if I was about to face an even tougher challenge.
Reika seemed to be having even more difficulty waiting than I was, though, because of her hunger. I briefly debated trying to sleep in the safe room overnight to recover from my overuse of essence and the poison completely, but I didn’t think that would be healthy for Reika.
We rested for a while. I drank some more of the mana water periodically, and it proved to be safe. I couldn’t tell if it was actually rejuvenating my ability to use magic or not, since I didn’t have a clear measurement of mana like an attuned did, and the costs of my spells would naturally be recovering over time regardless of if I was drinking the water or not.
Regardless of whether the water was helping, just sitting and resting was good enough for me to recover a little. By the time two hours had passed, I was able to hold my sword with my right hand effectively again. The numbness had faded, giving way to pinpricks in my arm and hand, and then finally just a lingering soreness.
I decided that was good enough.
Reika and I walked to the doors, then checked them for traps. I didn’t find any obvious ones.
I raised my scabbard and focused my aura to cut through it.
“Please don’t do that on the big doors. They’re not trapped, and they’re really nice.”
I frowned, but I humored Reika and just pulled the doors open. They weren’t locked.
Ahead, I saw nothing but whiteness. Not a hallway, not a room. Just an endless field of white.
I almost closed the door right away. I didn’t trust that in the slightest.
