To my surprise, we don’t emerge in another labyrinthine passage that we have to slowly work our way through. Instead, we’re in a relatively large chamber of maybe sixty feet by forty feet, and maybe twenty feet tall. Though that’s still far smaller than the arena from before.
In front of us is a sealed double door that looks made of extremely heavy metal alloys, and on either side are thick walls of stone I don’t want to try to bust down. I sense no hidden passageways hidden within them; Nicholas and Chloe both confirm after their own independent inspections of the room.
The door is locked. And for the first time in a good while, it’s locked so tightly that even a potent application of my [Unlock] glyph with three hundred points of [Ether] fails to even knock it ajar. This surprises me— three points will unlock most conventional doors, and even many Ethertech locks can be worn down with fifty to seventy-five points. For the mechanism to withstand this kind of power? It suggests that the Tower is getting serious in these final few floors. It doesn’t plan to allow us to bypass whatever trials or puzzles it has in store for us.
“Ah,” Nicholas says, pointing to the center of the room. “I believe this is the mechanism that will open the doorway.”
In the center of the room is a collection of stones that are slightly brighter in color. Sixteen of them in total, forming a four-by-four grid.
“So, do we need to do anything special to activate it?” Chloe asks. “Or… How does it work, anyway?”
“It’s a simple variation of the lights out puzzle, although the three-by-three one is more famous. When you step on one of the tiles, the tile you stand on, and all of the adjacent tiles, will switch between being lit up and being dark. Like so.” He steps on one of the corner tiles, which indeed does light up, along with the two directly adjacent. “The goal is to switch all the tiles to the dark position, which will bring us to the next floor.”
“So, uh–” Chloe tilts her head.
“Would you two like to give it a go? I think it would be a good opportunity for you to get experience with these sorts of puzzles. I might not be traveling with you the next time you enter a dungeon like this one.”
I’m not sure of Nicholas’ angle here. Just a few minutes ago, he was hurrying us along, and now, he’s stalling again. It doesn’t sit well with me, but thankfully, I do know the solution to the puzzle. In fact, it’s even easier than with the three-by-three variant. I step on an edge tile, then step off the array, move to another edge tile a knight’s move away, step on that one, and repeat the process two more times until I’ve turned off all the switches.
At which point, nothing happens.
Nicholas furrows his brow. “Excellent solution… Is what I would like to say, but it seems there’s a bit more to the puzzle.”
“I think I know,” Chloe says.
She steps on each of the four corner squares once and none of the others, at which point, the room begins to shake and the mechanism holding the door fast begins to deactivate.
“Eclipse Tower,” she says. “As in, the solution isn’t to turn all the lights off. It’s to form the shape of the eclipse. Darkness surrounded by light.”
Nicholas is briefly stunned, but recomposes himself in a tenth of a second at most. “Of course.” His tone carries the unspoken follow-up of ‘Why didn’t I think of that myself?’.
We head into the next room, this time with yet another puzzle, though one even easier than the last. Chloe fires a few weak [Piercing Beams] through some crystals of light dangling off the ceiling, once again forming the array into the shape of an eclipse, and the door opens.
We’re now in an absolutely colossal chamber. It’s gotta be the size of an entire football stadium, including all the bleachers, stretching as high as the tallest domes. In the center is a massive monolith, stretching a good fifty feet high. It’s pure black in terms of my ordinary vision, but it’s nearly blinding white when viewed through my [Archangel’s Gaze]. I’m forced to disable it while in this central chamber, lest I blind my Etheric senses entirely.
Now, I feel more than a little vulnerable to whatever other nasties might be lying in wait. But once again, there are none; Nicholas has said as much, and I trust him on this much at least.
Within the chamber, there are eight branching hallways, not counting the one from which we entered. Four on each side, evenly spread out among the side walls. With no immediate reason to prefer one passage over any of the others, we decide to start at our current location of six-o’clock, and then work our way around.
Sure enough, there’s another puzzle when we head into the hallway at the seven o’clock position. This time around, we have to go through, of all things, a teleporter maze.
It’s kind of odd how easy these puzzles are. Push some blocks around, activate switches in a certain pattern, move to a different room, pull a lever, push buttons in a specific arrangement, then do this, that, and the other. The closest thing to a truly interesting puzzle involves the use of angled mirrors and a beam of light, getting it to hit a series of light-activated mechanisms which, together, loosed some sort of Etheric seal somewhere else in the dungeon. The others feel more like time wasters.
The excessive boredom makes it feel like hours have gone by just since the fight in the arena, and we’ve got no sign that we’re even remotely close to the end of this dungeon.
“Something feels off,” Chloe says as we finish the seventh puzzle. “This feels like… it doesn’t feel right. It feels like we’re doing something we ought not be doing.”
“I don’t disagree in a vacuum,” Nicholas adds. “It does feel like we’re activating something. Something powerful. Something dark and ominous. Something much better left asleep. And yet, we have no choice but to continue moving forward.”
I try to fly up, seeing if perhaps, now that we’re back in the large chamber, we can skip some of these puzzles already. We can’t. My flight is being rebuffed by a powerful spatial distortion that keeps me from getting far off the ground. [Repulsion]-based forcefields stop me from moving across narrow gaps in the flooring, and they’ve been powered to such an extent that even when I try to repel said barriers, I’m the one knocked back instead.
Hells below, whoever or whatever designed this labyrinth even nailed the concept of impassable knee-high fences. It’s like… every trope of simple video game puzzles thrown into one, and then stitched together with immensely powerful invisible walls to keep us shoehorned on the ‘correct’ path.
At least there are no goddess-damned bats swooping down from the ceiling every five seconds, forcing us into an annoying encounter and making us waste our limited recovery items. It’s a larger comfort than it sounds, for sanity’s sake more than anything.
And what’s making the whole mess even more infuriating is all the damn backtracking we have to do. Several of the puzzles in the eight wings are connected to at least one other. Get this key over at the end of hallway A, go all the way to the completely opposite end of the main chamber to unlock a door, flip a switch, which activates a different platform somewhere else. It’s hard to keep track of; Nicholas’s [Analytic Prognostication] helps him to an extent, and I’m taking copious notes in my sketchbook to try to organize the data we’re collecting.
Minutes turn into hours. Fatigue sets in, and yet, we can’t stop. We can’t slow down. We have to keep pushing. Because all the while, there is a time limit. If it’s not the Warden showing up… whenever it might, then eventually we’ll run out of food and water, or we’ll need to sleep and have no safe shelter.
And that would suck almost more than had we succumbed to the various monsters that strangely, haven’t appeared in the dungeon.
No, this is something a lot bigger. Everything we’ve been doing to this point. It’s all been building up to something. Something involving that monolith. But I don’t know what it is. And that— for the first time in a very long time— terrifies me to more core.
Still, we move on, into the eighth and final wing of the tower. Space itself feels as though it’s beginning to unravel. As though we are stepping out of the boundaries of our own universe, and into a different one. Shit, after the trials of the fourth, fifth, and sixth ascents, that just might have more truth to it than I’d care to admit. Strange warriors from distant realms, a parallel Earth and an Operation Bioweapon that seemed so similar to the Project Seraphina which birthed the original me.
And then the trials and tribulations of a faraway land for the sixth trip up here, the overall world just feeling too rich and vibrant to be just a simulation. Maybe it is, but part of me feels that it actually did happen somewhere, somewhen. At least, I want to believe that it did, that Chloe, Kristil, and I actually did some real good for some real people, not just some constructs in some simulation somewhere.
As for what awaits us at the top of the Eclipse Tower, I don’t know. But the only path out is through, and so we march with determination up to the final of these eight trials.
It takes a moment to adjust our eyes from the darkness in the Tower to the sudden brightness of this final, somewhat smaller room. Pure sunlight streams straight down through the opening, casting the entire room in a rich and golden glow, despite it now being late in the afternoon at the earliest. This is exacerbated further by the crystal ball in the center of the chamber, refracting the cascading light through every nook and cranny.
The only other thing of note in the room are seven crystals on the opposite wall. This puzzle is a bit different from those we’ve seen before, but after everything we’ve gone through, after seeing the item the dungeon gave to me specifically? An [Elementalist’s Bandana], infused with an ability called [Rainbow Chain]? Seven elements, seven crystals on the wall, seven colors of the rainbow, where each element has its own distinctive color associated? I might not be right, but damn if I’m not confident that it’s my time to shine.
I place my hand on the crystal ball in the center. It’s warm to the touch, and not just in the sense that I would expect from an object exposed to constant sunlight. The warmth permeates past the physical sensation of temperature and enters into the Etheric. I feel a strange aura, one which calms and soothes me, in contrast to the eerie, unnerving feeling that spreads throughout the rest of this twisted tower.
A calm, patient voice enters my mind, a brief connection forming.
“Cast the seven elemental seeds in their proper order. When all seven crystals have been satisfied, the way to the beacon shall be revealed.”
I turn to Chloe, who smiles softly at me. I turn to Nicholas, who gives me a brief yet firm nod of approval. Turning back to the crystal ball, still feeling that connection, albeit much more distantly now, I begin to cast, in the order of the rainbow as described. The incandescent red of [Fire], the sturdy, steadfast orange of [Earth], the yellow-white, golden glow of Chloe’s [Light], the cool green of the [Wind] in my wings. The tranquil, deep, unfathomable blue of [Water] flowing through me. The deep mysteries of the indigo deep, pulsing with the energy of the [Darkness]. And finally, the radiant roar of violet [Lightning] coursing through me, spurring me onward.
One by one, the crystals on the wall each light up, pulsing with the power I’ve infused into the large sphere before me. And as the surge of lightning subsides and the final stone begins to glow in harmony with the others, the entire tower briefly rumbles. It seems a new path is before us, but will it lead to salvation, or ruin?