Trial and Flame

by Kevin Murphy

  “Cheat?” Mina asked. “How so?”

  Dakkon shrugged. “I’ve got no way to know if they’ll work, but I’ve got two ideas in mind. We can try to freeze it—but there’s a lot of ways that could backfire. So, I suggest plan ‘B.’”

  “And what’s plan B?” Cline asked.

  Dakkon grinned.

  \\\

  Six failed attempts produced a lot of grumbling from Cline, but the seventh try proved lucky. Cline worked through the routine step by step as Roth and Melee stood to the sides of the platform. When it came time for the final maneuver, the side pair grabbed Cline by either leg to brace him, then ran around cranking the blond ranger like an oversized fishing reel.

  After that seventh attempt, the monkey golem grabbed its forehead with its left hand then let its body fall backwards onto the platform. For the first time, it didn’t bother to reset to its starting position.

  “All right!” yelled Mina from the sidelines. “I think you guys did it! Good job!”

  Cline stood up and looked down to Dakkon. “Does my head seem flatter?” he asked as he jostled his hair. “It feels flatter.”

  “Yup,” Dakkon said. “Looks pretty flat to me.”

  Cline frowned at Dakkon’s response.

  “Don’t worry about it too much,” said Melee as she slapped the ranger on his back. “It was a necessary evil. Just be glad you’re not bald, eh?”

  \\\

  The monkey trial had everyone save for Cline in much-improved spirits. If they could catch a break, the rooms ahead would be more like that one—with no apparent time limit and no threat of impending doom from rooms filling with water or mechanically-driven spikes.

  The odd design of the tower was apparent as the next walkway between rooms was far shorter than the others had been—clumping two of the trial rooms more closely together. It was growing even colder, and the spiteful breeze showed no signs that it would be letting up any time soon, so Dakkon placed down another Hotspot for his group to keep them warm while they studied the clues ahead.

  The fourth room was labeled ‘selection.’ Its stone mural depicted a lordly figure in the upper-left of the frame, sitting atop an upraised throne. The figure leaned forward, holding an outstretched hand beneath it to five, robed others. The others knelt down with heads lowered in quasi-prostration. Each held a box above their head, presenting it to the seated sovereign.

  “Think we can find any useful information about gift selection on the forums?” Roth joked.

  Mina sat down abruptly and began to summon her media console. “Be as facetious as you’d like, but this is still the only room we’ve had anything resembling a real clue for since the first. You can bet I’m going to at least take a peek.”

  Roth shrugged at the response, sat down, and dug up his own media console. Mina had had a point. They didn’t have anything better to spend the next few minutes on other than trying to figure out how not to die. The rest of the party followed their lead, but ultimately, their collective search yielded nothing of significance.

  “I’m getting real tired of these dead ends,” Melee said with a scowl.

  “Oh hush, that’s the first time you’ve looked up anything,” Mina chided her friend. “But, you’re not wrong. It’s frustrating how little information there is on this place.”

  “On the flip side,” Dakkon said. “It does make it fairly exciting to explore.”

  “Agreed,” said Cline. “Stupid, too.”

  “Agreed,” echoed Dakkon.

  The party searched for 20 minutes finding nothing resembling a lead.

  “Think there’s any significance to the nearest gift-giving guy kneeling down a ways off from the other four?” Roth asked. After no one responded, he followed up with, “Well, then, shall we?”

  With no reason to delay further, the party stood, and Roth placed the palm of his left hand against the large stone door. The barrier rose upward, portcullis-style, as the one before it had. Not wanting to be trapped on the wrong side of the door—or under it—when it came crashing down, they filtered in quickly.

  Unlike the other chambers, which had been neat and orderly, this one was filled with mounds of assorted rubbish. In front of them were five great piles of mixed-up junk. There were wagon wheels, fence posts, bones, bricks, stakes, gloves, tankards, tassels, torch shafts, and other such tat. There were tools, trinkets, and waste made of metal, wood, and stone.

  The outer walls of the room were adorned with evenly-spaced ceramic vases, each filled with exotic-looking, but long-dead foliage. The room had the atmosphere of a long-undisturbed burial chamber. To further emphasize the vibe of decay, the potted plant by the exit door—another dead, thin-branched sapling—had been trimmed back to resemble an almost mummy-like gnarled hand.

  By the exit, beyond the piles, the room raised to a higher split-level, where five staggered, marble plinths stood. There was no collection of dust from the passing of time. The plinths were as pristine as any white stone. Beneath the plinths there was writing etched into the ground of the upper level in a box made of more white stone. Like the text above each room, they could read the message clearly. It read:

  Five gifts from five walks

  The whitesmith, the assiduous, presents a tool of trade.

  The hunter’s skill yields trophy kill, reshaped to show the way.

  The scoundrel casts the rest aside, his brigand’s gift is jade.

  The noble’s wealth binds precious lives, with precious things inlayed.

  The fool, forever last and least, his gift is found not made.

  Further examination of the ceramic vases spaced along the edge of the room revealed that, while both styles were decorated with complex, angular linework, their imagery could easily be divided into two differing types. One type depicted hands gripping unrecognizable weapons or tools in working positions. Other vases had peculiar and uniquely-posed hands with only one thing in common: they each had a single, apparently random finger which pointed up and toward the center of the room. Looking up to where the hodgepodge of fingers directed, a high, recessed ceiling displayed a massive well-preserved fresco of a hand reaching downward as if to pluck something up. Three fingers—the pointer, index, and thumb—were nearly pinched together as though to grab something from the second pile from the left, which it hovered overhead of. Despite its placement over a pile of junk rather than directly above the walkway, Dakkon found that having a massive hand hovering anywhere nearby was rather off-putting.

  “All right!” said Roth, enthusiastically. “Looks like we’ve got another non-lethal one.”

  “Thank the gods,” Cline said, clearly relieved. “This place is pretty creepy, though.”

  “True enough,” said Dakkon. “At least we’ve got a solid idea about where to start. That poem’s got to play a key role. Shall we try breaking it down?”

  When there were no objections, Melee took the initiative to read the first line aloud for group analysis. “Five gifts from five walks.”

  After only a brief pause, Mina was the first to comment. “Simple enough, we need to find five things—hence these five, obvious, barren plinths just waiting there for us to set things on.”

  Everyone nodded, agreeing with her assessment.

  “The whitesmith, the assiduous, presents a tool of trade,” Melee read the next line. The second line created a slightly longer pause than the first one had.

  “What’s a whitesmith?” asked Cline.

  “No idea,” said Dakkon who looked to the others for some insight.

  “Me neither,” said Roth. Melee simply shrugged.

  “How about you look that up, Cline,” suggested Mina. “Report back with what you find.”

  Cline nodded, accepting the task he’d been assigned, then stepped aside to summon his media console which would allow him to surf the internet for an answer.

  “Assiduous means careful, detailed, and focused,” said Mina. “It looks like each of the poem’s lines beyond the first contai
ns a character and a personality trait. So, the whitesmith is hardworking and meticulous.”

  “Okay,” said Dakkon. “I suppose we’ll have to find something in these stacks that represents the job. Maybe if we’re lucky, the first one will be in the first stack and so on.”

  “It’s like a tinsmith,” said Cline. “A whitesmith is someone who works with white metals. So, a tool of a whitesmith’s trade could be anything to help shape metal.”

  “Or white metal itself,” suggested Roth.

  “Or white metal itself,” agreed Cline. “Anything else you guys need me to look up while I’m at it?”

  “Hang tight, we’ll know in a second or two,” Mina replied.

  After a moment’s pause, Melee read the third line. “The hunter’s skill yields trophy kill, reshaped to show the way. That’s got to be something made out of fur or bone.”

  “Sounds right to me,” said Dakkon. “Something that shows the way… maybe a lamp?”

  “A compass?” suggested Roth.

  “Could be a baton, I guess,” proposed Mina.

  “Hmm, I reckon that one could be several things,” said Cline. “What’s the next line?”

  “The scoundrel casts the rest aside, his brigand’s gift is jade,” Melee continued reading.

  “What could a scoundrel cast aside?” wondered Roth aloud. “An anchor? Think they’re talking about pirates?”

  “I don’t know…” said Dakkon, skeptically.

  When no further suggestions were forthcoming, Melee read the fifth line. “The noble’s wealth binds precious lives, with precious things inlayed.”

  “Sounds like something worth finding,” Cline said with a grin. “Could be a crown or scepter.”

  “Binds precious lives, though,” said Mina. “Wealth binding lives sounds a lot like a dowry.”

  “Or a big, shiny rock,” said Melee, holding up the back of her left hand to clarify her point.

  “Yeah, an engagement ring or wedding band certainly fits, too,” agreed Dakkon.

  “Then it says, ‘The fool, forever last and least, his gift is found not made,’” Melee finished the poem.

  “That could be almost anything from these heaps of junk,” observed Cline.

  “Well, maybe not,” said Mina. “Unless its implying he’s a thief—which I doubt because the scoundrel is already another role—it sounds like its literally something that the guy found. I’d keep an eye out for odd stones, dried flowers, and whatnot—basically anything that could be found in the wild.”

  “All right, then,” said Roth. “Are we splitting up to dig around?”

  “Well, there are five piles and there’s five of us,” Dakkon said. “Let’s get to it.”

  Each member of the party walked to a free pile of junk then began digging through the massive piles for anything that might fit the mold. At first, they tried sifting through them in sections—but the amount of junk proved to be far too much to properly comb through. Soon, everyone took Mina’s lead and began the long, slow, meticulous process of moving their pile piece by piece to another location to ensure they saw every item at least once. Anything that might be of interest was set aside to go through at the end.

  Though the puzzle seemed interesting at its onset, solving it was a bit like cleaning up a horrible mess in a stranger’s house. No one knew exactly which pieces were important and had to stop to second guess themselves frequently along the way. Roth had even created an extra pile consisting of items which he thought were junk but which he really wanted a second opinion about.

  At the end, the party had found 48 items that could be the whitesmith’s; 23 bone and fur curios for the hunter; five jade objects that might have been related to the scoundrel; eight jewel-encrusted goodies destined for their pockets which might also have something to do with the noble; and a sizable pile of uncounted rubbish that could’ve been found along the roadside, which might’ve been the fool’s low-effort gift.

  Even with the new, reduced piles—they still had far too much to choose from. If they were to place objects on the pedestals, testing out each combination one by one, they might be there for a very, very long time. Some additional sorting was in order.

  The items that were most interesting to the party were all among the scoundrel’s and noble’s piles. Amongst the jade items, there was a statuette of a reptilian monster; a necklace tied together by black silken cord; a smooth ring marked with three black slashes across its top; a small, decorative blade with no special characteristics; and a single tear-shaped earring. There was no jade anchor—or anything else that appeared to represent casting the rest aside. There was a knife, though—potentially a tool of the scoundrel’s trade. However, the poem seemed to imply that the scoundrel’s gift wasn’t a tool, but rather something that he’d stolen.

  It was when the party compared the two smallest piles to each other that a possible solution presented itself. Among the eight bejeweled items in the noble’s pile, as Melee had predicted, there was a gold ring liberally studded with cloudy white diamonds.

  “See if you guys can dig up rings from the other piles,” Mina suggested.

  They could. After taking the effort to meticulously pull everything apart, producing a ring of pewter, bone, jade, and gold took no time at all. It took a little longer to find the ring made of eroded pumice from the final pile, but once they did—the party felt confident that they’d solved the puzzle. It all fit with the room’s aggressive hand motif.

  The riddle made sense that way—too, Mina observed. The thumb might be considered the assiduous finger by how it allowed people to manipulate tools and perform detailed work; the index finger pointed the way; the middle finger was in the center—both literally casting the others aside and figuratively doing so when it stood alone; the ring finger had long been associated with the bonds of marriage; and the final finger was last and least in all things.

  They placed the five rings on the waiting plinths, then Dakkon walked to the door and set his right palm on it. Nothing happened.

  “Hmmm,” Roth voiced the party’s concern. “That’s not good.”

  They were convinced that they’d found the solution, but they weren’t sure if there might be another step. They tried reversing the order of the rings, but nothing happened. They realigned them on the pedestals in different ways and nothing happened. Dakkon tried putting all five rings on his hand then touching the door with them and nothing happened. Each member of the party put on one ring and tried to touch the door, then the pedestals, then they held each other’s hands—but, in all cases, nothing seemed to work.

  About 30 minutes in to trying increasingly asinine solutions to the puzzle, Cline zoned out while staring at the ceiling. After a bit of time he said, “They sure push the hand imagery pretty far here. Those guys on the mural outside were kind of like the fingers of a hand… the pedestals are like fingers… there’s the pots and that painting overhead, there were five piles of junk, and even that creepy plant looks a lot like a hand.”

  Everyone paused what they were doing and looked at Cline, then they collectively looked to the plant which they had forgotten about—blending in with the scenery of the room as they tried this and that to get the door open. The plant was shaped like a human hand. It was about the right size to fit a ring on each of its five, neatly-trimmed—though twisted—branches.

  Dakkon collected the rings and walked them over to the plant, where he decorated its mangled form. Then, when he slipped the pumice stone onto the plant’s arboreal pinky, the hand began to move. It stretched out wide, then slowly curled each finger inward, clenching onto the rings tightly as a fist, then it stopped. When the group finally peeled their eyes away from the potted plant, they noticed that everything else in the room had transformed into mounds of dust.

  “What!” hollered Cline. “Not the gems! My payday!”

  Melee sighed and placed a hand on Cline’s shoulder. “Let’s just get out of here.”

  Dakkon sighed for a different reason.
He was just glad to be finished with the room. It had taken far longer than the other rooms combined since they needed to slowly sift through the room’s contents. But, had they tried to poke at the pile blindly, they would almost certainly still be at it.

  “We’ll just have to get some more treasures at the top,” Roth said to Cline, consolingly, placing a hand on his other shoulder.

  When Mina touched the door, it began to slowly rise. The sky had already begun to brighten, setting the stage for a chilly early-morning.

  Chapter 20: Endure

  The stone path which led to the room marked ‘perseverance’ was covered in bird droppings. It wasn’t exactly everywhere, but it was plentiful enough that no one was particularly excited to take a seat all the same. Even the protective alcove just before the door was fragrant with the odor of stale, cloaca-produced waste.

  Mina wanted to research the upcoming room’s left-of-door stone mural. She might’ve opted to do her net-scouring inside the room for a change—to escape the fecal minefield—but the carved stone portrayed someone in what appeared to be a considerable amount of pain. There was no chance Mina would walk into a room like that without first putting in her due diligence—this time, though, she would refrain from plopping herself on the ground while she worked.

  The mural showed a man with eyes tightly clenched shut, lips parted, and teeth gritted. The subject was clearly wincing in pain as he held onto some sort of sphere in front of him. The sphere was emitting something—depicted by straight lines connected to it like rays of light from a crudely-drawn sun. That, or perhaps the man was holding onto the sun itself.

  This time around, Mina’s search bore fruit, but rather than providing any hard data on the task ahead, the information simply gave the party insight into another old legend. Mina recounted to her friends what she’d found—a tale of mortals saving themselves when the gods refused to help, and of many heroes’ sacrifices.

  Like the story of King Kaeren, this legend was ancient in origin. Unlike most of Chronicle’s legends, however, this one was being talked about. It had its own community, with many comments about it scattered across the reaches of the internet. The reason for that, it seemed, was that the story contained mention of what may be the single most powerful weapon that had ever been created by mortal hands. It was difficult to keep the internet quiet about any clues related to powerful items when the information was so easy to find. There were plenty of amateur relic hunters who claimed that they would be the ones to find the powerful artifact. There were undoubtedly many serious relic hunters searching for such an item, too, but they wouldn’t be the ones casually spreading information to bolster their self-esteem.