by Kevin Murphy
Truth. Lies.
The party was silent in their hands-free assessment of the display. When Roth moved around to the backside of the pedestal, he paused deliberately and clicked his tongue.
“Everyone dies,” Roth said. It was the first thing uttered since everyone had stepped inside the peculiar new trial room.
“What?” Cline said with wide eyes. “What do you mean?”
“It says that right here on the back,” Roth clarified. “Truth. Lies. Everyone dies.”
“Oh,” said Cline absently, only marginally relieved by the given context.
Melee placed her face close to the lenses held by the pedestal and peered through them one by one. After the third, she said, “Looks like only the magenta one does anything.”
“Magenta?” Dakkon asked. “What do you mean it does something?”
“Take a look for yourself,” Melee said with a shrug, as she moved aside. “And, yeah, magenta. Those two are yellow and cyan.”
Dakkon mentally archived away Melee’s unexpected color knowledge then peered through each of the lenses. When he did so, he could see straight down the hallway to the end of the room. The yellow and cyan lenses did nothing, save for tint the hall a slightly different color. The magenta lens, however, revealed an arrow painted onto the far wall—pointing to the left—much like invisible ink under the scrutiny of ultraviolet light.
“Oh, take a look at this you guys,” Dakkon said to the others who hadn’t yet seen. “There’s an arrow on the wall."
One by one the others peered through the lenses. When Mina’s turn came, rather than bend down to look through the glass, she picked the lens up by its stem and held it up to her eye—drawing looks of concern from the other members of the party. When she noticed, she said, “What? If it’s a liar’s puzzle we’ll have to take it with us.”
“What’s a liar’s puzzle?” Dakkon asked.
“It’s a sort of logic puzzle where you have to figure out the truth by determining the rules of how its characters lie. It works because the liars always lie in the same way. So, if this magenta arrow is lying, every magenta arrow should be the wrong way—or every magenta arrow is the right way if it’s telling the truth,” Mina said.
“Oh, I remember those puzzles,” Roth said.
Dakkon did too. He’d done a version of them as a part of his early education. The trick was finding out the critical thread of information that would allow you to unravel the rest. “Why were you so sure it was a liar’s puzzle?” he asked.
“After hearing about the arrow, I figured it had to be that or pick one of three lenses—where one told the truth, one lied, and the third killed everyone. You know, ‘Truth, Lies, or Everyone dies,’” Mina explained then shrugged. “But, that didn’t seem very fair. So far, these trials have been objectively pretty fair if you assume we didn’t have all of the information we needed for the first one.”
Roth rolled his eyes at the explanation. Mina may have been right, but she hadn’t needed to show off that fact by grabbing a lens and alarming them all.
Mina used the lens to examine the rest of the hallway. Her lips pinched a bit when she encircled the pedestal.
“What’s up?” Cline asked.
“On the front, ‘Truth’ is glowing,” said Mina. “So is ‘Everyone dies’ back here.”
She handed the magenta lens to Cline for him to see, then picked up the cyan and yellow lenses. She looked at the front and back of the pedestal with each lens then sighed. “Of course,” she said. “They’re all the same. They all make the same words glow. If they’re lying, they’d say they were the truth.”
“Not to complicate things,” Roth said, “but, what happens when you look through two lenses at once?”
When Mina did so, she sighed again. “This time in green, ‘Truth’ is glowing—but nothing else. Good call. I’ll try each combination out. Someone jot on their arm what we find out.”
From her tests they found that the base lenses—magenta, cyan, and yellow—all caused the words ‘Truth’ and ‘Everyone dies’ to glow. The combined lenses—green, blue, and red—all caused the word ‘Truth’ to glow on its own. Combining together all three lenses created an almost-opaque black lens which was nearly unusable. However, when Mina bent down close to each word while looking through all three lenses, she saw a faint glow emitting from the words ‘Lies’ and ‘Everyone dies.’ The glow was so subtle that she asked the others to double check her work. Sure enough, the aura around the black words seemed to radiate like a slowly-moving miasma—quite unlike the almost-glittering display of the other colors.
“Taking all of that information into consideration,” Cline said, “… where does that put us?”
“Sounds to me like we’ve got to make a choice,” said Melee.
“What sort of choice?” Cline asked.
“Whether or not we believe that everyone dies,” Melee answered.
Dakkon took another moment to think about the information they’d been presented. The magenta, cyan, and yellow lenses all seemed to say that it’s true that everyone dies, while the colored combinations seemed to imply—by omission—that perhaps some people keep on living. The combination of all three lenses might reveal the answer to the puzzle, or it may be another liar in the puzzle. It did seem odd that a liar’s answer would be so hard to see—but, then, maybe the point was to make the answer appear correct because it was a little harder to find.
“Everyone dies, right?” said Roth.
“Of course, they do…” Mina said. “in our world, anyway.”
Roth nodded his understanding. “So that might not be the case here, huh? Anyone know of any immortals?”
After a moment of silence, Cline spoke up first. “Only the gods, as far as I know.” He then seemed to pause for an instant as though another, fleeting thought presented itself then disappeared as quickly as it had come. Dakkon noticed the strange tick, but he wrote it off as simple indecision.
“I wouldn’t really consider the gods a part of ‘everyone,’” Dakkon said. “Maybe everything, but not everyone.”
“Maybe that’s because we don’t have gods causing a stir on the other side,” Mina said with a shrug. “Still, I’m leaning towards everyone dies as the correct answer. So long as I’m expected to hand a portion of my income over to the government, I’ll defer to the old idiom: ‘Nothing’s certain, save death and taxes’—or something to that effect.”
“Well, let’s each take 10 minutes to see what we can find. Search for information on immortals—and the origins of the gods, I suppose,” Dakkon said. “It can’t hurt to take one more break when we’re so close to the end.”
The party nodded and stepped apart for room. A vortex of splotchy white and blue bent the space in front of Dakkon as he summoned his media console. When the portal’s haze dispersed, it left behind a stone obelisk visible to him alone. Through his personal console, he began to search for anything and everything he could about cheating death in Chronicle.
When the group returned to share what they’d found, results weren’t entirely conclusive. There were legends about those with the power to bring people back from the dead, and there were several—more mundane—ways to cheat death. Wards against death could be cast to prevent someone from going over the brink for a short time; elixirs could be quaffed to add years to one’s life; there was even a sect of people likened to immortals that could extend their lives for centuries—but their ranks all died in the end. Ultimately, when they compared notes, it certainly seemed like everyone died.
“Looks like we have our answer,” Mina said. “So, let’s assume that magenta, cyan, and yellow are telling the truth.”
With nothing else to go on, the party stood and formed loosely defensive ranks. They moved to the end of the first hall and took a right. Around the corner, another hall terminated in another divide in their path. Mina, Roth, and Cline each held one of the three base lenses at the ready.
“Cyan arrow to the left,” Roth sai
d. The others nodded.
“Before we go,” Dakkon said. “Let’s look at the combinations to make sure they’re disagreeing with the base lenses… I’ll also throw up little ice totems to serve as breadcrumbs, should we want to come back.”
“It can’t be that big in here, can it?” Melee said. “The central tower wasn’t all that much wider than the trial rooms we’ve already been in.”
“Still, I’d feel better,” Dakkon said.
“Yeah, that’s a good call,” Mina agreed. “It can’t hurt to gather info.”
While the others looked through the lenses once again, Dakkon built a small, round dome of ice at the corner of the path they’d taken. If they ever needed to go back, they could keep their eyes to the ground and turn toward the ice.
“Looks like there’s a red arrow to the right,” Mina said. “So, the opposite.”
“All right, good to know,” said Dakkon. “Let’s keep going.”
The party followed the cyan arrow to the left, Dakkon created an ice marker, and Cline spotted a yellow arrow to the right.
“Is it weird that the magenta and yellow both go right?” Roth asked, a bit concerned.
“Maybe?” Mina said, unsure. “But, there are only two options. I guess there’d need to be some overlap.”
After Dakkon quickly created his ice marker, the party turned the corner once again.
“Not cyan,” said Roth.
“Nor yellow,” Cline said. “Is it magenta?”
“…” Mina paused briefly. “It’s not magenta. I suppose we’ll just have to go the opposite direction of one of the combination arrows.”
The party tried looking with each combination—blue, green, red, and finally black. But, even using the combination of lenses, there was no indication as to which way they should turn.
“I can see a yellow arrow on the right wall way down on the other end,” said Cline.
“We’d only be at that end of the hall if we’d taken the wrong turn, last time,” Mina said.
“But if a correct arrow is down there…” Dakkon trailed off in thought. “I think, perhaps we might need to backtrack and start over following a different color.”
“I guess so,” said Mina.
The party turned at Dakkon’s ice marker and walked down the hall, but the next ice marker which Dakkon had left behind was nowhere to be seen.
“What’s the deal?” Melee asked. “Did we take the wrong turn?”
“No. It’s right. I mean left. I mean—we took a left here the first time, so this should be the correct turn,” bumbled Cline.
“We went right, then left, then right again,” said Dakkon. “If we’ve just undone the last two turns, we should only need to take another left and we’ll be back in the starting room. Since the ice is no good, I’m glad we noticed sooner rather than later.”
The party took the next left and found themselves in a hall much like all the others. The thick gray walls gave way to two options at the far end—left and right.
“Were we off by one?” Roth suggested.
“No,” said Mina. “This should be the start of the trial. Everyone, what are the lenses saying?”
“Yellow arrow to the far right,” said Cline. “That’s the second right for yellow.”
“Magenta to the left just behind us,” Mina added. “That one was right the first time, wasn’t it?”
“Red to the far left,” Dakkon said as he combined Mina’s magenta and Cline’s yellow lenses.
“Guys, I hate to say it, but I’m getting confused,” confessed Roth. “I think we need a better system.”
“Maybe we just need more data?” suggested Mina. “We know that magenta switches which side it’s on but what about the others? If we can find a pattern, maybe that can help?”
“How, though?” asked Melee. “Don’t we just need to follow the truthful arrows?”
“Well, it could be that we misunderstood the pedestal clue—or that there was no answer to the puzzle in that room,” reasoned Mina. “Maybe the liars are actually the ones that change place?”
“Or maybe they’re the ones telling the truth,” said Roth.
“Or maybe everyone doesn’t die, we started off following the wrong arrows, and we’re just making more of a mess for ourselves,” Melee said.
“Maybe,” conceded Mina. “Still, collecting more information can’t hurt. As we move, I’ll make a tally on my left arm for every time an arrow appears on the left, and a tally on my right arm for every time it appears on the right. We’ll get through this place, but it may take some time.”
“Do you think which direction we’re coming from might affect it?” suggested Cline.
“…” everyone paused and stared at Cline.
“Let’s just focus on left and right for now,” said Mina.
The party continued to follow the base three lenses where they could, stopping only long enough to make a tally of where each arrow appeared. After 30 hallways, Mina noticed some promising trends in their data.
Left arm:
Magenta: 8
Cyan: 17
Yellow: 0
Blue: 22
Green: 5
Red: 0
Black: 0
Right arm:
Magenta: 3
Cyan: 0
Yellow: 16
Blue: 0
Green: 3
Red: 18
Black: 0
The party had found no black arrows. Cyan and blue arrows only seemed to appear on the left, while yellow and red arrows had only been spotted on the right. Arrows for magenta and green tended to swap back and forth as they pleased.
“All right, here’s what we’ve got.” Mina said aloud as she presented the information she’d gathered. “Looking here, either blue or cyan tells the truth to the left, and the other lies. I noticed that the base colors always agree with one another—the same’s true for the compound ones. Also, it can’t be that we’re supposed to only follow the ones that switch sides—they show up too sporadically to make a path to follow.”
“Unless we’re supposed to follow them exclusively to find out,” pointed out Melee.
“Ugh,” Mina snapped. “Well that doesn’t make sense with the pedestal in the first room unless they’re trying to say that the answer changes—which it can’t. But, then, for all we know, we might’ve needed to figure out which colors went with which direction from the start, then find out which one was truthful through trial and error.”
“It sounds like in the worst case we’re going to have to run through these one by one anyway, so let’s just start with our first assumption and see where that takes us,” said Dakkon. “We can give following the compound arrows a try for a bit. If that doesn’t work out, we can work it out bit by bit from there.”
“I vastly prefer this solution,” said Roth, clearly dreading potential hours of walking down gray stone hallways. “Maybe we just chose the wrong answer at the start.”
“Yeah, maybe,” said Mina with a sigh. “Fine. Let’s try following the compound colors, then. Maybe if we’re lucky we won’t have to spend a full day in here. I really need to find Jinx something to eat.”
After only seven rooms of following the compound arrows, the end of the next hall had no more compound arrows to follow. A yellow arrow pointed to the right and a magenta arrow pointed to the left. When Mina turned around she took in a quick breath.
“What’s up?” Dakkon asked.
“This is the first room with two magenta arrows,” she said. “There can’t be two correct paths, right? So, the magenta arrows have to be lying.”
From the opposite end of the direction they came, there was a magenta arrow pointing to the right, and a cyan arrow pointing to the left. There were no compound-colored arrows—even in the opposite direction.
“Mina,” said Roth in his best entreating voice. “Mind if I see the lenses?”
“Sure,” Mina said, handing the warrior the magenta, cyan, and yellow lenses.
Roth put the three together and examined the end of the hallway. Then, he began combing over every bit of the wall until, at about two-thirds of the way down he stopped. “Hey guys, check this out,” he said.
Roth rapped on the wall with the back of his knuckle twice, just as Melee had done when opening up this trial for them. On his first rap, his fist connected solidly with the wall. On the second, his hand passed right through.
“Nice!” Melee exclaimed.
“Good going, man!” Dakkon yelled. “Let’s get the hell out of here!”
Everyone hurried to exit the trial room, lest they be caught within its endless sprawling hallways. When Roth stepped through, the lenses vanished—leaving him clutching onto nothing.
The room within the wall turned out to be quite broad. At its center there was a large, gold-railed spiral staircase leading upward. The room’s rounded walls were covered in their entirety with stone murals. Several large pillars stood evenly spaced throughout the area, giving the wide space a sense of grandeur by luring the eyes up toward the tall, raised ceilings. The smell of freshly baked bread, garlic, cracked pepper, and herb-crusted chicken filled their nostrils even before they took in the sight of the banquet table beside the stone stairs. The table appeared to have been freshly stocked for a feast. It was loaded full of delicious-looking food.
“Do you think it’s some kind of final trap?” asked Cline. “A temptation before completing the trials?”
“I’ll let you know,” Dakkon said as he barreled toward the table, snatched up a large, crispy-skinned chicken leg and took a big bite. He moaned exaggeratedly at the salty flavor of the juicy bird. He grabbed a fresh loaf of bread, bit into it, and its fresh-from-the-oven steam overpowered his nostrils. He then picked up a ready-filled mug of some sweet, citrusy mead and downed it gluttonously.