On the Shoulders of Titans

by Andrew Rowe

  Then the roots below us began to slither upward, latching onto our legs.

  After a series of expletives from everyone, Patrick and I drew our swords and began to hack away at the vines. Marissa lashed out with a blade aura from her injured hand.

  Sheridan focused on the walls, turning to the left and dragging a hand slowly upward. Spears of bone blasted from the ground on both sides of the hall.

  For a moment, the walls slowed their progress inward, but the bone spears were already beginning to creak.

  Sheridan gestured, conjuring more bone spears to replace the ones that were being crushed. “Can’t keep this up forever. Need an exit.”

  “Check the walls,” I instructed the others. “There will probably be a hollow spot somewhere.”

  Mara finished cutting herself free and leapt to the door I’d just opened, slamming her good fist into the stone. It cracked, but didn’t break.

  Not hollow, then. And probably not the right path.

  She winced and swung around to begin working on other walls.

  Patrick and I focused on vines, trying to keep us from getting entangled. Sheridan’s efforts were entirely on slowing down the creeping walls.

  I guessed we had a minute or two before we were crushed. I’d try to activate my circlet and teleport us out before that happened, but I couldn’t guarantee teleportation would work in this room.

  Marissa continued to leap from place to place, pounding on walls without finding any weak points.

  “Up!” Sheridan yelled.

  It took me a moment to see it, even with Sheridan’s prompting — a section of the ceiling that had just a slight outline around it.

  Marissa saw it, though. She ducked, channeling energy around her good hand.

  “Dragon ascends to sky!”

  She jumped higher than I’d thought possible, swinging her fist upward, and smashed straight through the ceiling into the next room.

  The rest of us ran to the spot where she’d jumped.

  She reached down with a hand. “Safe!”

  I jumped. Marissa caught my hand and pulled me through.

  We helped the other two up a few moments later.

  The room below us lasted longer than I expected. It took another solid minute before the walls had completely closed, pulverizing anything that was still inside.

  Still, we were all breathing heavily while we took in our new surroundings.

  This chamber was much smaller, maybe ten feet in each direction. It looked like we were inside a house now, or maybe a school building.

  There was a table in the center of the chamber, not far from where we’d emerged through the floor. It contained an open book, a single piece of parchment next to the book, and several pieces of alchemical equipment. Burners, distillation devices, that sort of thing.

  Next to those was an hourglass, slowly draining sand from top to bottom. It looked like it had just started the moment we’d entered the room.

  The single door to exit the room was directly in front of us. The gem in the door was colorless. It had an obvious slot for a key next to the handle.

  The left wall had a shelf with dozens of labeled jars and vials. Alchemical ingredients. Shadeleaf, Lifestrand, that sort of thing.

  Along the back wall, there were three large crystalline containers. Each was open on the top, but solid on the other three sides.

  Within each of the crystalline containers was a gold-rimmed treasure box.

  The far left treasure box was immersed in liquid.

  The central one was surrounded by an aura of fire.

  And the one on the far right? Lightning crackled within the crystalline container.

  Patrick walked over to the table and read the single piece of parchment aloud. “Find the right solution to choose your path.”

  I put a hand over my eyes. “Solution...? Ugh, the goddess’ puns are awful.”

  Sheridan walked over to the table, flipping through the book. “Alchemical recipes. But reading through all this would take ages.” They turned to me. “Corin, you’re an Enchanter. They teach you alchemy classes, yes?”

  I winced. “I sat in on a single class once. Aside from that, I’ve read a couple books on enhancement elixirs, and attended a couple lectures. I know how to distill things. Nothing advanced.”

  “Better than the rest of us, I suspect.” Sheridan offered me the book. “I learned about which potions to use to treat specific conditions, but not how to make them.”

  I scanned over the page the book had already been open to. With luck, it would be relevant.

  Neutralizing existing alchemical compounds typically requires introducing a concoction of a directly opposing magic type. This can be dangerous, however, because too much or too little of any individual ingredient can change the elemental alignment of the result.

  Rather than neutralizing the original concoction, this can potentially cause an explosive, or otherwise dangerous, reaction.

  The following ingredients are your best sources for basic elemental affinities.

  Waterweed is the best representation of water. It is a bright blue flower with a long, thorny green stalk.

  Firebloom is used in concoctions for the element of fire. It is a red bulb that glows softly at night.

  I skimmed over the rest of the ingredients it mentioned, moving on to the next page, which discussed activating agents and how to mix each.

  “I can...probably make something with this.” I glanced at the hourglass. It wasn’t draining particularly quickly — it probably was literally an hour. “I’m not confident that I can get the mixture right, though.”

  “We’re just trying to get to the boxes, right?” Patrick asked.

  “Presumably,” Sheridan replied.

  “The solution determines the path. We may get different keys for the room based on how we solve it.” I waved at the boxes. “Getting the chests out would probably be pretty simple without bothering to use alchemy. There may be a penalty of some kind if we just brute force it.”

  Sheridan shook their head. “Usually there isn’t a penalty for brute force, so much as a benefit for solving the puzzle as completely as possible.”

  I nodded at that, remembering the room filled with all the keys last time. We’d explored it more completely than we needed to, and gotten an extra key out of it. It was possible this was going to work similarly.

  “Okay. I’m going to try to figure out concoctions for neutralizing fire, water, and lightning. In the meantime, the rest of you figure out any alternate solutions you can.”

  Fire and water were simple; they neutralized each other.

  Lightning was trickier. It was a combination of fire and air, which meant I needed a combination of water and earth.

  But that didn’t mean just mixing a water herb with an earth herb. Just mixing fire and air didn’t make lightning; that would make an explosion. Mixing water and earth would make...soggy earth, not whatever their combined element was.

  “What’s the elemental opposite of lightning?” I asked Patrick. He was specialized in lightning, so I figured he’d know.

  “Sand.”

  Huh. Wouldn’t have been what I would have guessed, but I trusted him.

  There was actual sand in one of the jars, but I didn’t think that was the same as the sand element, and Patrick didn’t think it would work either.

  That meant I needed to find ingredients that represented the sand element, or maybe something that was designed to merge two primary elements into one of the more complex ones.

  I rummaged through jars and skimmed through the book’s glossary of components.

  Flameflower: A more powerful source of the fire element. Used in concoctions for granting temporary fire elemental power. Warning: Combusts when exposed to air magic.

  Apprentice’s Berry: Represents mental mana. Delicious. Highly recommended.

  Bird’s Foot: Represents transference mana.

  Luck Lily Extract: Liquid extracted from a luck lily. Whe
n exposed to transference mana, causes teleportation to a seemingly random nearby location. Extremely dangerous.

  Windbow: Represents air mana. Warning: Combusts when exposed to fire mana.

  Dreamglow: Takes on the elemental property of a single spell that is cast into it.

  Frostcane: Alchemically null on its own, but reacts to ice magic, creating an initial burst of ice and then taking on the ice element after exposure.

  Mage’s Folly: Reverses the elemental affinity of a concoction.

  Twilight’s Call: Represents umbral mana.

  Last Bell: Represents death mana.

  Queen’s Crown: Used to enhance the potency of concoctions.

  There were dozens of other listings.

  The fact that the list wasn’t in alphabetical order bothered me deeply.

  The hourglass was half way drained.

  “Uh, Corin? Don’t mean to rush ya, but maybe we should skip the potions?” Marissa offered. “Is it really that important to do it that way?”

  “Probably not, but I want to do this right if we can.” I started setting jars on the table.

  Waterweed for water.

  Firebloom for fire.

  Those were the simple ones, and I found what I needed to mix with them for the most basic of potions. In both cases, just water and an alchemically neutral agent to “activate” the compound. I chose peppermint for that function, since it was the weakest one and in plentiful supply.

  I opened the waterweed jar and found a green flower with a blue stem inside. I was in the middle of chopping it when I realized that was wrong.

  “Son of a...” I set my tools down, turning to the others. “The jars are mislabeled. Find me a blue flower with a green, thorny stem.”

  It took a few more minutes for me to assign out the descriptions of all the components I needed, and for everyone to find them.

  Once I had real waterweed and actual peppermint, I made the elixir.

  It didn’t look like much of anything, but we were running short on time.

  I poured it on the fire.

  The liquid seemed to cut right through the flame. It didn’t sputter and smoke like a normal fire exposed to water; it just made the fire vanish on contact.

  I kept pouring until the water reached a near-invisible rune on the bottom of the container, which went out as soon as the liquid reached it.

  “It worked!” Patrick clapped me on the shoulder. I ignored the moment of anxiety that caused. “Great work, Corin. Should we take this box and go?”

  I shook my head. “Let me try the others.”

  The firebloom elixir was just as easy to make, but it didn’t work as well. The “water” inside that box must have been something other than actual water.

  After a bit of additional experimenting, I used flameflower instead of firebloom. That worked.

  Our sand was running low.

  I still hadn’t found any ingredient that corresponded to sand magic.

  I lifted a plant in front of Patrick, then set it on the table. “Hit that with lightning.”

  “Seriously?” He blinked.

  “Yes.”

  He shocked the plant. It glowed with electricity.

  Carefully, I used a stone rod to sweep that ingredient — dreamglow — into a mixing bowl.

  Then, I prepared the mage’s folly, and mixed that in.

  The lightning around the dreamglow flickered once more, then faded. The flower turned gray-brown.

  Fascinating.

  “Uh, Corin, we really need to go.”

  “Get the other boxes out and get ready.”

  I finished the last elixir, which ended up being a gritty gray-brown compound, and poured it into the lightning box.

  The lightning rune flickered and died on contact.

  A musical chime sounded throughout the room.

  The three boxes and the hourglass vanished.

  The transparent gem on the door changed to white.

  And a key appeared in the center of the room.

  “Well done,” Sheridan said. “I suspect those boxes would have held standard keys. You’ve made us a better path. White should be a safe room.”

  “Ooh, nice!” Patrick walked over the door. “Can we get out of here now?”

  “Just give me a few more minutes.” I grinned. “I was hoping this would stop the timer. I have something else I wanted to do in here.”

  Marissa tilted her head to the side. “What’s that?”

  I illustrated by pulling the Jaden Box out of my bag, putting the remaining firebloom into the correct jar, and then putting the corner of the jar in the box. “Store: Firebloom.”

  “Oooh.” Patrick clapped his hands together. “Nice.”

  ***

  It took us another good hour to get everything sorted into the right containers and then stored in the Jaden Box.

  I fully intended to take anything useful in the spire that I came across, as long as it wasn’t nailed down or on fire.

  Possibly even if it was.

  After that, we proceeded into the next room.

  It was eerily familiar — a room with white stone walls, three doors leading in different directions, and a fountain in the center filled with mana-infused water.

  We didn’t stop for long in the safe room; everyone felt like the alchemy room had been enough of a break.

  We checked all three doors.

  To the left, a door with a yellow gem, leading into a room where stone spikes would protrude from tiles in the floor every few seconds.

  Easily solved with levitation, provided that there aren’t any other tricks.

  There were two other doors in that room; an orange one and a green one.

  On the north side of the safe room, we found a door with a blue crystal.

  That one led to a much larger room with a rotating circular platform in the center, divided into several wedges. The platform was angled downward, like a funnel, and at the base of each of the wedges was a huge hole. Each of the wedges had huge letters written across it, but I couldn’t read the words from this distance.

  On the side of the platform were three huge metallic spheres, probably around the size of my entire torso. At a glance, I judged the spheres to be just the right size to fit into the holes in the platform.

  To complicate matters, there was a gap with no floor — maybe fifteen feet — between the wheel and the closest accessible areas around it. That meant we couldn’t just walk the spheres over and drop them in the holes.

  I’d never been to a casino, but even I recognized the concept behind the challenge.

  Marissa pointed. “I want to do that one!”

  I glanced at her. “You want to gamble on whether or not we succeed?”

  “S’not just gambling. It’s a test of skill!” Marissa clapped her hands together, then winced. She kept forgetting one of her hands was still injured. “It’ll be fair, right?”

  “No.” “Nah.” “Definitely not,” came the chorus of replies from me, Patrick, and Sheridan.

  “Aww.” Marissa folded her arms. “I bet we can figure something neat out for it. Maybe levitate the spheres?”

  Patrick squinted as he inspected the room. “Depends on how heavy those are. They look like they’re metal — they could be hundreds, maybe thousands of pounds.”

  “We can investigate it, but let’s check the red room first.” I gestured to the last door.

  We walked over and opened it.

  The room ahead looked like a pleasant garden, save for the gigantic snake-like heads that were erupting from the grass even as we opened the door.

  I slammed the door shut. “Okay. Who’s good at gambling?”

  Marissa laughed. “Don’t like snakes, Corin?”

  “I don’t like poison. And that, Mara, looks like the kind of room where we’d get poisoned.”

  “Bah, I could take ‘em. But I prefer the wheel thing, anyway. That looks more fun!”

  “More importantly,” Sheridan pointed out, “I
t looked like a way up. I’m fairly confident I saw ‘stairs’ written on one of the slats on the whirl wheel.”

  I hadn’t been able to get a look from that far away, but apparently Sheridan had better eyesight.

  I also wasn’t familiar with the term “whirl wheel”, but I didn’t bother asking about it. It was easy enough to glean from context.

  We started heading to the blue room, but we were interrupted by the sound of Keras’ voice.

  “Corin, we have a problem.”

  I paused in my step. “What’s wrong? Er, I mean, necklace. Message Keras. What’s wrong?”

  It was easy to forget that I had to activate the necklace before I could actually send a reply.

  “Researcher is...gone.”

  I felt a moment of panic. “...Gone?”

  “She was just telling me about the next rune to smash, then she said something about her Summoner, shivered, and disappeared.”

  That was bad.

  Potentially very bad.

  If her Summoner had just called her back to the Divinatory, at least she’d be safe, but we’d have lost our tracker.

  If her Summoner had unsummoned her...or cut off her contract entirely...

  ...She’d be dead. And it would be my fault.

  “No specifics?” I asked, just to confirm.

  “No. Whatever it was, she couldn’t resist it. I think she was trying to, but it only lasted a second.”

  Resh.

  “Okay. Did her bracers disappear with her?”

  “Yeah?”

  At least that meant if she was physically transported somewhere else, she’d still have a mana source. That was good.

  “Okay. Did she tell you how to get to us?”

  “Not in detail, but up is up. I’ve climbed a good way before. Now that she’s not here, I can just cut through here and start climbing, but I’m worried about her.”

  “Understood, but we have no way to find her right now. Just head to us, then we’ll see if we can figure out if we can find her later.”

  “Okay. I’m on my way, but even without Researcher slowing me down, it’s going to be a while.”

  We said goodbye and turned off the necklaces for now.

  I hoped Researcher was safe.

  We headed to the blue room.