Trial 8: Doorway

‘Man, waiting for something to happen is nervewracking,’ Aeolia thought as she watched John, Senka, Rowan and Tok march around the temple. She nibbled on the sandwich she had procured but found her appetite a bit suppressed. Her attention was focused on John, studying his expression for any clue as to what he was thinking.

She was sure most people would have missed it, but she caught the flash of panic that crossed his face as he ended using Bask. And now she couldn’t help but feel a bit of unease as the trial neared what looked to be its final stage.

“You okay?” Teri’s voice cut through Aeolia’s grim thoughts.

“You can tell,” the winged woman muttered

“Still feels better to ask than to just jump into talking about it.” Teri grinned at Aeolia. “What’s eating you?”

“Did you notice John when he exited Bask?” Aeolia asked.

Teri shook her head. “I took the chance to center myself since I knew they’d not be doing anything. Crowds and all. Plus manifesting Verida isn’t exactly easy.”

“I think it’s my time to ask if you’re alright,” Aeolia slyly said, a genuine look of concern reflected in her eyes.

“I’ll manage,” the goblin answered. “It’s not the first time I’ve been in a crowd. What did you see in John’s expression?”

Making a mental note to do something nice for Teri for having to put up with this, Aeolia said, “He looked like he sensed something bad. He came out of Bask looking like he was expecting something to attack them.”

“They are in a dangerous location. We’ve seen that,” Teri pointed out.

“I know, but if John sensed something but the others, including Senka, didn’t, that’s a bit worrying, right?”

“It can be,” Teri answered. “But I don’t sense any real worry from people like Vel. I’ve gotten some annoyance from him, probably something that isn’t going as well as it could be, but nothing that points to things going off the rails.”

Aeolia sighed, but put her faith in Teri’s empathic senses.

“I get it,” Teri continued. “You’ve been with John the longest and met in battle. And for the most part we’ve been in control of things or were able to gang up on things that attacked us. Seeing John fight without any of us besides Senka being able to help is putting you on edge.”

“Can’t help but be a bit paranoid after getting thrown into crazy situations twice now,” Aeolia sighed.

“Being aware of how dangerous the Abyss can be isn’t a bad thing,” Teri assured her. “But we’d go mad if we expected a deadly encounter around every turn. And even if that was the case, we’ve gotten ourselves quite the number of allies already.”

Aeolia chuckled. “I never imagined I would be working with the Order, but they haven’t been as sanctimonious as I thought they’d be.”

“To be fair, we have some aspect of their goddess backing us.” Teri smirked. “Makes messing with us distasteful.”

“Thank Gaia for that.” Aeolia laughed, a mirth mirrored by Teri. Glancing at the display, she saw John kneeling by the door, a line of fruit in front of him.

“Looks like they found their way in,” Aeolia said. “Let’s see if they’re on the home stretch.”

---

The air in the temple had the musty smell of a long abandoned building. John imagined that, at least in the fiction of this barrier, they were the first to walk through its halls in a long time.

“Man, this is kind of depressing, Dad,” Tok muttered under his breath.

“But true to form,” Rowan chimed in. “Would you have preferred this place to be totally in ruins, or overrun by your ancestral enemies?”

“Okay, those are more depressing,” the dwarf agreed with a sigh. “Guess having helpful worshipers around would be a bit much to program in and I can’t see Dad or the others wanting us to fight them. That's a bit disrespectful.”

“Yeah, better just a set piece than that.” John nodded. “Plus, if this is supposed to be a test of our ability to solve a more mental problem, having to fight off enemies at the same time would be way too much.”

“Not to mention the risk of having some crucial component getting damaged or lost in all the chaos a fight would ensure,” Senka added.

“Yeah. I’m sure we’ll need to look for missing bits of whatever’s waiting for us, but I’d rather them be in deliberately set locations than blasted around the room after I throw a fireball,” John said.

“I’m all for not having our work load increase,” Rowan remarked. “Though I would prefer you to not throw fire around in close quarters.”

“I don’t plan to, but you know how things are.” John grinned at her. “A fight goes sideways and you have to pull out the nuke.”

“Thankfully, it seems like our fighting is done for today,” Rowan quickly said and John could see a faint blush color her cheeks.

‘I wonder if she’s thinking of another long thing you can pull out,’ Senka thought with a chuckle.

‘Now’s not the time for that,’ John thought back, but the thought of Rowan fantasizing about his cock caused it to begin to rise. Thankfully, with everyone’s attention focused on looking for a way to the central garden, it went unnoticed.

Suddenly, Candle let out a yip and scampered towards a nearby hallway, stopping right at its entrance. As the rest of them neared it, John could feel a slight breeze, one that carried with it the fresh scent of plants.

“Good job, girl,” he said to the spirit, bending down to scratch her ears, to Candle’s great pleasure.

They headed down the corridor until they reached a simple wooden door, sunlight coming from under it. Tok was the first to reach it and, after a moment of hesitation, he pushed it open.

Before them was a large, open courtyard at least the size of a football field. It likely had once been well tended and orderly, but time had caused the plants to grow wild and free, making the whole area an untamed thicket of foliage. In the center of the courtyard and, as far as John could figure, the whole temple was an imposingly tall archway.

It stood in the center of a ring of smaller stone pillars, eight in all, spaced around it. Carefully, the party marched towards the structure.

“I would have loved to see this place beforehand,” Tok sighed as they reached the arch.

“Do you think these were something here normally, or just added for our last task?” Rowan asked, her eyes flickering between the stones and the sky. “I think they’re lined up with the cardinal directions and their midpoints.”

“I don’t recall anything about them in the old stories,” Tok answered, his fingers ghosting over the stones. “But most of them are heroic epics. If these were for more religious things, I don’t know.”

Sending Arch
This archway stands at the center of most temples dedicated to one of the Eight deities of the dwarves. It can be used both as a means of communication between them and as an altar for worship.

“Communication, huh?” John muttered as he studied the arch after reading the Observe. “Hang on. If these were used for that, then there has to be some way to pick a target.”

“Probably these,” Rowan said, brushing away a bit of moss on one of the surrounding pillars, revealing a number of raised stone disks. Each bore a weathered but still readable glyph upon their surface. “They’re part of the pillars, so I think we’d need to touch them in the right order to activate the arch.”

“Sounds logical,” John remarked. “Tok, any idea what they say?”

Tok got close to his own pillar and cleared it of every bit of obscuring foliage, fingers tracing the disks. “Same dialect as the del shi we found before, so it should be readable. And they’ve got better penmanship than your attempt at drawing one. Let’s see.”

Tok spent a moment looking at disks, then moving to another pillar to study that one.

“Okay,” he said. “They’re whole phrases like ‘Mountain River’ and ‘Dark Forest’. So, defining features that I’m guessing each arch would have keyed to them.”

“Sounds likely. Each one would need its own tag to work,” John remarked. “A compound series of location tags to lock it in. Like this place could be ‘Lake Island’, ‘River’ and ‘Jungle’. The longer the string, the more accurate the system can be to make the right connection.”

“So the question we need to figure out is, what is home’s coordinates?” Rowan asked.

“Give me a few to get every one of these checked, then we can puzzle it out,” Tok said.

The next few minutes were taken up by Tok translating the glyphs. Each pillar had three disks on them, all facing the arch, meaning twenty-four total disks, though some were repeats.

“Hang on a second,” John said, his mind beginning to process the information. “The east and west pillars both had ‘lake’ in their top spots and jungle right after, right?”

“Yeah,” Tok answered. “Think that’s a clue?”

“Hell yeah I do,” John said with a grin. “I think the position of each disk represents landmarks in relation to this location. Going east or west from here, you’d hit the lake, then the jungle. Then cliffs in the east and plains westward.”

“That’s all well and good, but it doesn’t help us figure out how to get back,” Rowan remarked.

“Back, back, back,” Tok muttered under his breath before his eyes lit up. “Return trip! What if we have to use Gef’s home as the destination?”

“And how do we determine that?” Rowan asked.

“The story, of course,” Tok attested excitedly. “Gef came from the north, so we should be able to just turn on the north pillar and, bam, trial complete.”

“I don’t think it’s going to be that simple,” John interjected. “I do think you’re on the right path, but there has to be a bit more to it. Was Gef’s home directly north of this temple, or did it drift east or west? Do we need to just hit any symbol or is there a sequence that needs to be adhered to?”

Tok’s excitement dimmed. “Didn’t think about that. Um, the story did make a point that Gef had to travel east a bit before hitting the south road.”

“Was there anything about where Gef’s home was?” Rowan pressed. “Geographically, I mean. Was it by a river, in the mountains, that sort of thing?”

“‘Brave Gef was the greatest champion of the settlements in the Gohental Mountains’,” Tok recited. “That’s how the story starts. Other stories of Gef talk about a lake to the east of the mountains.”

“So, we hit the ‘mountain’ glyph on the north pillar and the ‘lake’ on the north-east one, and see if that works?” Rowan asked.

John frowned. “That feels way too easy. I know this is likely a copy of a real bit of tech, but it being a two button solution just feels off to me.”

“Too much gaming,” Senka chimed in. “In a realistic setting, no one wants an overly complicated system to make calls. If there are only a few locations to call, a simple method works better.”

John sighed. “I know. Can’t help it. Brain’s too game coded.”

“It’s not a bad idea to keep it in mind though,” Rowan said. “This is meant to be a challenge so the simple normal operation might have been changed. Won’t know for sure until we try.”

“Then let’s get going,” Tok remarked as he walked over to the north pillar. “So hit the mountain here and the lake over here.”

Tok hit the symbols in the order of proximity to Gef’s home, but the arch didn’t react.

“Okay, more complicated it is,”John muttered, a hand on his chin as he pondered what they were missing. “Any ideas on what we’re missing? The story’s the only bit of lore we can rely on. Tok?”

“The mountain, lake and the jungle are the only landmarks I can remember the story talking about,” the dwarf said, his voice growing frustrated.

“Did the monks do anything when Gef arrived?” Rowan asked. “Any weird action, or ritual?”

“Nothing like that,” Tok answered. “The Eight Pillars weren’t the sort of gods that wanted chants and prayers. They liked their followers doing the things they represented. Gep’kes Ani was perfectly happy with folks growing plants.”

“Wait a second,” John said, his eyes widening as an idea popped into his head. “Eight gods, eight directional pillars. What if we need to input eight symbols in total to get this thing running?”

“What? Like four for our ‘destination’ and four for here?” Rowan asked.

“Yeah,” John nodded. “A code for both destination and sending location. Probably so the mana needed to power the communication could be dialed in correctly as much as having the right direction to send the signal in.”

“That could be it,” Tok remarked. “Eight is something that comes up a lot in the old stories. Gef had seven allies come with him.”

“I think that could have been something you could have mentioned earlier,” Senka said in a faintly biting tone.

“Didn’t think old customs would be so relevant.” Tok shrugged, taking her criticism in stride. “Okay, so we need two more locations for Gef’s village and four for here. Come on, Tok, think. What else did Dad say about Gef’s journey? Mountain village, nearby lake.”

“A river, maybe?” Rowan supplied. “Did the lake have one feeding it or coming from it?”

“Yeah, there was one,” Tok answered. “Coming down from some of the mountains on the other side from the village. So mountain for the village’s actual location, the lake, the river feeding it and another mountain, maybe?”

“Can’t hurt to try it,” John said. “So now we need the four for here. ‘Lake’, ‘Jungle’ and ‘River’ feel appropriate, but we need one more. Was ‘Waterfall’ one of the ones on the south pillar?”

“Yep,” Tok said. “So, what order? Lake, Waterfall, River, Jungle? The order we came through in reverse?”

“Sounds like that would be the right order for detailing where the temple is,” John answered. “It’s in a lake, just past a waterfall fed by a river in the jungle.”

Tok nodded and went about tapping the respective glyphs. When he tapped the ‘Jungle’ glyph, everyone collectively gasped as a surge of magical energy pulsed from the arch. But that lasted only a moment before the arch became inert again.

“Well, that was a bit of a tease,” Rowan muttered.

“Means we at least have the right idea of this being a four and four code,” John said. “The question is whether we had any part of that right.”

“Well, I think we should start small,” Tok remarked. “How about just shifting the order? Put the temple’s in first then Gef’s village?”

“Can’t hurt,” John answered. “It could be the case that the sending location goes first.”

“Round two, here we go,” Tok said as he began to dial their finish line up once more.

This time, the magical energy from the arch surged stronger and for longer, before black smoke shot out in all directions from it, one that smelled of ash and burned John’s skin where it made contact.

And from the smoke, something stirred.