I. Tenth Floor: The Chromatic Conundrum
The passage beyond deposited us in a chamber where a stone archway dominated the far wall, its concealed door sealed as stubbornly as a dwarf’s purse. Flanking the archway on either side stood three wooden doors apiece, each accompanied by an unlit torch that seemed to drink in the darkness rather than dispel it. Opposite the archway, another doorway yawned with yet another dormant torch. Etched into the face of all seven doors was a colored circle-seven hues, seven mysteries, seven chances to remain trapped in this vertical tomb.
The door directly facing the stone archway bore a purple circle.
“Seven,” muttered Crow to himself, his elven eyes narrowing as they swept across the array. “Again the number seven.”
I confess, I saw only a maddening riddle. Crow saw a pattern of numerals. But Ender-Ender saw the truth before either of us had finished observing.
“Not numbers,” the paladin proclaimed, his voice carrying that particular dwarven certainty that brooked no contradiction. “Colors.”
He strode back out the way we had come before I could formulate a question, his plate armor clanking with the rhythm of a man who had already solved the puzzle in his head and was simply collecting the proof. In no time, he emerged bearing two of the magical torches from the previous room: one red, one blue. He held both flames together before the purple door, and the unlit torch beside it sprang into fiery life with an eager snap.
“Brilliant!” I exclaimed.
“As two and two make four,” Ender declared, with the satisfaction of a mathematician proving a theorem, “so red and blue make purple.”
And so it went. While Crow and I stood marveling at the first solution, Ender was already moving-grabbing torches, mixing hues, illuminating the dormant flames with the methodical precision of a master artisan matching glazes. Yellow and blue sparked green to life. Red and yellow birthed orange. The paladin worked with an almost preternatural intuition for the alchemical marriage of light, and within minutes, the door in the stone archway rumbled open, revealing what lay beyond.
I made a mental note: when faced with a puzzle, stand behind the dwarf and try to keep up.
II. Eleventh Floor: Tiles and Tentacles
We emerged into a cavernous space filled with water that smelled of stagnant age and something faintly metallic, like old copper left to tarnish in a tomb. Above the surface floated pathways that traversed the room, interspersed with square tiles-some colored, others plain, all promising either progress or peril. Beyond a red platform hung a door bearing a circular impression. A keyhole, perhaps? Or another invitation to frustration?
Separate platforms clung to the eastern and western walls. The western walkway terminated in what appeared to be a teleportation tile, its surface humming with dormant magic. The eastern platform sat isolated, accessible only across the dark water. In its middle sat an inviting large chest, its wood gleaming with the particular luster that whispered of treasure. On either side of the chest stood two decidedly less inviting skulls, their empty sockets seeming to track our movements.
Traps, perhaps? Almost certainly.
It was Crow who braved the puzzle first. Of course it was the ranger-the one among us who treated deadly mechanisms as personal challenges. Using a white torch, he tripped the white tile and triggered a volley of fireballs that roared past him with a sound like tearing canvas and a heat that singed the air. The chamber filled with the scent of scorched ozone and the whistle of magical flame. Crow proceeded to trip tiles and dodge fireballs with elven grace, his movements fluid as water, until-seemingly out of nowhere-a massive brain with a cruel beak erupted from the depths.
Water cascaded down its dangling tentacles as it floated upward, and then-using blindsight, for it possessed no visible eyes-pivoted toward us with the inevitability of a thunderclap.
“A Grell!” shouted Crow, who seemed to carry an encyclopedic bestiary inside his head, ready for reference at a moment’s notice.
Ender rushed to the edge of the platform and squared up to the aberration, his shield raised, his stance as immovable as the mountains his people called home.
“Watch out for the tentacles!” screamed Crow as he loaded his longbow with practiced speed. “They can paralyze!”
Ender took heed and parried the incoming tentacle attacks with his metal shield. The sound of rubbery flesh striking steel echoed across the water in wet, meaty slaps.
I flourished a quick classic mockery. “Begone, pox-faced loon!” I called out, and was somewhat startled to see the Grell retreat and start to submerge back whence it came.
I then noticed the floating severed tentacle and the puddle of sticky ichor underneath Ender’s sabatons. Perhaps-just perhaps-it hadn’t been all due to my theatrical brilliance.
With the colored stones tripped, we moved our attention to the teleporter. We tried placing a bear trap on the teleporting tile-nothing. We all gingerly stepped onto the teleporter-still nothing.
Once again, it was Ender who saw what we could not. While Crow and I stared at the dormant platform in bafflement, the paladin’s eyes moved from the colored tiles to the plain ones, from the plain ones back to the colored, his brow furrowed in that particular expression of dwarven calculation that preceded genius. He retreated to the previous puzzle room without a word, returned holding a green torch, and placed it on the plain tile opposite its green counterpart.
Voilà-the dull stone surface lit up in a matching viridian hue.
“The patterns,” Ender said simply, as if explaining arithmetic to children. “They mirror each other.”
The three of us rushed back and forth then, grabbing torches and revealing their colored mirror-image tiles with growing excitement. Just as Crow revealed the final tile, the chest that had previously sat between the fireball-breathing skulls popped into existence on the teleporter with a sound like displaced air. We grabbed the key inside and exited into… hell?
III. Twelfth Floor: The Throne of Bone
The room was dominated by an enormous black and red skull, the size of a small house. Massive horns curled up and around both sides of the skull, their surfaces ridged and ancient, etched with patterns that might have been runes or might have been the scars of some unimaginable conflict. A ghostly cardinal red light seeped out of every orifice and hung in a shifting, pulsing ethereal mist that seemed at once alive and yet, at the same time, the very definition of death itself.
I touched one of the horns, convinced that the demon head must be an illusion. It felt solid as a rock, warm and slightly vibrating beneath my palm, as if something vast and dreaming stirred within. Did this live once? Could it live again? We tiptoed around, whispering our worst fears about what this darkest of puzzles held for us, our voices swallowed by the oppressive silence.
The four corners of the room held piles of stone and rock, and above these were friezes depicting a giant warrior battling other warriors and monsters. In the gaping cave-like maw of the massive skull, bathed in the ethereal red glow, sat an ornate throne fit for a king or queen. Nestled in the throne was a huge bashed-in steel helm.
Ender, moving with the certainty of someone who had experienced a sudden flash of insight-the same certainty I had seen when he solved the color puzzle, the same certainty that made him reach for torches while we were still thinking-grabbed the helmet and ran back the way we had come through the puzzle rooms.
Crow and I looked at each other and realized, in the same heartbeat, that the paladin was heading for the giant skeleton in the mimic’s room.
We gave chase, but as we were leaping across the floating platforms, we heard the crack of bone on iron plate and the gasps of a paladin struggling to withstand the undead’s blows.
Everything seemed to happen at once. Ender emerged battered and limping, helmet askew, with the giant helmeted skeleton almost on top of him. Crow fired a dreadful strike at the giant and retreated just as the Grell reared out of the water. It lashed tentacles at Crow, missed the ranger, and then resubmerged, displacing a house-sized amount of water in a cacophony of sound and motion that, I noticed, distracted our dead hill giant.
We needed time. I conjured Tasha’s hideous laughter and hurled it toward the dumbfounded skeleton. It hit, and he fell prone across the platforms. Then, from somewhere deep in his undead soul, he started to laugh uncontrollably, his rotted teeth and broken jawbone chattering and rattling like dice in a gambler’s desperate hand.
I turned with the now unhindered paladin, and we sprinted toward the door at the end of the platform, dodging the tentacles of the now resurfaced Grell.
Crow was already there, in position, atop the skull. Ender hefted his war pick, waiting.
The laughter had stopped; we were tensed and ready. As soon as the giant’s clunking form bent down to pass through the doorway, I hit him with some barbed mockery. “Dress thy face, the hags are hiring!” He appeared befuddled, and his swings at Ender mostly missed the paladin, whose war pick and mace, in tandem with Crow’s arrows, crunched through bone until the giant warrior fell. The radiant damage from the paladin’s divine smites hit the undead hard, and he soon stopped moving.
We gathered ourselves. Surely, the long-dead hill giant was the final alpha boss of this vertical dungeon. But as we stepped through the huge door to the west of the throne room, we reconsidered.
IV. Thirteenth Floor: The Slumbering Wyrm
We found ourselves on the edge of a vast dark cavern. Stalagmites and stalactites hung down and thrust upward like the teeth of some enormous maw, allowing some cover to move into the room. The air smelled of damp stone and something else-something sulfurous and ancient, the breath of a creature that had slept since before kingdoms rose and fell. Crow’s keen eyesight picked out the central focus of the room: a pile of glowing gold treasure, and atop the hoard, a young black dragon. Asleep.
Its scales gleamed like wet obsidian in the faint light. Each breath stirred the coins beneath it, creating a soft, rhythmic rustle like wind through autumn leaves. Acidic vapor curled from its nostrils, etching faint patterns in the dust.
On the far side of the room, beyond the wyrm, was a door. Our escape. But there was a catch. A key hung around the neck of the serpent, suspended on a chain attached to a collar.
Our plan was hatched. This was a task requiring guile, not strength, and the stealthy agility of a ranger born in the wilds, where a snap of a twig could end a life.
Ender and I looked at each other and winced. We had witnessed Crow’s ability to appear amongst us seemingly out of nowhere, as if the shadows themselves bent to hide him. And yet… we also remembered other occasions, such as the farmhouse battle with the gnolls, where the elf had tripped over his own feet and exposed the group to great danger. Which version would we get today?
Ender was exhausted from battling the giant. I was running low on spells. Crow needed to deliver.
We worked our way silently around the room-or as silently as a group containing a paladin in full plate can move. Each step Ender took was a small miracle of dwarven restraint, yet still the armor whispered and sighed. We needed to get to the door on the far side for a swift escape if the serpent awoke.
Once in position, with the door confirmed as locked, Ender and I crouched down behind a stalagmite and watched as Crow went to work.
What followed was a masterclass in elven stealth.
The ranger moved like smoke given purpose. He zigzagged across the cavern, pressing himself flat against the stone floor whenever the dragon shifted, melting into shadow when its sleeping gaze might have swept across him. He spread himself across the floor with a patience I had never seen in him before, each movement calculated, each breath held. The dragon lay in the center of the golden hoard, and so Crow had to scale the pile in order to reach the suspended key-an act that required him to move through treasure that could shift and clink and betray him with a single sound.
He worked his way around the side from the rear, disappearing from our view behind the curve of the wyrm’s coiled tail.
And then… nothing.
For what seemed like an eternity, we caught no sight of our thief. The dragon shifted again, its claws flexing among the coins, its breath stirring the sulfurous air. My heart hammered against my ribs. Ender’s hand tightened on his war pick until his knuckles showed white beneath his gauntlets. And yet the dragon lay still upon its riches, undisturbed, unaware that a shadow had slipped through its hoard.
Just as Ender started to stand, gripping his war pick in both hands-prepared to charge, prepared to die, prepared to buy seconds with his life-there was a soft click behind us.
We turned as one and saw a shaft of light through the now-open door, disturbed only by the shadowy figure of a thief standing in the doorway. In his hand, the key caught the light like a captured star.
I looked back as I passed into the next room. The dragon slept on, dreaming whatever terrible dreams dragons dream, never knowing how close it had come to waking.
V. Fourteenth Floor: The Treasure Room
We walked into a large, bright room-a shocking contrast after the cavern’s gloom, the light so sudden it made us squint like moles dragged from our burrows. The walls were pale marble, scrubbed clean of the grime and menace that had characterized every floor below, and the air smelled faintly of lavender and old magic.
A human wizard entered through the brick and mortar of the far wall, sauntering into the room with the resigned gait of a man who had long since abandoned hope but could not quite abandon dignity. He wore a collapsed three-starred pointed hat and tattered blue and silver robes-the garments of a man who had forgotten what it meant to be free, though he clearly remembered how to dress for the occasion. A chain was locked around his neck, tethering him to some unseen anchor beyond the wall, and its links rattled with a melancholy rhythm as he moved. His gait and appearance were the very epitome of sadness itself, a walking monument to misfortune that made my bardic heart ache with inspiration.
He spoke with no mirth, his voice as dry as dust and old parchment: “Congratulations on completing one of Jack’s silver towers. My function is to explain the room and its functions.” His eyes were sunken, hollowed by years or decades, and his pointy hat and robe were faded and torn. He managed a gesture that might have once been grand, now reduced to a tired flourish. “Before you are the rewards.”
The wizard shuffled forward, the chain pulling taut with a metallic rasp as he approached a plinth in the center of the room. He motioned us to approach. As we drew near, he made a gesture, and the plinth opened up with a sound like stone grinding against stone-an ancient, hungry growl that suggested the architecture itself had been waiting for this moment.
Before us were six gold bars with the number 100 etched in the top, their surfaces gleaming with a weight that promised fortune and hernias in equal measure. With the 398 gold we were carrying, we were now just shy of 1000 gold. I briefly entertained the notion of retiring to a small cottage, then remembered that we were still trapped in a magical deathtrap and that cottages rarely featured imprisoned wizards.
There was a dark blue and black scimitar, its blade catching the light with an edge that seemed to drink it in. Ender’s eyes widened with the particular recognition of a man who knew his weapons. “A Scimitar of Wounding,” he breathed, running a reverent thumb along the flat of the blade. “Nice.”
Next to it sat a leather bag with a face that you could swear just winked at you-a disconcerting expression from an article of luggage, though I supposed after fighting a brain with tentacles, a flirtatious satchel barely registered on my list of oddities.
“A bag of holding,” beamed Ender, holding it up with the satisfaction of a dwarf who had just been handed a bottomless lunchbox. “This is a worthy reward.”
Along the rim of the plinth, we noticed four indentations matching those of our medallions.
The wizard said, “Place your bronze medallions in the sockets.”
We did as we were told, and the inner section of the medallions-that part which held the serpent-transformed to silver, the metal shifting with a soft chime like a bell struck underwater. I felt a strange weight settle upon me, the gravity of progress, of having crossed some invisible threshold from bronze contender to silver survivor.
At the end lay a tightly rolled scroll, its seal unbroken, wax stamped with a symbol I did not recognize. We broke the seal and unfurled the parchment, which crackled with the sound of dry leaves underfoot. On it was a list of names:
A Relay
War Mage Jespa
BK Xatalan
Org Nenshen
Karen
Asashna
Delto Kue
“Seven names…” announced Crow, his elven brow furrowing.
“…and seven ascendants,” noted Ender, his voice dropping into that grave register dwarves reserve for prophecies and particularly bad weather.
We quizzed the sad mage on his character and predicament, but he insisted with mechanical firmness that his only function was to explain the function of the room. We pointed out, with the relentless logic of adventurers who have grown accustomed to bullying the laws of magic, that he was part of the room and so fell within his own remit.
Clearly torn between duty and desire, he stuttered and whispered that his name was Lazren.
Immediately, the chain tightened with a vicious snap, and he received a shock of magical energy that arced through his body in sickly blue tendrils. He fell prone, his hat tumbling from his head, and for a moment I feared we had killed the poor man with the simple cruelty of asking his name.
Crow, ever the romantic, decided to try to free the imprisoned wizard and attacked his bindings with his shortsword. The blade sparked against the chain, and once again, the poor man was felled by arcane energy, his body convulsing as the tower’s magic punished him for our compassion.
Glowering at us with a look that managed to be simultaneously furious, exhausted, and deeply disappointed, Lazren slowly rose to standing. He indicated with a raised eyebrow and the toe of one pointed shoe some scratches on the floor-scratches so faint they might have been accidental, might have been nothing. We inspected them more closely and realized they formed an arrowhead which pointed toward one of the portals. At the head of the arrow was a scrap of blue and silver material that matched the wizard’s robes. On the backside was scrawled, in a hand that trembled with desperate haste, the following message:
FIND D OF O
LORTMIL MT
S. OF VALUNA CT
MAKE HASTE
Lazren raised both eyebrows with a mixture of compulsion and pleading, the chain around his neck quivering with tension. “Go now… please.”
We felt remorse for the old magician-a sharp, bitter thing, the knowledge that we were leaving him to his chains while we walked free with his clues and his treasure. But the tower’s magic brooked no argument, and so we complied, almost falling over each other as we bundled into the recommended portal, carrying his hope with us into the unknown.