“A good puzzle, it's a fair thing. Nobody is lying. It's very clear, and the problem depends just on you.”

-Erno Rubik

==Zidaun==

This entire area had been strange.

Sure, the vast gathering of skyrays had been terrifying, but overall there had been no need to deal with anything more than a few simple traps.

In a normal dungeon, if they were inclined to vast acts of creation like this, I might assume that their instincts had tried something and it didn’t work. Plenty of dungeons had nonsensical stairs, and wandering corridors to nowhere.

However, this place was perfectly constructed. The trees were balanced against the low growing plants and the slender saplings struggling to break through the canopy casting the shadows of their elders. Insects multiplied in profusion in the ground and hummed in whirling dances through the air. Small animals raced through the underbrush, the shaking of their passage often the only sign of their presence. Elusive herbivores were only visible due to animal trails and swift blurs in the distance. And above all, colorful skyrays darted through the air like flowers carried on the breeze.

No, I would not say that this place was built without understanding.

That did not mean my own understanding was sufficiently developed to unravel what was going on. As we followed the lightly wandering trail, the continued absence of a threat made me uneasy.

It was possible, though I thought it unlikely, that Caden had been in the middle of redesigning this when he was given the second skill book. If so, this area might lack whatever threats it was meant to have, but it I would be a fool to count on that.

The others are not fools either, and so we each proceeded carefully, each of us wary of what threat might emerge.

Eventually, the path lead through a stone archway into another clearing. The clearing was surrounded by dense woods, the base of the trees crowded with thick thorny brambles, forming an, if not impenetrable, at least formidable barrier.

At the back of the clearing, ten empty archways were set into a crumbling wall.

We stepped into the clearing, each of us wary…

Each of the archways glowed with light, revealing an opening into dirt and stone tunnel. Then, one tunnel closed, the tree symbol of the arbor monument etched into the stone seal.

Nothing else happened.

“Well,” Inda said finally, “that was anticlimactic.”

“This entire place has been off,” Gurek muttered. “Other than scaring us, this has been nothing but a pleasant walk in the woods.”

That was a fair point, and we each agreed in our own ways.

“Odd that activating the monument closed a path though.” Firi said, his brows furrowed. “I would have expected it to open one instead.”

“Obviously some kind of puzzle,” I said, sighing.

The others winced a little, and with good reason.

Puzzles in dungeons were notorious for being… convoluted. Personally, I attributed that to most dungeons operating off of instincts. That meant the correct solution to puzzles could easily be nonsensical, and only worked out with large amounts of trial and error. Other times it was so simple and obvious that it shouldn’t count as a puzzle at all.

Awakened dungeons tended to be better at them, but even they often had trouble understanding the perspective and limitations of how people viewed the world. Etching out a number combination across multiple rooms in tiles, with walls cutting across individual numbers, was obvious to a dungeon. To others, it looked like decoration, since every number was broken into multiple rooms.

I doubted Caden would have that issue, but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t be difficult and painful.

“Okay, so… we need to go back and find the others?” Inda asked.

I nodded, as did Firi and Gurek, though Gurek grumbled something under his breath.

We turned around only to find that the archway to enter the clearing had disappeared. No sign of the pathway remained, the entire perimeter now and even taller barrier of razor sharp brambles. Arm thick wooden stems wound around and about the trees, the spines of the brambles dripping with something dark and poisonous looking.

Aurora’s Rampart

Plant

Poisonous

Learning that it was, in fact, poisonous was helpful, but didn’t tell me much more than before, though I did let the others know.

“It might be possible,” I said, “to get through or around the barrier, but it seems pretty obvious that we are supposed to pick one of the options.”

“And what happens if we choose the wrong one, huh?” Gurek said, scowling in frustration.

“If there is only one correct choice,” Inda said, “odds are we will find out.”

I just nodded, waved forward, and we started to walk towards the portals.

We studied them for a moment, but other than the sealed portal, they were completely identical. Just in case, however, I reached out and touched the arbor symbol. Nothing happened, but that was what I expected. I would have felt foolish if we learned that they did something later and we hadn’t even tried.

Identifying it didn’t help either.

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

Eventually we chose a portal at random and entered, the other portals sealing as soon as one of had entered.

The tunnel wove a few times before we saw a familiar sight. The same willow leaves formed a curtain over the exit.

“Shit, are we back to the beginning?” Gurek said, looking like he wanted to hit a wall.

“Can we check something?” Inda asked, looking around.

I wasn’t sure what she was looking for, but it appeared Firi and Gurek were just as confused.

“What are you looking for?” Firi said.

“What will we find if we turn around and go back down the tunnel?” she said.

That… was an interesting question. If we were back to the start, would we find the path to The Meadow if we went backward?

We turned around, but after a quick jaunt back through the twists and turns, we stopped. There, ahead of us, was the same green curtain of leaves blowing fluttering gently.

“Oh gods,” Gurek muttered, “it’s some kind of labyrinth.”

“Don’t be overly dramatic,” Inda snapped. “So far it is just a puzzle. We need to go through and verify it, but it looks like if you get it wrong you just start over at the beginning. Annoying, but hardly a terrible punishment.”

Just in case, we still turned back around again and then went through the exit that way. We emerged onto a familiar path. An identical willow matched the equally identical path and woods. Well… almost identical.

Skyrays soared through the trees, suggesting that we wouldn’t be dealing with the enormous swarm again.

We started forward, and I noticed something else. The trap that had been right near the entrance was gone. Instead, another pitfall trap was placed a few dozen feet farther down the path.

“It isn’t completely identical,” I said, before pointing out what I noticed.

“Doesn’t really change anything,” Inda said. “We will need to head into the woods to find the other monuments anyway.”

“Might as well get started,” Gurek said, before setting off into the woods.

Going into the woods off the path was a different experience. There were the obvious elements of walking around various bits of shrubbery and trampling through various low growing grasses, but the atmosphere seemed to the be the most profound change.

Before, we had been walking along a created path. Now the wildness of the woods became more apparent. The sun was hidden by the encompassing canopy, beams of light streaking between the leaves to spear against wooden trunks and pierce down into the foliage were the only evidence of its presence. And even so, the layered shield of the trees blocked all but the luckiest shafts, the majority spending themselves in splashes of green higher up in sprawling boughs.

Sound, likewise, was damped. The calls of the insects and skyrays muted by the enfolding green. Each leaf was a tiny muffling wall, more likely to sound its own whispering song in a susurrous with its brethren then allow another sound to penetrate deeply through the woods.

Together, the shifting lights and sounds called me to reverence in a way that few things could. Whatever else this place might be, the woods spoke sacred words to my soul.

The others must have felt something similar, for we traversed through the woods in comfortable silence. I was not the only one with a smile on my lips.

Soon enough we found another monument. This one was substantially less well preserved than the last one. It was tilted and partially buried in the earth. Still, a red image of fire was plainly visible, and a quick inspection revealed it to be the ‘flame monument.’ It activated and glowed just the same as the other.

Eventually we reached the edge of the woods. Steep cliffs led upward, and aurora’s ramparts were barely visible at the top. We considered it a rather clear indication that we were not meant to climb up them.

The next few hours passed in this fashion, as we trekked through the woods crossing back and forth finding more monuments and activating them. They all had different names: skyray, star, snowflake, and so on. Eventually, we tracked down nine of them, and we unable to find another.

That part was fine. There were ten portals, so closing nine of them should presumably leave only the correct pathway open. The problem was that each of the monuments was in various levels of decay. One had crumbled down to rubble, a broken symbol of an open cavern split in two lay in separate pieces on the ground. Neither one started to glow when they were touched.

I did my best to move and join them, fusing bands of stone to keep them together. When that didn’t work I manipulated the stone and crystal directly, fusing the two sides into a single piece. Still, it refused to do anything.

Unable to do anything, we shrugged and gave up for the moment.

With that done, we followed the path back to the end, finding the familiar archway and clearing. Once again, there were ten arches, all but two closed.

“With one monument being broken,” Inda said, “and its portal not closing, it’s obvious that an element of chance has been deliberately included.”

“You think this is to combat us?” Firi said, his head tilted.

Inda paused for a moment, then said, “What do you mean?”

“Well…” he started slowly, “it knows we are here to map the dungeon, right? It has seen us defeating monsters, and making notes, and a map, and generally documenting how to beat the dungeon.”

“This…” he waved toward the arches, “has some randomization to it. And the location of the monuments and traps were randomized.”

Inda nodded in understanding.

“Right,” she said, “even the arbor seal is in a different location. So the correct portal’s position is likely randomized too. Is it trying to make our work useless?”

“No,” I said, waving one of my hands in dismissal. “I don’t think so. It could have made things far more random. Completely random monsters and bosses. I wouldn’t put it past to to completely randomize the terrain, either. Instead, this area is mostly the same. The strategy to defeat it hasn’t changed...”

“It won’t let people cheat,” Gurek said.

We all turned to look at him.

“What?” he said, his posture curled in a little bit. “People do that all the time. The dungeons that give good resources, they get run over and over to collect loot. Stuff the local area needs, money, whatever… People figure out how to get them and then just run the area over and over again.”

He was right. That was what most professional teams ended up doing. The average people who just wanted a good living and to make money would pick something they could do and hope that the dungeon wouldn’t change something up and kill them.

Most new adventurers died before they reach that point.

“That is how most people make money in a dungeon,” Inda said. “If this one won’t let people do that…”

No no,” Gurek both his hands in denial. “You don’t understand. The overall strategy here should remain applicable, right? So people can run this area over and over. However, they won’t be able to do it the exact same way twice.”

“It forces them to not get complacent,” I said. “They need to look for traps everywhere, and track down the monuments. And even then… it is going to force them to work for it. To possibly need to repeat the puzzle due simply to chance.”

Inda and Gurek devolved into bickering about exactly what it would do, neither seeming to notice or care that they agreed on the broad strokes of the effects.

What does Caden actually want?

Training people not to be complacent and cheat was excellent for the adventurers… but what did it do for Caden?

Well… it got him more competent people who would get farther into the dungeon. Maybe that is all he wants. The same strategy to collect more over time until they die in a final harvest.

A part of him, however, had started to wonder.

Caden… feels so much like a person. What if he wants something different? He seems to have a sense of humor and an appreciation of beauty. Sure, it is all dangerous, but he is a dungeon. That is his nature.

And yet… the dungeon so far had felt less like a dangerous trap, and more like… well… an adventure. People call us that, adventurers, and it is our guild name, but most of the time that isn’t what we actually feel like.

It was impossible to know for now.

And who knows how Exsan fits into all of this.

His own thoughts dwindled away and he finally interrupted the squabbling pair.

“Don’t you think we should keep going?” he said mildly, his smile quirking up on one side, and an eyebrow raised in inquiry.

Both cut off and turned to look at him, Inda starting to blush as she took a step backward.

“Right, right,” Gurek muttered before turning away, marching toward one of the open portals.

Either portal was as good as the other, so nobody objected to his choice.

He stepped through and we followed.

The same dirt and root bound tunnel greeted us again, though after a few turns we were pleased to see a change.

Ahead, while a curtain of leaves still blocked off sight, they were now a colorful mix of yellow, red, and orange.