The passage from the cave went straight, its rough walls slowly smoothing out to polished grey, then melding seamlessly into brilliant mirror-clear silver. At the far end of the passage, a wall blocked their path. In the very center of the wall lay a mask, like a giant face molded from the silver of the wall, inset with blue crystals for eyes. It was very creepy even before it spoke.

"Who transgresses my passages?"

"None of your business," growled Star.

"It matters not. You will answer or you will not pass."

"Starstar," Star said reluctantly.

"Runescale."

"Unbending."

"Maya Starborn."

The mask smiled, the crystals of its eyes glinting evilly. "Once you enter, you are bound to my rules and cannot return until you pass my trials. Be warned."

Then the wall split in half, the mask stretching at the center as the two halves of the door swung outward, until it snapped down the middle, both halves still animate, each one-eyed half face grinning evilly out at the adventurers.

Star started forward without hesitation, so Maya followed. Snappy hesitated at the door, clacking her claws anxiously.

"It's okay, come on girl," Maya coaxed, and Snappy reluctantly sidled in after her.

"Why are you wasting your pets on a dungeon run?" Star asked. "They won't survive it."

"They're soulbound, they’ll be fine."

Star's eyes widened. "What, already?"

"I had some help, but yes."

"How do you get your funding?"

"Mostly grinding in higher zones with higher level players," Maya said truthfully. "But I'm also lucky with drops, as you've seen."

Runescale grinned back at them, and Maya waved reluctantly.

"Enough to bind two creatures? No wonder you don't have time for class." Star shook her head in disbelief.

"I can get highly focused on things," Maya said. "Like this dungeon. I need to kill the boss as fast as possible. Are there any shortcuts?"

"Just don't try any of the riddle doors. They're stupid hard and change every time."

Maya thought of her black star tile and grinned. "So it's multiple choice?"

"Yeah, there's a Hall of Prowess and a Hall of Contemplation. One is a gauntlet of monsters, the other is a bunch of stupid riddles that don't make sense."

They reached the crossways, and Star gestured along the red corridor. But Maya hesitated.

"Is there a penalty for trying the riddles and failing? Are there monsters guarding that hall at all?"

Star frowned at her. "You said you were in a hurry! Don't go near the riddle hall."

"I might have to, if I'm going to finish fast. I have a few thoughts to try."

"Alright, your quest, your call. But can you send your pets with us so we can start clearing the Prowess corridor?"

"Sure. Snappy, Hunter, I want you to fight with Star, Ben, and Runescale, okay? Try to keep them safe like you would me."

Hunter wagged his tail, licked Maya's hand, then trotted over to Star's side. Snappy, being the independent crystal-back crab that she was, objected strenuously with much clacking of her claws, and only deigned to follow Maya's request once she'd been officially ordered to do so.

"We're going to have to do something about that rebellious streak one of these days," Maya told her, then the party split.

The Hall of Prowess was easy to see, by the faint reddening of the silver in that direction; the Hall of Contemplation was the same but faintly blue. Maya only considered a moment before following her initial instinct and hurrying down the riddle path. The first door was solid silver, with the same creepy mask face staring out at her. Or, more accurately, the right half of it. The other half was nowhere to be found, the edges trailing out in thin stretches like melted mozzarella until fading into the solid smoothness of the silver.

"So, Maya Starborn alone chooses the Hall of Contemplation? You are brave, and foolish, and wise. This is your last chance to turn back. Once you enter the Hall, your choice is set and cannot be reversed." It grinned nastily. "There are those who even to this day remain trapped in my halls, unable to ever be free of their folly and ignorance. Step forward if you dare."

The door split open, though this time the face vanished entirely, sinking back into the door until it was smooth and unmarred instead of splitting down the center. Maya wasn't sure which was more creepy, the way it kept watching her even as it slowly smoothed out, or its half-faced gaze.

She was sure it would find something even creepier to do next time.

She advanced into the Hall of Contemplation, and found herself in an actual hall. Wood panels lined the walls, hung with portraits of various officious looking harpy and elven dignitaries in stiff uniforms and stiffer dresses, though she couldn't help noticing that all the harpies had their arms completely bare. Was that a cultural thing? She hadn't noticed anything like that among the players or local NPCs...

The door behind her clicked, the echo of its sealing bouncing across the hall. Maya was locked in, but she couldn't bring herself to worry. Today, she didn't have to worry about anything. Today would be good, no matter what happened.

She examined the portraits one by one, making note of any distinctive features, but they were all quite similar and uninteresting. One harpy had a beak piercing studded with a ruby. Another wore nearly a dozen strings of beads and necklaces of various descriptions. An elf wore a masquerade mask of a harpy's face; one harpy had fake pointed ears strapped to her head. Those two stood out to her the most, as there was little sign of levity among the assembled portraits, and to have them impersonating each other felt playful in a way the rest of the stiff dignitaries would surely have disapproved of.

The wall at the far end of the hall was empty, blank and smooth, but she thought she saw the faintest bulge where a single blue jewel peeked out at her. The creepy half mask thing was still watching.

She shivered, but put it out of her thoughts.

There were twelve portraits, seven harpies and five elves, arranged six on each side of the hall in no particular order. Maya didn't see any instructions beneath them, nor any indication of who they were. Once she'd examined their contents, she began to move them aside to check the wall, then examine the back of the frame. The wall was plain wood paneling, no secret button or hidden safe. The backs of the portraits were plain and flat, without any mechanism to open them, as though the paintings had been fused into them and could not be changed or replaced.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

She approached the far end after replacing all the portraits. "Can you give me a hint?" she asked the mask, which oozed into shape with its evil grin when addressed.

"Of course I can, but why should I? You're not trying very hard."

"There's nothing to indicate what I should be doing."

"Of course there is. You just aren't seeing it."

Maya frowned and looked at the portraits again. What was she missing? Everyone was wearing a different variation of the same outfit, so it wasn't based on the clothing. Did she need to rearrange them somehow? Were they in pairs? If so, she could match the two impostors together easily, they obviously went together. She found another portrait wearing jewelry, and paired it opposite the one with all the beads, gave the beak-ring harpy to an earringed elf, and matched two harpies with pale feathers when she couldn't find any other significant similarities.

The mask on the door laughed at her, a thin shrieking laugh of derision and triumph. "Wrong, wrong, wrong! You know nothing," it cackled.

"I'm not done."

Maya took down all the portraits and stood back, considering them. Then she frowned at the walls. Now that the portraits weren't breaking it up, she noticed something different about it. The wood was paler at the end near the entrance, darker at the end by the mask and the exit door. She crossed the room to check from the other end. No, it wasn't just perspective. The exit side was distinctively darker, by a bare shade or two, but the gradient was real.

She returned to the portraits, trying to discern any way to use this information, but they didn't include wood at all. Each portrait was painted against a greyish-blue background, lacking any distinctive features. She started comparing outfits, convinced that there had to be some visual cue for how she was supposed to match them. But if there were, she was missing it. Her neat rows became a haphazard pile as she tried one combination after another with no success.

Finally she stood and scowled down at the paintings, disappointed. Her luck was failing her.

But... the more she looked at the jumbled pile, the clearer the distinction became. It was the background, after all. The top portrait in the pile had a paler background than the one beneath it.

It took a few minutes to sort them out, but soon she had two rows in a steady gradient of light to dark, one faintly greyer, one slightly bluer. A glance at the door revealed a single blue eye-gem staring at her, and she took that as an indicator to place the bluer paintings on that side. She swiftly matched them to the wood gradient, and the half-mask hissed with disappointment as its door swung open.

"Consider well before proceeding, not every trial can be taken slow," it whispered menacingly.

Maya disregarded the warning and strode through at once. She heard the mask's mocking laugh as it slammed the door shut behind her.

The next room was completely round. The floor curved like a shallow bowl and water steadily seeped up from several holes near the center, already forming a growing puddle. So, this room had a timer built in. She'd have to be fast.

The walls were divided into eight sections, each depicting a stylized symbol. It took Maya a while to figure out what they were supposed to represent, but one had a fairly distinctive fan of lines that she soon realized were supposed to be wings and once she had that piece in place she quickly started to recognize other features. They were all stylized, but upside-down, representative of the eight possible species to choose from. Lizardine, Harpy, Elf, Human, Sprite, Merla, Vampire, and Felinis. Some were different than she'd have expected from the species, the vampire depicted by its eyes rather than fangs, and few of them actually had a body per se, but once she knew what she was looking at the symbolism was obvious.

Water began to lap at her feet, though she walked around the edges of the room. It was filling fast. Perhaps she should have taken Star's advice. There hadn't been an actual riddle door yet, and her tile would do her no good here. But there was no point in bemoaning it, choice made, move on. And quickly.

They weren't arranged in any sort of order, listed differently than she remembered from the character creation window. The secondary characteristics, what were they? Adaptive, absorptive, mental, physical, magical, whatever else. She couldn't recall which went to which type of creature, so she couldn't tell if they were paired according to that or something else.

What could she possibly do here? At least the portraits were movable, the carvings on the walls were quite immobile. She tried pressing them, but apart from a faint difference in the panels’ texture she learned nothing. Two symbols were on a warm panel, two cool; two were rougher than the rest, two smoother.

The ceiling was blank, curved in a perfect match to the bowl beneath it. Maya imagined that if the walls weren't there, the convex ceiling would fit perfectly into the floor, leaving no space for anything in between. She double checked that it wasn't slowly descending, but it remained equidistant from the symbols on the walls. So it was just an avoid-drowning puzzle, not an avoid-being-crushed puzzle. Good to know.

Water continued to flow upward, and Maya began to wonder if the symbols were a distraction. Perhaps the real goal was to stop the water. She found the spot where it flowed in, a few little holes in the floor, like a grate, but to widely spaced for her to cover it. At least not with her fingers or by standing on it. But she wasn't helpless.

She began firing ice spikes into the holes, jamming the inflow. They'd melt eventually, they weren't intended to be used as permanent blocks, but it should at least buy her enough time to think, splashing violently in every direction as she sealed each hole, the sourceless laughter of her adversary showing its disdain for her methodology. Well, it could laugh as much as it wanted, she wasn't going to be discouraged so easily.

The water calmed and settled into a perfectly still pool just reaching her ankles. She spent a while staring down at the reflection of the silver symbols in the water. The way the wall curved, it made them all seem to be standing around Maya where she stood in the center. For a moment she wondered if that was important, but she couldn't figure out any way to leverage that concept. All she had to work with was the pool of water.

Experimentally, she flicked a hand through the reflection of the harpy symbol. It rippled, but not like ordinary water, thicker, slower, as though time delayed. Hm, interesting. She knelt, waited for the ripples to subside, then tapped the reflection twice in quick succession. The ripples spread, shifting the symbol just a little before it settled back to its original form.

There was something to this. Maya stood and walked slowly around the room again. The warmer symbol, the rougher, there was some alignment here. Was it incorrect?

Yes. She'd known from the first moment that they were in the wrong order. It was just a matter of making them match. The texture on the wall must be to designate what symbols belonged where.

Unfortunately, she couldn't solve this without the full details on each species, so she logged out and switched to the character creation. She almost laughed when it appeared, the ground beneath each character shifting to adapt to their type. Rough ground for adaptive, flat ground for absorptive, bluer hues for aquatic, gold for magical. It might as well have spelled out the answer for her.

When she returned, she had a plan. The ice spikes had vanished when she logged out, so she replaced them hastily. The room had filled almost to her knees in her brief absence. That would make moving around more difficult, but at least now she knew what she was doing.

The magical creatures, Elf and Harpy, needed to go by the warm wall, the Human and Felinis by rough, and to complete the pattern the rest would fall into place. She just had to somehow shift each symbol. They were each made up of the same number of lines at least, so she began the painstaking task of figuring out the sequence of taps and nudges that would shift the water to reflect the symbol she wanted rather than the symbol that was physically present.

She could do it. Each one, she could do. It took longer than she'd have preferred, but she was fast and the water moved slow. Far harder was turning to each symbol without sending out ripples that disrupted everything, and she instinctively knew she needed them all changed at the same time in order to succeed.

Before she'd finished memorizing the sequence, the water started flowing in again, and she paused to hastily spike it closed again. Really, how was anyone supposed to solve this thing?

Well, it was probably intended for a group, actually. With four people, each responsible for two symbols, each standing over a section of the water inflow holes? Yeah, that would work. But Maya had come on her own, which made everything that much more complicated.

She could do this. She had to.

Once she figured out each sequence of water strikes, she practiced moving smoothly in a circle without disturbing the surface. Then, put it all together. Move fast, but not abruptly. Shift each symbol, slide over to the next, always in gentle motion.

The first symbol had lost its cohesion by the time she finished the eighth, so she started the sequence again, nudging it back in shape, and continued around the circle in such a way, gradually increasing in speed until suddenly, the walls rippled.

Maya froze, and then the symbols were in the correct order. The water began to drain instead of fill, and the half mask appeared on the wall behind the elf symbol, scowling at her. "Halfway," it said grudgingly, as the wall opened to admit her.

Maya exhaled before continuing, the exertion of the riddle fading as her stamina restored to full. This was not what she’d imagined when she chose the riddle route, but it was actually kind of fun.

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