Chapter 102 – The Frostland Vault

The team spread out to take measurements in the room, placing down several divination devices to take readings on ambient mana levels and energy types. As the two arcanists channeled mana into them to activate them, Gomaer went up to one of the walls and started moving stone tiles around. When he was done, there was a heavy sounding clunk and one of the stone pillars in the middle of the room opened up like a flower. Mirian had no idea how something like ‘stone’ was bending so flexibly.

Each of the petals of stone contained hieroglyphs that vaguely resembled myrvites. There were also channels carved into the base that led to the center. “Do these take specific magichemicals?” she asked.

“Got it in one,” Aelius said, already getting the vials out from his pack. “The magichemical matches the myrvite spell organ it’s distilled from. Costs two drachms to open this up each time.”

The magichemicals mixed in the center of the stone flower, then there was a brief flare of arcane energy and the substance took on a yellow glow and began oozing like honey. Mirian knew for a fact that what usually happened when you mixed them was a rapid exomagical reaction that usually ended in a fireball, and the resulting substance was a pile of black tar and a lot of smoke. Professor Seneca would have had a conniption.

“You’ve analyzed the properties of this substance?”

“As best we can. It becomes inert if you take it out of the Vault.” Aelius looked to his other arcanists. “Got the measurements?”

There were nods all around.

Aelius scooped up the glowing yellow substance with a bare hand and unceremoniously chucked it at the north door. There was a plorp sound as it hit, then started dripping down the stone. Then, the substance rapidly spread across the door as if it had a life of its own, and the whole door glowed yellow. With another clunk, the door rumbled open, splitting apart into six segments that retracted into the wall.

“Doesn’t work on any of the other doors,” Gomaer said. “Just that one. No clue how to open the others in this room.”

The next room was encircled by strange growths, something like a cross between muscles stripped of all flesh and fungal hyphae. Here and there, the organic growths bloomed into something between a blossom and a mushroom cap.

As before, the arcanists spread out to place down their measuring devices, while Aelius opened up his journal again. Hidden under the mushroom caps were ‘spores’—which took the form of tiny stone hexagons each with a hieroglyph on them. There were slots by each door, each one representing an ecosystem. To solve these puzzles, they just had to cluster the hieroglyphs representing plants and animals that existed together.

“Strange. They really are like trials,” Mirian said.

This time, all three doors rumbled open.

“Readings are good,” the sorcerer said, marking down the results in his notebook.

They proceeded like this. All in all, the team had nine rooms unlocked. All of them seemed to involve some sort of puzzle. Sometimes, they only knew how to open one door. Sometimes, several. Mirian had already noticed that the layout of the Vault seemed to defy physics. If they opened a northern door, then an eastern door, then a southern door, then circled back through a western door to what should have been the same room they started in, they instead found a completely different room. Another sure sign of the Elder Gods at work.

I wonder what Respected Jei would make of it, Mirian thought. At no point while she walked through the rooms had she realized she was moving through another spatial dimension—and yet, she must have been. She resolved to sketch out some ideas on the math behind that later. For now, she was too interested in the magical results.

Ambient magic had grown as they descended to third level, then risen again once they got in the Vault. Beyond that, there were pinpoint spikes of arcane energy occurring—as best she could tell—dozens of times per second. The only thing that did anything comparable was a spell engine, and even a train’s spell engine did so on a much smaller scale.

The teams had long ago looted what they could from the Vault, bringing back several samples that Elsadorra was still helping them study, but there were plenty of ‘easy’ rooms, as Aelius termed it, they could still attempt to open.

“So what does a ‘hard’ room look like?” Mirian asked.

“Well, let’s just say there’s a reason we’re staying in the outer rooms,” Aelius replied. He walked over to another door they hadn’t opened and pressed his hand against it.

No puzzle for this one. It just split open revealing a large corridor, a few hundred feet long with a very high ceiling.

The corridor went for about ten feet, then led to a sheer drop. “Goes down fifty feet,” said Aelius. “So you’ve got to have about a ten foot horizontal leap, and don’t mess up. Then there’s that next part,” he said, gesturing. Silently, the walls in that section began to close, until they were touching. Then just as silently, they moved open again and repeated the process. That section of crushing wall had no way around it, and was twenty feet long. “So you can’t just carefully set up some ropes and anchors to ferry everyone across. After the crushing corridor, there’s all those tiles. We threw some rocks in there, and there’s certain tiles that, when touched, send out a column of superheated fire. Beyond those—took Gomaer’s arm to hit that far—gravity in the corridor reverses. Amazing bit of magic, no clue how they accomplished it. So that nasty looking ceiling there with islands of stone surrounded by ceiling spikes? You essentially fall up into that, then have to make perfect jumps from platform to platform until you get to the end.”

“That’s quite the death trap,” Mirian said. “But couldn’t a quick levitation spell get you across all of that?”

“Oh, that’s the best part,” Aelius said. “The entire corridor has an antimagic field. Just a suppression field, but no spell is going to work in there, and it also deadens any of the devices we put in until they’re back out.”

Fascinating, Mirian thought. “Have you tried to locate the antimagic glyphs?”

He chuckled. “They’re not near the entrance, I’ll tell you that much. Also, fair warning, if you start drilling into the walls to remove anything here, Scrappy is gonna come looking. So that’s why we don’t go any further.”

Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

“Fair enough,” Mirian said, though in her mind she was already thinking about how she’d tackle it. In preparatory school, the dueling instructor had made them run obstacle courses for agility, and this reminded her of those. She was trying to trace the route she would take.

Maybe she could practice at the end of the cycle. Except, if she waited that long, she’d have to get through the entropic antimagic field, and probably reopen all the puzzles because of the Labyrinth shift. To even attempt this room, how much of a cycle would she have to give up?

“Do entropic antimagic fields nullify mana elixirs?” she asked.

“No,” said Aelius. “Though that’s a suppression field in there. If it was entropic, I don’t think it would be humanly possible.”

“Right, just a stray thought. What a fascinatingly deadly place.”

They went back to the puzzle in the room that the group was working on.

This room had more of the strange muscular-looking fungi, but there were no glyph tiles under the caps. Instead, there were tendrils dripping down from the caps like they were some sort of jellyfish. If you put something in the tendrils, they gently grabbed it and brought it up until it touched the top of the cap. Inevitably, they then dropped whatever they’d been given to the floor.