Chapter Twelve
“The crushing weight of emptiness, the terror of wasted time, these are the horrors which await you in the Third Trial.”
The metal tube halted, slamming me against its hard sides just as it had done before.
I muttered a curse and rubbed my right shoulder, doubting I would ever get used to the sensation of hurtling through the darkness of these impossibly deep tunnels.
But even colliding against the cool, curved metal wasn’t as bad as what happened right afterward.
The bottom dropped out beneath me and deposited me unceremoniously in the middle of the Third Trial.
I hissed as I rose, massaging the same knee I’d slammed into the first time. The metal tube whizzed away several feet above me. I grumbled a curse and glared at the passing transport before turning to locate my partner.
Dante was already here. This time, for the first time, I could see him right at the beginning.
We were in the center of an enormous chamber.
The walls were an ordinary, glossy gray stone.
The ceiling was approximately thirty feet high with metal beams that almost looked like pipes and spanned horizontally from one side to the other.
Littering the smooth stone floor around us were rocks of varying sizes, some as big as boulders, others mere pebbles, a wasteland of bits and pieces of dense stone.
At the heart of the chamber was a platform roughly half the height of the room itself, like a perfectly square tower jutting from the center of the room and rising high above us.
On top of it sat a thin pedestal and the familiar glowing rings, hovering and turning slowly in midair.
They blazed crimson and, encased in a thick glass box, cast a daunting bloody pall over the room.
“Adrian,” Dante said.
I turned my attention to him. He pointed at the side of the raised platform where a long white rope laid coiled on the ground. Next to it sat a sharpened blade, shimmering red in the light of the rings.
We approached with caution, scanning to and fro as we reached them and stared down at them, silently trying to figure out their purpose.
The rope seemed obvious. We’d need to climb the platform to get to the rings, but what could we attach the rope to?
How could we use it to climb those fifteen feet upwards? And what was the knife for?
A sudden pulsating light caught my attention.
It came from a button glowing a faint white on the side of the platform.
I strode toward it as Dante pocketed the blade.
There was one word carved above the button on the side of the platform.
A long one, one I hadn’t seen in any of the heroic, saintly tales Bria was using to teach me how to read.
“Surrender,” Dante read from over my shoulder. He stood beside me, gaze firmly set on the button. “That’s what it says.”
I froze. An out? The Geist were giving us an out? My blood chilled at the very next thought that came, unbidden, to my mind. What could be so horrible about the Third Trial that the gods themselves would deem it necessary to build in a failsafe escape?
“Come on.” Dante turned away.
I stared at the button for a moment longer before tearing my gaze away and following my partner.
“We could use the rope,” Dante said. He reached for the coil of rope. “Toss it over the beams up there and climb. But we haven’t exactly been doing the right sort of strength training for a fifteen-foot rope climb and, no offense, but I’ve seen thicker muscles on my little cousins.”
I scowled at him but didn’t argue. He was right.
Climbing vertically up a rope like this would take an enormous amount of upper body strength.
Had I gained enough during these past few months of training?
Had Cosmo and Myrine pushed us into this far too early, used to young men and women who had trained their wholes lives, not malnourished Lower Ringers?
“So we’ll use the rocks” he decided. Dante looped the rope around his belt for safekeeping and clapped his hands together in finality. “We’ll pile them up around the base and climb them to the top. Should be easy enough. We’ll be able to roll most of them into place.”
I glanced around at our surroundings for another moment, but without a better idea, I nodded along and moved into place beside him.
We got to work rolling the bigger rocks toward the base of the platform, setting them into place, and making sure they remained still before piling smaller and smaller rocks on top of them until we had a pile that reached nearly to the top of the platform.
Once it was ready, we stepped back, breathing heavily from exertion, and slapped our hands together to rid them of the excess dirt accumulated from the stones.
“You first,” Dante told me with a nod. “I’ll follow and give you a boost at the top if you need it.”
I stepped forward and reached out for the first rock.
As I climbed, I looked around the room from my vantage point, doing my best to ensure we hadn’t missed anything. I had a nagging suspicion in the back of my mind that it couldn’t possibly be this easy. But hadn’t I thought the same thing during the First Trial?
My split attention caused me to slip once.
My foot slid off of a poorly placed stone, sending a cascade of smaller rocks tumbling down toward Dante below me.
He cursed and leaped to the side to avoid the small avalanche, then glared up at me as the stones finished skittering loudly to the floor below.
I grimaced and mouthed an apology before refocusing.
Soon after, I was high enough up that I could see the smooth top of the platform and the rings glowing in their glass encasement. I glanced down at Dante whose clenched jaw was the only indication he was expending any effort at all.
I flexed my fingers and released one hand.
It wasn’t far, just a foot or two. I took a deep breath and stretched my arm out as far as it would go, reaching with the very tips of my fingers—but I couldn’t grip the lip of the platform.
I huffed through my nose and opened my mouth to tell Dante, but his hands were already pressed against my butt, pushing me upward.
“Don’t get too handsy, Viper,” I muttered.
“I’ll let go of your bony ass as soon as you grab the platform,” he vowed with a growl that had my cheeks heating foolishly.
I tore my gaze away from my partner and reached for the top of the platform. I found purchase and gripped the edge tightly before lifting myself upwards with a groan. With a final heave, I pulled myself up and over the lip of the platform. I stumbled slightly as I righted myself and straightened.
I turned back to Dante, hair flipping over my shoulder, and grinned down at him, victorious. He chuckled, shaking his head. I left him down there and took a step toward the encased rings.
Then froze.
I looked down at my feet. The room was no longer red.
White lights had flickered on overhead. The rings were blue now, just as they had been during our last two Trials, and the glass casing had vanished.
I wasn’t sure what I’d done, but any apprehension I’d felt of being unable to get through that box to the rings was gone.
I was just about to celebrate our quickest victory yet when I took another step forward, and we were bathed in that red light once more.
The glass box reappeared, the rings locked away from us.
I stopped, turned back, and stared at something on the floor behind me.
“What is it?” Dante called up to me.
“It’s a weighted platform,” I replied. I tested it with a foot and the red light vanished again. “It responds to weight and releases the rings. But the second you step off…”
I trailed off, making my way back to the edge of the platform and peering down at my perplexed partner below. Dante turned away with a frown and glanced at the rocks scattered around him.
“So we just find a boulder heavy enough to weigh it down?” I asked, voicing the first idea that came to mind.
“And get it up there how exactly?” Dante raised brow.
I chewed my lip for a moment and stepped away from the edge, peering around for a solution. There had to be one. There always was.
I tested the weighted platform with one foot, just tapping it at first, then putting more and more weight on it until it finally turned blue along with the rings behind me. I released it, plunging us back into the red light and unreachable rings. Almost my entire body weight; that was what it took.
Hands on my hips, I looked all around. There was no way Dante and I could lift a boulder heavy enough to weigh down the platform, let alone carry it up our hastily built rock wall. But maybe we didn’t have to.
“Give me the rope,” I said, leaning over the edge.
Dante frowned. For a moment, I assumed he was going to question me, but then he untied the rope from his belt and tossed it up.
I unravelled it as quickly as I could and backed away toward the center of the platform, staring up at the beams high above us.
I took a deep breath and sent the rope flying high toward the ceiling.
The first attempt failed.
The second wasn’t much better.
But on the third, the rope finally wrapped around one of the thin beams and fell back to the top of the platform on the other side of it. I grinned, victorious, and gripped one end tightly before tossing the other down to Dante.
“Get whatever mid-sized stones you can. Not so heavy that they’ll break the rope or that I won’t be able to lift them but heavy enough to make a difference on this weighted platform.”