Arfur's First Person POV Walkthrough Part 1

This comprehensive walkthrough provides solutions to all of the puzzles and analyses the story behind the puzzles. Every step is described in the first person point of view and every puzzle is detailed and considered within the context of the story line.
Read this to gain insight into the game lore or read this just for for fun but be aware that this guide is spoiler heavy.
It's a long story so it's split into two parts.
All views on the story line are my own.

Part 1 Overground

Welcome to this first person walkthrough of Quern.
Part 1 (this part) is a detailed walkthrough of the overground areas.
Part 2 is a detailed walkthrough of the underground areas.
There is a link at the end of this walkthrough.

Arrival

When I opened my eyes I suffered a brief sensation of dizziness, not because I was ill or unwell, but because I simply had no idea where I was or why I was here. It was like waking up and not remembering for a few brief seconds where you were or what time it was. In this case however the feeling didn’t pass; it persisted, confusing my mind and my senses. I couldn’t even remember what I had been doing before awakening and I certainly didn’t understand where I was or what I was supposed to be doing here.
Furthermore I felt a strange sense of dislocation, a feeling that I had been delivered here or perhaps pulled here from somewhere else. From somewhere that was definitely not here or anywhere even close to here. I closed my eyes, shook my head, and tried to clear my thoughts.

Eventually I opened my eyes for the second time and looked around. Before me was an odd looking frame, asymmetrically built in solid stone. There was no door as such, just the stone frame. I frowned in thought. When I had first opened my eyes the frame was all I had seen and it had been glowing with a green sickly hue. Now it was just an empty frame, a gateway to nowhere. I slowly turned around in a full circle to realise I was in a round enclosure surrounded by rocks and enclosed by a high fence built from sharply carved stakes. Beyond the stake fence I could see fir trees and tall rocks. Opposite the frame there was a door, built into a stone wall.

I went to the frame and examined it. Beyond it there was just a dead end. Most unusual for a gateway, I thought. Let’s face it, if it was a gate then it was supposed to lead somewhere. On the frame there was a hand print emblazoned upon a metal plate. On impulse I pressed my hand against the plate and to my surprise it glowed green for a few seconds. It was the same green hue I had seen earlier.

My mind raced. Was this a transporter, a portal from somewhere else? I had definitely come from somewhere else, that was the only thing I could be sure of right now. Everything else that was happening was just too surreal. If I was in a dream then a portal was quite possible. And if I wasn’t in a dream then a portal was the only explanation I could think of anyway. I looked around the back of the frame and saw some intricate workings that were glowing green. They looked broken.

With a sigh I turned away from the frame and looked across to the other door. It was at the top of a shallow slope made from wooden planks and I had an ominous feeling that this door wouldn’t open. It just looked too solid. Sure enough, when I reached the door i could find no way to open it. In the centre of the door was a circular relief consisting of four quadrants and I noticed that one of the quadrants was missing.

This was worrying. Was l doomed to stay in this enclosure, trapped until I died of thirst? The sharp stakes of the fence looked lethal but perhaps I could climb over them. I walked back down the ramp, intent upon studying the fence but then I noticed a table that I had failed to spot earlier. On the table was an envelope, sealed with a wax seal, and beside it there was a shape that looked suspiciously like the missing quadrant.

I picked up the letter and saw that it bore no name or address. I looked around and listened but there was complete silence everywhere. I was completely alone and within my rights to open the letter. The seal popped open easily and I read the letter at first quickly but then once again, this time much more slowly.

Welcome. I am Professor William Maythorn. Although I bear responsibility for trapping you in this world, I have no intention of harming you in any way. As a matter of fact, you should consider yourself lucky for I wish to share all my knowledge with you. I will grant you the opportunity to study all of my discoveries and examine my wondrous creations. Eventually, I will require your assistance in an essential matter. You must cooperate with me for you have no reason or chance to resist.

I was astounded. This letter, apparently left for me to read, implied that I had been absconded and deliberately trapped here. Furthermore the wording of the letter was cold in nature, ‘you must cooperate’, ‘you have no chance to resist’ left me feeling numb and angry. Who the hell was this William Maythorn character who seemed to think that I was lucky for being absconded?

Looking about again I realised that I had no choice but to play along. For now. I had to get out of this enclosure, find a way home, retrieve my memory and then sort out this Maythorn dude.

I picked up the quadrant from the table, convinced that this strangely shaped piece would open the door. Once through, all I had to do was find a phone, call the cops, and get out of here. I headed resolutely up the ramp and tried to press the quadrant into place only to find that it wouldn’t fit. I was getting annoyed now. I was losing patience with everything, especially with Maythorn and his totally annoying statement that I was lucky.
When I get out of here, I muttered, I’ll show him who’s lucky.

And now this blasted quadrant wasn’t fitting.

With a sigh I pulled it away from the door and had a look at it. There were three triangular pegs sticking out the back and they didn’t line up with three triangular holes in the door. It was a simple matter to spin them around until they lined up but my annoyance with Maythorn prevented me from feeling pleased with myself. Instead I jammed the quadrant back into place whilst imagining that the circle on the door was Maythorn’s face.
Eat that, I muttered.

The Main Square

The door slid open by splitting into three parts. I was impressed, not only by the mechanism but also by the hint of available power that was being harnessed. The stone door was thick and undeniably heavy. A lot of mechanical power would be required to move it and it had slid sideways and upwards almost effortlessly. For a moment I forgot about Maythorn.

I stepped through the door and saw before me a lot of open space. There were lots of rocks and many fir trees, wooden pathways and a smattering of rope fences that demarcated path edges and unsafe ledges. In the distance I could see an orange light that looked vaguely like a street lamp. But what really caught my attention were the buildings. Directly in front of me was a circular tower with a platform running around it at the very top. It vaguely reminded me of a lighthouse. The remarkable thing was that the tower was impossibly built on the top of a tall column of stone. There were other buildings too and they were all circular with domed rooftops, all seemingly made from stone.

I had not seen architecture like this before and a queasy feeling ran through me. Was I on an alien planet? The question sounded daft but I was thinking seriously. Seriously because nothing here looked particularly earthly. Okay, the note had been written in my language and William Maythorn sounded like a normal guy so he could have come here from Earth too.

I walked anti-clockwise around the tower until I found myself back at the start. Three circular buildings looked out directly onto the tower’s circular pathway and a fourth circular building was set away at a distance up a short flight of stone steps. There were also at least four closed doorways between the buildings.

I repeated my anti-clockwise circuit, this time trying doors to see what lay beyond. The first building had an unusual lock that looked like five concentric circles whilst the second and third buildings were both sealed tightly shut with no visible door handle or lock. Between the second and third building was a locked door that had a pentagonal key hole and beside the door, set into the wall, was an oblong with two peg holes. Between the first and second buildings were two doors and one of them was open. When I reached it I decided it wasn’t actually a door, it was more like an open archway. Through the archway a wooden platform led around a massive stone, past a raised bridge and ended up beside a wider platform beyond which I could see lapping water. In the centre of the wide platform there was a raised structure with a winch. A rope was wrapped around the winch and there was a handle to raise and lower a large hook that was dangling from the rope. I tentatively turned the handle and the hook descended through a hole in the platform towards the water below. When I raised the hook back to its starting position it glistened wetly.

I turned my attention away from the winch and looked about. The platform on which I stood seemed to be hanging above the water, held in place by thick ropes that were fastened to the rock faces above me. The ropes groaned as they moved under tension but the platform seemed solid enough. The platform also had two tables. The nearest table was close to the winch and there was a small banded wooden box on the table beside a shallow bowl, a glowing orange crystal and a few nameless tools. The box had a keyhole shaped like a gearwheel and it was locked.

The second table was slightly further away, one I had passed by when I arrived. On the table there was what looked like a torch and there was another sealed letter. The torch was actually a large orange crystal mounted on a stick and it had a permanent glow, much like the smaller crystal that I had seen on the first table. I picked the torch up thinking it might be useful in lighting my way. It was then that I realised there were other orange crystals mounted at various positions on the rock walls. Quite how a crystal could channel the energy to permanently glow I didn’t know but it was evident that they were set up to cast a cheery light in dark places.

I looked down at the letter, wondering if it was another missive from William Maythorn. I was tempted to ignore it but then decided it would be foolish to do so. I picked it up, broke the seal and read it.

When I set foot in this island, I was an enthusiastic archaeologist in search of the remains of an ancient civilisation, the Dulmar. In manuscripts they refer to this place as the forbidden world, they called it gwan Quer’nelok. To simplify it, by the right of the explorer I gave this island a new name, Quern. I soon realised that this world means much more than an archaeological site and my interests expanded. To make you understand the extraordinary nature of this island, and to clarify my deeds for you, I left a series of letters around the island.

Well, it was definitely written by Maythorn for the writing was in the same hand. The letter itself however was not particularly useful and I got the immediate impression that Maythorn was withholding information in favour of being mysterious. Why would he want to leave a series of letters rather than just one? I felt like a puppet dangling on a string and Maythorn was the annoying puppet master jerking my strings.

Okay, I sighed. Keep calm, keep it together. Let’s make sense of this situation and I’ll eventually get out of here, the sooner the better. If Maythorn wants to play a game then I’m in.
The trouble is, I thought bleakly, I don’t really have a choice.

So I was on an island called Quern, pretentiously named by Maythorn. And, according to Maythorn, this island was extraordinary. So extraordinary that he wanted to force me into following a trail of letters in order to learn its secrets. I was beginning to hate him.

Five Circles

I left the hanging platform, returning the way I had come until I stood once more in front of the tall tower that looked like a lighthouse. There was one round building that I had yet to visit and it was the one at the top of a short flight of stone steps. I circled the tower and when I reached the base of the steps leading up to the building I saw a round cover in the ground, close to the tower ledge. It looked like an iris that might open and I wondered if it was connected with finding a way to enter the tower.

I made my way up the steps and reached the entrance to the building. This one was different to the others, it appeared to be opened by a rope that was strung vertically in front of the door. A brief examination showed me that the door would open if the rope was pulled down. Beside the rope was a wooden construction which seemed to be connected to the rope but there was no obvious way of using it. And beside the wooden construction there was a cage filled with blocks and when I prodded the blocks I discovered that they were loose and could be slid around within the confines of the cage.

The cage, being vertical, prevented me from freely sliding the blocks around. But on the right side of the cage there was a hexagonal hole that shouted out to me for a hexagonal lever mechanism. Indeed the cage seemed to be rotatable but without a lever to provide the necessary leverage it was too heavy to rotate. I did see however that if I could find a way to rotate it into a horizontal position then the cage and blocks would become a sliding block puzzle.

To the left of the building the path continued, sloping gently upward towards two more doors. One was a door set into the solid rock wall and the other was a gate built into a man-made stone wall. Neither of them would open. At the bottom of the slope there was a table upon which was set out some bowls and dishes. One bowl was filled with pine cones and others contained what seemed to be crushed pine cones set into a gelatinous substance. It almost looked like a meal, set out for a hungry animal. Mmm, yummy.

Eventually I returned to the space outside the tower in order to collect my thoughts. I knew of nowhere else to go having explored the few places that were open to me and I had to work out what do do next. I had to rely on the sparse information given to me by Maythorn knowing from his letters that he wanted me to discover his next secrets. And all I had in my possession was a yellow crystal torch and two letters.

I reread both of the letters and there before my eyes were the clues I needed. Each letter contained a small circular pattern, a pattern that was easily ignored on my first readings. Merging the two patterns together yielded five concentric rings with certain sectors blacked out. This just had to be the key to gain access to the building with the circular lock!

I returned to the building with the large circular rings on the door. The mechanism proved very easy to manipulate: slide the small selector knob sideways until it is over the required ring and then rotate the central knob to advance the selected ring one sector at a time.

The door swung open to reveal a small, single room that filled the whole of the building. Inside there were a few orange crystals that suffused the interior with a soft orange glow. At the back of the room there was a large wooden chest and I slowly lifted the lid to reveal the contents. Inside there was only one object worth taking but I was delighted to find it - it was a crank handle with a hexagonal protuberance. My mind visualised that sliding block puzzle and the hexagonal slot on the side of it.

I looked around the room but there was nothing else worth taking. On the wall by the entrance there were some hand sketched drawings pinned to the wooden slats behind them. One of the drawings showed a fish looking at what appeared to be bait on a hook but the bait looked oddly like a pine cone. Now that was interesting. I had seen pine cones set out on a table, almost like it was food. Was it fish food? And the hook... that could well be the hook on the hanging platform.

I had expected to find another letter but in this I was mistaken. So the next step, if I were to follow the trail set out by Maythorn, would be to use my latest acquisition, the hexagonal crank.
And, I mused, perhaps I needed to go fishing with some pine cones.

Sliding Block Puzzle part 1

I returned to the door with the rope. Across the pathway I saw the table with the pine cone dish and I hurried over and picked the dish up. Then I returned to the door and hefted the crank, weighing it in my hands. It was a heavy crank and it would allow me to apply a large amount of torque to the cage with the blocks in. I slid it into the hexagonal opening and it was a perfect fit, obviously part of the cage design. Then I heaved the crank in a clockwise direction and was pleased to see that the cage rotated into a horizontal position without too much effort. Now I could see how it worked. There was a slot on the left side of the cage that, when vertical, would align with a similar slot in the wooden frame next door. And in the cage was a darker smaller block, probably a heavy metal block, that would fit through the slot. So all I had to do was position the metal block in what would be the lower left position of the cage once it was returned to its vertical state and then slide the block further left and into the wooden space. The weight of the metal block would then open the door.

It was a fascinating contraption but totally impractical as a door locking mechanism. Relocking the door would be really difficult and as for the challenge of keeping the key, or should I say crank, in your pocket...

It was frankly laughable. So that meant only one thing; this whole lock with the crank and the sliding blocks was a one-time setup. A setup for me. A test. A challenge to ensure that I was capable of moving on to the next test or to the next letter. Maythorn was definitely pulling my puppet strings. My opinion of him dropped down another notch.

The sliding block puzzle was no more nor no less than just that. Now that the cage was horizontal I had no problem sliding the stone blocks around and slowly teasing the metal block into the corner. Steps led around the cage allowing me to view it from above and behind and from this angle all I had to do was tease the metal block into the upper right corner. Once there I then pulled on the crank, returning the cage to its vertical position. The final move was to slide the block leftwards, which I did. The weight of the block then pulled the rope downwards and the door to the building swung open, dropping down to create a ramp that led me inside.

The Crystal Laboratory part 1

This building was much larger than the previous one I had been in but it once again consisted of a single room dotted about with glowing orange crystals. It was circular and a large table occupied the centre with smaller tables hugging the curved walls. A large open balcony on the far side of the room admitted a lot of daylight, making the room look larger than it was. My first impression was that this room was a laboratory for every table seemed to have some apparatus on it.

I decided to search around the room in a clockwise direction, investigating the tables that were against the curved walls. Before I even reached the first table I passed a switch mounted on the wall. It was a heavy duty switch, the type with a pull down handle, and above it there was a picture that looked like one of the outside gates. I pulled the handle down, listening carefully for something to happen. It remained quiet and still everywhere and when I tried to lift the handle back up it refused to move. Fine, I thought, whatever it is I’ve just done can’t be undone. Hopefully one of the doors or gates outside was now unlocked.

The first table on my left contained what looked like a generator with a manual winder. Cables led away from it towards a bracket that appeared to be a placeholder for a torch. I wound the handle and it felt like I was turning a generator but nothing happened. On impulse I slotted my yellow crystal torch into the bracket and wound the generator again. This time the yellow crystal flickered with some kind of energy, sparkling and coruscating with a bright pale light. It was highly unusual but then the crystal was already classified by me as an unusual item because anything that permanently glowed was surely unusual.

It could be radioactive, I thought bleakly. Anything that glowed for a long period of time had to acquire long term energy from somewhere and nearly every yellow crystal I had seen was merrily glowing and had probably been merrily glowing for many days, weeks or even months. It was a disquieting thought thinking that I might be pumping myself up for a bout of radiation poisoning.

I spun the handle again and the crystal scintillated some more. That looked too sporadic for low level radiation. I hoped so anyway. I retrieved the torch and examined it. It had not changed, it was not the worse for wear for being electrocuted.

I moved on to the next table. Here there were some blue crystals but they weren’t glowing like their yellow twins despite looking very similar in terms of cut and shape. A small experiment had been set up consisting of a manual shutter positioned between two crystals, one blue and one yellow. I opened the shutter and the yellow light from the yellow crystal lit up the blue crystal, passing through it and onto a piece of paper. There was some kind of hardened liquid that had been painted onto the paper and the inky liquid fluoresced under the blue filtered light. When I closed the shutter the fluorescence died away. It was like invisible ink from a spy story, appearing only when excited by some kind of light and ideal for conveying secret messages. Upon closer inspection I spotted that there was a convex lens next to the shutter, meaning that the light from the orange crystal was being focused through the lens onto the blue crystal.

I wondered whether the fluorescence was caused by ultraviolet light, either as a result of the blue filter only letting through the shorter wavelengths of light or by the fact that the blue crystal was being excited into generating ultraviolet light. Like the first table, this was a setup designed to demonstrate an effect. I was under no illusion who had set this up and to who it was directed. Maythorn and me, in that order.

There was a third table but there was nothing demonstrable on it. Various crystals were scattered upon the surface but this looked more like a preparatory workbench than anything else. There was a sheet of paper with a picture of crystals and various symbols scribbled on it but it was meaningless so I left it alone.

Next along the wall was the balcony which afforded a fine view of the ocean with solitary sharp edged rocks jutting out of the water. It looked very peaceful yet worryingly devoid of life. I could see no birds and certainly no boats. I wondered whether I was the only person here, on this island. Or even on this world. Was I truly alone? Where could Maythorn have gone?

Beside the balcony there was a low table on which there was a spinning wind catcher, much like the ones found on an anemometer. The tiny wind catcher was turning a tiny generator and that was in turn powering up a blue crystal. Now this was interesting. It would seem that blue crystals were also susceptible to electricity and would light up if excited by an electric current.

There was another item on the table and this was a book with a short transcript entitled The Legend of Quer’nelok. It was full of bluster, words and sentences with no import other than to a reader filled with similar bluster. Towards the end however there was an intriguing few sentences.

...According to the legend, Quer’nelok is a monoway world that was hidden within the Worldchain somewhere between the Lashann Line and the eastern edge of the Ilona Worldcloud. According to our current knowledge, the idea of a hidden world contradicts the rules of the Worldchain. Many unsuccessful expeditions were launched in search of Quer’nelok throughout the centuries...

There was a footnote that expanded on the Lashann Line:

A series of secluded worlds mostly populated by primitive independent tribes.

Another footnote expanded on the Ilona Worldcloud:

A cloud of 21 civilised worlds which are members of the United Empire of Worlds.

Was this a piece of fiction I was reading or was it factual? Until I had arrived at this place I would no way consider stuff like this to be real but I was beginning to suspect that I was no longer on Earth and that was making my brain think in a different way. The book mentioned a ‘Worldchain’ consisting of many worlds and clouds of worlds, some with alien civilisations, some with primitive tribes. And this world, this Quer’nelok or Quern, was hidden somewhere in this chain of worlds. I thought back to the enclosure where I had arrived and the stone frame that looked like a portal. A portal perhaps from one of the other worlds in the chain? Was Earth in the chain? I was beginning to think that I had arrived through that portal, in which case I was well and truly stranded until I could get to understand this place where I now stood. My mind was definitely beginning to boggle.

I reopened the second letter written by Maythorn and read it again in a new light. He spoke of an ancient race called the Dulmar and of Quern being a forbidden world. Dammit, it made more sense when read in conjunction with this book before me on the table.

Keep moving, I thought. Keep going until I find Maythorn then I can ring his bloody neck.

The Crystal Laboratory part 2

The next item on my tour of the wall was a large safe but it was tight shut. Finally, yet another table hugged the wall and on it was a 5 by 5 keypad and on each key there was stamped a strange alien digit. I pressed a few random keys but nothing happened.

Finally I moved my attention to the large circular table in the middle of the room. Right in the middle of the table there was an enormous blue crystal, by far the largest I had seen yet. It emitted no light and I couldn’t see any cables or generator that would urge it to light up.
On the table were a few pots and wood logs and beside them I saw another letter and beside the letter there was a book. I snatched the letter up, broke the seal and read the contents.

I prepared for your arrival for decades, the only thing you need to do is to climb the stairs I have built. This is the place where my journey began, where I became truly aware of the unbelievable power this island possesses. I was rather curious back then, so eager to discover and learn. My mind was so clear and naïve. I miss those times.
Your journey must also begin here. I need you to inspect my studies and understand the basic utilities of these crystals. I’ve put an empty notebook right next to this letter. Feel free to take notes and draw sketches for yourself.

The notebook was indeed empty and strangely I was pleased with Maythorn in that he cared enough to provide me with one. It was the first positive thing he had done yet.

Looking around I decided that there was little else to examine. However as I stood beside the central table with my back to the strange keypad I looked over to the balcony and noticed a metal loop on the left side of the open window. It was vertically mounted and it seemed familiar to me. After a moment's thought I hurried over to the shutter demonstration and opened the shutter. Orange light was focused onto the blue crystal and again the ‘invisible ink’ fluoresced. My attention however was on the lens that had been revealed by dropping the shutter. It was a miniature version of the loop by the balcony.

I walked over to the loop but unfortunately there was no lens in it. It did strike me however that it was looking towards the large blue crystal in the middle of the room. It was most odd. Beyond the loop, in the far distance, I could see a building with a contraption on on upper platform. The contraption looked like a large eye and it was looking my way.

Having pulled down the switch marked with a gate sign I was hoping that one of the doors or gates somewhere outside would now be unlocked. Before finding out I made my way back to the hanging platform. I had seen that picture of a pine cone being used as bait on a hook and at the hanging platform I had seen a hook on a winch. I had no idea at all why I needed to catch a fish but I was beginning to realise that everything I was seeing and discovering was meticulously staged. I was acting a well thought out play on a stage where all of the props had a purpose and were set out ‘just so’. And I was my own audience.

I was disappointed. The dish of pine cones refused to be hooked and I couldn’t think of a way to attach it. I was sure that I was on some kind of right track with this but for now I had to admit defeat. Thankfully I had no need for a fish anyway.

A quick check of the outside doors confirmed my thinking. Two gates were now unlocked, the one next door to the original door where I had started this sorry misadventure and one up the slope past the crystal laboratory. It was the latter gate I passed through in order to explore new ground.

The Watchtower

Immediately through the gate I was presented with a fork in the path. To the left, stone steps led downwards whilst to the right the steps headed upwards, both directions disappearing around bends in the path.
At the fork junction there was a small metallic looking dome set into the ground.

Without hesitating I chose the upward path, not because I thought it would be more useful direction to explore but simply because there was no reason at all to choose one over the other. It was only a short distance following a curve around the rock wall face when I came to a dead end. The path simply ended but appeared to continue again in the distance. Between my path and the far path there was an open gap with an impassable vertical drop. There was a sconce set into the wall with a bracket for a torch so I popped my yellow light in but nothing happened. Interestingly there were wires running from the sconce down into the ground and behind the torch there was what appeared to be a lens. The lens, I suspected, was admitting the yellow light of the torch through the wall and into whatever lay beyond.

Looking around I realised that I was standing directly beneath the balcony of the crystal laboratory and I could see a window in the rock face directly below the balcony. It would seem that there was a lower level below the lab that I hadn’t found and I made a mental note to return to the laboratory to see if I could find a way in. It would seem that the lens was allowing the light of the torch into this lower level.

I retrieved my torch and headed back down to the fork. Once there I continued down the steps until I reached the bottom. Here I was at sea level for to my right I could see the water lapping against the rocks and a distant hazy horizon of nothing but water and empty sky. On the other side of the path there was a building with the door wide open and just behind it a taller building with steps leading up to an upper area. This taller building was the one I had seen from the balcony and I could now make out what looked like a telescope, staring back inland. From the balcony I had thought it to be an eye looking directly into the laboratory and perhaps, I thought smugly, I had been right, in a way.

First things first. I entered the building with the open door, noting as I entered that there was a symbol by the side of the door that was glowing orange. I was sure that other closed doors I had encountered also sported symbols but those other doors had all been closed tight and the symbols hadn’t been glowing.

Inside I saw the usual things that I was now getting used to seeing. Bowls, baskets, orange crystals, sacks. Useless things. There was some things here however that caught my eye. There was a weighing device, a bit like a balance but on ropes. I weighed my torch and my dish of pine cones but all I learned was that the torch was slightly heavier than the dish. Beside the weighing device there was a square funnel with a dispensing arm.

When I left the building I spotted another metallic dome that was identical to the one up by the gate. And above it, set into the rock wall, was an iris with a tempting lever beside it. I pulled the lever and the iris opened up to reveal a lens, set firmly into the wall.

I keep encountering crystals and lenses. I thought. It must be important...

Next I approached the taller building to discover it had two floors. The lower level was the usual single room and it contained a beautiful colourless crystal that looked like ice. Frozen inside it was what looked like a key. Beside the crystal was a bench and on it was a lens which I scooped up. It was perfectly formed, a class convex lens used to focus parallel light into a point.
That loop in the laboratory is just shouting out for a lens, I thought, and now I’ve found one!
And here was another sealed letter. Good old Maythorn, I thought, he’s never far away.

Through my geological research I discovered that one of the island’s most common endemic minerals can be used as a weak but consistent energy source. To test out their limits, I started to construct simple mechanisms designed to harness the power of these natural energy crystals.

Hmmm, I’ve already worked this out, I thought. And I’ve seen some of the ‘mechanisms’.

There was an odd looking diagram pinned on the wall by the door. A network of five nodes in series. I sketched it into my new notebook, just in case. I was learning that everything was of importance and that everything had been placed by Maythorn.

I climbed the steps onto the upper platform. The only thing to be found here was the telescope which was surprisingly large and imposing, made of wood and fitted at both ends with a glass lens. The views in most directions were good, obviously this place was a watchtower. Or, I corrected myself, had once been a watchtower.

I peered through the telescope and the view through the eyepiece was actually quite good. Not only that but the whole thing revolved very easily giving me a 360° view around the entire watchtower. I found the laboratory quite easily and I could make out the loop that, according to my theory, required the lens that I had in my pocket. All I needed to do then was to somehow shine an orange light onto the lens whereupon it would pass through the lens and onto the big blue crystal in the middle of the lab. I was, of course, thinking of that shutter demonstration where the invisible ink fluoresced under blue light and where the tiny loop holding the tiny lens was a smaller copy of the large loop I was now looking at. I was sure that Maythorn had set that demonstration up for a reason and I was equally sure that I was close to understanding it.

I stepped back and looked at the telescope once more. Next to the eyepiece was a torch bracket; this was something I’d missed until now. I pulled out my orange torch and placed it in the bracket and then I looked through the eyepiece once more. To my delight I could see a beam of orange light that was being beamed through the telescope. It was a very strong light, much stronger than the torch on its own, so some kind of amplification or magnification was taking place. Quite frankly I wasn’t too worried about that particular issue right now; I was more interested in the fact that the orange light was being beamed onto the loop on the balcony.

The Five Symbols

I left the telescope and the torch, ensuring that the orange light remained centred on the loop, and headed back to the crystal laboratory. As soon as I arrived I went over to the loop and tried to insert the lens. To my delight, the lens snapped into place and the orange light from the telescope was suddenly being focused across the space and directly onto the blue crystal! Just like in the shutter demo.

I looked about and there it was. On the wall was an array of fluorescent symbols, neatly arranged in five columns and five rows. But what did it mean?

The answer was easy to reach. The same symbols were also to be found on the 5x5 keypad and therefore the message on the wall had to be something to do with what keys to press. In addition the piece of paper on the table, just to the right of the shutter demo, gave information on the key sequence.

The first line on the paper was labelled ō and llll. From the wall array I found the corresponding key symbol, this being in the column marked llll and in the row marked ō. This key symbol was an o with a broken vertical line passing through it. So this was the first key to press and it was present on column 5 and on row 4 of the keypad.

Rinse and repeat for the next four symbols, following the order on the piece of paper. For the record the keys to press on the keypad ended up being:

c5r4, c1r3, c4r5, c3r4, c5r2.

I keyed the sequence in and with a rumble of stone on stone the section of floor I was standing on slid sideways to reveal wooden steps leading down into a small cellar room. I had found the lower level!

Actually I had found only half of the cellar. The other half was out of reach behind a locked door that had a normal looking lock and handle made from polished copper. Two objects caught my attention. First there was what looked like a glass fishbowl on a bench by the door. It looked incongruous amongst the wood and stone surroundings so I picked it up. Secondly I found a blue torch. It was identical in shape and form to the yellow torch but it wasn’t glowing. And it was blue.

I knew that the blue crystals didn’t glow like the yellow ones. The little wind powered generator on the balcony upstairs was delivering a charge to the blue crystal beside it but that crystal was flickering, losing and gaining its glow as the current ebbed and flowed with the wind power.

I went upstairs and looked at the first table, the one with the hand operated generator. As an experiment I put the blue torch into the bracket and wound the generator. Sure enough the crystal sputtered with blue light but it quickly faded when the generator stopped turning. I wondered whether it was the strength of the charge being delivered to the blue crystal that wasn’t strong enough to kickstart it into continuous life. I tried to turn the generator faster but unfortunately I got nowhere.

I was quite keen to see this blue torch light up. The fact that it was torch shaped implied that it could somehow stay alight otherwise why was it torch shaped? And I was also wondering about this whole ultraviolet light thing. There was a secret message beside me on the wall and the next question was, were there any more? That was a question that could be answered by using a portable UV source. A blue crystal torch perhaps?

My reasoning was bolstered by the fact that as I looked around the lab I could see specks of fluorescing ink all over the walls and over the domed ceiling. This meant that the central blue crystal was shining its special light in every direction and not just filtering the beam of yellow light.

I needed a stronger source of electricity...

Lighting the Torch

I left the crystal laboratory and made my way back to the watchtower and the telescope. Maybe, I mused, what I had thought of as a telescope was actually a spotlight. The yellow beam issuing out of the front lens was quite strong so what was the real purpose of this device? Surely Maythorn hadn’t built this device just so that I could shine it through a lens and onto a blue crystal? It just had to have other uses.

It was this line of thought that made me remember the other lens behind the iris that was set into the wall just a short distance away, the one I had opened by pulling the small lever. I grabbed the telescope, (or was it a spotlight?), and trained the orange spot onto the lens. There was an instant reaction and rather than view it from a distance I jumped straight off the ledge and hurried up to it. It was the metallic dome beneath the lens that had been affected; it had risen up on a vertical pillar from the ground to waist height and the dome had swivelled open to reveal a big black button. Beside the button was what I assumed was a light which was not lit. I did notice however that beside the lens there was a new orange light.

Naturally I pressed the button. The light by the button came on with a yellow glow but other than that nothing seemed to happen. I sighed, none of these puzzles were easy. I was beginning to acknowledge that Maythorn had a devious mind and in devising these puzzles he was feeding his own sadistic need to punish as well as his desire to ‘educate’ me.

I had seen a similar metallic dome at the top of the steps, by the door leading back to the crystal laboratory so I headed up there and found that this one had also risen up out of the ground and was exposing a button and light. However when I pressed the button nothing at all happened.

Yet they were the same thing and so had to be linked somehow. Eventually I gave a mental shrug and decided to move on.

There were a couple of things to do that I could think of. Firstly I had acquired a fishbowl and once again the hook and winch over by the hanging gallery came to mind. The fishbowl had a handy handle so could I hang it on the hook and get me a fish that way? I still had no idea why I needed a fish but if Maythorn had provided the possibility in this mad world of his then it needed following through.
Secondly I had new places to explore for I had seen a path leading away from the watchtower along the side of the waterline that I hadn’t walked along yet. Not to mention the second gate that I had unlocked earlier.

I returned to the hanging platform. This place was tantalising me, dangling its own virtual carrot in front of my face. I hooked the fishbowl onto the hook and lowered it into the water. After a short while I hoisted it back up and was disappointed to see that the bowl was filled with clear water but there was no fish. I was about to retrieve the bowl off the hook when I remembered the picture, the picture of the fish and the pine cone. I quickly took the pine cone dish and emptied it into the water in the bowl. Then I lowered the bowl once more into the water.

When I lifted the bowl back up I was delighted to see that I’d caught a fish! I had no idea that pine cones could be so delicious! Well, to this new fishy friend of mine anyway. On closer inspection I decided that what I had caught was more eel-like for it was long and narrow yet had fins and a fishy head. It was definitely an unusual cross between an eel and a fish. And to my amazement it sizzled. It was an electric eel! I decided not to touch it.

I headed back to the watchtower with the intention of exploring further along the path. However as I passed the crystal laboratory I had a sudden thought about the fish and the blue torch. The fish, or was it an eel, could zap out electricity and the blue torch needed electricity to make it light up. I knew that electric eels back home could zap about half a kilowatt of power which was enough to shock a human but would this little fellow have the umph to shock a blue torch into life?

I entered the lab and looked at the hand operated generator which I knew wasn’t powerful enough. Beside the generator there was a bowl and the wire from the generator was draped across the bowl. I gently poured the water out of the goldfish bowl, complete with fish, and into the bowl on the table. Then I placed the blue torch into the bracket. I wasn’t quite sure what would happen but at that moment my fishy friend decided to zap his surroundings and the blue torch flared into life.

And to my delight it remained lit! And when I picked the torch up I was surrounded by a blue glow, quite unlike the orange light that I was used to. The fish continued to swim happily around in his new dish so I left it there.

I walked over to the wall with the secret message and as I neared it the letters fluoresced, revealing to me the symbols from before. I had been right, this torch would automatically reveal any further secret messages to me!

Four Buttons

I headed down to the watchtower and then followed the path to the left as it meandered along the waterfront. The path was a mix of wooden planks and hard stone and I soon came across another metallic dome, tucked away on the left side of the path, almost out of sight. And then further along I spotted another one on what looked like a circular jetty that jutted out a short distance into the water. That made four domes altogether and they all looked identical to one another. And they all did nothing when I pressed their buttons.

Continuing down the path, I passed a locked door on my left and then at a fork in the path I headed right to encounter another locked doorway. This one had an unlit symbol on the door frame. I ended up heading down the left fork and walking underneath a wooden bridge. I recognised the bridge as being the one in the enclosure where I had started this adventure so I figured that this path had circled around the places I knew and had brought me back to the beginning.

The path turned to soft sand and then on the left I saw a gate that I recognised. It was the second of the two gates that I had opened in the crystal laboratory and it took me back towards the tower, perched silently on a column of rock like a top heavy lighthouse.

The path continued past the gate and with my new bearings I could make out that I was heading towards the hanging platform area but this time underneath the pathway that I had used up until now. Eventually I reached a broken section of path where the wooden planks had been splintered and knocked loose by what looked like falling boulders. It was impassable. Just beyond the broken section I could see a raised bridge and I recognised this, having seen it a few times on my way to the hook and winch mechanism. The bridge was raised in two halves and I could see that the distant side was easily accessible from the hanging platform. There was a lever there that I assumed would drop that half into position.

The near side was a problem. The broken section of pathway before me prevented me from getting to it and I doubted that I could reach it from any other angle. However, I mused, if I could figure out a way to drop the near side half of the bridge then I would then have more of this pathway to explore.

I marched around to the hanging platform, which was only a short walk away thanks to the open gate close by. When I pulled the lever on the bridge it dropped into position. As I expected I couldn’t reach the other half to drop the rest of the bridge so, for now, I couldn’t cross over.

I returned to the watchtower in order to consider my options. I was intrigued by the four metallic domes and I knew that there was a secret here waiting to be found with them. I was also intrigued with the blue torch that I carried but so far the blue glow hadn’t revealed any secret messages scribbled on walls or rocks.

I decided to investigate the metallic domes and decided to number them from 1 to 4. Number 1 was the one by the gate at the top of the steps, number 2 was the one beneath the iris and lens close to the watchtower, number 3 was the one along the pathway tucked away on the left hand side and number 4 was the one in the centre of the circular jetty. I knew that number 2 would light up when I pressed the button but number 1 wouldn’t. I also noted that pressing number 1 also turned number 2 off so there was a definite link between them. Now I was wondering whether I had to discover a correct sequence of button presses so I set off trying just that. And I was finally rewarded to discover that if I pressed the buttons in the order 2-4-1-3 then upon pressing button 3 there was a conclusive reaction. The four columns sank back down into the ground and became dormant again.

It didn’t sound much but something had happened. The burning question was, what? It was then that I remembered the picture on the wall. In the lower room of the watchtower was a network diagram showing circles linked by straight lines. If the circles on the diagram were numbered 1 to 4 then there was the sequence, staring me in the face. The diagram then showed a fifth circle. But where was it?

It was time to go on a hunt.

Sliding Block Puzzle part 2

It didn’t take long to discover the ‘fifth circle’ and in retrospect it was in the obvious place. Right beside the tall tower there had been an iris set into the ground and now I realised that it had been an identical iris to the one in the wall. Except now the iris couldn’t be seen because in its place was a column that looked identical to the four columns with buttons and it had obviously risen out of the ground in response to me pressing the buttons in the correct sequence.

I approached the pedestal to find a rectangular block resting upon it. The oblong block contained six rectangular buttons, all in line, and on the rear there were two semicircular pegs whose shape looked familiar to me. I picked it up.

With the block removed from the pedestal I could now see a panel but at first glance it was unclear what to do with it. There were three horizontal bars, each with a unique circular shape on them. Upon closer inspection I decided that the shapes were like small keyholes and the horizontal bars were like bolts in a lock.

I had to admit it but if this was a construct devised by Maythorn then I had to take my hat off to his ingenuity and his craftsmanship. Building this type of puzzle was a feat of engineering that would require a huge amount of planning and building over a long period of time. How had he achieved this? There were puzzles here that were linked together over long distances and mechanical bits that would require access to workshops and tools in order to build and assemble them. I shook my head in both bewilderment and admiration. Don’t get me wrong, I still thought Maythorn was a bombastic maniac but now I had to admit he was clever with it.

As I pondered this I suddenly remembered where I had seen the peg shapes before. Close by was the door with the pentagonal hole in it and beside it, in the wall beside the door, were the same semicircular peghole shapes that I had seen on the oblong block. I marched over to the door and sure enough they were the same. I pushed the block into place and it snugly snapped into position. It was then I noticed that there were lines painted on the six keys and that they fluoresced under the light of the blue torch. The lines were actually one line that snaked up and down across the keys and I could see that they indicated an order to press the keys in.

When I pressed the keys in the suggested order nothing happened. I suspected I also needed something to fill that pentagonal hole.

Fired up by the sudden discovery of the hidden lines I wandered around with my blue torch, searching every nook and crevasse for any more hidden messages. To my delight I found one on the sliding block puzzle. Four of the blocks fluoresced with strange symbols but unfortunately I could make no sense of them. I could only imagine that I had to shuffle the blocks into a new order, one that put the shapes into a certain pattern. But what order?

There had to be another message. I had missed a clue and I had no idea at this point whether it was on a missed piece of paper or whether it was another invisible clue waiting to fluoresce. So I continued walking around with my blue torch held out, looking for something to light up. When I reached the telescope I had the sudden idea that perhaps it would also project a beam of blue light instead of an orange one. It was a worthy idea and I plugged the blue torch into position and looked through the device, looking and hoping to espy another message through the eyepiece.

I was not disappointed. I found the message written on the side of a large rock that was out in the sea, poking upwards like a huge iceberg. The top half of the message was undoubtedly a picture depicting the sliding block puzzle and the lower half was a drawing of the four symbols positioned in a 2 x 2 matrix. It was exactly what I was hoping for - the answer to the new sliding block puzzle!

I retrieved the torch and made my way back to the puzzle. I had to swing it into its horizontal position and then, when stood over it, I had to visualise the solution when viewed upside down. Then I had to slide the blocks so that four of them lined up in the same alignment as I had seen on the diagram. And of course this all had to be done under the blue light so that I could see the symbols.

The puzzle as such was not overly difficult and simply required patience and a bit of forward thinking. When the final block slid into the correct place a small panel slid out from the side of the cage and in it I saw a copper key which I quickly grabbed.

Time to Think

The key was indeed copper coloured and I knew immediately where the lock was. It took only a few seconds to run up the ramp into the crystal laboratory, down the steps into the cellar and see the locked door with its copper lock and handle. The key turned the lock easily and inside I found a small cosy room with a desk. I could just imagine Maythorn sat here, writing his memoirs and devising his puzzles.

On the desk there was a pentagonal plug, a sealed letter and a thick book entitled ‘The Key To Success’. I opened the letter.

It is time you learned the truth about this island. As you probably notice by now, this world has no day night cycle nor weather changes at all. In fact the whole concept of time has a different meaning in this place. For one who stays in this world, the relative time in other worlds appears static or fixed. This incredibly powerful phenomenon also prevents the aging of living tissue. When I realised this, I was eager to find out what kind of eternal source gives Quern this extraordinary power, it made me forget the task I originally came here for. The archaeological exploration of the Dulmarian city has become irrelevant.

Well, this letter was a complete revelation. To be honest I hadn’t noticed the lack of passing time but now it had been pointed out to me then it seemed obvious. I had been here for hours and yet I hadn’t realised that the sun’s position was static. Neither had I noticed any weather, other than that little wind catcher on the balcony upstairs. I couldn’t recollect anything changing.

Maythorn said that the passing of time everywhere else in the universe had stopped. Did he mean that time here was passing differently creating the phenomenon of time slowing to a standstill everywhere else? And did this otherworldly passing of time here on Quern stop timebound events here; the weather, the day/night cycle?

This was bad enough but then Maythorn had mentioned aging. Had I stopped getting older? Had the rest of the universe frozen and stopped aging and as a result I’d stopped aging too? The concept sounded ridiculous but I somehow felt a powerful need to believe, or at least to defer non-belief until I had proof one way or the other.

This was something I really needed to think about.

The book beneath the letter was a thick tome and promised a lengthy read, perhaps it was a more objective explanation of this time business. But when I opened the cover I discovered that the book was false containing nothing more than a hollow compartment. In the compartment there was an odd looking object that I picked up and examined. It was like a key but the handle was bulbous and there were three levers on the end that swivelled in different directions. It was an important object, of that I had little doubt. It had been hidden in a false book after all. The book title was ‘The Key To Success’. Was this a reference to this object, this key?

I now had a pentagonal plug and I knew that there was a door close by with a pentagonal hole set in it. I set off for the door whilst musing about this time concept. Did I need to hurry or did I now have all the time in the world? If I wasn’t aging then what did that say about my body? I wasn’t hungry or thirsty so did that imply I no longer needed to take in nourishment? I was expending energy by moving so how was it being replenished if I no longer ate? Crikey, what about one of the most fundamental laws of the universe, the one about energy conservation?

This place was becoming a little bit scary.

The North Shore

I pushed the pentagonal plug into the door and then keyed in the correct 13 step sequence using the six keys on the oblong block. The door slid open, using the same mechanics as the very first door back at the starting enclosure. Well, I thought, that certainly used up some energy. The blocks making up the door were thick and looked very heavy.

Move on, I chided myself. Let’s not get bogged down with detail. Physics was being manipulated here and it wouldn’t pay to mull for too long on trying to understand.

I stepped through the door into a new area of the island. In many ways it was more of the same; pathways, rocks, firs, distant water and orange lights. Directly in front of me was what looked like a kiln with a door set into it. When I opened the door I saw a piece of framework, designed to support something, and beneath it a pile of ashes and cindered logs. If there was meant to be a fire here then it had been extinguished a long time ago and the oven space was cold and cheerless. On the right side of the oven there was a lever which I pulled. The door promptly swung shut and I could hear a ticking sound that lasted for a few seconds before the door swung back open. It was obviously a timer mechanism but the whys and wherefores eluded me.

To the left of the kiln the path led down to a wooden pier that jutted out into the water. On the pier was a chest locked with two padlocks. Obviously I needed two keys.

To the right of the kiln the path veered left and here I came across a blacksmithing station complete with anvil and tools. On the anvil there was a letter. I wondered what revelations Maythorn would reveal this time.

This shore is special to me. The physical work I used to do here helped me calm my restless mind. Besides preventing the natural decline of organisms, the phenomenon also eliminates any need of nutrition. This means that despite the dry weather, the trees and bushes around here could easily be millions of years old. As I realised that time is no longer an obstacle, I had the opportunity to learn and perfect all of my artisan skills. This is the very place where I became a craftsman. After mastering blacksmithing and carpentry I started to practise more advanced mechanical engineering.

So, I thought. That confirms the fact that I don’t need to eat or drink. Which is crazy because I keep expending energy all the time. And hey, I’m breathing so I still need oxygen. I breathed in deep and held my breath for a while before letting my breath out with a whoosh and breathing in again. I still needed oxygen but strangely I didn’t need nourishment like food or water. With a sigh I put the letter away and told myself to move on.

On the blacksmithing station there were many oddments associated with the fine art of blacksmithing but one contraption caught my eye. It was a strange device with a lever sticking out of the side. The lever had a light built into it, shining with the ubiquitous orange glow that I was getting used to. The lever was moveable and I could slide it left or right. After a quick fiddle I worked out that moving the lever would make it rise or fall depending upon which direction I moved it. The trouble was the rise was a small lift as if it were on a ratchet whilst the fall was a complete drop back to the bottom. It soon became clear that the challenge was to raise it to the top, one ratchet position at a time.

The puzzle was not difficult and I soon worked out the order required which was RLLRLLR. As a challenge it seemed to me that Maythorn wasn’t up to his usual standard with this one, perhaps he was running out of ideas already. When the lever clicked into the topmost position a panel popped up to reveal a key.

The key looked about the right size to fit one of the padlocks on the pier chest. Perhaps, I thought, it fits both padlocks. There again, I mused, perhaps not.

There was nothing else of import to find at the blacksmithing station so I moved on, following the path to the base of a ladder. Intriguingly the first five rungs were missing rendering it unclimbable. Backtracking a little way up the path I next came upon what seemed to be a woodworking station but there was nothing on it to take. There was however a sign consisting of four circles with diametric lines at various angles. I made a sketch.

In his letter Maythorn had stated that he’d perfected his blacksmithing and carpentry skills here and no doubt put them to use in building his enigmatic contraptions. It seemed a lot of effort to me but then being stuck here until the arse end of eternity demanded some kind of hobby.

Except Maythorn seemed to have gone and if he wasn’t here then somehow he’d escaped. Or maybe he was hiding somewhere, close by, watching me. Or, I thought bleakly, maybe he’s dead.

The path continued beyond the woodworking station, past a locked building and finally reaching another waterfront where a small wooden skiff bobbed up and down beside a jetty. There were no oars to be seen and the skiff had no obvious means of power. There was an odd looking cylinder with a hole in the stern section that reminded me of a place to put a wind-up key but I pushed the thought aside as being ridiculous.

The Skull Puzzle

Further along the path I encountered a strange contraption, one that immediately gained number one spot in my list of weird contraptions so far. Maythorn had certainly gone over the top with this one, I thought.

It was an orange skull, carved from crystal, and the eyes emitted two sharp beams of orange light. The angle of the light from each eye could be controlled independently by two levers and the beams were centred on a piece of apparatus containing eight small lenses in a 2 x 4 matrix. Two of the lenses were being lit by the two beams at any one time and the lever adjustment selected which two lenses were being lit. It was the general weirdness of it that amazed me, the sheer effort that Maythorn must have put into the design that was so over the top. It was genius and it was madcap, rolled together into one eccentric piece of loopy madness.

I played with the levers, trying all combinations of lens selection, but nothing happened. I suspected there was something missing and another panel to the side of the lens matrix seemed to confirm this. It needed a missing part.

Beyond the skull I spotted a table containing various orange crystals. It was interesting to see that some of the orange crystals weren’t glowing. On the table, along with the crystals, there was another key. It was identical to the other key I had just acquired and it didn’t take a genius to conclude that both keys were required to open the pier chest. Probably.

I ran back to the pier and tried the keys in the padlocks. Sure enough it needed both keys to open the chest and inside I found the usual collection of motley items. There was a lever in the chest that I took because it had two shafts and I had seen a possible use for such a shape over by the crystal skull. There was nothing else to take but as I was about to leave I spotted a diagram scratched into the inside of the lid. More circles and more diametric lines. I made a sketch in my notebook.

I headed back to the skull and studied the wall where the lens matrix lived. Next to the matrix there were two vertical slits and when I tried to fit the two lever shafts into the slits I was pleased to find they fitted perfectly. Unfortunately when I pulled the lever down nothing happened.

So, I thought, I surely had to do something first with the skull and the lights. I was becoming a tiny bit familiar with the way Maythorn’s mind worked and I realised that the solution to this problem would move me on to whatever Maythorn wanted me to see and learn next.

I had two diagrams, taken from close by, both showing circles and diametric lines. Did these two diagrams contain the answer to this particular puzzle. After a brief think I decided that the answer was yes, the solution was indeed here. The first diagram showed four circles and an arrow beside them suggested an order going from left to right. The second diagram had a 2 x 4 pattern of circles just like the lens matrix. Correlating the two revealed which lens to shine the skull’s eyes on.

The first circle on the first diagram had a diametric line running diagonally from lower left to upper right. Finding the two circles having the same diametric line on the second diagram revealed which lens to light up, in this case the third one down on the left column and the second one down on the second column.

Using the skull levers I then moved the light beams to light up the similarly positioned lenses on the lens matrix and having done that I then pulled the lever. There were four little lights next to the lever and the first light became illuminated.

Haha, I thought. One down, three to go!

The four positions, for the record, were 3-2, 3-1, 1-4 and 1-2 where the first number was the left column position and the second number was the right column position. After entering the fourth position all four lights became illuminated and a key popped into view on the right hand side of the matrix panel.

I had seen old clocks before, the ones that needed winding up once a day. Clocks that didn’t need batteries. Clocks like old grandfather clocks or clocks like the ones in Edwardian parlour rooms that tick away majestically all day long. And the clock keys always had a specific shape associated with wind-up keys, a handle like a figure 8 and a tubular shaft.

This key I had just acquired was a wind-up key, of that I had no doubt. And my mind went instantly back to the skiff with its astern cylinder and its hole that reminded me of a wind-up clock hole.

Maythorn had topped himself with this one. Was I going to take a ride in a clockwork boat? The answer of course was yes.

The Five Note Puzzle part 1

I climbed onto the skiff, wondering not only where I was going to go but how. The key fitted snugly into the wind-up hole and after a moment's hesitation I turned the key. It took three half-turns before the clockwork mechanism decided to groan into life but then the skiff began to move, at first slowly but then with gathering speed. It was actually quite a pleasant journey, short-lived but exhilarating. We passed very close to the hanging platform, where I had caught my electric fish, but we sailed past it before I had a chance to take in any details or indeed have a chance to look about and notice any other features. We passed rocks and squeezed between tight gaps and the little skiff unerringly made its way into a hidden cove whereupon it ran itself onto a rocky shelf and ground itself to a complete standstill. I clambered out and decided that the trip had definitely been a one way journey for the skiff was completely out of the water.

I was confident that Maythorn would provide a way back.

I followed a wooden pathway through an arched stone opening and to my left I came upon a door with what looked like an old fashioned gramophone horn pointing out of it. If this door was meant to be opened then the horn had to be an unusual part of the lock mechanism and I could only surmise that the horn was listening for a signal that would unlock it.

To the right of the door there was a pentagonal table with plates set into each of the five corners. On one of the plates there was a clay vase and beside the table there was a set of bellows with a nozzle pointing at the table. Beside the bellows there was a lever which I promptly pulled.

Two things happened. Firstly the table slowly revolved one full turn before stopping back in its original position. Secondly the bellows slowly contracted, blowing air through the nozzle and over the table whilst it revolved. When the clay vase passed through the air stream it emitted a note. I had to smile, acknowledging the ingenuity of Maythorn, for here was a device obviously capable of sounding a five note sequence. All I needed were more vases, four more to be exact, which if placed on the table plates would sound notes in turn as they passed through the air stream.

To reinforce my thinking, I could see that the horn on the door was pointed right at the table. Listening.

How long has this lock been listening for five notes? And how did it receive the power to do such a thing for so long? I knew such thoughts were unhealthy. An answer would be provided eventually or I would remain in ignorance forever; either way I just had to move on.

To the left of the horn door I saw a clay vase which I duly picked up. I then collected the vase from the rotating table. If my thinking was correct then I had to find and collect three more vases which was going to be quite a collection. I decided to identify and categorise the vases in my mind to prevent confusion so I assigned them a number and a shape.

The first vase, vase number one, was the first one I had picked up and I thought of it as an oddly shaped pear. The second vase, vase number two, was another odd shape, much like an hour glass, and would presumably emit a different note because of it. I tested my theory by placing the two vases side by side on the table and pulling the lever. Yes, the two notes emitted were different notes and that meant that the five notes I needed to play were almost certainly going to be different frequency notes. And that meant I not only needed five differently shaped vases but also a sequence to play them in.

The Alchemy Lab part 1

I continued along the pathway, crossing over a bridge and then entering a large space that was filled with apparatus and many colourful items. Immediately to the left there were four very large glass vats containing, from left to right, a blue liquid labelled Terv, a purple liquid labelled Jhes, an empty vat labelled taxs and a green liquid labelled Gen. Judging by the messy splats on the floor the third vat once contained a red liquid.

Beyond the vats I came upon what looked like a large pipette containing a pale green liquid. The pipette was suspended over a clear crystal, much like the one I had seen in the watchtower room below the telescope. In that room there had been a colourless clear crystal with an odd looking key trapped inside it. I suddenly froze, thinking about that key in the crystal. I had seen it somewhere else, yet where? In my pocket I was carrying a key, an odd shaped misfit of a key that I had found in the false book in the cellar of the crystal laboratory. I realised, belatedly, that the two keys were very similar. I filed the information away, knowing that it would be important.

I squeezed the pipette. After all it was just asking to be squeezed and how could I resist? The green liquid was released and it dropped all over the clear crystal. Seconds later the crystal began to dissolve and within a short moment it had vanished, as if it had never existed.

It took me a while to realise that this was a subtly disguised message from Maythorn. This was a message showing me how to dissolve clear crystals. Or more specifically, how to get to that key inside the clear crystal in the lower room below the telescope. All I had to do was find some more of that pale green liquid and find a way to transport it to back to the room below the telescope. I looked around but there was no more to be seen.

Beside the pipette experiment I saw a diagram that was at first meaningless. I sketched it anyway, knowing that Maythorn had surely left it there for me to find. And further along I found my third vase. Vase number three was an oval shaped bellied vase.

I returned my attention to the diagram, wondering why it was here. It looked like a list of ingredients but there was no indication of what would be made if the ingredients were added together. I wondered whether it was a convenient recipe for the pale green liquid. If it was then I obviously had to make it in order to melt the crystal to get the key.

The first four ingredients of the recipe were the labels of the four vats and worryingly the taxs liquid was required. I looked back at the empty vat and realised that maybe I would have to manufacture some taxs liquid first before I could create the pale green liquid. I sighed, knowing that Maythorn was certainly the orchestrator of this new puzzle.

Also on the list of ingredients were three piles of coloured powder. I mentally shrugged, knowing that I had plenty left to explore.

Continuing around the room I came to the next table on which there was a motley collection of different coloured powders. There were eight different colours in all and there was a wooden spoon close by that had presumably been used to scoop powder up. I pocketed the spoon. So here were the powders for the recipe, I thought, and thankfully the colours I needed for the recipe were present.

Next to the table I spotted vase number 4 which was a narrow vase.

In the middle of the room was a large table centred around a wooden pole fashioned from a tall tree trunk. The table was filled with experimental paraphernalia, coloured flasks, bowls, boxes and a few glowing crystals. It was evident to me that Maythorn had spent a considerable length of time here, tinkering with powders and colours. There was a cauldron shaped receptacle here in the centre which looked like it was good for mixing things together. I found a test tube which, like the powder spoon, I pocketed.

Beneath the cauldron were ashes from a previous fire. I grimaced. Mixing these ingredients together would more than likely require heat from the fire.

Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble, I muttered.

The Alchemy Lab part 2

I was tantalisingly close to understanding what to do but I wasn’t quite there yet.

Vase number five was also on the middle table. It was a round vase, bellied like number three but more rotund. Now I had five vases!

The final object of interest on the table was a note. As soon as I saw it I knew it was from Maythorn and I opened it slowly hoping that this time I would learn something worthwhile, something that would explain why I was here and why Maythorn thought it was necessary to trap me in this place following his frustrating clues.

I hope you enjoyed the ride. Unfortunately the boat was only designed to get you here. This is the place where I dived deeper into learning about the vegetation of the island. Through herbology and chemistry were far from my original expertise, by studying the experiments, recipes and manuscripts of the Dulmarians. I had everything I needed to master these arts. At the time I thought the opportunity this place offered me was a blessing. I was a wanderer back then, who always enjoyed being alone. I have never been a people person. Though I was undoubtedly on my own, sometimes I had the strange feeling that someone, or something was watching me.

So, two more strings had been added to Maythorn’s bow. Now he was a master of herbology and chemistry as well as blacksmithery and woodwork. After all he literally had all the time in the world. As long as he wanted in fact. A week or a century, it didn’t matter. The rest of the universe was frozen and here time ticked on without any changes or decay. Not for the first time I shrugged away the pit of despair caused by thinking about energy violation and frozen entropy.

Move on, I thought. Keep moving.

I returned to the letter, reading it again. There was nothing new here, nothing to assist me in escaping this nightmare. And what was this about the feeling of being watched? The loneliness was bad enough and I’d only been here the equivalent of a day or so. The last thing I wanted planting in my mind was the concept of being watched.

I looked up, above the table, and fancied that there was space up there to walk around but I couldn’t see how to get up there.

The Five Note Puzzle part 2

I was about to leave the alchemy lab when I saw the diagram on the wall. I stood and studied it for a while wondering if it meant what I hoped it meant. It consisted of six horizontal lines, five vertical lines and five dots. The dots were connected by another line running from left to right. To me it looked like a musical stave where the five dots were the five notes. The sequence was surely the sequence I needed to open the horn door!

What bemused me was that there were six lines on the stave implying that there were six possible notes. I saw that the third line down was unused. Either this was an irrelevance that I could ignore or it meant that there was a sixth vase.

I looked about wondering if there was somewhere else to explore. Then I spotted the wooden steps leading down to an inconspicuous path running between the tall rock walls that surrounded this room. At the far end of the path was a rusty door that was firmly locked and on a shelf by the door I spotted vase number six. It was shaped like a flask.

I hurried back to the horn door and stared at the rotating table with the five plates. I knew what needed to be done. I needed to work out the order of the vases, from the lowest note to the highest. Then I needed to place the vases on the table in the same sequence as depicted in the diagram.

Piece of cake, I murmured.

I placed the vases randomly on the table and listened to the notes as the table rotated. Eventually, through trial and error, I managed to sort them into note order which was vase numbers 4, 6, 2, 1, 5 and finally 3. Unsurprisingly the narrow vase had the highest pitch whilst the larger bellied vases had the lowest. In shape order I had narrow, flask, hour glass, pear, round and finally oval.

If my theory was correct then the third highest note was going to be unused and this was the vase shaped like an hour glass. The other five vases I then placed around the table in the correct sequence as follows:

Sequence 1 = vase number 1, the pear vase.
Sequence 2 = vase number 6, the flask vase.
Sequence 3 = vase number 3, the oval bellied vase.
Sequence 4 = vase number 4, the narrow vase.
Sequence 5 = vase number 5, the round bellied vase.

I pulled the lever and watched the table revolve. The bellows blew over the vases and the five note sequence played out. There was a welcome grinding sound as the horn door slid open with three solid sections of door parting in three different directions. I had done it!

What had I learned? I had put some pots in some order and opened a door as a reward. What had Maythorn taught me in doing that? It was no secret that Maythorn wanted me to learn the secrets of the island and to share in all of his discoveries. It was the something that kept me going, the promise of being able to understand what this place could do. That and the equally great incentive to find Maythorn and knock his lights out for kidnapping me.

I struggled with the lesson of the vases. It had been the toughest puzzle so far and I had no idea what I had just learned from it. I sighed, dreading the thought of how many puzzles I had left to solve, puzzles devised by a man who had had centuries to devise and build them. How many more? Dozens? Hundreds? Were they going to be as pointless as the vase puzzle?

My mind told me I needed to sleep. Some circadian rhythm inside me was telling me to close my eyes and nod off. But I wasn’t tired, not in the slightest. It was a strange feeling, being wide awake when I aught not to be.

I stepped through the horn door, ready to face the next puzzle.

The Gardens

An arched bridge crossed over a stretch of water and at the apex of the bridge there was a small area in which I saw two vertical water pipes that appeared to come up from the water beneath me. The pipes then continued onwards towards the new area I was about to explore. An iron wheel that looked like a water valve sat snugly between the pipes.

I was becoming quite brazen now in trying things out and generally fiddling with what I saw because the puzzles I had seen so far all seemed to have been carefully crafted to withstand examination. I was sure that Maythorn had designed all of his puzzles to be fiddle proof. So I spun the wheel and was rewarded by the sound of water momentarily sloshing through the pipes. I moved on.

The path led through a ragged curtain door beyond which I entered an airy space that was dedicated to plants and horticulture. Except, I thought bleakly, it once was. Everywhere I looked the plants were dead, shrivelled and colourless. The soil was dry and the whole place was untidy, desiccated and neglected. I shook my head sadly, trying to imagine what this would have looked like if the plants had been healthy and in bloom. Here was evidence that Maythorn was no longer here. Why else would the plants have died if not through neglect?

There were three directions to choose from and they all led into small dead ends. To the left I found a long cylindrical canister containing a retractable scroll. On the scroll was written a strange recipe along with a diagram of a dead leaf with an arrow pointing to a green leaf. I frowned in thought at this and it got me thinking afresh about the plants.

This place was frozen in time. Things didn’t age, things didn’t die. I wasn’t getting hungry or thirsty. I wasn’t sleepy. I wasn’t getting any older. So, I mused, what had happened to the plants? Surely they wouldn’t need feeding or watering either. Why were they dead? And here I was with a scroll in my hand containing a recipe to revive plants. This was doubtless another message from Maythorn, this was a recipe to revive plants and therefore I would at some stage have to make the recipe and bring the plants back to life.

I studied the recipe, trying to glean some clues. This time the ingredients consisted of four coloured powders and two portions of Jhes. All of these ingredients were available back in the alchemy lab.

Along the right hand path I found a pair of tongs in a small wooden cupboard. The tongs had cupped grills at the end so they would be useful for snatching things up. A larger cupboard was also in this area but like many other places it was locked and labelled with a strange symbol.

I passed through another curtain door to reach the final dead end. Here I found a painting of an island and paints, no doubt Maythorn had his hobbies. There were various diagrams pinned up and each diagram was an illustration of a plant labelled in an odd language. The language looked similar to the labels over the coloured vats I had seen earlier.

On a bench I found a rusty key, another note and a workable tool that looked like some kind of press. I opened the note.

I often visited these gardens to relax and to admire the beauty of nature. The Dulmarians already separated and named all of the native herbs, I decided to keep their original names. You’re probably wondering why all of these plants are dry, considering the unique attributes of the island. The truth is, they cannot wither naturally here so I had to weaken them myself. It was necessary in order to force you to follow the path I’ve laid out for you. To be able to proceed, it is essential to find a way to revitalise these herbs. There is no reason to be worried. Just barely, but they are alive.

I should have been shocked at Maythorn’s admission of plant cruelty but I wasn’t. He was a guy who didn’t care about others so why should he care about plants? I already detested him for stranding me here and for forcing me to jump through his hoops and so I just looked upon his apathy towards plant health as another violation to add to his list of effronteries.

The Crystal Laboratory part 3

At the bottom of Maythorn’s letter were five symbols and I felt certain that I’d seen them somewhere before. After a bit of thinking I realised that they were the same symbols as the ones I had seen in the crystal laboratory, the ones that had fluoresced on the wall after I’d shone light onto the blue crystal in the centre of the room. And there was a keyboard there too with those symbols on the keys.

I decided to return to the laboratory but the trouble was I didn’t know how to get there. The boat that brought me here had firmly grounded itself at the end of its journey so I needed to find another way back. However, as much as I hated Maythorn I had confidence in him that he wouldn’t strand me in one area, unable to retrace my steps. In his own words in an earlier letter, he’d spent decades preparing for my arrival and journey.

I rifled through my belongings, looking for inspiration, and ended up staring at the rusty key I had just picked up. There had been a rusty door back near the alchemy lab, next to where I had found vase number six. I headed back to that door and was pleasantly surprised to find that the key fitted. I passed through and followed a wooden gangway to finally come upon the wooden bridge that I had seen earlier. The bridge had two halves that could be lowered and raised and I had already lowered the far half in anticipation of dropping this near half at some time. I pulled the lever that was set in the ground beside the bridge and the near half dropped down to meet up nicely with the other half. This was a welcome find for now I had access back to the crystal laboratory and in fact to all areas that I had already explored.

I crossed over the bridge and made my way to the crystal laboratory. The pathways were becoming familiar to me now and I quickly arrived. I headed straight to the keyboard, the one that had opened up the lower level, and it was a simple matter to key in the five symbols from Maythorn’s latest letter. For the record the keys were:

c2r1, c5r1, c5r5, c3r3, c1r4

I wasn’t really expecting anything to happen because in my mind I thought the crystal laboratory had been ‘done’. Maythorn’s modus operandi so far had been to pretty much exhaust one area before moving on to the next. So I was particularly pleased to hear a sliding sound coming from the wall over by the balcony. When I moved closer I saw that a panel had slid open revealing a circle of eight light-up buttons.

I pressed some of the buttons and quickly learned that the light on the pressed button would toggle on and off with each press. Furthermore two other lights would also toggle, these lights being at 135 degrees to the pressed button.

It also became evident that I needed to get every light lit. It was a logical, geometric puzzle but it proved annoyingly difficult to get all of the lights on at the same time. However after much button pushing I managed to do it and I was rewarded by the opening of a hidden door leading into a small room.

Super spoiler, for the record:
To open the door first press lights until only two are lit. (This is the starting position of the puzzle but it is also quite easy to get back to if there are many lights lit.) The two lights need to be separated by one unlit light. Note that if only one light is lit then pressing that light will actually setup the puzzle with two lights. The overall position and angle of the two lights doesn’t matter.
Now remember the position of two unlit lights as follows. Light A is the unlit light between the two lit lights and light B is the one directly opposite light A.
Now press the two lit lights, one after the other. Then press lights A and B.

The door was a sliding panel that rumbled upwards out of sight and the room beyond was small, dusty and poorly lit. Beneath a small circular window was a table on which were a few crystals and on the table I was intrigued to see red crystals. These were a new colour of crystal to me, having only acquainted myself with orange and blue ones so far. The largest crystal was indeed a red one and it was sat on a circular stand filling the area with a faint red glow. When I picked it up I was surprised to see that it was quite hot and it was set into a hexagonal metal base with integral fixing spigots. It was most unusual.

There was nothing else to do in the small room so I reentered the crystal laboratory and considered my options. The remaining puzzles I had to solve involved plants, recipes and mixing powders and liquids together. So why had Maythorn directed me here? Was the red crystal all there was here and if so what purpose did it serve?

I eventually made my way back to the alchemy lab. I had nothing left to do but try and follow the recipes I had found but my confidence was quite low as I hadn’t quite worked out how to do it. The recipe that I thought was for the pale green liquid had a missing ingredient and I had been given no motive to follow the plant reviving recipe.

But there was nothing else left to try. I muttered under my breath, berating Maythorn for being an insufferable megalomaniac and basically damning him to hell and back. Who was he to control my life so?

I searched the area again, seeing if I had missed anything. Eventually I reached the room at the end of the garden area, the one with the painting of an island propped up on a wooden easel. It was a simple picture, an island with rocks and tall fir trees and I smirked slightly as I decided that Maythorn wasn’t that good an artist.

Many years does not an artist make, I told myself with a wry smile.

The paints were still set out, almost as if the painting was unfinished. Then I frowned as I spotted something, something very odd. The brush had a white fluorescent paint on its bristles and there was a tray of the same white paint beside the other colours. I had seen that stuff before, in the crystal laboratory. It was the invisible ink that only fluoresced under the glow of a blue crystal!

I swore then, realising that there was probably a hidden message close by that I had missed. I pulled out the blue torch and held it aloft. Immediately a diagram fluoresced into view right on top of the painting. I scrutinised it and realised it was another recipe. It was in fact the missing link I needed that linked this recipe with the other two. It showed me how to make the liquids in the large vats from the plants.

Everything fell into place then. I needed to revive the plants using the first recipe, then I needed to harvest the revived plants to manufacture the taxs liquid using this new recipe. Once I had that then I could create the pale green liquid using the remaining recipe and then I would be able to melt the crystal and get the key.

I didn’t have a clue what to do after that but I was confident that Maythorn would provide in his usual diabolical way.

Reviving the Plants

I returned to the cauldron that was in the centre of the alchemy lab. This pot just had to be the means by which I was to make the concoctions I needed. I also had a wooden spoon for collecting the powders and a test tube that I could surely use to obtain liquid from the vats.

The cauldron looked lifeless, filled with some old congealed goo and looking hopelessly unusable. What it needed was warming up using the fire pit below the pot. I examined the fire pit and noticed beside it a tray that I could swivel into place. The tray was hexagonal and there was a small focussing mechanism mounted beside the tray consisting of two small glass lenses.

Then I thought of the red crystal. It was hot, generating both heat and light. And it had a hexagonal base! I pulled the crystal out and was delighted to see that it fitted perfectly on the tray. Not only that but the focussing mechanism automatically directed light and heat from the crystal into the fire pit. Like the telescope it was amplifying the heat and within seconds the fire pit burst into flame.

It was another piece of the jigsaw fitted. Another step towards Maythorn’s mad dream that was educating me towards his goal, whatever that was. Another step closer to finding Maythorn and getting my revenge.

The cauldron quickly warmed up and the congealed gooey mess inside rapidly evaporated leaving a reasonably clean interior that I deemed would be suitable for mixing.

I carefully studied the plant reviving recipe. The required ingredients were two measures of Jhes liquid, two scoops of red powder, one scoop of orange powder, one scoop of purple powder and two scoops of blue powder.

Creating the mix proved to be very easy. I used the test tube to decant the purple Jhes liquid from the vat to the cauldron and I used the wooden spoon to gather scoops of powder, being careful to observe the required quantities. The mixture bubbled nicely as I added the ingredients. Once I had what I believed was the correct concoction I operated the pump on the right hand side of the cauldron to transfer the mixture into a metal beaker that was conveniently positioned below the pump nozzle.

The liquid mixture sloshed around nicely as I lifted it away from the cauldron. Now all I needed to do was go and water the garden. There wasn’t an awful lot of the mixture and I doubted there was enough in the beaker to water every plant, of which there were many. And I didn’t have a watering can. And I couldn’t help but wonder how long it would take the plants to revive. Crikey, I thought, it could be weeks.

I recovered the red crystal before leaving. The last thing I wanted was for the whole place to burn down because of a fire that would never go out.

I made my way back to the garden area, passing the horn door and the musical table on the way and once in the garden I looked around, trying to decide what to water first. Thankfully I spotted the overhead pipes before watering anything. The pipes were positioned over the garden beds and were obviously there to simultaneously irrigate all corners of the garden.

Then I remembered the pipes I had seen earlier at the top of the arched bridge. I had operated them when I had first seen them but I hadn’t fully investigated what they did. Now it seemed obvious, they controlled the garden irrigation system. I headed over to them and saw that there was a neat way to introduce the mixture; a small grille was positioned beside the wheel that operated the water valve. Would one beaker of mixture be enough?

I carefully poured the contents of the beaker through the grille and then operated the wheel. After listening to the sloshing of water as it ran through the pipes I reentered the garden area, hoping to see that the leaves everywhere were wet. Then all I would have to do was wait.

To my huge surprise I found that all the plants had been instantly transformed. They were now in flower with a huge variety of shape, size and colour to see and marvel at. I could only imagine that the weird time flow in this place had accelerated the plants rejuvenation. I wasn’t aging. The whole place wasn’t aging. And yet the plants had jumped from near death to full bloom in just a few seconds.

It was bonkers but my ability to accept anything bonkers was currently in full flow. Anything could go right now. Anything could happen and I probably wouldn’t as much as blink. Maybe time for the plants had snapped back to what was, before they had been ‘weakened’, to use Maythorn’s word. I mentally shrugged. It was another mystery to add to my list of mysteries, like frozen time or like not losing energy or not needing to sleep forever or…

Move on, I muttered. Just move on.

What a Mix Up

I next needed to catalogue the plants and correlate them with the pictures and plant names that were pinned up in the room with the painting. So I wandered around, examining the flora and cross referencing them to the diagrams. It was an enjoyable task and proved to be quite a stress buster.

The names of the plants were not readable or pronounceable so I ended up identifying the plant by colour and shape as required for the next recipe. This recipe, the one that fluoresced on the painting, would make me some taxs liquid.

For this I worked out that I needed one of the bright blue flowers, two small red berries, one large purple flower, one purple curly stalk and one stalk of the red tipped fern. Annoyingly the latter was named in the recipe but not documented in a diagram. Luckily it was the only plant in the garden that hadn’t been named and drawn so by elimination it had to be the required plant.

I ended up using the tongs to gather the plants because the cupped ends were ideal for holding the petals without crushing them. My intention had been to throw the petals into the cauldron but it was going to be a weary slog if I had to traipse between the garden and the alchemy lab many times. Instead I eyed up the plant press that was at the end of the garden in the room with the painting, wondering if it would be feasible to extract and mix the petal juice using the press instead. The more I thought about it the more sensible it became. All I had to do here was mix plant juice so surely there would be no need for a cauldron or for any heat.

The process turned out to be very easy. I carefully placed each plant into the press and then spun the threaded handle to squish the juice out. The juice conveniently ran into a neighbouring receptacle which looked like it had been specifically made for this exact job. Of course, it had been made for this very job. Maythorn had prepared everything for this moment.

It took six operations of the press to fill the receptacle and a gauge beside the receptacle then confirmed that it was full. Finally I transferred the contents of the receptacle into my test tube, ready for transporting to the alchemy lab. If my plant selection had been correct then I now had a test tube full of taxs liquid!

I returned to the lab with my prize. I now had what was required to create the pale green liquid and this final mix definitely needed the use of the cauldron as it involved combining a selection of vat liquids and powders. I checked the ingredient list to see that I required one measure of Terv liquid, one measure of taxs liquid, two measures of Gen liquid, one measure of Jhes liquid, one scoop of green powder, two scoops of white powder and one scoop of yellow powder.

I duly added the required ingredients to the cauldron starting with the taxs liquid which I was already carrying. Then I filled the metal beaker and I was pleased to see that the colour looked correct, namely pale green.

Now for the moment of truth. I made my way back to the watchtower with the telescope. In the lower room the large crystal was still there and trapped inside it I could see the key that I needed. Why did I need the key? The stupid thing was I didn’t actually know and my major trepidation was that I didn’t know what I was going to do once I had that key in my hands.

I lifted the beaker and poured it over the crystal. To my delight the crystal began to shrink, a bit like a speeded up film of a block of ice melting. After what was just a few seconds the crystal shrunk to nothing, leaving no residue. I picked up the key that was left behind and studied it. It was very similar to the one I already had but this new one had two teeth that could be rotated whereas the other one had three.

Upper Viewpoint

I had a vague notion about the two keys that I had, something about them nagged at my memory. I had seen something that these keys might fit but my mind couldn’t recall exactly what it was. Something to do with the difference between the keys…

My immediate attention however was drawn to something else, something that distracted me from thinking about the keys. When the crystal had melted away it had revealed a wooden cupboard that had been stuck shut by the crystal but which had now freed up. I pulled the doors open and inside I found five wooden poles, bound together by string. The poles were metal capped.

I knew immediately what the poles were. Earlier I had spotted a ladder bolted to a vertical rock face but the five lower rungs had been missing. These poles surely had to be those rungs.

I set off in search of the ladder and found it on the north shore where the skiff had been moored. The ladder was unclimbable without the rungs but the poles I had slotted easily in place, clearly made for the job. I clambered up, keen to find somewhere that was fresh and different. At the top I had a good view. The sea stretched to the horizon, unbroken in the distance and with a hazy cast.

I was on a stone ledge, a bumpy walkway cut into the rock that disappeared around a bend in the rock face. It was not overly wide or roomy but there was space for a table set with three stone bowls. In the central bowl there was a small key with a handle shaped like a gearwheel. I took the key and moved along the walkway to come across a second table with notable objects on it. A glowing orange crystal illuminated the tabletop revealing a long metal lever with a wooden handle, roughly cut stone bricks and a letter. I took the lever and then slowly opened the letter.

After decades of hard work, experimenting and prototyping, I achieved a great progress in crystal engineering and it clearly became one of my many expertise. This was the time she first appeared to me. At that moment I realised that I was never really alone. The strange sense of being watched I used to feel was probably her. She introduced herself as the warden of this world. What a miserable lie it was. She had no right to claim such a title.

Maythorn displayed his usual self congratulatory prose, keen as always to be sure that I knew that he knew. But this time there was another vibe in the letter, an unsurety brought about by the arrival of another. Someone else was in his space, his personal space, and I could tell that he didn’t like it. And he didn’t like her, whoever she was. Was she a figment of his imagination brought about by an eternity of loneliness? Or was she real, like me? Was he going mad, talking to himself and slowly losing his mind? I sincerely hoped not because despite my loathing for him I was totally in his hands. In his care, if you like.

I looked around but I was quite alone. I had no feeling of being watched, unlike what Maythorn had experienced. I sighed and read the letter again. It offered no information that would help me.

There was a third table at the end of the walkway. On this table there was a mechanical device with concentric circles set into a panel, handles and switches. However nothing would operate. Three cables were strung across to the nearest building which I recognised as one that I’d found earlier, locked and unable to enter.

I clambered back down the ladder and returned to the main square. I knew exactly where I was going because I knew exactly where the gearwheel key fitted. I remembered when I was at the hanging platform, trying to catch the fish in the bowl, that there had been a little box on a table and that the little box had a lock built into a gearwheel shaped design. Surely the key would fit.

I inserted the key and it turned with a satisfying click. I was expecting the box lid to pop open but instead the entire table began to slide sideways, vanishing into a concealed recess in the neighbouring rock. It only took a few seconds for the entire table to disappear from sight leaving a gap that then began to transform into a set of steps leading down to a lower level. Maythorn’s ingenuity knew no bounds, I thought.

The lower level was small and practically at sea level. There wasn’t much here, just a metal cupboard which as usual was locked. The lock was unusual, being a hole with a strip of metal across the hole, and I had no doubt that it required a tool of the correct shape.

On the ground amongst some pieces of junk metal I spotted a cylindrical shape. It looked incongruous amongst the rusty bits of metal so I picked it up. At the end of the platform was a door that I found could be opened and it led back into the main square.

The Generator Room

Once again I found myself rummaging through my belongings, looking for objects I still hadn’t used or didn’t understand. The list was small: two keys with moveable teeth, one long metal lever and a cylindrical piece of burnished metal that looked important but offered no clues.

I wandered around the main square checking for doors that were still locked. Between the entrance to the northern shore and the steps leading up to the crystal laboratory there was a round building with a short set of wooden steps leading up to the door. The door was tight shut with no sign of a keyhole or locking mechanism but on the ground beside the door there was a mechanism that looked like it needed a handle.

I was delighted to find that my metal lever fitted the mechanism perfectly and when I pulled the lever the door slid downwards into the ground. Inside the building there was a lot to see. It was small but despite its size it contained many interesting objects.

My attention was caught by two things. Firstly a large wheel was up against the back wall and it was silently rotating. Secondly a grille set in the floor was spewing a cloud of steam into the room. Beneath the grille I could see pipes that stretched away beyond my view.
I tentatively moved forward onto the grille and nothing untoward happened. Maybe, I thought, it wasn’t steam after all, which would surely be scalding. Perhaps it was just harmless smoke.

The machine against the back wall was very interesting. There were five cup shaped sockets lined up in a horizontal row and beside the row there was a vertical column containing various circles with icons embossed on them. The icons looked very familiar for I had seen them many times, scattered around the area. Where there was a locked cupboard or sometimes a locked entrance then there was often one of these circular icons close by. I counted eight of them.

The top icon was illuminated whilst the others were unlit. And in the left socket there was a cylindrical object that looked identical to the one I was carrying in my pocket whilst the other four sockets were empty.

Meanwhile behind the machine the wheel silently turned, minding its own business. A taut cable beside the wheel moved vertically upwards. Whether it powered the wheel or the wheel powered the cable I couldn’t tell.

I carefully pulled the cylindrical object out of the first socket. There was a faint mechanical whine and the lit icon went dark. When I replaced the object the icon lit up again. Somehow the presence of the cylinder was causing the icon to illuminate. The whole mechanism looked like it was delivering electrical power, controlled by the presence of the cylinder in the socket. Perhaps the cylinder was acting as a battery or perhaps it was acting as a switch. Perhaps, I thought, there was a huge generator beneath the building driven by steam creating a bounteous supply of electrical energy to feed the whole island. Something had to power up the sliding doors and stuff that I had encountered so far.

I took the cylinder that I already had from my pocket and pushed it into the second socket. Interestingly two more icons lit up. I wondered if adding yet more cylinders would activate the remaining icons.

The two cylinders sat side by side in the machine and it was evident to see that they had a different pattern engraved on their surfaces. I experimented with them, swapping them over and trying them in different socket positions before concluding that the machine couldn’t tell any difference between them or cared which socket they were plugged in. Any mix of sockets produced the same effect, namely the top icon was powered up when either one of the cylinders was inserted anywhere and the top three icons were powered up when both cylinders were plugged in anywhere.

I was getting to know Maythorn and the way his mind worked. He didn’t do anything unless it was necessary and the cylinders had a difference which meant that it was a required necessity. And that, I thought, meant that the cylinders did something else as well as power up little icons. Something else where the engraved differences were meaningful.

I needed to revisit all of the places on the island, checking for doors with accompanying icons. But first I had other things in this room to investigate.

On my left was a table on which there was a letter and a small wooden pail. The pail was unusual in having a small hole in the top and having a metal band wrapped around it with two lobes that protruded upwards.

I opened the letter, wondering what new insights Maythorn was prepared to offer this time.

She was convinced that if I stayed, I would soon reach a point upon which I would no longer be myself. I couldn’t understand her point. Although she tried to convince me to leave the island, I did not listen. I knew that the knowledge I gained could have changed my entire civilisation for the better. The gateway was fully operational at the time, but I didn’t know for sure whether I’d be able to find Quern again. It took me fourteen years to locate this world, I could not take the risk. I wasn’t ready to leave all my work behind. Not yet.

Hmm, he certainly seemed to be fixated on this other person. Real or unreal, she was filling his thoughts. Yet surely, I thought, he had penned these letters afterwards, towards the end when he was setting out his puzzles for lucky old me. And that meant he was writing about what had been, many years previously. Did that mean she had been real? If so, who was she and why was she trying to stop him?

To the left of the table there was another contraption with a lever that slid up and down. Continuing leftward, on the other side of the door there was a second table filled with junk; pieces of metal and a few diagrams that had been left behind. Two diagrams had been obscured by a thick daub of red paint rendering them unreadable. I smiled, remembering that I had seen a similar thing in the garden room by the painting. Obviously Maythorn had his own way of deleting his failures.

The final contraption in the room was a rotatable cylinder having four independently rotatable wheels with various black and white symbols. It was like a combination lock where it was possible to dial up a certain number, except in this case the numbers had been replaced with symbols, a mix of vertical and horizontal lines. Beside the cylinder there was a button. It seemed to me that one had to dial up the correct set of four symbols then press the button.

There was a lot to see in this room but not a lot to do. I decided to go for a walk.

Berry Juice

I had managed to light up two new icons by inserting the second cylinder into the generator and it was time to hunt them down. I eventually found them both close together in the garden area and to my relief I saw that they had both opened up to reveal shelving. The first cupboard was in the room with the painting and there I found another odd machine with another odd lever that moved up and down. When I pulled it down a dark liquid was released onto a lower stand. The find was a bit disappointing.

There was a note pinned above the machine.

The squeezed liquids of the native berries have quite intense effect on one's senses. Though drinking pure berry juices would be almost unbearable for the human body, the substance this device mixes with the liquids makes their effects significantly weaker. Be cautious, even though they are diluted, some of them could be quite intoxicating

I looked at the machine again and I could see that it might be able to squash berries and then add the juice to the dark liquid and then deposit the mix into a receptacle. All I needed was a few berries and a suitable receptacle.

The second freshly opened cupboard was in the neighbouring area of the garden and in there I could see some plants and a glass chalice. I had to assume that these poor plants hadn’t died and been revived like the others in the garden for they had been hidden away all this time. What a miserly existence, I thought.

I studied the chalice and ended up walking over to the juice machine to see if I could use it as a receptacle for collecting the berry juice. The chalice fit perfectly onto the lower stand.

I was a little bit cautious about what I was about to do. Maythorn, as usual, was steering my actions and I had no choice in deciding where he steered me. Right now he was steering me towards drinking some unusual juices and my mind filled with trepidation at the prospect of potentially poisoning my body. After some deliberation I concluded that he must have drunk them himself and he had survived.

Why would he want me to drink berry juice? The note spoke of intense effects on the senses and of how intoxicating it could be. Did he want my senses to be heightened for some reason? If so then why? Was there something I needed to see or hear that I couldn’t see or hear without imbibing the juice?

I went back to the second cupboard and studied the plants. There were four different types of plant in all, three of them were plants with berries and the other was a fungus growth growing from a piece of wood.

I chose one of the plants, one with fluorescent green berries that cast a green hue over the neighbouring plants. I used the tongs that I already had to snip a berry off and I carefully deposited the berry into the top of the juice machine. When I pulled the handle down the dark liquid mixed with the berry juice and the resulting mix was deposited into the chalice. I removed the chalice from the machine and swirled the drink around. It was like mixing a cocktail.

Here goes, I thought, and quaffed the drink down. My vision spun and the room looked sickly and ethereal. My ears filled with a strange sound and the straight lines of the room became indistinct and wavy. The effect was short lived and everything turned back to normal after a few brief seconds.

I had learned nothing. Heightened senses or not, I had gleaned no information. The only upshot was that the drink had tasted quite nice. Other than that it had been a waste of time.

I had little choice but to try the other two berries. There was a small white berry and a larger purple berry and they both sent my senses awry for a few seconds. The effects were subtly different but the end result was the same for I learned nothing. I then tried the fungus. This was a worrying moment as it was a move up from berry juice but I had little choice. Suffice to say that the term ‘Way out man’ was a perfect description of my state for a few seconds.

I considered mixing the mix. Maybe a stronger concoction of multiple berries was required. Or maybe I had missed something and just needed to repeat what I’d done. I had a vision of drinking hallucinogenic berry juice over and over again until I keeled over in a fatal stupor.

Then I had an idea. I seemed to remember that there were berry plants growing in the garden. I searched out two berry plants, fully revived thanks to my watering efforts. There was a yellow berry plant and a red berry plant. When I drank some yellow berry juice I was startled to experience the most dramatic effect yet - the whole world turned over as my vision turned upside down. That yellow berry was far stronger than the curated plants in the cupboard!

The final berry to try was the red berry and here I finally observed something interesting. My vision took on a red fiery hue and through it I noticed that a patch of red paint on the wall was displaying a spiral pattern. When the effect passed I looked at the patch again to see that the spiral had completely disappeared. The red patch, I realised, was where Maythorn had daubed a swathe of red paint to cover whatever was underneath. There was another red patch beside his island painting and I quaffed another red berry potion to see if there was anything there. Sure enough another spiral swam into view through the red haze.

Was the red juice revealing something that had been written beneath the red paint? Was this what Maythorn wanted me to discover? Was all this juice drinking and potential poisoning all for this? It seemed plausible because I knew of one other place where red paint had been used to obscure whatever was underneath. It was in the generator room, the very room that had opened up these cupboards for me. The coincidence was too high to ignore. There had to be a message beneath that red paint!

The Hidden Number

I mixed another chalice full of red berry juice and headed back to the generator room, being careful not to spill it. I was becoming a little blasé about imbibing these juices yet I knew I could be damaging my body and causing irreparable harm. Maythorn certainly had a lot of explaining to do when I finally got my hands on him.

Once in the generator room I gulped down the berry juice and for the third time my vision turned red. And the red paint on the wall displayed a four digit number: 3719. I wondered if my eyes were bloodshot with all of this berry drinking but I shook my head clear as my vision returned to normal.

What, I pondered, was the purpose of the number? All of the effort spent on berry production had culminated in this, a weedy little four digit number. Maythorn’s mad mind had to be fizzing with megalomaniacal glee knowing that he had made me jump through hoops to get this far. I knew his argument; to get this far I had learned about the berries and what they could do and I had learned how to read numbers hidden beneath paint. I had progressed along a path of learning and wisdom that he thought was necessary. He was just so damned maddening in his secrecy.

Right, I thought, I now have a four digit number. My eye was immediately drawn to the rotatable cylinder that was right here beside me. On it, it was possible to dial a four character sequence, much like a combination lock. What if those characters represented numbers? If so then I could enter the number and perhaps something wondrous would happen.

I examined the characters and saw that they were just combinations of horizontal and vertical lines and as I rotated them the number of lines increased in a certain way. It reminded me in a way of ‘tallying’, an ancient method of counting by adding strokes. One stroke for a 1, two strokes for a 2, etc. A 5 was four strokes with a line crossing them out. It was a way of counting something without actually counting them. At the end you just added up how many 5s there were and worked it out from there.

In this case, 1 to 4 was represented by one to four vertical strokes. A 5 was represented by a single horizontal stroke and a 10 was represented by two horizontal strokes. A 7 for example would be made up of one horizontal stroke (5) overlaid with two vertical strokes (2).

It became a simple matter of dialling up the number 3719. When I pushed the button beside the dial a panel in the lower pedestal slid smartly to one side to reveal… a third cylinder.

I plugged the cylinder into an empty socket and was rewarded with two more icons lighting up.

The Cave

Once again I needed to find out what had just opened up because of the two new icons. Thankfully it didn’t take long to find out because the first place I checked was the neighbouring crystal laboratory. I soon spotted a cupboard that now stood open and in the cupboard there was a diagram showing rows of black and white squares. There were in fact two diagrams that looked very similar and each diagram was labelled with an icon. The two icons were in fact the very two icons that had just been lit up. One of the icons was for this cupboard and the other icon was for somewhere else, still to be found.

Above the diagram were two buttons, one above the other. It soon became clear that the diagram was showing a sequence of button presses and it was a simple matter to press the upper and lower buttons in the given sequence. For the record the sequence was UULUULLULU. I made a note of the second sequence for I was certain that it would be needed when I discovered where the icon was.

After keying in the sequence a new panel slid open to reveal an extendable rod with a hexagonal platform at one end, much like the hexagonal base on the red crystal. I stashed it away in my bulging pockets.

I needed to find where the second icon was and I set off looking around the island. My familiarity with the twisting paths and walkways was becoming stronger every time I tromped around but I was unsure where this particular icon was. I found it eventually, on a part of the island where I had seldom walked. From the watchtower a pathway set off along the waterfront, heading south and east before bending around and heading back towards the main square. Along that pathway there was a fork and the right fork had previously led to a sealed door - except now the door was wide open. Inside the doorway a short path led to a barred gate that blocked the way further. The lock for the gate was a two button panel just like the one I had used in the crystal laboratory. It was a simple matter to enter the sequence that I had made a note of which was ULLLULUULL.

The gate swung open and I entered a new area. As always, I carried a hope inside me that this would be my final destination, the final place where this would all end and from where I could go home. Was Maythorn here, waiting for me? Of course, I knew he wouldn’t be here because there were still too many puzzles that remained unsolved but it was always a nice fantasy to harbour when I walked into a new area.

I was in a cave of sorts but it was a light, dry and airy place unlike many other caves I’d been in. Above me I could see the sky and on the far side of the cave I could see a path leading back out into fresh air. I passed through to find a small inlet looking out over the sea. The wind here was cool and sharp and I breathed deep, enjoying the view and the lulling sound of lapping water.

Eventually I returned to the cave and looked about. In one wall there was another barred gate but immediately behind it there was a stone wall that looked like a closed doorway. It was evident that two things needed to be opened if I needed to pass through, the metal gate and the stone door.

To the left of the double locked door there was a circular object positioned at eye level on the wall. It looked like a dartboard wheel except it only had eight segments and two concentric zones making sixteen sectors in all. I found out that each sector could be depressed whereupon the central bullseye area would rotate a little way. After eight different sectors had been depressed they would all pop back leading me to conclude that I needed a code telling me which eight areas to press and in what order. I decided that this had to be the lock for the double locked door.

On the other side of the cave there were two pictures set on easels, the left one was labelled as number one and the right one was labelled as number two. I reasoned that these had to be diagrams explaining how to unlock the two locks on the double locked door. Next to these two pictures was a table on which was a letter and a rusty gearwheel. I deftly pocketed the gearwheel and then opened the letter.

By now it must be obvious to you that I connected these marked doors and entrances to the main energy converter unit. Actually, this feature has nothing to do with the crystal battery machine’s main purpose at all. I have implemented this secondary function in order to direct you along the path and prevent you from spoiling my well structured course. When the converter is fully powered, meaning that all the batteries are in place, it supplies energy to the Mechanics. I can only hope that she will not interfere with our work. She is but a desperate echo of a fallen civilisation lingering here agelessly. It is clear that she is not worthy of the gift that has been given to her.

It was interesting to learn a few naming details about Maythorn’s constructions. He spoke about a ‘main converter unit’ and about a ‘crystal battery machine’ as well as naming the cylinders that I was collecting as ‘batteries’. The cylinders were to me just chunky metal cylinders, solid and heavy, but if they were indeed batteries then I had to revise my thought processes. Another notch on Maythorn’s bow would now have to be as an expert in electricity and electrical generation. Was there no limit to this man’s talents?

I had two more ‘batteries’ to find, judging by the number of sockets left to fill, and then, according to Maythorn, energy would be made available to the ‘Mechanics’. It was information without knowledge, it was Maythorn telling me things but explaining nothing. And he had the cheek to call it a ‘well structured course’. The man was a buffoon.

More interestingly he spoke further about the woman who was following him, calling her someone from a fallen civilisation. That was certainly an interesting turn of phrase.

Burning the Flag

On the wall behind the table there was another diagram numbering the sectors on the wheel. The numbers ran from one to sixteen using the same code as the code wheel back in the generator room. The numbers appeared to be allocated totally randomly.

With nothing else new to examine I turned my attention back to the diagrams on the easels. The left diagram, labelled with a 1, was quite obviously a depiction of the wheel sectors and eight sectors of the sixteen were highlighted. Was the puzzle that simple, just to depress the sectors that were highlighted? After trying it out, the answer was a resounding no. There had to be a sequence, an order in which to depress the sectors. The solution turned out to be simple, I had to depress the eight highlighted sectors but in numerically ascending order. Using the diagram behind the table the sectors to depress were numbers 1, 3, 4, 6, 7, 12, 14 and finally 15.

There was a welcome sound of stone scraping on stone as the stone door behind the gate slid open. The gate itself remained closed. To my surprise the wheel then rotated 180°, coming to rest in an upside down position. There had been a vertical white line running diametrically up the middle of the wheel with an arrow head at the top. Now the arrow pointed downwards to reinforce the notion that the wheel was upside down.

I moved over to the gate and peered through the bars. Beyond the gate was a small room and in the centre of the room I could see a battery resting on a pedestal. So there was my goal, the reward I would get for solving the wheel puzzle. Like a child looking in a sweet shop window I stared at the battery. If I could get this battery and then get just one more then I would have the full set and I would be able to power up the ‘Mechanics’. I almost licked my lips in anticipation.

I studied the second diagram but to my dismay it was damaged and unreadable. The centre of the diagram had been badly burnt and the paper or papyrus or whatever it was had been totally destroyed revealing the back of the wooden easel through the burned out hole. If this was a true accident and if Maythorn’s clue had been destroyed then it could potentially strand me here forever.

In the centre of the hole there seemed to be a drawing burned into the wood of the easel. I leaned in to get a good view and I recognised it as a depiction of the telescope back at the top of the watchtower. Maybe, just maybe, Maythorn had placed this burned hole as the actual clue. And maybe it was linked somehow to the telescope.

With little else to go on I ran back to the watchtower and climbed the steps up to the telescope. What was there about this telescope that could link it with burned paper? I looked around at the various vistas that could be seen in all directions and I noticed a tattered flag that was blowing in the wind just to the right of the lens that I had placed in the crystal laboratory. I had seen the flag before, the last time I had used the telescope, but I had thought nothing of it. Now I looked at the design on the flag with new eyes for there on the flag there was a wheel and beside it there was the number two in code.

Then it came to me what to do. I took the extendable rod that I had recently acquired from the crystal laboratory and I slotted it into the torch holder bracket on the telescope. Then I took the permanently hot red crystal and placed it onto the hexagonal cap of the rod. Like the yellow and blue torches before, the light of the crystal shone into the telescope and was amplified and emitted through the telescope lens like a torch beam. And this beam was hot. Very hot.

When I looked through the eyepiece of the telescope I could see the red beam shooting forward like a laser beam. I swung the telescope around and aimed it at the flag knowing already what would happen. The diagram had been burned through and sure enough the flag started to burn through as well. Within seconds the entire flag had sizzled up in flame and reduced to a fine ash that drifted away on the breeze. In the space where the flag had been there was now displayed another sector diagram, much like the one in the first diagram. It had to be showing the sector keys that I needed to depress in order to open the gate!

I hurried back to the cave and worked out what sectors to depress based upon the new sector diagram, ignoring the fact that the wheel had turned over. Once I had the eight number sequence worked out I then imagined the wheel upside down to identify the actual position of the segments. I eagerly depressed the identified segments and was rewarded by the gate opening up. At last.

Imagine the eight sectors of the wheel. Starting at the twelve o’clock position and travelling clockwise, number them sector number 1 to sector number 8. Imagine the two concentric circles of the wheel. Call them the outer circle and the inner circle.
Each individual sector can now be identified. For example 1outer is the first sector travelling clockwise on the outer circle.
The first puzzle: Depress 4inner, 3outer, 7outer, 5outer, 8outer, 2inner, 4outer, 8inner.
The second puzzle: Depress 2inner, 3outer, 2outer, 7inner, 6outer, 6inner, 8outer, 5outer.

I entered the small room and approached the battery. It looked identical to the other three batteries and I picked it up off the pedestal, knowing for sure that this fourth battery would open up more places by powering up another icon or two. As I lifted the battery up, the stone door at the entrance slid shut, trapping me in like a prisoner in a cell. Annoyingly the only way I could find to reopen the door was to place the crystal battery back onto the pedestal.

Weighing Things Up

It was apparent that the pedestal required a weight placed on it in order for the door to remain open. I was carrying various objects and I studiously tried every object on the pedestal but none of them triggered the door to open. This was obviously Maythorn’s next puzzle and I ended up leaving the room, and the battery, in order to consider my next course of action.

I needed to fool the pedestal and that meant I needed to swap the battery with an object that weighed exactly the same. It was a poser but eventually I remembered seeing weighing apparatus in a room that abutted the watchtower. It was a vague memory so I headed back to the watchtower to refresh my memory.

The weighing apparatus was indeed in the room at the base of the watchtower. I had been in here before but at the time the need to do a bit of weighing was not on my to do list. The apparatus was like a pair of scales where it was possible to compare weights using a balance and two trays. The left tray was actually a fixed bucket and beside it there was a bowl of sand. The right tray was empty. I noted that there were two orange markers that were level with each other which meant that the balance was in equilibrium. So the empty right hand tray was the same weight as the left hand bucket, which I saw was empty.

If I was to reproduce an object with the same weight as a battery then I needed a battery to measure against. I hurried over to the generator room and took one of the batteries to use as a reference. They all seemed to be the same, especially in weight, and I was sure that if I could copy the weight of one battery then it would be the same as all of the others.

Back at the scales I placed the battery on the right hand tray. Then I used my trusty scoop to transfer sand to the bucket. After transferring four scoops the markers on the scales returned to the equilibrium point. So, I thought, a battery weighs the same as four scoops of sand.

My mind was already considering ways of transferring four scoops of sand back to the pedestal and I was also aware of the way Maythorn presented his puzzles to me. So far every object I’d found had served a purpose, some purposes being more obscure than others. In my possession at the moment I had a wooden pail, much like a small bucket with a metal band that looked remarkably similar to the wooden bucket fitted to the left hand side of the scales.

Next to the scales there was a square funnel and below the funnel was a holder that looked like it might be a good fit for the pail. Sure enough the pail fitted snugly and the small hole in the top of the pail lined up admirably with the spout of the funnel. Here was my sand transporting device.

Using the scoop I transferred four scoops of sand through the funnel and into the pail and then I retrieved the pail from the funnel holder. It felt heavy, heavier than a battery, and of course it was because I was hefting not only the sand but also the weight of the pail. As a check I took the battery from the tray and replaced it with the pail. Now I could see that the pail was heavier than the left hand bucket. What I needed to do was remove some of the sand until the pail weighed the same as the bucket.

I emptied the sand out of the pail back into the bowl of sand and started again. With the pail positioned beneath the funnel I scooped just three scoops of sand into the pail. Then I placed the pail onto the scales and I was delighted to see that the pail now weighed the same as the bucket that was still filled with four scoops of sand. So here was my battery replacement, a pail filled with three scoops of sand!

I returned to the generator room and replaced the battery back into its socket. Then, knowing that the cave entrance was unlocked, I went back to the cave and reentered the small room with the pedestal. It was but a moment’s work to take the battery and replace it with the pail. It was a real Indiana Jones moment as I watched the door, waiting to see if it would open or if it would stay closed. When it slid open I breathed a sigh of relief. I had the fourth battery!

Encounter

I passed through the door, knowing that I had to go back to the generator room and fit the fourth battery in place. Before I could leave however I sensed a sudden movement outside the cave entrance and a ball of light suddenly appeared, floating through the air, zigzagging around the confines of the cave. A woman’s voice filled my mind.

“Who are you that wanders this world uninvited?”

To unexpectedly hear a voice was quite a surprise after my time in solitude. To hear it in my head, directionless and so close, was overpowering. It came from nowhere yet it came from everywhere. It was in my head but not in my ears.

It came from the ball of light, of that I was certain, but it was not coming over the air. It was a telepathic voice, entering my skull from the middle outwards.

“Another explorer?” the voice asked.

This had to be Maythorn’s follower, his female watcher who had been unhappy with his interference in this place. He had called her a warden, an echo of a fallen civilisation. He didn’t like her but I wasn’t sure why. What seemed clear right now was that she wasn’t a figment of his imagination, not at all.

“What are you seeking? Power? Immortality? Or are you just a fool, looking for salvation?”

She didn’t seem too interested in starting a conversation. Although she paused briefly between sentences the pause wasn’t long enough for me to reply. She apparently had things to say to me but she didn’t seem interested in hearing any response.

“You can’t simply enjoy the power of Quer'nelok… not without consequences.”

The ball of light continued to dart around the cave, spilling its blue glow around as it moved. Other than the voice in my head I had no impression of what it was, what she was. Was she human? Was she an alien?

“You must leave the same way you came here,” she said. “For your own sake.”

The ball then floated out of the entrance and wafted away out of sight. I quickly recovered my shock and followed it but once outside there was no sign of it. It was as if I’d imagined the whole thing. Perhaps I had.

I was frustrated. I would have relished a conversation. The warden didn’t know me or where I’d come from. She had advised me to go back the way I’d arrived but I couldn’t. I had been brought here beyond my control and I had no choice but to progress with these bloody puzzles. She didn’t understand my situation and she had no right to tell me to do things I just couldn’t do.

She seemed as bad as Maythorn.

The Mine part 1

I made my way to the generator room, mulling over what I’d just heard. I was the one doing all of the work but I actually knew nothing. Maythorn and his warden companion knew lots but did nothing to help me. I was definitely the underdog in this relationship and I wasn’t happy.

I added the fourth battery and two more icons lit up. The first one of the two had an icon that looked like a bottle and the second icon looked like a pick axe.

I had an idea where the bottle icon might be and that was back in the alchemy lab. As I walked to the lab I managed to calm down and began to think more rationally about the warden and her monologue. No, she didn’t know me but it seemed reasonable to assume that she didn’t know Maythorn either. After all he was as much an interloper in this world as I was. Perhaps, I mused, she was assuming that I was like another Maythorn, a dabbler and an overbearing know all. Well, she was wrong. I was here against my wishes and all I was doing was trying to get back home.

In the alchemy lab I saw that a previously closed cupboard was now open. In it there was a vat, a smaller version of the four big vats behind me, and this vat contained a white liquid. I had no idea what to do with it so I left the lab and went off in search of the other icon.

I found the door on the trail between the crystal laboratory and the watchtower. It stood open with the glowing pick axe icon shining brightly beside it. Inside there was a wide tunnel cut through the rock and lit by orange torches. Half way along the tunnel there was a low table against the left wall and there were a few dark blue crystals and a well used pick axe on the table top.

Above the table there was a wall mounted lever switch. I pulled the lever downwards but nothing seemed to happen although I thought I heard a noise coming from further along the tunnel. From my vantage point beside the lever I could see a fair way along the path and I could see what looked like a raised bridge. When I pulled the lever down again I saw the bridge fall into position but almost immediately rise back up, almost as if something below the bridge wasn’t grabbing it properly.

I moved up to the bridge and studied it carefully. It was quite a simple mechanism consisting of a single section that cantilevered on the far side. I could see what looked like a magnet beneath the near side end position and it was evident to me that the magnet wasn’t working. A pair of cables came out of the magnet and headed off to a mechanism close by. I had to assume that the mechanism wasn’t providing the correct power to the magnet.

Moving over to the mechanism I saw a circular panel with a rotating handle that could be set into one of the four cardinal positions and after further study I came to the following conclusions:

• The dial at the top showed the amount of power being delivered to the magnet. There appeared to be a ‘sweet spot’ between the red and the amber areas that depicted the optimal power level. The power scale was a simple graduated scale and the optimal sweet spot was at number 11 on the scale.
  
• Power was delivered by pulling on a power handle at the top right of the panel.
  
• The amount of power delivered was determined by rotating the main handle into one of the four cardinal positions. The power was incremented by 7 if the handle was to the left, it was incremented by 5 if the handle was downwards, it was decremented by 7 if the handle was upwards and it was decremented by 5 if the handle was to the right.
  
• I had five attempts to adjust the power to deliver 11 units, the number of attempts being shown on a display in the lower left corner of the panel.

It was a classic Maythorn puzzle and it required a little patience to solve but in the end it was down to simple mathematics. As usual I gawped more at the mechanism itself rather than the underlying puzzle. Maythorn sure had time to kill when it came to designing the mechanics around the puzzle.

The solution, after ensuring that the attempt counter was set to 5, was as follows: I rotated the main handle to the left then pulled the power handle twice, next I rotated the main handle to the right and again pulled the power handle twice, finally I rotated the main handle back to the left and pulled the power handle once. The top dial now read 11 on the scale, exactly between the amber and the red zones. In mathematical terms I had done

7 + 7 - 5 - 5 + 7 = 11

Although nothing seemed to have happened I was confident that power was now being provided to the magnet. I returned to the lever on the wall and pulled it down whilst watching the bridge in the distance. This time it dropped into position… and stayed there. When I approached the bridge I could see that the pathway was indeed staying down but it was wobbling in an alarming manner, almost as if the magnet beneath wasn’t quite up to the job. I quickly crossed over and looked back at the bridge from the other side. Tucked close against the bridge support I spotted a lever and I quickly pulled it down. The bridge immediately stopped wobbling. I could only imagine that a more stable power source was now powering the magnet from this side of the bridge.

The Mine part 2

With the bridge now safely accessible I crossed back over to investigate a table that I had so far ignored. On the table there were magnifying lenses, various crystals and a book that looked quite similar to one I’d seen in the crystal laboratory. I read the page that had been conveniently left open, doubtless containing a key passage that Maythorn wanted me to read. The passage had a heading called The Ancient Gateways and it revealed that the worlds of the Worldchain were all linked by mysterious ancient gateways. Apparently many religions all around the Worldchain believed that the gateways were divine gifts and were subsequently worshipped as holy shrines.

I had read about the Worldchain in the crystal laboratory. It was a connecting link of many worlds that spanned across multiple dimensions and Quern was one of the worlds on the chain. I had struggled with the concept then and I still did now. My mind went back to my first encounter with this place, beside a gateway that I had thought could be a portal. Was that portal one of these ancient gateways? I clung to the concept for it teased me with the compelling notion of being able to return home.

I crossed over the bridge, knowing that I was no closer to unraveling the mystery of this place. The manner in which Maythorn was drip feeding me with tiny snippets of knowledge as a reward for solving his blasted puzzles was maddening. Why couldn’t he just tell me? Why couldn’t he just play it straight and explain the physics of this world to me, man to man? What I had learned so far could’ve been told to me in a few short minutes over a quiet sit down and a nice cool drink.

The bridge spanned a narrow chasm that seemed to be a natural source of orange crystals. This place had to be the place where Maythorn mined the raw crystals. On the far side of the bridge there was a chamber, with tables to the left and right and with a wooden door straight ahead, set in the rock face.

On the left hand table there were two rotating armatures, powered from crystals whose light was focussed through lenses. One crystal was yellow and the other crystal was white. The armature powered by the white crystal was spinning considerably faster than the one powered by the yellow crystal. Beside the two armature casings there was another casing that looked like the outer shell of a battery and I suddenly realised that it had to be here where Maythorn manufactured his batteries. And if he had any sense, I thought, he would make them from white crystals and not yellow. Was this what Maythorn was trying to tell me, that his batteries were made from white crystals?

A dawning realisation came to me then. I picked up the empty battery shell and hefted it in my hand. Was my next puzzle going to be a lesson in battery manufacture? After all I needed one more battery.

Also on the table there was a letter.

This is the exact place where I achieved the breakthrough. After hundreds of failed attempts I finally managed to create a much more efficient energy source capable of providing relatively large amounts of power constantly. This white luminous mineral is the compressed and purified version of the natural, locally common reddish orange coloured energy crystal. To be able to cast specific machine parts I developed a procedure to liquefy this new crystalline material. I thought that a discovery of this magnitude could change the subject of my whole research, even the meaning of my presence here. I was right!

So, I thought. Maythorn has developed a way of liquefying white crystals that was in turn manufactured from yellow crystals. And he was casting machine parts, presumably from the white liquid. It sounded like a way of creating infinite energy! The batteries I had collected so far all had a white stripe running around their middles and I couldn’t help but wonder whether the white stripe was nothing more than a shape created by the casting of white liquid. In fact, I mused, the inside of the battery could be a solid mass of cast white crystal and the stripe could be nothing more than the gap between the upper and lower casings. I looked at the battery shell once more and found it quite easy to see it as the lower casing.

A battery that never ran out.

The yellow glow of the orange crystals took on a new meaning to me as I pondered this discovery. The orange crystals were prolific and Maythorn had apparently mined them in abundance. He’d converted them to white crystals and then reduced them to a liquid. Then he had cast the liquid into moulds to create parts, somehow baked them back into a solid and voila, he had a machine part that provided bountiful energy. Forever.

He hadn’t been kidding when he had claimed to have learned something important.

The Final Battery

On the right hand side of the chamber were two tables separated by an array of what looked like pipe work. On the leftmost table there was set out another of Maythorn’s demos which again showed the superiority of white crystal over yellow. On the rightmost table I found two more components that I reckoned were required for battery manufacture. There was a battery casing that looked like it would be the other half that I needed, namely the upper half, and there was a clay mould that looked remarkably like the shape I would need for casting the battery interior.

There was another small machine here, one that was operated by pressing a button. I had no idea what it was for.

Between the tables there was a strange set of four pipes that looked like a cross between a pipe organ and a drinks dispenser. There were four buttons at the bottom of each pipe and an unusual slider mechanism that slid sideways in front of the pipes. Again I had no idea what it was for.

There was yet another strange contraption in front of the tables with four white spigots sticking out of it. I mentally shrugged. There were a lot of mechanical ‘things’ here, none of which were making any sense to me. I had a vision of Maythorn building them and trying to predict how I would interpret them. The onus was on him to make sure their purpose was clear when the right time came so I moved away from them knowing with surety that I would be back.

I opened the wooden door and was pleased to discover that it lead out to the waterside, close to the cave where I had acquired the last battery and where I had enjoyed a one way conversation with an annoying ball of light.

I figured that I had to build a battery and I had two halves of a battery casing and a mould for casting the liquefied white crystal. I also had a good idea where the white liquid was so I headed off to the alchemy lab where I had recently discovered a vat containing, you guessed it, a white liquid.

My first task was to fill the clay mould with the white liquid. When I reached the recently discovered vat I was delighted but not surprised to find that the mould fitted perfectly to the vat nozzle. It confirmed my belief that everything had been designed by Maythorn for the express purpose of serving my needs, needs designed by Maythorn himself. I was the puppet and Maythorn was the puppet master, pulling and jerking my strings, making me dance to his tune for the express purpose of ‘educating’ me.

I opened the nozzle until a sufficient quantity of white liquid had filled the mould then I carefully lifted the mould away. Now all I needed to do was harden it into a solid shape. Maythorn hadn’t given me any direction on this part of the process and that surely meant he had already imparted the required information to me at some point earlier.

I had an inkling. Back at the north shore, close to the entrance to the main square, there was a kiln. I headed off to it being careful not to spill the precious white liquid. The journey was uneventful and I arrived at the kiln, hoping that I wasn’t mistaken and that this was the place to be. I remembered seeing a metal framework extending out of the kiln, waiting to receive some kind of payload. To my delight the mould fitted onto the framework and again I found myself thinking of Maythorn and his devious planning. Despite seeing this kiln here quite a while ago I now realised it was here for just one purpose - to bake me a battery!

In the base of the kiln there was a hexagonal plate that exactly matched the base of my red crystal. When I snapped the crystal in place the light of the crystal quickly went to work and ignited the fire inside. I retrieved the crystal and pulled the lever that I knew would retract the mould into the oven and provide a timed bake.

When the kiln door opened I peered cautiously at the baked mould. The white innards of the mould certainly looked solid and I lifted it away from the kiln being careful not to burn my fingers. Yes, it had completely solidified! I shook the mould, trying to extract the white interior but it was sealed tight inside the mould.

I needed to get the battery core out of the mould and then attach the two battery casings but it became quickly apparent that this wasn’t a job for fingers alone. I needed a machine of some kind to provide the necessary leverage. I wasn’t too sure what to do but I headed back to the mine, reasonably confident that one or more of the unknown contraptions in there would serve to extract the core. After all, it was in there where Maythorn had built his own batteries.

It was the small machine that sat on the rightmost table that did the trick. The mould fitted perfectly onto the rests of the machine and when I pushed the button the mould was spun upside down and the core was smartly knocked out.

Now all I needed to do was assemble the three parts but I needed to assure myself that I was going to assemble them in the correct order and alignment. I made my way back to the generator room where the other four batteries were busy powering up the various doors. I decided to use the remaining empty socket as my ‘workbench’ using the other batteries as a reference and surprisingly the process proved to be extremely simple. First I pushed the battery base into the socket, then I carefully inserted the white core into the base. Finally I positioned the battery top over the core and pressed them together. The final result immediately began providing power to the generator and to my relief the final icon lit up. It was a gearwheel and in lighting up it completed the set of eight icons.

I made a mental note of the five batteries that were lined up like little soldiers before me. Each battery had a different white pattern and I wasn’t being fooled. Nothing was wasted here in Maythorn’s world and differences like this would at some stage be relevant. The five patterns were circle, rectangle, hexagon, diamond and oval.

The Mechanics part 1

I already knew where the doors controlled by the gearwheel icon were. There were two of them, leading into the same building and it was the only remaining locked building in the main square. In one of his letters Maythorn had spoken of the Mechanics and that it would be powered up once all icons were lit. I wondered if the Mechanics, whatever they were, would be inside this building.

From the generator room it was just a few short steps to the door of the building but although the door was open there was a smooth metal shield preventing entry. Undeterred I headed through the entrance to the north shore, passed by the kiln, and tried the other entrance. This too was open but again there was a smooth metal wall preventing further ingress.

I pondered on this and eventually I remembered that there were cables entering the building from a nearby contraption that was only accessible via the ladder that I had repaired. I climbed up the ladder and followed the path to the end where there was a table, a machine and three cables heading off to the building. The machine had been dead and lifeless when I had last seen it but now some of the front panel was illuminated. So here was the next puzzle, fresh from the devious mind of Maythorn, and one I would have to master before being ‘allowed’ to gain access to the building.

I sighed and studied the control panel that faced me. There were four concentric rings, some of which were illuminated. To the right there was a big button which when pressed selected which rings lit up. I pressed the button a few times and concluded that there were four configurations that were selected cyclically. If the outer ring was ring 1 and the inner ring was ring 4 then the four configurations were rings 1+4, rings 2+4, rings 1+3 and then ring 2 on its own.
The lit rings could be rotated by a central handle whilst the unlit rings remained stationary. In each ring was a missing segment and I realised that the missing segments had to be lined up in a row to solve the puzzle. To add to the mystery the segments had two possible ways of being lined up, these were to the left or to the right, yielding two possible solutions.

The solution was as follows.

• Select configuration 1+3 then rotate the missing segment in ring 3 to the desired position.
  
• Select configuration 1+4 then rotate the missing segment in ring 1 to line up with ring 3.
  
• Select configuration 2+4 then rotate the missing segment in ring 4 to line up with rings 1 and 3.
  
• Select configuration 2 then rotate the missing segment in ring 2 to line up with the other rings.

I chose the right hand solution first and was rewarded with a distant chiming sound when I completed the solution. Whilst rotating the rings I also noticed that the view through the far window of the building changed, as if the rotating rings were being duplicated inside the walls of the building. It was, once again, a fascinating puzzle and a masterwork in mechanical design.

Intriguingly there was a slotted handle on the left hand side of the rings but it refused to move or do anything useful.

I headed down the ladder to see what effect, if any, had been achieved and was rewarded to find the nearest door now fully open whilst the farthest door in the main square was still closed off. I suspected that the farthest door would open if I solved the puzzle for the left hand solution but the nearest door might then close. Quite why the building would require two doors that were differently opened I didn’t know.

I entered the building to be confronted by a semicircular room full of mechanical items. The building, it seemed, was bisected into two halves and through a window in the bisecting wall I could see the other half. So, I thought, that explains the need for two doors. A semicircular table was positioned against the bisecting wall. Gearwheels, cogs and various mechanical bits were strewn around everywhere and beneath the table I could see moving wheels, revolving endlessly in a cloud of steam and busy on some unknown task.

On the table there was a letter.

You managed to get into the mechanics. Clearly you’ve completed all of my previous challenges. This could mean that you are a genius fulfilling all of my expectations and you are truly worthy of all the further knowledge I am about to offer you. Or you could just as well be a fool, considering the fact that the power of Quern literally gives you infinite time to guess the solutions of all my puzzles. One way or the other, I am sure your presence here is no mistake. Your participation in this matter is absolutely essential. If she were to appear to you, she would try to poison your mind with her misleading lies. You must ignore her just as I once did.

Maythorn had a way with words that once again exasperated me. He was complimentary and condescending at the same time as he wondered whether I was a worthy hero or an utter fool. I was neither. I was just a man caught up in his world trying to get to the end of a long trial with no idea why.

There was another note on the table containing six cryptic statements. The note was written on stiff card and strangely written in white ink.

• From number 5 number 3 is reachable with a knight’s move.
  
• The sum of the numbers in the 3rd row is 7.
  
• Number 4 stands alone in the column on the far left.
  
• In none of the rows can stand a number that’s greater than the numbers in the row below it.
  
• If you add up all the numbers in the 4th column, the result is 3.
  
• Number 5 is the only one standing alone in both its row and column

Beside the table there was a stand containing a 4 x 4 array of holes, five of which were occupied by pegs numbered 1 to 5. Next to the array there was a lever. I pulled one of the pegs out to see that it was an elaborate column of cogs mounted on a shaft. Once inserted back into the grid I assumed that the cogs meshed with other internal cogs. Looking again at the note it seemed that I had to move the pegs around so as to satisfy the six statements.

It was an exercise in logic and the solution was as follows.

• Place peg 1 in row 1 column 3
  
• Place peg 2 in row 2 column 3
  
• Place peg 3 in row 3 column 4
  
• Place peg 4 in row 4 column 1
  
• Place peg 5 in row 5 column 2

Once I had the pegs in place I pulled the lever that was positioned next to the grid and watched a shaft extend outwards to the left. At the end of the shaft there was a gearwheel which smoothly engaged with more wheels mounted on the left hand wall of the room. I had no idea what the wheels did but I could see that I had completed the linkage by solving the puzzle.

The Mechanics part 2

There was little else to do in this room. The mechanical assembly beneath the table continued to spin, ticking away like a giant clock. On the table there was a jar with a rounded top that looked like it might be usable but I left it there and decided to go back up the ladder and try the second solution to the ring puzzle.

Once I reached the machine I quickly adjusted the rings to solve the left hand solution. I then descended the ladder, hurried over the main square and checked the doorway to the Mechanics building. It was now open and I stepped inside to discover another semicircular space, this being the second half that I had spied through the window of the bisecting wall. It was just as steamy and noisy as the other half but not as untidy. The only item of interest was a panel on the left wall, positioned beside a set of gearwheels that looked remarkably similar to the set in the first half of the building. In solving the last puzzle I had succeeded in engaging a missing gearwheel to complete the linkage. Now on this side I could see that a similar wheel was missing and it seemed obvious to me that I needed to complete the linkage in the same way. Unfortunately the gearwheels were locked away behind a grilled door which was frustrating because I was sure that the rusty gearwheel I already had in my possession was the one for the job. All I had to do was unlock the door and fit the gearwheel.

I eyed up the panel on the left of the lock. There were six vertical buttons and the bottom one was lit. Beside the five unlit buttons there were little horns, like little Victorian loudspeakers. When I pushed one of the unlit buttons the accompanying horn sounded out a note and I quickly tested each button to find out that each accompanying horn sounded out a different note.

I eventually pushed the bottom button and the machine played three notes. When I copied the three notes by pushing the correct three buttons a new light came on at the top of the panel. It was one of three so I figured I had to reproduce notes two more times in order to fully illuminate the top light.

I remembered a game from my childhood called Simon where a sequence of notes had to be copied using memory. This was no different. The second time I pressed the bottom button I heard five notes which I duly copied. The third press resulted in me listening to a fourteen note sequence which again I copied. Fourteen notes were difficult to remember but thankfully I found paper and pencil to note them down as they played out.

I tried the grilled door and thankfully it swung open to reveal the gearwheels. I hefted the gearwheel out of my inventory and was pleased to see that it fitted perfectly. Now I had, in my estimation, both gear mechanisms in a working state. All I had to do now was discover how to use it.

With nothing obvious to see either inside or outside I ended up returning to the ring puzzle, the one at the top of the ladder. I had already made a mental note that there was a mysterious slotted handle on the left hand side of the rings so I decided to give it a pull to see if it did anything. To my delight I heard a rumbling coming from inside the building and through the building window I could see movement. The movement appeared to be downwards rather than sideways which was unexpected.

I headed back to the building. Ordinarily my legs would have been protesting madly by now having ascended and descended the ladder so many times but I was not at all tired or exhausted. It was a strange feeling, not getting tired or hungry, and I felt in my mind that I should take a rest but my body kept telling me otherwise.

I entered the building and stood there in amazement. The bisecting wall had gone, the junk, the gears, everything that had been present earlier had gone. Even the steam and the ticking noise had gone. In their place was one big room with things against the circular wall and an open space in the middle. Standing at the northern door as I was, there was a long table to my right that appeared to be full of the usual junk and above the table was a blackboard with a circular diagram chalked on it.

On the left of the table there was a box with glass sides and inside the box was a key that I recognised. I already had two keys that were very similar to this one and yet were unique because they had configurable teeth. The one in the box looked remarkably similar having what looked like four teeth whereas the ones in my pocket had two and three teeth respectively. I was not at all surprised to find out that I couldn’t open the box and when I inspected the box for a keyhole I couldn’t find one. On the side of the box was a circular depression that looked like it might accept a circular key but I had no idea what to do with it.

Next to the box, sitting on velvet, there was another unusual looking key. This one had eight white spigots sticking out, like teeth but they were quite fragile looking. In fact, I thought, they almost looked like small white hexagonal crystals. I picked the key up and examined it more closely. The crystal spigots were adjustable and could be raised and lowered in pairs.

I had seen something like this earlier, something about the four white spigots…

The rest of the table contained lots of bits but nothing looked useful. Bits of battery, papers, books, mostly junk.

I looked around the room and saw five panels spaced around the wall. The panels were identical in shape and they appeared to be connected together by a pipe that encircled the room at ceiling level. A sixth panel was also connected to the pipe and it was of a different design for on the front it had a torch holder and a lens that would direct light into the pipe. I fitted the torches that I was carrying into the holder, orange then blue then red, but nothing happened.

I studied the diagram on the blackboard and realised it was a map of the room and it labelled the five panels with symbols made up of vertical lines, horizontal lines and diagonal lines. On each panel there was a smaller panel with a starburst design on it and I could see that the symbols on the blackboard were partial drawings of the starburst pattern. I’d seen that starburst somewhere else but I couldn’t remember where.

The Mine part 3

There didn’t seem to be much to do in the room, despite there being plenty of mysterious contraptions. Eventually I conceded that I had to go elsewhere and my mind turned to the key with the white spigots. I was certain that I’d seen similar spigots somewhere else and furthermore quite recently.

I meandered around and eventually found them in the mining area where I had collected the battery components. There was a machine here, fixed between the two tables, consisting of four vertical pipes. Feeding into this machine was a contraption with four white spigots sticking out of it. The coincidence was too high to ignore so I took the key and inserted it into a slot beneath the spigots. It fitted fine and the spigots on the key pushed up against the spigots on the machine, raising them upwards to a new height. Before inserting the key all of the machine spigots had been level but now with the key inserted the four spigots were no longer level. I knew that the key spigots could be individually raised and lowered so it seemed to me that it would be possible to raise or lower each key spigot in order to raise and lower each of the machine spigots. I was sure that the challenge was to configure the key spigots to bring the machine spigots back into line when the key was inserted.

The solution was fairly simple to reach. Looking at the key with the handle on the right then the spigot positions were:

• Set the leftmost spigot (furthest from the handle) into the middle position.
  
• Set the next spigot into the fully raised position.
  
• Set the next spigot into the middle position.
  
• Set the rightmost spigot (nearest the handle) into the fully lowered position.

As soon as I inserted the key with the spigots set correctly there was a click and the four vertical pipes spun around to reveal a graduated scale running up each pipe. The left pipe was marked with nine positions on the scale and all of the positions were illuminated. The shorter second pipe was marked with four positions, none of which were illuminated. The third pipe was marked with twelve positions and none of the positions were illuminated. The fourth rightmost pipe was marked with nine positions and four of them were illuminated.

I fiddled about with the mechanism and quickly found out that the illuminated positions could be transferred between the pipes. A button at the bottom of each pipe marked the source, a slider mechanism running horizontally along the bottom marked the destination and a lever on the right performed the transfer.

On the third pipe there was a marker set to position 10. The puzzle was to fill the third pipe up to the marker by transferring the illuminated positions between the pipes.

This was similar to a classic puzzle usually depicted by moving water between different sized bottles containing different starting volumes of water. It was another Maythorn classic, presented through the construction of gratuitous mechanics. Considering that everything in this world was aimed at me and me alone I supposed that I ought to have felt honoured but oddly I just felt a mental weariness that made me want to kick the machine. Professor William Maythorn was a man who I really wanted to meet and it wasn’t in order to shake his bloody hand.

To the right of the pipes I noticed that another little door had opened to reveal a small container in which there was an empty torch holder and the small container was connected by three narrow pipes to the bigger pipes which suggested to me that it was linked in an important way. Furthermore, to the left of the pipes I noticed that there were three orange torches also connected in a similar manner using three narrow pipes each. I placed my orange torch into the holder where it fitted snugly and then closed the door. That made three orange torches on the left and my orange torch on the right. Was it important? I didn’t know but it seemed somehow logical. The three torches were telling me something and the container on the right had to be there for a reason.

I set to and worked out the solution to the pipe puzzle. The starting configuration was 9004, this being the number of lights in the four pipes from left to right. Six steps from this configuration got me to the solution as follows:

• Move pipe 4 to pipe 3
  
• Move pipe 1 to pipe 3
  
• Move pipe 3 to pipe 4
  
• Move pipe 3 to pipe 2
  
• Move pipe 4 to pipe 3
  
• Move pipe 1 to pipe 3

As soon as pipe 3 displayed 10 then I saw one of the torches on the left burn up before turning black in a cloud of evil looking smoke. At the same time my torch on the right blazed up quite brightly before settling down with a paler but brighter light than before. The pipes meanwhile flashed their lights and ended up restoring themselves into the 9004 configuration. The marker on pipe 3 was now set to 6.

What had happened? It seemed to me that the energy in the torch on the left had been transferred somehow into the torch on the right. Certainly the left torch was no longer shining which was new to me. Until now the orange crystals had provided infinite light albeit at a low energy level but now the torch was black and very definitely dead. The right torch however was no longer orange. It was paler in colour but brighter than before, as if it contained the energy of two torches.

Crikey, I thought. This is an energy transferal machine!

There were two more orange torches on the left and I was in no doubt that they were in the queue for energy transferal. I was in the process of creating some kind of supertorch containing the energy of four orange crystals.

The next sequence, to provide a solution for setting pipe 3 to 6 was as follows:

• Move pipe 4 to pipe 3
  
• Move pipe 1 to pipe 3
  
• Move pipe 3 to pipe 4
  
• Move pipe 1 to pipe 2
  
• Move pipe 4 to pipe 2
  
• Move pipe 3 to pipe 1
  
• Move pipe 4 to pipe 3

A second torch turned black and smoky on the left and the torch on the right shone brighter than ever with a clean pale light. The whole container rattled alarmingly and I had a stark vision of the whole machine exploding in my face. The marker on pipe 3 moved to position 11.

The final sequence was as follows:

• Move pipe 4 to pipe 3
  
• Move pipe 1 to pipe 3
  
• Move pipe 3 to pipe 4
  
• Move pipe 4 to pipe 2
  
• Move pipe 2 to pipe 3
  
• Move pipe 4 to pipe 2
  
• Move pipe 2 to pipe 3

With a bang that made me jump the container containing the torch flew apart as the front half flew across the chamber. The torch itself blazed in a bright white light, spilling out energy and light into the room like a mini sun. I waited but nothing further happened so I tentatively took the torch. Despite its brightness the torch was cold and all traces of the original yellow had gone. I was holding a white crystal torch and it hurt my eyes to look directly at it, such was its brightness.

Juggling Batteries

I had no idea what to do with this white torch but I knew places where there was a torch holder to try it out in. I headed back to the mechanical room because there was one in there and I quickly slotted my new torch into place. The result was dramatic. The other five panels lit up, displaying partial starburst patterns and a couple of lights in the panels continued shining upwards to be reflected further upwards through the ceiling. I looked over at the diagram on the blackboard and noted that the same patterns that were chalked up were in a different order to those on the panels. Where the diagram agreed with the panel then that was where the lights continued up to the ceiling. All I needed to do, I thought bleakly, was work out how to fiddle with the order on the panels so as to get them in the same order as the chalky diagram.

I had been thinking a lot about where else I had seen the starburst pattern before and I eventually remembered where it was - in the generator room. The generator room was very close, just across the main square, and I headed over there. Right beside the entrance there was a machine fastened to the wall and on it there was a starburst pattern, exactly the same as the patterns in the machine room. Next to the starburst there was a socket and I chided myself for not seeing it earlier. The socket was the same shape and size as the five battery sockets on the other side of the room and that meant a battery would fit in it.

I picked a battery at random and plugged it in. There was a lever above the battery that I pulled down and to my delight the starburst lit up showing a pattern that I was sure was one of the patterns in the mechanical room. I decided to try a different battery and this time the pattern was different but once again I was sure that the pattern was repeated in the mechanical room.

I had a suspicion what needed to be done. I already knew that every battery was different by virtue of the white pattern on the side of the battery. Now I suspected that the partial starburst pattern would be different for every battery and that I could match the white patterns with the starburst patterns. My suspicion was that the five batteries needed plugging into the five sockets in the same order as the five patterns drawn on the blackboard.

After checking every battery and noting their pattern I returned to the mechanical room and cross referenced the patterns with those on the blackboard. This gave me an order in which to place the batteries. I then hastened back to the generator room and swapped the batteries around into what I hoped was the correct order.

The battery order, from left to right, was diamond, hexagon, circle, rectangle and oval.

When I returned to the generator room I was pleased to see that all of the lights were now being directed upwards into the ceiling and furthermore a new button had appeared on a pedestal near the centre of the room. When I pressed the button the circular grill in the centre of the room began to rise, heading higher and higher until it reached the ceiling. In rising it created a spiral staircase, stretching from top to bottom and looking like it had always been there.

This mechanical room was indeed a marvel of 3D design. Originally consisting of two semicircular rooms with a bisecting wall it had collapsed downwards into a large room with items left lying on the tables looking like they’d been undisturbed for God knows how long. And now part of the floor had been raised into a spiral staircase providing access upwards into what looked like a loft space. My undying anger at Maythorn for bringing me here remained strong but my admiration for his ingenuity and knowledge was growing all the time.

The Loft

I climbed the staircase to discover a circular loft space with a few items scattered around against the walls. My attention was first drawn to a letter.

Those couple hundred years have passed quickly. I managed to master the use of all the natural resources including all kinds of metals and all the minerals this island had to offer. After I developed the new energy source, the pure white energy crystal, I thought that by harnessing the power of my new invention I was capable of anything. I felt like a god. Those were the golden ages of my presence here. At that point she tried to convince me again to leave. Naturally, I did not listen. She clearly could not understand the complexity and the importance of my work here. The great power I wish to acquire here could change the lives of thousands, if not millions of people.

The letter, like so many of the others that I’d read, told me nothing other than that he considered himself more and more omnipotent whilst judging his female antagonist to be a complete moron. It was classic Maythorn.

The letter was on a table below a large brass looking sphere whose function I couldn’t begin to guess at. There was a round, bright display beside the sphere, a circle with a few radial lines at various angles. Moving clockwise around the loft space I first examined a larger copy of the bright display showing the same set of radial lines. From this display two connecting wires were strung across to a central machine that was fixed to the ceiling. Next I came to a blue sphere that was attached to a bracket on the wall. Below the sphere there was a sliding handle that wouldn’t move. Finally I came upon three diagrams pinned to the wall but I could make no sense of them.

The central machine was a bulky heavy looking machine with a white handle designed to slide horizontally. Like the other handle it wouldn’t move. In the floor, five lights shone upwards from the room below, but they just petered out in the central part of the ceiling. All that effort Maythorn had engineered below to activate five lights and get them to shine upwards seemed to be wasted.

The Ruins

There was certainly a lot of stuff to take in here and it looked like new stuff that hinted to me of future puzzles. I still had a few existing puzzles to work on however so I tried not to be drawn in to what I was seeing here. I had my nice new white torch and I had a feeling I still had more to discover with it. I had my two configurable keys and I knew of a third, sitting in a box in the mechanical room. Three similar looking keys with a different number of teeth on each. I had been pondering this issue for quite a while now and I had a good idea where to go to resolve it. In the centre of the main square there was the mysterious tall tower and I had managed to reveal a pedestal at its base that had three strange keyholes. A prime candidate if ever there was one.

I descended the spiral staircase, retrieved my white torch and set off for the pedestal at the base of the tower. The pedestal was still there and I examined the three keyholes more closely. Sure enough, the keyholes required different keys having two, three and four teeth respectively. I took out my two teeth key and adjusted the teeth so as to match the keyhole. When I inserted it the bolt for that key position was smoothly drawn back. I repeated the move with my three teeth key and the respective bolt was drawn back as well. Now all I needed was the four teeth key from the mechanical room and I would be able to fully unlock this pedestal.

Next I headed up the path that passed by the crystal laboratory before passing by the entrance to the mine. I was heading towards the telescope with the intention of fitting the white torch to the telescope’s eyepiece, just to see what would happen, but when I passed through the arched gate I decided instead to try the path to the right, the one that came to a dead end beside the window that was below the balcony of the crystal laboratory. I had only walked this way once before and passage had been denied by a large gap in the path. However right next to the gap there was a torch bracket, one I had no understanding of.

The gap was as I remembered it, revealing a drop down that would severely test my immortality in this world were I to fall. Pulling out the white torch I pushed it into the sconce where it fitted snugly with the bright light in just the right position to flood a nearby lens that was built into the wall. To my delight small metal sections slid and unfolded out so as to fill the gap, creating a walkway that looked safe and passable.

I retrieved my torch and after confirming that the new section wasn’t about to fold away I crossed over to enter a new area of the island. There were steps leading downwards between steep rock walls and to my left a fence protected me from falling into the sea. I soon reached an intersection where the path continued to the right and a wooden bridge hung over the water, swinging in the breeze and looking a little bit unsafe. Next to the swaying bridge were two cupboards with heavy metal doors.

To my surprise the doors were not locked. In the top cupboard there was a drawing and in the bottom cupboard there was an object that looked a bit like an electric torch. The drawing made little sense to me, much like all drawings in this place when first seen and the torch was unusual in having a blue bulb that reminded me of the blue sphere on the wall in the mechanical loft.

I carried on down the path where it continued to follow the edge of the water before heading down more steps culminating in what seemed to be a dead end. As I approached the final wall I heard a click at my feet and the wall began to slide sideways, disappearing into a slot in the cliff face. Beyond the wall the way continued onwards and I recognised it as being the northern shore, close to the kiln. It was another way out, revealed by me inadvertently stepping on a pressure plate. It was a happy find as it added another route to my mental map.

I returned to the bridge. As I stepped onto the wooden planks I steadied myself despite knowing that the bridge was secure and safe enough. I just don’t like swaying bridges, okay? I was half way across when my wobbly concentration was suddenly interrupted by the arrival of a ball of light that swept fearlessly across the water beside me. It was her, Maythorn’s antagonist and unwelcome companion. In Maythorn’s eyes she was an interloper, an intruder and a nuisance. To me she was still an enigma, brazen and cold but clearly having a different mindset to the professor.

Her mental voice filled my mind.

“Look around you. This is the gift the last one who called himself an explorer left behind. Seeking power, he defiled this once sacred grounds. And I couldn't stop him. I'll carry this burden forever.”

As she spoke she moved over the water, clearly drawing my attention to what lay below her. Wrecked buildings and destruction, laying haphazardly in the water. Was this Maythorn’s doing, this dreadful damage?

She then darted away, disappearing down the path towards the north shore. I momentarily forgot about my unease on the bridge as I replayed in my mind what she had said. Left behind. Maythorn had gone, he’d departed from this world and gone elsewhere. I’d always hoped that he was still here somewhere and that my torturous route through his puzzles would bring me closer and closer until at the end I would meet him face to face. I needed answers and I needed to know why. Why was I here? Why me? But now I felt a loss inside myself. I was alone in this world, chasing a ghost who possibly no longer existed. Where had he gone? Had he gone through a portal? Could I follow him? Why had he gone? The questions rippled through my mind as the import of her words struck home and I began to feel truly alone. Maythorn was no hero of mine but he was a fellow human being after all. And he’d gone.

I made my way unsteadily across the rest of the bridge to find a metal gate blocking the way. I couldn’t see a way to unlock it.

Lighting the Way

I despondently made my way back across the bridge and trudged back towards the mechanical room and the loft. I had uncovered a new area but all I had to show for it was a blue torch that shone a transient blue beam at wherever I pointed it. It vaguely reminded me of a remote control device. It wasn’t much and the only thing I had to go on was that it looked a bit like the blue globe in the loft space of the mechanical room. So I headed there to see if I could learn more.

Once in the loft I pointed my remote control at the blue sphere and watched as the blue beam lit up the target. Interestingly the sphere immediately turned white. Below the sphere there was a handle and I quickly pulled it down, wondering if it would now do anything.

I wasn’t disappointed because once again there was a rumble of stone moving on stone and various things around me began to move. Firstly a section of the domed roof opened up to admit daylight and provide a pleasant wash of fresh air. The central machine began to swing upwards, revolving vertically and then extending outwards until it was pointing like a horizontal cannon through the new opening in the dome. The whole loft space then slowly revolved, turning the cannon and the entire dome until it pointed in a direction that seemed to satisfy it.

The similarity to a cannon wasn’t lost in me. There was a strong white beam of light issuing from the mouth of the cannon, shining brightly across the land beneath. Looking at the mechanism I could see that the five lights coming up from below were now focussed on the rear of the cannon and their collective light was being focussed and amplified to create this intense beam.

Below the new opening there was a set of controls. Four white buttons were directional controls allowing me to move the cannon around and point it anywhere I fancied. To the right of the controls there was a lever that set the speed of the cannon’s movement, allowing me to finely position the beam on whatever target I had in mind. To the left of the controls there was a directional indicator that showed the bearing of the cannon.

It was a mind boggling transformation and it added to my admiration in Maythorn’s ability to design and build. I was already impressed with this amazing building in how it had reconfigured itself from two bisected rooms into one larger one and then how it had revealed a spiral staircase leading into this loft space but now it had surpassed itself in revealing this cannon that had been hidden away above the loft. I shook my head in wonder.

As I moved the cannon around onto different distant targets I noticed that the image cast into the distance was the pattern that was on display on the wall beside me. It was a circular pattern with dark spoked lines.

I looked again at the three diagrams that were also pinned up beside me. They were labelled 1, 2 and 3 and they each had another number and what looked like a picture. The first diagram had the number 70 and I wondered whether this was a bearing. Were these clues telling me where to point the cannon?

It was an easy thing to check out. I rotated the cannon until the directional indicator pointed to 70 and then panned the beam in a vertical direction looking for some kind of target. There! On the side of a cliff face there was a blue light! It was difficult to make it out from this distance but it was somewhere over on the north shore.

The beam seemed to have no affect on the blue target so I headed down the spiral staircase and tried to hunt it down for a closer look. I could actually see the beam shooting across the sky above me as I headed across the main square but the further I got from the cannon the fainter the beam became. Nonetheless I was able to ascertain the general direction and I ended up standing beside the chest on the north shore, the one with two locks that had required two keys. I spotted the target then, high above me on the side of a stone cliff. It was a blue target much like the one I had seen in the loft space and I knew what I had to do. I pulled out the remote control, pointed it at the target and watched in delight as a circular plate beside the target opened up to reveal a spoked pattern. It was a different pattern to the one I’d already seen but it was obviously of the same type.

I hurried back to the loft and adjusted the cannon to point directly at the plate target. When nothing happened I wasn’t at all surprised as the patterns didn’t match.
Now, I thought, all I have to do is find a way of altering the transmitted pattern from the cannon in order to get a match.

I studied the cannon. The white handle beckoned to me and I gave it a tug. It hadn’t budged the last time I’d tried it but this time it slid smoothly and a set of lenses in a cartridge dropped down to where I could reach them. At the same time a floor extended across the spiral staircase to give me easy access to the lenses. They were all etched with patterns and each one could be individually loaded and unloaded from the barrel of the cannon. It seemed to me that the transmitted pattern had to be an overlay of all the lenses that were loaded.

If awards could be given for puzzle building then Maythorn probably deserved one. Dreaming up the puzzle was the easy part; building it from raw materials and making it function was the truly ingenious part. Maythorn had plenty of ingenuity, of that I was certain.

I tinkered with the lenses. As well as being able to load and unload them I found that once loaded they could be rotated. All I had to do was find which combination of lenses and turns were required to create the pattern. Worryingly there were six slots for lenses but only four were present and I knew that Maythorn didn’t do anything unless it was significant. I suspected that I would need to find the other two lenses.

Nevertheless I had a go at producing the pattern using the four lenses that were available and eventually I succeeded using only three of them. I numbered the slots 1 to 6 from left to right and noted that slots 4 and 6 were empty. I ended up loading slots 1, 2 and 5 and leaving slot 3 unloaded. The required pattern was then achieved by rotating the loaded lenses. It was a bit hit and miss but the large copy on the wall showed me how I was doing.

Once I had the correct pattern I restored the white handle back to where it came from and the lens cartridge lifted back into place. I then aligned the beam with the distant plate and I was rewarded with a flash of light. Something had happened but I didn’t know what.

The second diagram was at bearing 347 and I rotated the cannon in the same manner as before. I spotted the blue light high up on the cliff face but when I left the building to get closer I found that I couldn’t get close enough to activate it using my remote control.

I then tried the third bearing at 248. This one turned out to be a lot closer and I found it hiding in plain sight by the hanging rock. When I tried to activate it I had no trouble at all but then when I tried to reproduce the pattern in the cannon I failed miserably. I seemed that I needed one of the missing lenses.

I had to conclude that the first activation at bearing 70 must have achieved something to progress me further. My route through this world, as usual, was being determined by Maythorn and, as usual, he wasn’t making it easy. Interestingly the position of the first target was very close to the new metal door that I had recently discovered so I went to check it out. To my delight I saw that the door had opened and that the swaying bridge now led into a new area.

Green is for Go

It was a small rocky area on a small island surrounded by more rocks over the water that were tantalisingly near but too far away to reach. There was a mechanism here that immediately held my attention, not because of its shape and complexity, but because of the green glow that emanated from it. I had seen that green hue before and it was a colour I still thought about quite often. It was the colour of the portal that I now assumed had brought me here. When I had first woken up here my first memory had been of the gate and its sickly green hue. It was the colour of a waygate.

When I walked up to it I saw that there was a green crystal clamped in the centre area and from it a green beam was being emitted downwards, focussed using the usual lens arrays that were prevalent hereabouts. There was a wheel beside the emitter and I turned it to discover that I could rotate the green beam in a vertical direction. Beside the mechanism I saw a hand print emblazoned on a panel and it was the same type of hand print I’d seen on the waygate back at the start. It was to do with transporters, I thought. Was I getting close to the end of my journey at last? I couldn’t resist the impulse to reach out and touch the hand and I was besieged with a moment of dizziness that passed as quickly as it arrived. On the stone wall behind the mechanism was a plaque with the letter A on it.

In the centre of the area there was a pedestal containing a clear globe and this one I could rotate horizontally. There were a set of lenses attached to the globe that suggested the setting up of a direction.

I rotated the green crystal until the light fell upon the clear globe. It seemed the logical thing to do. A horizontal shaft of light then issued out through the lens assembly. I looked about and spotted another green crystal on a neighbouring rocky plateau so I rotated the globe until the green beam shone across the water and onto this second crystal. As I did so the green beam became brighter as if it was being reinforced by the energy of the second crystal.

I noticed a broken bridge that had once spanned the water where the green beam now travelled. Looking around further I then spotted another green crystal in the other direction but it was high up on another little rocky islet.

After a moment’s deliberation I pressed the hand print again. To be honest there was nothing else to try but I didn’t care to undergo the nauseating dizziness that I had just experienced. When I pressed against the print I was surrounded by a green glow and then I moved. The sensation was of travelling along the green beam and it all happened very quickly. One second I was standing by the green crystal staring at the plaque with an A on it, the next second I was staring at a different plaque which had on it a B. Unbelievably I was standing beside the second crystal and I turned around to look back at where I had come from, in the distance over the water.

To say I was taken aback was an understatement. I didn’t believe for a second that Maythorn had invented waygate travel but I did believe that he had found a way to harness it and exploit it. I already knew that waygates were used as a mode of travel between worlds, the books I’d already read told me that. And I knew that waygate technology was much older than Maythorn, despite his claim of longevity. No, he had somehow discovered an energy source in these green crystals, a new colour to me, and it was an energy that he had harnessed to power waygates.

Looking down at the green crystal before me I saw that it had another hand print, waiting to be pressed. I blithely pressed it and I found myself transported back to the first crystal. Where had Maythorn got these hand print panels from? Had he plundered old waygates, cannibalising them for spare parts? Had he, in so doing, broken the one I had first arrived in rendering it impossible to return home?

Here was a thing to ponder. The ball of light, the woman, had informed me of the destruction of buildings by Maythorn. She had shown me the debris in the water close by. She was telling me quite clearly that Maythorn was doing more than learning the new physics of this world but in so doing he was harming it, plundering it. And perhaps, I mused, he was also plundering the portals and in so doing harming the links between the worlds of this Worldchain. It was certainly something to think about.

I transported myself back to B and looked around. A pathway led away, crossing over a wooden gangway that served as a small bridge. On the gangway there was a hexagonal panel with six nodes and a central button. Positions A and B were marked on the panel making me think this was something to do with the transporters.

Further along the path I came to a second hexagonal panel sporting six outer nodes that appeared to be lights and a seventh central node. Some of the nodes were illuminated. Four keys extended out from the bottom of the panel and when depressed they turned some lights off and others on. A lever on the left changed the action of the keys, making them operate a different set of lights.

Beyond the hexagonal panel the pathway came to an abrupt end where there was a suspended table hanging from the rocks above. On the table there was the usual collection of discarded bits, a diagram, a metallic quadrant and a letter pinned beneath the quadrant. The diagram showed A and B with a six hop hexagonal route mapped between them.

I pocketed the quadrant and opened the letter.

The opportunity I was given was meant to be shared among the worthy. My goal has become to readjust the gateway and to make this world more easily approachable. Although no one has ever been able to even scratch an ancient gateway before, using the purified power I discovered, I managed to disassemble it, and get access to its crystals. Doing so, I also shut down the gateway temporarily. I imprisoned myself in this world for the sake of science. I had to make this sacrifice. To form a testing field for this type of rare mineral, I had to demolish several Dulmarian buildings.

So, I thought. Here was Maythorn openly admitting that he had tinkered with the gateways. It sounded to me like he had pillaged the green crystals and as a result had knackered the local gateways. He also admitted that he had deliberately demolished several of the indigenous buildings, a fact that had already been pointed out to me.

Building the Link

So what to do next? I was certain that the next challenge for me was right here, amongst these islands. I retraced my steps, examined my options and I studied the two hexagonal panels and the transporters. The diagram on the table showed a six hop connection between A and B yet I already had a connection, a two hop connection. The only conclusion I could reach was that the six hop connection was another way to get back to A and it was one I needed to discover and set up, presumably so that I could then use the two hop link for another purpose.

Next to the B crystal there was a lever and when I pulled it the glass globe in the first area rose upwards until it was level with the other green crystal that I could see beyond it. That was the key piece of information I needed. I had to reach that distant green crystal, let’s call it C for now. With the globe elevated then I could link the globe to it. And A could then be swivelled vertically to establish a new connection, a new two hop link between A and C.

Further exploration led me to discover a lever on the first hexagonal panel. When I pulled it down the panel powered up and a pointer appeared in each corresponding position that was illuminated on the right hexagonal panel. And when I pressed the central button the pointers rotated. It was then I realised what I needed to do. I needed to establish the six hop route by rotating the pointers to match the connection in the diagram. I also saw that for each visible pointer on the panel a corresponding clear globe appeared, rising from a hexagonally capped silo. These had to be the actual links for the new route.

The challenge was in setting up the pointers. The diagram showed the six hop connection from A to B and it involved five pointers that controlled five clear globe pillars. I named the pointers 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5, starting from A and moving towards B.

Step 1 was to set up pointer 1 without caring what the other pointers were set to. On the second hexagonal panel I jiggled with the four keys until light 1 came on. Then on the first panel I pulled the lever and then pressed button A until pointer 1 pointed to pointer 2. Finally I pulled the lever again.

Step 2 was to set up pointer 2. On the second panel I jiggled with the four keys until light 1 was off and light 2 was on. Then on the first panel I pulled the lever and then pressed button A until pointer 2 pointed to pointer 3. Finally I pulled the lever again.

Step 3 was to set up pointer 3. On the second panel I jiggled with the four keys until lights 1 and 2 were off and light 3 was on. Then on the first panel I pulled the lever and then pressed button A until pointer 3 pointed to pointer 4. Finally I pulled the lever again.

Step 4 was to set up pointer 4. On the second panel I jiggled with the four keys until lights 1, 2 and 3 were off and light 4 was on. Then on the first panel I pulled the lever and then pressed button A until pointer 4 pointed to pointer 5. Finally I pulled the lever again.

Step 5 was to set up pointer 5. On the second panel I jiggled with the four keys until lights 1, 2, 3 and 4 were off and light 5 was on. Then on the first panel I pulled the lever and then pressed button A until pointer 5 pointed to button B. Finally I pulled the lever again.

There was a final step which was to raise all of the glass globes. So on the second panel I jiggled with the keys until of all the lights were lit. Then on the first panel I pulled the lever. A green beam sprung into life, encircling the first area in what I assumed was a hexagonal pattern. I returned to the B crystal to confirm that the green beam was connected to the B crystal and in the distance I could see the same beam connected to the A crystal. I quickly checked that the globe next to A was raised to its higher position before pressing my hand to the hand print.

It was a six hop journey back to A. It all happened very quickly but I managed to count them as I moved around the island, arriving at A in what was a brief flash of time. I didn’t care to think too hard about how this teleportation worked. Whether I was disassembled into a pattern buffer à la Star Trek and then reassembled again or whether I was just spirited across on an ethereal gust of wind I didn’t know. I tried not to care.

I looked around to confirm that the new green beam was indeed a hexagon and that it now freed up the globe above me for my next challenge which was to use it to connect A and C together. If I could teleport up to C then I knew I was on my way to whatever was coming next.

The lens array on the globe was still pointing to B but I needed to spin it somehow to point to C. I furrowed my brow in frustration for here was a big problem. To reach the globe I needed to lower it but that meant breaking the new link. Then I spotted a new lever beside the raised column that hadn’t been there before and when I pulled it the raised globe dropped back down.

I rotated the globe until I thought it pointed to the C crystal then I raised the globe using the new lever to check I’d got it right. Once that was done I rotated the A crystal to point upwards to the raised globe. And there it was, a new link between A and C! I pressed my hand on the hand print and I moved up to the new location.

I was only slightly disappointed to find that there was no C plaque. I was however greatly pleased to see that there was a hand print that would allow me to get back.

The First Light Puzzle

This new area was small but here there was a rusty metal cupboard that looked exactly like the one I’d seen close to the hanging rock. This one however wasn’t locked and the doors swung open to reveal a busy panel of tiny tubes in a six by six array. At the top of the array I could see light entering a tube and I found out that I could twist every tube to make a pathway for the light. At the bottom of the array there was an exit tube. It seemed that I needed to twist tubes in order to get the light running all the way to the bottom exit.

The puzzle was quite easy. The light entered the array at row 1 column 3, or r1c3 for short, and then it passed through the following in order to reach the exit at r6c4:

r1c3, r1c2, r1c1, r2c1, r3c1, r3c2, r3c3, r2c3, r2c4, r3c4, r4c4, r4c5, r5c5, r5c6, r6c6, r6c5, r6c4

The light then left the array and travelled to a neighbouring pillbox which began to shine very brightly through circular holes. A small panel close by then slid open and inside I found a portable transporter mechanism consisting of a hand print panel and a green crystal. There was also a lens that was unmistakably designed for inserting into the cannon.

Two good rewards, I thought. The lens would allow me to create more patterns for the cannon whilst the portable transporter promised access to places yet undiscovered. Interestingly the transporter had a hexagonal base, the same base that there was on the red crystal. And that meant the transporter would fit onto the extendable rod which in turn fitted onto the telescope. I had already projected orange, blue and red beams of light through the telescope with great success and I wondered now whether there was any merit in shining a green transporter beam through the telescope too.

I made my way to the telescope, looked about for inspiration and ended up staring at the metallic dome that I had already operated with my orange torch. It was just outside the steps leading up to the watchtower and as I stared at it I remembered a diagram that I had seen not long ago. It had been in the cupboard by the swaying bridge and it had shown a column that, if my memory was right, was what the column below the metallic dome looked like. The diagram also showed a quarter circle and that, if my memory was still right, looked like the metallic quadrant I had picked up only a short while ago. I took the quadrant out of my pocket and examined it. It looked like it was one of four pieces and that also made me think. If it was one of four pieces and if I could find three more pieces and join them together then I would have a circle that looked like it might, just might, be the right size to fit the box in the mechanical room. And that meant I would be able to retrieve the third key, the key with the configurable teeth.

I fitted the orange light to the telescope and trained it on the lens above the dome but nothing happened. Then I placed the white torch into the telescope and to my delight the column popped up, this time to a higher position than before and in the base of the column was another quadrant piece. My second piece. Hopefully, I thought, there were two more to find.

Whilst considering my options with the metallic dome I had noticed that on the cliff face, high above the dome, there was a green crystal, one I hadn’t really noticed before. This was a fortuitous discovery and I wasted no time fitting the extendable rod to the telescope followed by the portable teleporter. A green beam then appeared, streaming from the telescope, and it was an easy matter to point the telescope at the green crystal to see the green beam intensify like it had before.

It was a gamble because I didn’t know for sure whether or not I could get back but my faith in Maythorn’s ability to make his puzzles work was high. I pressed my hand against the hand print and I moved through the telescope and up to a high ledge overlooking the watchtower.

I arrived at a high vantage point providing a good view of the telescope and also with a fine view over the water. I stood there examining the scenery whilst a cool sea breeze washed pleasantly over me. I was greatly relieved to see that there was a hand print for getting back. Stone steps led upwards, further towards the summit, and I cautiously climbed up them not because I was tired but because I was simply cautious. Tiredness didn’t figure in this world but cautiousness was something else. I was theorising to myself that the puzzles were getting tougher and more convoluted in their nature and I was becoming concerned that I would soon encounter a puzzle that I would be unable to solve and that would be disastrous for me. Totally disastrous. And the fear of disaster bred caution.

At the top of the stone steps I came to a table and chair, lit by the glow of an orange crystal. On the table was a book, opened to a section entitled The World Chain. It offered a further description of the worlds of the Worldchain by explaining that they were all linked together by ancient gateways. If a world only had one gateway then it was an endpoint called a Monoway World. If a world had two gateways then it was called a Lane World in that it extended the chain to the next world. (Apparently the Lashann Line is the longest chain known consisting of twelve Lane Worlds in a row.) A Branching World had three gateways and a Junction World had four or more gateways.

I also read that gateways were always geometrically placed, spaced equidistantly on the circumference of a circle up to 300 meters in diameter. Here on Quern I hadn’t come across any other gateways other than the one I had woken up beside so my guess was that this was a Monoway World, a world with just one gateway. It was a thought that worried me. The chances of a single gateway leading back to Earth seemed remote enough to be zero.

I moved away from the table, wondering anew how I was going to get home. These gateways sounded like they were static, always pointing to the same worlds. The configuration of the chain was fixed, the topography was immutable. How was I going to get home if Earth wasn’t next on the chain, or even on the chain at all?

Before me a blue flickering light pulled me out of my reverie and there, in my path, was the floating ball. It was her, making herself known to me again.

“Now I see,” she said. “He trapped you here. Did you really come here without any intent? Without any selfish goals?”

She darted about, first to the left and then to the right. Her blue radiance played over the rocks and stones as she moved around me.

“My name is Gamana, I am protecting this world. He’s playing you just as he once played me. All these little puzzles he makes you solve must be part of his stubborn plans. There was a time when I thought of him a friend, and I helped him, just as you help him now.”

She was speaking more softly than before. On previous visits she had come over as cold and demanding, as someone contemptible and brusque. This time she seemed to know more of my predicament and she was seeing me as a different person.

“What have I done? How could I not see it? But wait! Maybe... yes... Maybe you will be of some help after all! For now, you must obey his rules, but honestly, do you have a choice? Still, our time will come...the time when we will stop him.”

Then she was gone, floating away until she was out of sight. This sudden appearance changed things, her recognition of my forced compliance to do Maythorn’s bidding made me think differently about her. Gamana sounded more friendly and her closing comments hinted at an alliance against Maythorn. I needed to think this through and I smiled through gritted teeth at her change of demeanour.

More Telescopic Finds

There was another rusty metal cupboard on the wall here, looking exactly the same as the previous one. It was covered in strong looking vines that were growing from a pot beneath the cupboard. The vines were steely strong and refused to budge or even bend. I knew I had to get into the cupboard and that meant I needed to remove the vines, but how?

I wandered around the area to find it was small and self contained. At the far end the ground led onto an overhanging rock that jutted out over the main square providing another admirable vista of what lay below. There was also a good view of the tower, a place that I hadn’t yet visited but a place that was doubtless important.

As I stood at the end of the overhang, trusting in the rock to take my weight, I realised that I could see the blue light of the second target for the cannon, the one at bearing 347. I had tried unsuccessfully to activate this target earlier but I hadn’t been able to get close enough. Now, from my position on the overhang, I was sure that I was near enough so I whipped out my remote control and pointed it at the blue light. Yes! The circular panel beside the blue light swung open to reveal a pattern for the cannon.

From this angle I could see thick wires entering the target and then continuing on towards the metal cupboard. These wires were dotted all over the island, thick and strong, and I had mainly ignored them. But now I could see what they were doing. They were light pipes, carrying white light across the land. They bowed under their own weight as they looped across the open air so I had to think of them as a kind of thick fibre optic cable.

I made my way back to the metal cupboard and studied the cable. It entered the cupboard at the top so it seemed logical to assume that inside the cupboard there would be another light pipe puzzle where I would have to route light from the top to the bottom of an array. Leaving the cupboard at the bottom was another cable that headed off to another pillbox, just like the previous one had.

So why, I wondered, did the cable arrive via target 347? The answer of course was easy to deduce. The target was surely acting as an on-off switch for the light. I sighed as I considered this next problem. Not only did I have to remove the tough vines from the box in order to open it but I also had to turn the light on by using the cannon on the second target. It would seem that Maythorn’s twisted mind was still running at full speed.

At least, I thought bleakly, I now know what needs to be done. What I needed to do at the cannon was clear but I had no idea how to remove the vines. I doubted that it was a matter of cutting them, they looked far too tough and solid. And I was sure that Maythorn wouldn’t make it that easy. The only other way I could think of removing them was to poison them. There was a funnel stuck in the pot and it had to be a clue, planted by Maythorn for me to ponder over. I probably had to pour something into the funnel, a weed killer of some kind. I had already concocted a potion that instantaneously revived flowers so was it possible to concoct a potion that did the reverse? Maythorn had done exactly that when he had destroyed his flowers so he had to have a formula somewhere - all I had to do was find it. The answer had to lie in the garden area or in the alchemy lab.

Finding Another Recipe

I first made my way back to the cannon. I had opened up the target plate but I still needed to create the pattern using the lenses in the cannon. I had another lens in my pocket giving me five lenses in total so I was quietly confident in creating the pattern but the proof, as they say, was in the pudding.

The procedure was much as before, using trial and error until the pattern was reached. With the slots numbered 1 on the left to 6 on the right and with the new lens in slot 4, which had been empty, I successfully created the pattern using just the lenses in slots 1 and 4. I then targeted the distant target and was rewarded with a flash of light. I assumed that light was now being delivered to the metal cupboard!

Next I made my way to the alchemy lab. I needed to find Maythorn’s weed killer concoction but I wasn’t sure where to look. What I was sure about was that if it had been reachable when I was last here then I would surely have found it. Maythorn was mad but he wasn’t stupid; if he wanted me to find it now and not then it meant that I had something extra at my disposal now that I didn’t have the last time I was here.

I searched around and eventually my attention was drawn to the circular space above the central table. It looked like there was standing room up there but I couldn’t see a way up. But then I spotted what looked like a green crystal, almost out of sight between the rafters. Could it be a transporter up there? After scrutinising the crystal from various angles I worked out that it was more or less above the cauldron but how was I to use it?

When the answer came to me I almost kicked myself. Sitting snugly right next door to the cauldron was a hexagonal tray. I had used it to light the fire beneath the cauldron with my red crystal and my portable transporter had the same hexagonal base. I hurried back to the telescope to retrieve the transporter and then fitted the crystal assembly to the hexagonal base. It was a perfect fit and when I rotated the crystal to its horizontal position a green beam shone out, heading vertically upwards to the green crystal above my head. On the way the beam was focussed through two built-in lenses resulting in a vertical transporter beam.

I pressed the hand print and moved upwards to find myself in a small secret room above the alchemy lab. Surely I was on the right track, finding this cosy nook!

There was the obligatory table tucked up against the curved wall and on it there was another metal quadrant, a letter and a notebook. The notebook was opened at a list of five recipes concocted with a mix of thirteen potential ingredients. Four of the five recipes were for the four big vats in the alchemy lab below me whilst the other was a new one that I hadn’t seen before.

I opened the letter.

I prepared everything to slow you down, to force you to understand everything I once understood. I want you to know that this journey I called you upon is more important than you or even me. The success or failure of your quest will profoundly affect the whole world. I can only hope you are worth all my efforts.

Goodness, he was filled with such self importance. He hoped I was worth all of his efforts but at the moment I still had no clue what it was he was blathering on about or what he actually expected of me. Okay, he had stolen some transporters, presumably from places that were already in need of them. He had got them working using stolen crystals. He had harnessed infinite energy but I was still unsure of their final efficacy because this was a world where nothing wears out, ever. Would they work back home when good old entropy started increasing again? The only other living creature hereabouts, Gamina, thought he was an ass. I confess, I was still not converted to his cause.

Also on the table were flasks containing red and blue liquids whilst on the floor beside the table there were a few discarded cylindrical canisters containing blank scrolls. I was still carrying one of these canisters containing the recipe for reviving plants. A brass cylinder was also here, roughly the same length as a canister but somewhat fatter. It was mounted securely to the wall in a vertical position and on the top of the cylinder was a mounting spigot that looked like it was designed to connect to a canister.

It was curiosity as much as anything else that prompted me to try and fit my canister to the top of the cylinder. When I discovered that it fitted perfectly it was curiosity again that prompted me to press the orange button built into the side of the cylinder. Nothing in this world of Maythorn’s was here by chance, you could say that everything here was curated, placed just so in order to serve a purpose that suited his agenda. This was a lesson that I was learning, to view items not as objects of happenstance but as things that were deliberately placed. Placed, unbelievably, for my convenience.

There was a rumbling inside the canister and it shook as if something was happening internally. For a fleeting moment I was worried that I was destroying the recipe that I knew was rolled up inside but then I was sure that I didn’t need that recipe again. When the rumbling ceased I lifted the canister away from the cylinder and unrolled the paper. It was a new recipe! The diagram on the recipe depicted a withering leaf and I almost shook my head in disbelief. I needed a recipe for a weed killer and miraculously I now had one.

Deus ex machina, I thought. Maythorn was the god and he will provide.

The Second And Third Light Puzzles

Examining the recipe I saw that it required two types of liquid and three types of powder. One of the liquids, called Xoev, was new to me but the second liquid and the three powders didn’t look problematic as I was certain they already existed. The recipe for the new liquid was unsurprisingly the fifth new recipe in the notebook next to the letter. So, I thought. I first need to create the liquid Xeov then after that I need to create my weed killer.

Looking at the recipe for Xeov I saw that it required five different ingredients. Pinned up on the wall by the window there was a picture of four plants, ones that hadn’t been identified before, and three of them were required ingredients in the recipe. The remaining two ingredients I recognised from before.

I moved back down into the alchemy lab and headed off to the garden. My first task was to mix five plant extracts and they proved easy to find by cross referencing the plants to the pictures. Using the same technique as before I obtained plant specimens using my tongs then I crushed the plants one at a time in the plant press before filling my test tube with the resulting mixture.

Having completed the first task I headed back to the alchemy lab and began filling the cauldron. My test tube, now filled with Xeov liquid, was first emptied into the cauldron followed by a sample of Terv from the vat close by. This was then followed with samples of black and green powder from the table. Finally I trudged across to the watchtower to obtain a scoop of sand from the room with the weighing scales.

I poured the final brew into my jug, hoping that I’d got everything right. I’d paid particular attention to the quantities with some of the ingredients being doubled in quantity and I’d been very careful to identify the plant types. The only way to confirm the mixture was to see what the effect would be on the vine so I returned to the telescope, set up the transporter and moved up to the summit.

I carefully tipped the mixture into the base of the vine using the funnel that was already there. There was an immediate reaction. I had half expected the plant to wilt and lose its grip on the door but instead the entire plant simply disintegrated into dust, vanishing into nothingness. There was no way Maythorn had used this particular concoction on his other plants; if he had there would’ve been no way for me to revive them.

I opened the door and inside I saw a light tube puzzle that at first glance seemed to be identical to the other one I’d already solved. There was a six by six array of tiny tubes with light entering at the top but this time the exit tube was on the right edge. On closer study I noticed an orange light entering from the left and an orange exit also on the right edge, above the white exit. So this time it looked like I had to route two light beams.

White light entered the array at row 1 column 2, or r1c2 for short, and then had to pass through the following in order to reach the exit at r5c6:

r1c2, r1c1, r2c1, r3c1, r3c2, r3c3, r4c3, r4c4, r4c5, r4c6, r5c6

Orange light entered the array at row 5 column 1, or r5c1 for short, and then had to pass through the following in order to reach the exit at r2c6:

r5c1, r6c1, r6c2, r6c3, r5c3, r4c3, r4c2, r3c2, r2c2, r2c3, r3c3, r3c4, r2c4, r1c4, r1c5, r1c6, r2c6

As before, upon completing the puzzle the neighbouring pillbox lit up and a small panel slid open behind which I found a lens for the cannon. This was the sixth and final lens and one that, I hoped, would enable me to match the one remaining pattern at bearing 248.

My next trip was back to the cannon above the mechanical room. First I rotated the cannon to bearing 248 and made a note of the pattern that I had to reproduce. Then I pulled down the lens cartridge and inserted the final lens into slot six which was the only empty lens slot left to fill. Finally I managed to reproduce the pattern using just lenses 2, 3 and 6. As before I was rewarded with a brief flash of light from the target whereupon I wondered what I had just achieved.

The answer came swiftly. There was another metal cupboard down by the hanging platform, looking exactly the same as the previous two. The cupboard was one I had discovered quite a while ago and it was very close to the target I had just managed to activate. Surely the target was now flooding white light into the cupboard!

I headed over there and sure enough I could see light shining through the cupboard handle and when I opened the door I was presented with my third six by six array of light tubes. The puzzle was tougher than before consisting of white light entering the array on the right hand side which then split into two separate orange lights heading off in different directions. I could see a piece elsewhere on the array that would recombine the orange lights back into a white light which then needed to be routed to the bottom of the array.

The first orange light emerged from the splitter at r3c6 and then had to pass through the following in order to reach the combiner at r4c2:

r3c6, r2c6, r2c5, r1c5, r1c4, r1c3, r2c3, r2c2, r1c2, r1c1, r2c1, r3c1, r3c2, r4c2

The second orange light also emerged from the splitter at r3c6 and then had to pass through the following in order to reach the combiner at r4c2:

r3c6, r4c6, r4c5, r3c5, r3c4, r3c3, r2c3, r2c4, r3c4, r4c4, r5c4, r6c4, r6c3, r6c2, r5c2, r4c2

White light was routed from the combiner to the exit at r6c5 as follows:

r4c1, r5c1, r5c2, r5c3, r5c4, r5c5, r5c6, r6c6, r6c5

Upon completing the puzzle, the neighbouring pillbox lit up and a small panel slid open behind which I found a large heavy magnet. To say it was an unexpected reward would be an understatement. By completing this puzzle I had, in my understanding, completed all possible puzzles associated with the cannon and the three cupboards and I had been hoping to receive the fourth and final quadrant. Instead I had a magnet and it was quite a heavy one. It had a large ring welded on the back of it, quite clearly for the purpose of hanging the magnet onto something.

Just up the steps from the cupboard there was the hook on a winch, the one I had used to catch me an electric fish. Could I go magnet fishing? I clambered up the steps and hung the magnet on the hook before lowering it into the water. After a futile consideration of how long to wait I decided to just pull it back up and see if anything had attached itself. When the magnet reappeared, dripping with water, I was amazed to see that a metal box was stuck to the underside of the magnet. In the side of the box was a door and behind the door there was the fourth metal quadrant.

The Tower

Finally! I now had four quadrants and I knew exactly what to do with them. It had been a long and torturous road obtaining the full set and if my idea was right I was now about to acquire my third key to the tower. I made my way to the mechanical room and once there I studied the box on the table. Inside the box was the key I needed and on the side of the box there was a circular depression that I assumed was the locking mechanism.

I fitted the quadrants, one at a time, and each quadrant fitted in perfectly. The box then clicked open and I retrieved the key. It had four configurable teeth and I knew exactly what to do with it. I headed into the main square and approached the tall tower. Beside the tower there was the pedestal where I had already unlocked two of the three bolts and in my hand I clasped the third key. It had four adjustable teeth and I moved them around so as to create a cross when viewed along the length of the key. This was the pattern required by the final lock.

I inserted the key and it was with relief that I saw the third and final bolt slide away. Whatever this pedestal did, I thought, it can now do it.

I wasn’t disappointed. There was a deep rumble accompanied by a rattling vibration that started beneath my feet. It began to grow, at first weak but rapidly building up in strength. Billowing clouds of dust filled the air, making me step back away from the pedestal and tower.

The entire tower on its tall column of stone was moving downwards, sinking slowly into the ground. Maythorn’s engineering abilities had already amazed me but this had to be his greatest achievement, moving a huge stone tower vertically into what had to be a subterranean cavern of some sort. I stood there, agog at what I was seeing. The entire tower sank lower and lower until eventually it came to a halt when what was the true base of the tower reached ground level. Beneath the base the stone column that had supported the tower had vanished into the ground. How Maythorn had engineered this feat of mechanics was completely beyond me.

I stepped through the tower door, not sure what to expect, and all I could see that looked to be functional were two vertical racks of well oiled gear teeth running vertically up opposite sides of this circular chamber. Their purpose seemed clear to me, they were part of rack and pinions devices that were capable of raising the floor where I was standing to the top of the tower. Looking up I could see the top of the tower, high above my head.

Beside one of the racks was a button which I pressed. Immediately the floor began to rise as the pinions cut into the base of the floor rotated. The floor rose swiftly until it reached the end of its travel where it stopped. I was now at the top of the tower, standing on a platform where there were no walls, just a commanding view in all directions. I stood there for a while, enjoying the vista despite feeling somewhat insecure due to the lack of a railing. It made me feel lonely. I could see everything yet I could see no one, I could hear no one and I could talk to no one. The world hereabouts was barren, empty of life and devoid of motion.

What next, I wondered. Here I was, at the very top of the enigmatic tower and I suddenly didn’t know what to do next. All of the puzzles seemed to have led to this very moment, this brief period of time where I now stood, looking out at the world. There had to be something.

As I circled around the platform I noticed two levers, tucked out of sight, directly behind the two vertical rack assemblies. I pulled both of them down but nothing happened. Finally I pressed the button again, after all there was nothing else to do. I began to descend but this time everything around me lowered as well. The rack and pinion assembly was stationary because the floor wasn’t being lowered, instead the entire tower was being lowered. I had a mental image of Maythorn digging a hole with nothing but a spade in his hands, a hole deep enough to take the tower and the stone pillar combined.

The tower came to a halt, this time with what had been the upper platform at ground level. My intuition told me that my final destination was underground, simply because the tower had been swallowed up down there. I needed to get down to the base of the tower, down to whatever Maythorn had dug out down there.

I pressed the button again but nothing happened. Then I lifted the two levers back up to their starting position and tried pressing the button again. The rack and pinion mechanism shuddered into life and the floor dropped down. My last view of the sky was seeing it being swallowed up by the eclipsing tower walls and everything around me was plunged into darkness as I sank down into the ground.

Part 2

Part 2 continues the story underground!
Click here for part 2:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2846136345

[AdieCats]

THANK YOU. These have been incredibly helpful!

[Arfur Brain]

I've added a link

[AdieCats]

How do I access Part 2?