Chapter 16
Traps and Puzzles
Not long after the valves opened up, the pit completely filled up with red sludge with a white hot glow in the mix. But it didn't stop there. The lava overflowed out of the pit and seeped onto the platform that Lily and the others stood on, slowly rolling towards them. And along with the lava came a wave of heat that instantly got the trio sweating rivers. It was stifling and stung their cheeks, but that was the least of their worries.
Color drained from their faces.
Eyes glued to the lava, Eddie asked, "Does that look like I think it looks like?"
"Back! Everyone get back!" screamed Lily.
She pushed the twins ahead and then scrambled as far away from the spreading lava as they could. The lava picked up speed and was right behind Lily in the blink of an eye. The lava just barely touched the heel of her right shoe where it burst into flames. Lily saw the flames out of the corner of her eye, shrieked a string of bad words that good children her age should never say and ran faster, quickly joining the twins at the wall where she kicked off the burning shoe and watched it melt into the incoming lava puddle.
They went as far as to press their backs against the walls while standing on their tippy-toes. But with no way out, it was just a matter of time before the lava caught up to them.
"What do we do? What do we do? What do we do?" screamed Eddie.
"Quick! Lily!" cried Viv. "Get out the magic carpet! Hurry!"
Lily spun and went, "Huh? Oh, right! One magic carpet, coming right up!"
Light flashed from her bracelet and a large blue carpet popped out from one of the jewels. Once Lily was sure everyone had climbed on, she barked at the rug to start flying.
As they headed up to the ceiling, Lily spotted an opening, sort of like a square chute that appeared to slant upward into the wall.
There! She thought. That must be the way out!
She commanded the carpet to fly up to the opening while she and the twins ducked down low to avoid hitting their heads against stone. The lava followed the gang up the chute, getting menacingly closer by the second.
Lily glanced back, saw the lava catching up and urged the carpet go to faster. While she focused on piloting the carpet, Viv and Eddie also glanced back and noticed something else about the lava behind them: some teeny-tiny drops of the glowing hot stuff splashed onto the back end of the carpet. And like Lily's shoe before, where the specks of lava touched burst into flames.
"Fire!" screamed Eddie. "Fire!"
"What?" Lily shrieked.
She turned to look back, but Viv yelled, "Eyes on the road!"
Lily snapped her eyes back in front just in time to see they were swerving close to the ceiling. She got the carpet to go a lower altitude and narrowly avoided scraping her head.
Viv and Eddie kicked their feet at the flames to stamp them out. That and the wind just barely kept the fire at bay before the flying carpet finally reached the exit and emerged into the next chamber. A splash of hot magma followed them before being cut off from the rest by the opening ceiling shut.
Halfway across the room, the magic carpet broke apart into dozens of light particles and disappeared. With no flying carpet under them, Lily and the twins dropped down and hit the ground, painfully.
"Ow!"
They all rolled across the cold, hard floor a couple of feet before stopping. Lily stopped, laid on her back and stared up to see stalactites hanging from the ceiling. She wondered if this place was actually part of some underground cave or if those wicked spikes were put there on purpose. But that wasn't important right now.
"You guys okay?" she asked the others.
The twins groaned back, "Yeah."
They picked themselves up with a groan and then went over to help Lily back up on her feet. A brief look around revealed that there was absolutely nothing in this chamber except for another doorway at the end. Nevertheless, Lily, Viv and Eddie moved with caution, taking their time to inch towards the exit step by step.
It was a good thing they did. Because after covering one-third of the way, when Lily gently put her foot down, the floor cracked with a loud snap.
"Back!" she screamed. "Back, back, back!"
She turned to run away, but then Eddie shouted, "No! Wait! Stop! Look! The other side's the same!"
It was not just in front of them. Cracks spread behind them and the floor completely fell apart, with the pieces plummeting into the dark pit below. Only a few differently shaped platforms remained, including the one that Lily and the twins stood on.
For a while, nobody moved. Nobody dared to even breathe, fearful that the platform they stood would join the rest of the floor at the bottom of the endless dark below. It wasn't until she was starting to feel lightheaded that Lily took a deep breath and then gave the pit a quick look.
"Looks like we're flying again," she said.
But when she asked the bracelet to produce another magic carpet, a note popped out of one of the jewels instead and read: "Warning: anti-flight magic detected."
After reading the slip of paper out loud, Lily groaned, "Great! We can't fly! Now how are we supposed to get out of here?"
The trio looked around at the other platforms while huddled close together in the middle of their own, not too keen about accidentally plunging to the abyss below. Some platforms were long rectangles. Others were basic squares. There were a few that looked like machine gear pieces. And lastly, there were a couple shaped like the plus sign of a math problem. Between each platform were gaps that were far too big to jump over.
Eddie rubbed his chin thoughtfully and then spoke up.
"Say," he said. "Don't those pieces of the floor look kind of like part of a puzzle you'd see in a video game?"
Viv and Lily took a look at the remaining floor pieces again.
"You know what?" Viv said. "Yeah, you're right. Hey, Lily, try use the bracelet to make one of them move."
"Already on it."
Lily pointed at the closes platform, a rectangle one, and gave her bracelet the order. A ray of light shined from the bracelet and wrapped itself around the rectangle. Slowly, the platform turned ninety degrees, stopping right in front of Lily and the gang, giving them more space to walk.
It really is like a video game puzzle, Lily thought.
Following advice from the twins, Lily moved platform after platform, sometimes redoing an area, until they all connected to form one crooked bridge to the doorway at the end.
Solving the puzzle was simple enough, but actually moving the pieces of the puzzle took a lot out of Lily. But that was no surprise when you think about how much magic she must be using to make those big, heavy blocks of stones move. Not only that, she had to feed magic power into a crystal ball again to get the doorway open. The whole thing left her feeling utterly drained and after opening the doorway, she dropped on all fours. However, she was back up and running again after lying down for a few minutes.
From then on, it was just one trap room after another. In the next chamber, arrows flew out of the walls. The chamber after that had plants that spontaneously grew out of the ground and ensnare anything within reach. There was a hallway with purple lightning dancing all around it. And following that was a pitfall.
Thanks to the power of Lily's bracelet, the gang was able to make it through all of those traps mostly unscathed. If they didn't have that bracelet, Lily and the gang probably would have been trapped in that maze forever, or worse.
When the arrows came flying at them, Lily conjured a bunch of round shields that clustered together around her and the twins like a turtle's shell that blocked all the pointy things. At the chamber with the shrubs and tress that wanted to hug the gang to death, the bracelet spat fire out of its jewels and burned them all away. In the hallway full of lightning, Lily held the bracelet over her head and used it to absorb all the electricity in the air and redirect it away.
The pitfall, however, was unavoidable.
Lily, Viv and Eddie were just strolling down a hallway when the floor collapsed beneath their feet and they went plunging down to another room, screaming their heads off. But before they crashed into the ground, light flashed from the bracelet and a huge bed mattress appeared under them to cushion their landing.
After rolling onto her back to stare at the hole they had fallen through, Lily said, "That . . . was horrible."
And it wasn't just traps the gang had to go through. Like at the chamber where the floor collapsed and left behind pieces to move and make a bridge, there were puzzles that they needed to solve in order to move on.
The room they fell in had the exit sealed shut by a multi-layered, dial puzzle, where each layer had to be spun until a complete picture was made. It was impossible to move the layers of the circle puzzle by hand (Eddie tried and failed miserably), so Lily used the bracelet to turn each dial until it formed the picture of a parrot. Once the picture was complete, the doorway slid down, opening the way to the next room.
The way out of that room was high up the ceiling. To reach the exit, Lily had to assemble a bunch of huge stone blocks just left lying around the room together to make a staircase. It took a while to get it just right.
"Phew!" After climbing up the stairs into the next room, Lily dropped down and sat cross-legged on the floor, wiping sweat off her brow. "Someone please tell me we're close to the finish line already. I don't think I can take any more of all these traps and puzzles."
"Well, I think you're in luck, Lucy," said Viv. She nodded to the pair of doors at the end of the room. They were big, blue and together, had a picture of the school symbol drawn in glittery gold. "If that doesn't scream last room, I don't know what does."
"But will that last room lead to an exit?" asked Eddie.
"Only one way to find out," said Lily. "It's not like we have another choice."
Her eyes fell on a row of crystal balls on stands shaped like dragon claws just like the one at the very first room. At this point, it was obvious to Lily that she was seeing another puzzle. One she correctly guessed required her to feed magic to the crystal balls in the correct order. Get the wrong order, and she'll have to do it all over again.
This trial wasn't as deadly or dangerous as all the other ones, but it was probably by far, the most draining and frustrating. Lily lost count the number of re-dos she had to do, or the number of breaks she had to take in between because she ran out of steam. Eddie and Viv tried to help by keeping track of the different combos that Lily made.
Finally, after an eternity of Guess-and-Check, Lily got the right combo and the doors parted open, swinging into a round chamber lit blue by the glow of a giant gemstone placed smack dab in the middle.
Viv let out a low whistle while Eddie went, "Whoa."
Even from outside, the stone was impressive and mesmerizing. Lily and the gang couldn't help but admire it as they slowly walked into the room.
Eddie wondered, "Is that whole thing sapphire?"
"If it is," said Lily, "it's the biggest sapphire stone I've ever seen. Maybe the biggest in the whole wide world."
The stone was at least ten feet tall and six feet wide. It appeared planted into the floor and contained something inside. Lily's mind was boggled, thinking about how much money it must be worth.
She walked closer to get a better look at the stone, but stopped and gasped when she realized what the stone had inside was -
"A girl!" she cried out. "There's a girl inside the stone!"
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