1.8.6 - Paired Pitfalls

Hantz and Brawn talked their way across a drowning room and put down a thing that would not stay hurt.

Hantz and Brawn came to a chamber split clean down the middle. A wall they could not reach across, a grid of carved rune-tiles set into the stone on either side, and above it all a great rainbow cut into the wall in dead grey stone. A small bronze plaque asked them, politely, to close the door behind them. They did. It sealed, no handle on the inner face. Somewhere deep in the wall water began to move, and the carved flowers along the floor started to weep.

A riddle ran across both halves of the room, and neither of them could read it alone. Something born where rain meets sun. Seven colours. A road strung between the hall of the gods and the fields of the living. They knew it on sight, a rainbow bridge, and the room had left help for anyone who looked: a child's painted toy with a little figure that slid up and over the arc, a shrine to a watchman with a horn, seven dull stones that fitted into the floor and shone as one. Sure of themselves, they spelled out RAINBOW. The room bit back. The water climbed a finger higher, more petals opened to pour, and the arch above stayed grey. Close. Wrong name. A moment of digging turned up the right one. Bifröst. They called the letters across the divide, one side then the other, and the bridge lit band by band as the water lapped at their ankles and rose no further.

Beyond it stood the Patient One. Smooth amber stone, taller than a man, in no hurry at all. It hit hard, and worse than that, it healed, closing its wounds nearly as fast as the two of them could open them. They found the shape of it together. It only stayed wounded while both of them kept striking, neither one hanging back to play it safe. They were convinced the lingering flames off Hantz's work were what held its healing down. Wrong about why, right enough about how, and it never came back to cost them. Nobody went down. When it finally stopped mending it did not shatter. It sat down on the flowered floor, the amber light going out of its eyes, and the way onward opened.

Two trials, and no blood owed. Hantz and Brawn came through whole. On the far side of the temple, Gunnar and Riven's reckoning is still waiting.

Remember For Next Time

• Bifröst: the rainbow bridge between the realm of the gods and the world of the living. The name that opened the way.
• The Patient One: beaten only by refusing to fight it alone. Ease off, and it healed everything back.
• Pair A's turn: Gunnar and Riven still have a trial of their own before anyone reaches the heart of the temple.

Where We Are

Hantz and Brawn have finished their side of Freya's temple. Gunnar and Riven's last trial, and whatever waits in the sanctum beyond, is still ahead.