As soon as the stone swallowed her, Nova's world inverted.
She found herself suspended upside down, her boots affixed to the ceiling as though fused to it, while the sky stretched impossibly beneath her feet. Gravity felt wrong, warped, as though the room had been designed to disorient her on sight. Her head pounded with brutal intensity — a deep, rhythmic ache that made her vision pulse.
For a moment, she simply hung there, breathing through the pain, weighing her options.
She attempted magic — a sharp pulse of silver meant to stabilize the chamber and break the inversion. The walls absorbed the spell whole, swallowing the magic with a soft, hungry shimmer. No shift. No reaction. The temple refused her power.
Eventually, she chose the only path forward.
She lifted one foot and stepped.
In an instant, the world righted itself. No transition, no softening — one heartbeat she was upside down, and the next she stood upright as though nothing at all had changed. The headache surged viciously, and she staggered.
She had barely taken a breath before the stone beneath her flared. The walls reacted at once — the puzzle solved — and the chamber pulled her through, the stone behaving like liquid. It yanked her out of the room in a swift, disorienting rush and deposited her unceremoniously into a narrow passageway beyond.
The walls sealed behind her.
Nova sank down where she landed, pressing a hand to her temple. The throbbing was so sharp it made her vision stutter. She closed her eyes, steadied her breathing, and forced the pain back into something manageable before rising again.
On the far side of the maze, Fin, Jax, and Rex all staggered at the same moment — a spike of agony ripping through the matebond like a blade.
Fin's breath hissed out. "What is happening with her headaches…?" The question wasn't meant to be spoken aloud, but it tore out of him anyway.
Jax and Rex both lifted their heads immediately.
"They've been getting worse," Jax said, his voice low and grim.
Fin swallowed. He kept forgetting — impossibly, foolishly — that Jax and Rex felt her pain just as he did. Maybe not to the degree, but they felt her. Another reminder. Another wave of helplessness none of them could mask.
A section of stone beside Jax rippled — then lunged.
"Jax—!" Fin barked, but there was no time.
The wall seized him with impossible force and dragged him through, the stone folding around him like the gullet of a beast. The surface sealed immediately, smooth and soundless, leaving nothing but a faint echo behind.
Rex and Fin exchanged a single, grim look. There was no preventing it. No resisting it. The temple chose.
They moved on.
It took less than a minute for the next strike.
The ground beneath Fin shimmered and the wall beside him snapped open like jaws. Fin reached for his sword, too late. The temple wrenched him sideways, ripping him through the stone with brutal precision.
Hyran barely had time to gasp before the opposite wall answered in kind. A vortex of shifting rock seized him by the chest and pulled him into darkness, his startled oath echoing for half a heartbeat before the wall smoothed over again.
The temple's hunger was methodical.
Jax plummeted out of the upside down room, landing hard on the smooth stone of the passageway. He figured that out pretty quickly, but he landed not as graceful in the hallway.
"You alright there Thorne?" Rex called.
"Oh you know, just hanging upside down for a solid minute." Jax said panting.
A moment later, Hyran was ejected into the hallway by the stones. He looked entirely too excited and made eye contact with Aeron, grinning.
Rex and Jax looked at one another and didn't need to say it.
But just as Jax stood up, the stones sucked him through to the other side. A vast circular hall.
A domed ceiling traced with constellations.
And at its center — a colossal sphinx carved of black stone and molten gold, its eyes lit with an inner fire. The creature watched him with chilling stillness.
The floor shifted beneath him, rearranging into narrow tiles suspended over an abyss. Some glowed faintly. Most did not.
The sphinx spoke in a voice like grinding marble.
"Choose wisely, Moonbound. Only truth spares the breath."
Riddles appeared in the air — three lines of ancient script. Jax read quickly, mind racing. Each answer corresponded to a tile. Step on the wrong one, and the abyss pulsed, promising annihilation.
He moved. One tile. Two. Three.
The sphinx's tail lashed. A tile behind him disintegrated into dust.
He kept going.
He reached the final platform as the last tile collapsed behind him, the sphinx's golden eyes narrowing in approval. The instant his boots hit the landing, the wall slammed open and spat him back out into the passage.
Just in time to glimpse Nova getting ejected out and sucked into another in the same motion.
As he stood up, he saw Aeron and Rex swallowed together. Aeron's face was alight. He was smiling. Excited.
Jax let out a short huff and shook his head, smirking under his breath. "Gods…"
Aeron and Rex were hurled into a cavernous room that hummed with shimmering runes.
Floating in the center of the chamber were dozens of stone blocks suspended in midair, forming a path toward a distant exit platform. Each block bore symbols, sigils, and numbers — an arithmetic sequence woven with magic.
Aeron's eyes lit up with wild academic delight. "Oh, this is brilliant."
Rex gave him a flat stare. "Brilliant is not my first word."
A glowing inscription carved itself into the wall:
CHOOSE THE CORRECT SEQUENCE TO CROSS.
A SINGLE ERROR RESULTS IN TERMINATION.
As if to clarify what "termination" meant, one of the blocks turned red — then detonated, spraying shards of molten stone into the air. The explosion was instantaneous and absolute.
Aeron's grin widened. "So we simply solve the equations. Easy."
Rex pinched the bridge of his nose. "If you miss even once, we explode."
"Yes," Aeron said cheerfully. "Exactly."