The world spun around Sylas and he found himself standing on a black ice mirror. In fact, all around him were broken, fragmented reflections of himself and the world. It was hard to see if he would run headfirst into a wall with a step or fall into an endless abyss.
Sylas had thought he might run into a lot of things when he stepped into the portal, but this was the last thing he expected. He thought he might find some clues on the other side, but instead he found more confusion.
He looked around to find that Alex was a distance away. It wasn't far, only three meters or so. But in a world one, it might as well have been a world.
Neither of them dared to move without first understanding the situation. But then the world began to shift around them.
Silvery lights bounced around endlessly, changing the geometrical shapes of the fragmented black ice. They became more rapid until Sylas' eyes had a hard time keeping up.
He realized that if the changes to these shapes were also related to the shifts in danger, they might not have a choice of whether they ran into problems or not.
Alex's body suddenly flickered and became a shadow that appeared by Sylas' side just as the latter felt the world spin around him once again.
Sylas found his feet landing on smooth limestone. He didn't bother to wear shoes these days because they would only get destroyed, and he couldn't wear Treasures, so he felt the difference even before his vision cleared.
He thought that he was back in the pyramid, only to find that the world around him was nothing like what he might expect.
It looked like he had been thrown into the middle of a floating, Jenga-like maze of thick limestones.
Sylas ducked as one of the pieces almost took his head off, and his heart skipped a beat as the reverberating clash of two in the distance echoed like a bomb through the space.
The heft of these floating stones was easily in the several tons. Even with his current Strength, he couldn't lift one of these over his head. But now they were floating around erratically.
Sylas jumped up, grabbed one by its ledge, and pulled himself up.
From this vantage point, he could see Alex in the distance, but it still wasn't enough, so he continued to scale them, getting higher and higher.
But by the third one, he realized something strange.
'I don't feel like my view is changing much. It feels the same...'
Sylas' head turned. He scanned the region step by step before looking straight up. However, it was the same no matter where he looked.
The Jenga-like limestone pieces were somewhat spaced apart, and it felt like there should be more than enough room to see through them all, but if you looked far enough into the distance, they would eventually compile in a way that was no different from a stone wall.
No matter how high he went, or how close he moved, Sylas had a feeling that he would never reach the end of these puzzle pieces. They were moving in relation to him, and though their movement seemed somewhat random, they were stuck in a configuration that layered across his line of sight just enough to obstruct his views from all angles.
So the question was... how should he get out of here?
'A puzzle? Is that it? Is this entire pyramid one big game? To what ends?'
If that was all there was to it... Sylas didn't believe that this would be all that difficult at all.
His gaze shifted and he landed on a limestone that looked just like the others. With a few hops, he landed on it.
When he first got here, he heard a loud booming sound that was the result of two limestones smashing into one another. However, since then, he hadn't heard anything.
Plus, if all of the limestones were moving in relation to one another, then how could they crash?
That could only mean that there was something special about at least one of the limestones, and it would be the key to getting out.
Alex appeared in a flash by Sylas, but the latter didn't give him a look. It seemed that Sylas was already prepared for Alex to freeload... at least for now.
Sylas' gaze flashed and, as expected, he found something. He pressed a foot down slightly harder and a rush of Aether lit up a Rune.
The limestones continuously crashed. Sylas had only rammed the limestone beneath his feet against one of the others, and yet it had resulted in a cascading effect where they all continuously rammed into one another until...
The two men shot forward at the same time, scaling through the limestones and soaring out of the Jenga palace. They felt like they were falling through darkness and might have made a mistake until, once again, they suddenly felt the ground form beneath their feet.
Sylas looked back to find a spherical blob of floating Jenga-piece limestones in the far-off distance. It bobbed slowly through the air, moving without much speed, and yet it was a steady mass.
He looked away and forward.
There was a perfect straight stone path ahead that bulged out to form a circular pattern around an altar before continuing ahead in its usual straight form. No matter how far ahead he tried to look, it seemed like the path was endless. Either that, or his eyes simply couldn't see that far ahead.
Sylas walked toward the altar, observing it for a moment. But it didn't have anything special other than a bowl filled with nothing at all.
Sylas reached forward and touched it. Right then, he felt his Aether being sapped away before a light flashed and then vanished.
It wasn't much Aether at all, maybe the equivalent of a prick of the finger. But the result was
'Ancient Ithkuil. Just one symbol?'
[Author's Note Below!]