The door shut behind them with a quiet clunk, and the trio stepped into a vast chamber. The air was still, heavy with the scent of aged paper and timeworn wood. Tall shelves lined the walls, packed tightly with leather-bound volumes, yellowed scrolls, and brittle folders, each labeled in careful handwriting. Above them, a domed ceiling arched high overhead, supported by thick stone columns veined with age.

“Looks like we’ve reached the records hall,” Jonah said, his voice hushed. “This place must be centuries old.”

Orla ran her hand along the spine of a nearby book, noting the faded ink on the label: Tower Maintenance—Year 108. “They kept detailed archives. This isn’t just history. This is a record of how the tower works.”

Elliot circled the large central table, where a wide sheet of parchment lay unfurled. It was a diagram—an architectural sketch of the tower. Dozens of lines crisscrossed the paper, with notations written in a mix of numbers, symbols, and a strange, formal script.

“Blueprints,” he muttered. “Old, but still accurate. These symbols match the ones on the puzzle doors.”

Jonah flipped open a nearby binder, its pages filled with neatly inked diagrams and gear schematics. “This wasn’t a tower for sorcery or ritual. It was engineered—every chamber, every mechanism. Someone designed this whole place with intent.”

Before anyone could reply, a low clicking noise echoed from the far side of the room. Against the back wall, five metal plaques slid out from hidden slots, each engraved with a familiar symbol: an eye, a star, a tree, a key, and a flame. Below them, a message had been etched into the stone in steady, blocky handwriting:

“Only one path leads forward. The others return you to the beginning. Study what came before.”

Elliot groaned. “Classic.”

Orla was already scanning the map on the table. “No, it’s more than that. Look—every time we’ve seen these symbols, they’ve been part of a sequence. This tower doesn’t do random.”

She pointed to a note on the blueprint near the spiral staircase they’d climbed earlier. “See this? The eye symbol was next to the hallway with the numbered-letter riddle.”

Jonah nodded, flipping back through his notebook. “And the star showed up near the entry puzzles. They were simpler.”

“The flame,” Orla added, “was next to that false door that reset the gear mechanism.”

Elliot frowned. “So what you’re saying is… this isn’t just a memory test. It’s a logic test. A trace-the-pattern test.”

“Exactly,” Orla said. “We have to think like the person who built this place.”

One by one, they revisited each symbol’s past appearance, mapping its location and outcome.

Jonah ran his fingers along the engraved plaques. “If four symbols send us back and only one lets us move on, then the right choice is the one that’s always advanced us—never reset us, never tricked us.”

“The eye,” Orla said decisively. “It showed up before a correct path. It marked progress.”

Elliot glanced at the others, then stepped forward and pressed the eye symbol.

With a quiet thunk, a section of the wall to their right shifted. Dust fell from the stonework as a narrow staircase slowly rotated into view, climbing upward through a previously hidden passage. Faint daylight filtered down from above, revealing well-worn steps carved directly into the stone.

Jonah exhaled. “We’re still in.”

“No magic tricks,” Orla said with a nod. “Just good design, clever engineering, and a long memory.”

Elliot grinned. “And more stairs. Of course.”

They stepped onto the staircase, one by one, the wall sealing quietly behind them with a mechanical click. As they climbed, the air grew cooler and thinner, the light more natural. Whatever waited at the top of the Grand Puzzle Tower, it wasn’t a trap or a trick—it was something real. And they were getting closer.