I hated to admit it, but I froze.

  I froze even though I knew that not just our success, but our very survival, now rested on my shoulders. Jonah was tied up protecting us from the throwing knives of the living roots and vines of the chamber while Nimbus and Ruth were being strangled by the Rootbound Gate.

  And, of course, there was the gradual stirring and awakening of the Tree Chimp Guardian directly over us, which now seemed a lot less gradual with only three minutes left on the timer.

  Maybe that was why I froze. I wasn’t used to having so much pressure on my shoulders, and I suddenly found myself wishing that I hadn’t even entered this stupid dungeon in the first place. If I had known ahead of time how dangerous dungeons—even Basic dungeons—could truly be, then I might have just taken my chances with Wolfbrand out in the woods.

  But when I thought about Wolfbrand, I thought about Martha. And Sheminith. And every other person whom Wolfbrand had hurt or killed. I thought about Barlow the bear and how Wolfbrand was clearly enslaving the poor creature against its will.

  And I thought of my family, as well as the entire village of North Forest, including Isaac and the Codexium, unaware of the danger that Wolfbrand posed to all of them.

  I couldn’t afford to freeze, couldn’t afford to fail in this dungeon.

  Yet I couldn’t see a way forward. My first attempt at inscribing a glyph on the Gate Podium had failed and worsened our situation considerably. If I failed again, then the timer would halve once more, and then there would be no time at all to try a third time.

  But I didn’t understand why my first attempt failed. It had said to inscribe Balance on the Gate Podium, and I did. I mean, I knew that we had had our doubts about the exact interpretation of that description, but I didn’t have time to experiment with different interpretations.

  The way I saw it, I had two interpretations left to try:

  One, assume that the dungeon was lying to me, and the Gate Podium was basically a red herring to make us waste time and energy on something that wouldn’t open the Gate to the next room. I didn’t know how likely that was, but Jonah had said that dungeons don’t play fair, so I couldn’t dismiss it entirely. Maybe we really could just brute force our way through the door, and nothing bad would happen.

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  Yet Jonah had already tried that and suffered some kind of consequence that we still didn’t entirely understand—and wouldn’t if we didn’t get to the next room.

  So I needed to assume that the dungeon was being honest, even if not entirely direct or clear.

  Inscribe Balance …

  Inscribing the literal glyph for Balance was definitely not what it meant. It must have been referring to a different kind of balance. Perhaps a balance between two different glyphs? But what did Balance even mean in the context of glyphs? I may have been an Inscriptionist, but my self-taught education could only take me so far, and I didn’t have many books or resources about glyphs. The book Isaac had given me about basic Codexing mentioned that balancing your glyphs was important for certain forms of spellcasting, but I doubted that had anything to do with what the dungeon wanted us to do.

  “Aaron!” said Jonah behind me in an increasingly frantic voice. “What are you doing? Open the Gate!”

  I jerked my head over my shoulder to see that Jonah was still maintaining his barrier, but he looked a lot more tired now. Sweat rolled down his temples and the side of his face in thick rivulets, and he was constantly shifting his weight from foot to foot as if trying not to fall over from exhaustion. I wondered why he wasn’t just leaning on his trident for support, but maybe that had something to do with the specific barrier spell he was using. The throwing knives continued to deflect off the barrier harmlessly, though it seemed like the cracks took slightly longer to heal than they had before.

  Then I whipped my head toward the timer and saw that there was a minute and a half left. As soon as my eyes landed on the timer, I heard the sound of stone scraping against stone and looked up at the Tree Chimp Guardian. Its arms stretched out and were definitely moving now, its stony eyelids blinking rapidly as if it were awakening from a deep sleep.

  Then I looked at the timer again. It was already at the minute mark and counting down fast.

  I needed to do something.

  I needed to inscribe Balance.

  But what did Balance mean?

  My eyes were suddenly drawn to the glowing green glyphs inscribed on the door to the second room, partially obscured by the crisscrossing vines and roots covering the gate. Nimbus and Ruth were held toward the top of the gate, so they were not blocking my view of the glyphs.

  That was when I realized I understood what the glyphs meant. I felt like I had seen them somewhere before, even though they didn’t quite look like the glyphs that humans used to inscribe spells when using the Codex.

  That was also when I finally understood what Balance meant.

  With 30 seconds left on the timer, I turned my attention back to the Gate Podium and, activating Trace Glyph again, inscribed balance on the Gate Podium.

  Not the word Balance, however, but rather the balanced glyphs on the door to the second room.

  The glyphs that stood for Life and Decay.

  I scratched out the last flourish on the glyph for Decay right when the timer hit zero.

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