“Now what am I supposed to do?” Sophia stared at the setup in front of her for a long moment as she waited for directions, but no spirit appeared to say anything.

  She carefully made her way forward to the centerpiece of the room, the ice circle surrounded by tree branches or maybe roots set onto another circle of ice. If she stood over the bump in the ice in front of the table, she could reach the center circle. She started to touch it, but pulled back her hand when she was less than an inch away and took another look at the ring of branches.

  They all had a central, core branch and were evenly placed around the circle, all twelve of them. The four at the cardinal directions seemed a little longer and wider than the other eight; they were clearly more important. It was almost like a compass, but that would subdivide into eighths, not twelfths.

  “It’s a clock,” she muttered. “But what does a clock have to do with melting a heart? Is there a specific time I need to set? Can I even set a time? There are no hands on it.”

  Maybe she needed to search the area around her? There were all of those shelves.

  Sophia picked up one of the cubes of not-cold-enough-to-be-real ice. It was opaque, but cool water started to drip off of it immediately and moments later, she held a small white pebble. “Okay, then yes, this has to be a thing.”

  Sophia set the pebble back where she’d gotten it and watched it for a moment. It didn’t seem to gather any ice, so she started picking things up and melting them as quickly as she could. She wanted to see what was there in case it gave her a clue.

  Many of the lumps turned into water and nothing more, but when she finished, she had a collection of pebbles. The vast majority were white, but a handful were black. Eight of them, one black and the rest white, started on the table; the rest came from shelves around the room and even from the snow-covered surface she thought of as the floor.

  There were seven black stones and forty two white stones. Sophia could already guess that that would be a time to enter on the clock, once she figured out how, but she didn’t have any way to enter a time. There were no clock hands. Maybe she should follow her first instinct and touch the clock? Maybe they were hidden under the ice, the way the stones were?

  Sophia set her palm against the circle in the middle of the clock face and expected it to melt. It didn’t; instead, it began to glow a bright light blue. “Maybe I just turned it on? Would that make the branches that are already there the clock hands?”

  Sophia shrugged to herself and touched the seventh main branch, just to the left of the one in the bottom middle. It also lit with the same light blue light, though only the central branch lit up; the side branchings didn’t.

  Sophia frowned at that, then nodded decisively. “That must be the hour, the side branches must be the minute. Then … is it up from the forty or down from the forty five? Let’s try up, that makes more sense I think.”

  She touched two of the side branches on the eighth main branch. They lit up, but nothing more happened. “Maybe I need to light up forty-two minutes? Or all seven hours?”

  Sophia tried all of the combinations she could think of, but nothing happened. She did learn that she had to select the minutes in order on each branch, but the branches were completely separate. She also learned that she could touch a branch again to dim it. Touching the center of the clock would dim the entire clock face, resetting the entire puzzle.

  “At least whoever designed this made it easy to check my work,” she muttered as she stared at the uncooperative piece of glowing art. “I have to be missing something. What is it?”

  She started to step back and look over the room to see what she missed, but her foot caught on the large bump under her feet and she had to catch herself on the snow-covered ledges to either side of her. She laughed ruefully. “And what I missed has been sitting there staring at me the whole time, hasn’t it?”

  Sophia bent down to touch the large lump that was half-buried in the floor. It took both hands and at least twice as long as any of the other lumps before she was able to free the baseball-sized black rock from the floor. “Yep, that’s a big miss all right. Eight forty two, not seven. Okay.”

  Sophia quickly tapped in the new time, then when nothing happened tried the second most likely option of lighting her way up to that time. This time, when she paused to see if anything happened, the center or the circle turned a golden yellow, almost the color of sunlight. It seemed to shift back into the wall, deforming until there was a hole in the middle that formed a half-sphere large enough for Sophia’s fist, then it went dark again.

  No, not just dark; the entire center area became black. Sophia stared at it for a moment, then looked down at the table. The last black stone she’d found was almost exactly the right size for that hole, wasn’t it? That would make the black color a rather large hint.

  Sophia picked it up and pushed the black stone into the hollow. It slid easily into place, then stopped with a click that sounded more like stone and metal than ice and stone. A wave of golden light spread over the stone, then out through all of the branches. Once it reached the tips of all of the branches, the two large vertical branches seemed to deepen in color, then split down the middle.

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  The entire slab of ice-covered stone split down the middle. As each half rotated towards Sophia, she leapt backwards and watched as it knocked the pebbles she’d left on the table onto the floor. The now-golden stone she’d placed in the center of the clock face floated in thin air, while the twin sides each had a curved bite missing where it fit between them.

  She heard the pebbles splash, like they’d landed in water. That drew her attention to the floor, which was melting as she watched. It wasn’t deep yet, but Sophia didn’t know how deep it was going to get.

  Sophia looked back up at the new opening that revealed only a stone wall. The edges glowed with golden light as the orb floated up to settle in at the top of the opening. Once it was in place, the dark wall seemed to ripple and disappear, replaced with an opalescent gleam. Sophia chuckled; she knew exactly what that was.

  A portal.

  Or, at least, something meant to look like one. The Challenge clearly didn’t need to show its portals that way, but just as clearly this was her instructions: step through the portal. The fact that the water was still rising and the snow on the ice ledges was starting to melt was only an additional incentive.

  Sophia pulled herself up onto the tree root-supported table, then crawled through the portal since it wasn’t quite tall enough to stand.

  She found herself kneeling in a snowy clearing dominated by a single large tree. It drew her attention before she even registered the people around her, partly because it was such a dominating presence and partly because of the way it echoed the puzzle she’d just solved, with a large ice-blue circular glyph set into its trunk surrounded by a series of small symbols, while a golden ball of light with its own fiery structure floated in an empty place in its crown.

  Sophia was slightly disappointed to realize that she wasn’t the first person there. Both Dav and Amy were already in the clearing; Amy was staring at the tree, while Dav grinned at Sophia. His pants looked damp from the knees down, which told Sophia that either he’d taken longer to get through the portal after he opened it than she had or he’d had a different puzzle.

  Si’a and Larryt also waited in the clearing, but Taika was nowhere to be seen. Well, at least Sophia wasn’t last.

  “Brrr,” Taika’s voice came from behind Sophia. “Did it have to get water everywhere?”

  Apparently she wasn’t very far ahead of last place, though. Sophia swung around. Taika did not look like he’d gotten wet at all, although the spots of color that floated away from him gave away his feelings. He might have escaped the water, but he still wasn’t happy about it.

  Sophia grinned at the irritated rodent. “You don’t look wet.”

  “Hmpf. I know better than to stand in water,” Taika answered, still grumpily, before he moved forward slowly. “Unlike some of you. Water isn’t good for chinchillas. We don’t dry easily. So, now, this tree is the winter thing I need to copy?”

  Water wasn’t good for chinchillas? Sophia blinked at the rodent. She’d never cared for one, so it wasn’t a surprise that she didn’t know. It was a good thing that Taika did.

  “Yes, this is the Heart of the Forest in Winter,” Si’a answered Taika. “The Spirit Tree. It calls us here to dance around it, which we will do once you leave. Go ahead and study the Tree.”

  Sophia took that as more of a recommendation than an invitation. It was a reminder that they had limited time. She walked around the tree and found that, unlike the pillars elsewhere in the Spirits of the Woods Challenge, the symbols she could see on the side where she started were the only symbols present. That had to be the spellform.

  At first, it seemed like it was missing connections, but as Sophia sketched the symbols she could see where they should be, and a closer check of the tree showed her that the connections were etched into the bark itself; they simply weren’t lit like the symbols were. They weren’t the firmly placed links the other displays had; instead, they were more like suggestions, but suggestions that she knew she should follow. She marked those lines in another color, so she’d know they were different when she went back over her sketch later.

  The orb in the crown of the tree was different and problematic. First of all, it was weird; she could clearly see every single part of it and how it was made whenever she looked at it, even though it was far enough away that it should have been blurry or blocked by a tree branch at some angles. It was always visible.

  Second, less disturbingly, there were no indications of how it connected to the spellform on the trunk of the tree. That was a problem that could only be solved through experimentation; even a small change in the connection location or method could have a significant effect on the power and stability of a spell. Sometimes it would even change the effect, especially if you shuffled the order of the connections. Sophia’s guess was that that had something to do with the strange lack of information on this spellform, but that meant she had a lot of things where she had to guess if not right, then right enough.

  There were several likely options from the way the symbols on the side of the tree and the orb sat in relation to the tree itself. She might simply need a simple connection from the top of the circle, or maybe the symbol that floated above it, to the orb. She might need to encase one in the other; her guess was that it would be the blue symbols around the golden sun, but either was possible. The last option, and the one she thought she was going to try first, was to imitate the tree itself and curve the blue symbols slightly and set the orb on the far side of the partial cylinder, as if it were in the bark at the back of the tree.

  It might work or it might not, but it met all of the requirements to be a proper spellform. It would be interesting to see what it did. Sophia was sure it would have something to do with “Spirit Shriek,” whatever that Ability was.

  If Sophia counted them, there were exactly 72 meltable lumps (including the large one that she tripped over). She wasn’t counting. If she had, only finding 71 might have been a clue she missed one.

  Technically, the puzzle would have accepted any eight of the large branches and any 42 of the small ones being lit. The clock shape was a reference to time but was not required knowledge. The solution she arrived at is the one the Challenge came up with first.