Verity felt the world vanish for a moment as she stepped into the plane between the doorway and the labyrinth. The repulsion exerted by the plants failed to block the invasive sensation of the barrier completely. Still, it passed quickly, and she arrived into a totally new space. A smooth stone wall, dozens of feet tall, faced her with no visible gate or entrance. The roof of a large keep could be seen just passing the imposing wall. A distant shape was on the roof, but she could not tell what it was. The situation was not what she had expected from this infamous dungeon, so she spent a few minutes unmoving, looking for a clue as to where she should proceed. Nothing stuck out to her, and she chose to walk towards the walls. It was apparent at closer examination that there was no way to circle the space to look for another opening since the cavern walls blocked her access to any other side. Dead vines coated the grey wall giving it a darker coloration at a distance. Unsure what to do, she decided to strip the vines off the walls to see if anything was hidden beneath them.

It took hours to sift through all the vines covering the long wall, but once she had, there were small words or single letters hidden in various spots. She pulled out the rough map she had made to draw on the back. It was fortunate that her charge, Lady Kora, had taken it upon herself to educate the servants serving her. It was not done as a mercy or out of kindness, but instead, to allow them to read to her and provide more interesting company. Verity felt supreme gratitude for that now as she deciphered some potential sentences from the letters she found. The statement she decided made the most sense was:

Seek The Key To Unlock What Is Next, Climb The Wall To Perish Fast

It made her move about as far from the wall as she could without feeling stupid, yet she could see no other way to proceed, not a key or lock to use it on. This was unsettling, but she went through the wall again, walked the entire cavern, and evaluated the place she had arrived at for any clues. When that failed to turn anything up, she let herself lay on the smooth floor, heedless of the plants crushed under her as she did so. Her eyes closed tightly in her distress, and she went weary from the tension of the last few days as well as the futility of this trial. There was nothing there! She screamed in her mind, trying to get angry enough to begin the difficult climb up the apparently deadly wall that looked fairly innocent from her current perspective. She was tired of looking vainly for a nonexistent option when there was a clearly visible one standing right in front of her. For all, she knew it was a ploy to distract her and make her avoid the obvious option.

This failed to give her the confidence she sought since the line kept repeating in her heard on a constant loop, Seek The Key To Unlock What Is Next, Climb The Wall To Perish Fast. It was heard in her own voice; instead, it was almost mechanical in nature and distorted. It quieted as she neared the wall, so she hesitated again and moved to start her climb right next to the word Fast which was one of the few intact words she had located in her search. Verity hoped it would bring her luck as she began to scale the wall.

Placing her hand in a slight crack above it, she started to haul her body up, only to release her grip when a bright flash from the word stopped her. It did not happen again while she waited, so she started again, only to have the flash repeat itself. It took her exhausting mind a few more attempts and experiments to realize that one of her dying plants had brushed against the inscription when she had climbed from that point. This had been what activated the light. It made no sense to her on why it would do this; there were no plants in the challenge, and there was no way for the creators to expect such an occurrence. Maybe the life energy from the plants did something to the magic in the words causing a flash? It failed to explain why or what was happening, but it certainly contained many. If it had just been dungeon spawned stone like the rest of the room, then it would not have had a discernable reaction to the plants.

Nevertheless, it did. That was enough to stop her attempts at climbing to focus with renewed hop on lightening up each word or letter. When that failed to have a reaction, she went over every inch of the space with handfuls of green mush clenched in her hands. It was about forty feet in front of the doors and near where she had arrived that she stumbled upon an abnormality.

Verity had been scooting along on her hands and knees, searching for any change, when a seam appeared on the floor in front of her. It revealed a removable slat of stone that she successfully pried away from the ground to rest beside her. There was a short three foot fall before a small shoot that pointed towards the keep.

Someone without her cheat of using the non-integrated plants would have had to feel the difference in the illusion coated trap door, dispel the magic, or figure out some method she had not thought of. If she had not heard about the perils of this place from back home, then she would have realized it now. There might not be a creature here that killed her, yet starvation would have been a real threat after a few days and the wall contained some sort of method to make a climber 'perish' upon the attempt. There was also this weird buzzing in her head that she had failed to fully notice until after she was in the hidden tunnel and closely cuddled in with the plants. Magic? She considered the way everything had seemed so barren and how she had only noticed the vines when she got close. It was possible that this was not complicated for those gifted at piecing magic or able to resist the spell cast on the room. Whatever had been the cause, she was free now to go and find the key to unlock her next challenge.