“We came all this way just for a dead end…?” Harrier pants with disbelief as he glances around the room; the floor is like a work of art, but is otherwise totally empty, apart from the solid wall the party of Coursers has found themselves faced with. “N-No, there has to be something we're missing…”

Falcon sighs, looking rather defeated as he stares directly at the wall. “Look, I don't know what else to tell you. We ain't getting past this thing, Harrier.”

“Come on, everyone,” Beryl calls to the group, audibly exhausted as they glance back in the direction they came. “We might still have time to retrace our steps, see if we missed anything-”

“If there was anything else to see on the way down, we'd have seen it, Beryl,” the bay stallion snaps at her, eliciting an annoyed glare from the smaller Courser. “Better to admit it's time to cut our losses.”

“Alright, why don't we just… calm down, take a moment to consider our options,” Noticing Beryl's ears pinning back, Topaz hastily steps between Harrier and his cousin, hoping to stop their argument from escalating too far. But before either of the more abrasive horses gets so much as a chance to have opinions about the Heraldic's intervention, a mechanical rumbling sound erupts from somewhere behind the wall, and everyone begins frantically looking around; desperately searching for either the source or the effect.

“A-Ah,” Topaz stammers, realizing with a pang of horror that a tile beneath one of his cloven hooves had sunk ever so slightly in the same instant that the noise had started up. “I- I think that was me, I'm so sorry-”

Falcon quickly glances down at Topaz's hooves; the pale Heraldic stands on a tile that's sunken below the rest of the floor, and while he seems absolutely terrified about it, Falcon suspects the eccentric horse may have just cracked the first part of the code.

“Oh, man, don't even worry about it,” He says excitedly, beginning to poke and prod at various tiles beneath his own hooves; the ornate flooring makes far more sense now, but if there's a pattern here, just one tile pressed won't be enough to uncover it. “Hell, I think you just solved this for us!”

“Solved it…?” Harrier mutters in confusion, before his eyes widen as he realises what his brother is doing. “Oh- A puzzle! Really, I should have guessed…”

“So…” Topaz begins, awkwardly straightening his posture. “Not a booby trap?”

Beryl snorts with amusement, her tail flicking behind her. “Don't worry, you probably didn't doom us. You can sleep easy tonight.”

The pale Heraldic huffs indignantly, refusing to look her in the eye; but if the tension written all over his body disappearing in an instant is anything to go by, he's genuinely relieved.

“We'll still need to be careful,” Harrier sternly points out, glancing sideways at his brother. “We have no idea what's on the other side of that wall, after all.”

Beryl nods in acknowledgement of his warning, before carefully making her way across the tiled floor, seeing if anything stands out. “Everyone, spread out. The answer has to be in the tiles, we just need to find it.”