The torches, it turned out, weren't held by anyone — just old, ward-fed brackets set into the walls, burning on some ancient enchantment that had apparently never once needed refueling in six hundred years. That answered one question and immediately raised several more that Xavier decided not to think too hard about.
The room itself was a proper chamber, high-ceilinged, its far wall dominated by a heavy stone door carved with four circular discs, each etched with a different symbol — flame, wave, stone, gale — clearly meant to rotate independently, currently locked in some configuration that meant absolutely nothing to any of them.
Two skeletons peeled off the walls the moment they stepped fully into the room, ancient armor rattling loose on brittle frames, blades raised with the eerie, mechanical purpose of things that had been standing perfectly still for centuries and were extremely ready to stop doing that. Their armor, Xavier noted even mid-crisis, matched the soldiers depicted in the corridor murals almost exactly — the same banded plate, the same crested helms, ghosts of a war that had apparently never actually ended for them, just paused.
"Okay," Stephan said, drawing Ember. "That's the spooky part. Got it. Moving on."
The nearer one advanced with a slow, deliberate gait, testing the weight of a blade it hadn't swung in centuries, joints creaking with a dry, papery sound that set Xavier's teeth on edge more than any monster roar could have. There was something almost worse about the silence of it — no war cry or snarl, just patient, mechanical intent, like a soldier reporting for duty.
"The door first," Bruce called, already crouched at its base, tracing the carved discs with quick, careful fingers while Xavier and Stephan closed with the skeletons. "This is a sequence lock... The discs need to land in a specific order, and getting it wrong probably does something we don't want to find out about firsthand."
Xavier's skeleton came at him with a rusted longsword, ancient technique still somehow intact in the way it moved — proper footwork, a real guard, the ghost of some long-dead soldier's training still animating the bones. He met the first strike with his own blade, flame catching along the edge on contact and scorching straight through the brittle sword arm on the follow-through. "Any idea what order?" he called, ducking under a wild follow-up swing from the now one-armed skeleton and answering with a short burst of flame that reduced the rest of it to smoking fragments.
"Working on it!" Bruce turned the first disc on instinct, guessing at flame given the room's general theme, and moved to the second, reasoning his way through what felt like the most obvious order — flame first, since fire had clearly been the war's central act, then wave, to douse it, then stone to rebuild, then gale to scatter what was left. It felt, to him, like a reasonably clever guess.
He turned the fourth disc into place, and the whole mechanism answered with a deep, grinding groan that was very clearly not the sound of success.
The discs spun themselves backward, hard, resetting to their original positions with a force that sent a visible shudder through the stone door and kicked up a fine spray of centuries-old dust, and somewhere deep in the wall a low, resonant hum began building that none of them liked the sound of at all.
"That's a no..." Bruce said, snatching his hand back from the door as if it had burned him.
"Is it going to explode?" Stephan called, mid-swing against his own skeleton.
"I genuinely don't know, and I would prefer not to find out by waiting around!" Bruce backed off the door several full steps, watching the hum fade slowly back into silence without anything actually detonating, and let out a breath he hadn't realized he was holding. "Okay. Okay. Wrong order. Noted. Very noted."
"Guessing isn't working," Xavier called, catching a follow-up swing on his blade and answering it with a shove of raw heat that sent his now-armless opponent stumbling backward into the wall. "Maybe don't guess."
"Thank you, that's extremely helpful. I hadn't considered not guessing," Bruce shot back, though there was no real heat in it, just the irritation of a man who'd been wrong in front of an audience.
Stephan's skeleton proved more stubborn than Xavier's, dodging his first two swings with a fluid, unnerving grace that had no business belonging to something held together by six hundred years of dust and stubbornness. It caught his third swing on its own rusted blade, steel screeching against steel, and answered with a counter-thrust that Stephan only barely twisted out of the way of, cursing the whole time about swordsmanship being unfair when the other guy had six centuries of practice and nothing better to do with it.
"A little backup would be appreciated whenever you're free!" he called, circling to keep the thing's blind side toward him.
"Bit occupied," Xavier called back, finishing off the last stubborn scraps of his own opponent and turning to throw a quick lance of flame at the joint of Stephan's skeleton's sword arm, just enough to buy him an opening.
Stephan took it without hesitation, driving Ember through the weakened joint and following through with a full-strength swing across its ribs. It took that hit, then a second one square to the spine, before the whole frame finally buckled and it collapsed into an ordinary, undramatic pile of bones. Stephan straightened, breathing hard, grinning anyway. "Please tell me that's the last of them."
"No idea," Xavier admitted, already turning to cover Bruce while he worked. "How's the door coming?"
"Badly," Bruce admitted, crouched back at its base now that the immediate danger of detonation seemed to have passed, studying the four discs with considerably more caution than his first attempt had shown. "I got cocky. Guessed based on vibes instead of actually thinking it through, and vibes were wrong. Give me a minute to do this properly."
"Take your minute," Xavier said, sword still raised, scanning the room for any sign of a third guardian rising to replace the two they'd already dropped. "I'd rather you get it right the slow way than fast and wrong again. Or maybe not? I hate it down here. Hurry up, actually!"
"For the record," Stephan added, kicking a stray rib bone out of his path, "I'm choosing to be encouraged that the door didn't just kill us for guessing wrong. Feels like a good sign. Optimistic, even."
"Or it's saving something worse for whoever guesses wrong twice," Bruce muttered, not looking up from the discs.
"You couldn't have led with the optimistic read?" Stephan said.
"I contain very little optimism most days. You know this about me."
Xavier kept his own sword low and ready, watching the empty alcoves along the walls for any hint of further movement, and let the two of them bicker their way through the tension the way they always did, grateful, in the quiet, unspoken way he rarely said out loud, that neither of them ever seemed to run out of it when it actually mattered.