Day 8 - Rock

You glance in your rear-view mirror and see a massive lizard-like creature barreling toward your van. Yikes! You frantically look around and see a cave entrance off to the left. You swing your poor Aerostar around and launch yourself into this cave, quickly turning off the lights and engine.

Thump. Thump. Thump. You hear the large beast prowl outside, trying to find where you went. You wait. Hold your breath. Hope it doesn’t see you.

As you wait, you take in the rocky terrain you now find yourself in. Bits of stone are littered around the cave, like puzzle pieces waiting to be connected back together. You continue to listen for signs of danger. What do you hope doesn’t happen while you are inside this cave?

  • You will need to match the phrase halves together to form full clues. The top and bottom halves will match up, as will the halves on the left and right sides.

    Once you have those pairs, one clue from each set will match together to form something related to this puzzle’s theme.

  • Two clues (each clue being made up of half of a phrase) can be connected via lines to cross over one of the circles.

  • Only the odd-numbered circles matter in this puzzle. At each of those spots, you should have two clues that cross there.

  • The answers to the clues will give you half of a mineral or stone name. Use these clues phonetically (how they sound) to create these minerals and stones.

    For example, EYE and EARN combine to form IRON.

  • Use the number each clue set crosses over to extract a single letter from each mineral or stone. Read those letters in the order of these circles, from top to bottom.