Partway through Eye of the Storm — the main quest that takes you past the Flow Gate to the final island — Palia sits you down in front of a wall of stone tiles inside the Temple of the Gales and asks you to restore a mural of the Silverwing. It is a sliding puzzle: tiles slide into the empty space, nothing rotates, and the door stays shut until the bird is whole.
Most guides hand you a memorised move list. The problem: if your board starts differently, or you make one exploratory move first, the list is useless. Better to spend the same five minutes learning the method that solves every arrangement — this one, and every sliding puzzle any game throws at you afterwards.
The method (works on any shuffle)
Picture sliding puzzles are ordinary sliding puzzles with the numbers painted over — here is the full walkthrough, but the short version:
- Know the target picture. Before touching anything, work out which tile belongs where in the finished Silverwing. In Palia the finished mural is symmetric enough that this is the genuinely hard part — pictures are harder than numbers precisely because tiles look alike.
- Solve the top row first and never touch it again.
- Then the left column of what remains. Also final.
- Recurse. The board shrinks toward the bottom-right corner.
- The last six tiles solve as a rotation: walk the empty cell in circles and the final 3×2 block clicks into place.
Two Palia-specific mercies: the tiles move with WASD / the directional buttons rather than clicks, and there is a reset if you tie yourself in knots. Resetting is not failure — untangling a mistake usually costs more moves than starting clean.
Stuck anyway?
If the mural refuses to come together, recreate the board in our sliding puzzle solver — number the Silverwing tiles mentally from top-left, enter the current arrangement, and it will return the shortest move sequence. That beats scrubbing through a YouTube walkthrough hunting for the frame where the boards happen to match.
After the puzzle
Solving the mural triggers the event at the Night Sky Temple and opens the Vault of the Gales with its bundles — the quest wraps up from there, and the dialogue varies slightly depending on whether you have finished Elouisa's and Caleri's discovery quests beforehand.
One more thing worth knowing: a later quest step asks you to return to the room with the sliding puzzle. The game means exactly that room in the Temple of the Gales — the mural chamber. Nothing needs re-solving; the point of return is the room, not the puzzle.
The bigger family
Palia's mural is a picture-mode member of the sliding tile puzzle family — the same game as the 15 puzzle, dressed in feathers. If the temple puzzle was the first slide puzzle you ever enjoyed, the 8 puzzle is a ten-minute next step, and your own photos make good murals too.