All In, Enderal [Travelogue of Skyrim Total Conversion Mod, Enderal]

[Guile]

- Turns out I was still in the wrong location, and I had to get off the mountain entirely before I could find Agnod.
Some of these attempts were better than others.

Spoiler: pictured: man's dream of flight

- Agnod's design is pretty cool. It's half buried in the snow at a weird angle, so you have to do a bunch of platforming up pipes (that look suspiciously like the completed Agnod had spider legs) just to get inside.

Spoiler: not pictured: the 8 tries it took to climb up here

It was a bit odd that if you stand on Agnod and look at the path it cut into the mountain it seemed to smash in and then turn left. Maybe it was trying to turn around?
It would've been pretty neat to be able to look out and see the hole where the great work of seven decades of starling ingenuity had torn through the world on the way down, that's all I'm saying.

- Inside, the ground is very uneven. The hull is cracked places, burying parts of entire rooms in snow and what's left is covered in icicles. There's a mix of gold hull plating, red emergency lighting, light reflecting off snow and ice and even water. Lots of great set design here, lots of variety.

Spoiler: Nice set design

Although it's also very dark in parts. I'm very glad I finally figured out I could buy a magelight to free up a hand for double swording. It cuts out every two minutes, which is very inconvenient if I'm left trying to battle a horde of mechanical spiders in the dark, but still worthwhile.
There's even sections where machines still pump and run and a reddish steam hisses and broils out of still-active ship parts. Agnod's heart still beats.

- The locals are very, very active, thanks for nothing Pahtira. Mechanical spiders, dwarf balls (I mean sphere guardians, yeah) and centurion giants are the order of the day.
It's actually the dwarf balls that present the most difficulty.
Centurions are lumbering giants that I can kite around pinging arrows off their chassis all day until I dent them enough to fall over.
Mechanical spiders are weak enough to hit with Entropic Blood, which gives me another (debatably) warm body between me and my enemies; plus they naturally explode in purple lightning when they die, which means that they explode twice when I hit them with Entropic Blood. It's like fireworks.
Dwarf balls are fast, stabby, and too high level to take over with my talent. They hang out in ball form when not angered by intruders, so I found myself walking by them all the time only to get a sword in the back. Then I found myself shooting every vaguely ball-shaped thing just in case; a lot of urns and pots were irreparably damaged in their name.

- I do start to wonder after a while where all the starlings are. Surely this was a crewed spaceship? There's not even a skeleton to be found, just endless rooms of starling-tech monsters. There's one up in the cockpit called The Navigator, even.
Then I start to wonder… see, when mechanical spiders explode on death, they spray out chunks of that starling gold metal and burned-looking soul gem bits, but also what looks like chunks of meat.
The dwarf balls splinter into bits without any such gory mess, but the top humanoid half stays mostly intact… and the centurions just fall over, fully intact. Fully humanoid, if gigantic in size.
Was Agnod crewed only by these mechanical horrors to begin with, or did the starlings do this to themselves?
Did it happen before the maiden voyage, a sacrifice of the individual in the name of the glorious starling master race, each starling crew member carefully closing themselves up in shells of unfeeling metal, Cybermen style? Or did it happen after, when their ship was hulled and they were stranded on the roof of the world with a bunch of deadly snow bears outside and no help coming?
Do sphere guardians bleed soylent green?

- I'll spare you the horrors of the dozens of careful battles, the hundreds of mechanical spiders, dwarf balls and centurions slain, and the dozens of my own gruesome deaths at their hands (and blades, and spider-tips).
It's a lot, because Agnod is a goddamn labyrinth. Worker's barracks, engine rooms, cockpit, generator room, etcetera. I actually popped open a couple of master-class doors with my two Ondusi's Master Scroll of Lockpicking that were supposed to expedite the whole process, but then I got lost and ended up wandering backwards through a bunch of content anyway.

- I almost have to admire how SureAI managed to cram in a spider section behind one of the master-locked doors. It's like the ship got torn open in the middle and the little blighters get in anywhere there's a spare space for them.
The pure blue-white is a welcome break in the color palette, at least.

Spoiler: SureAI likes their giant spiders

Well, there's a couple dozen corpses in here, though they're all wearing shit hauberks and iron swords instead of starling tech. Where the heck did they come from? If they're adventurers that are dying in droves to the defenses and the spiders are dragging them back to their lair, who would brave the Great White North with an iron sword? Just how many hapless fools have Yerai and Pahtira sent here to die because they wanted a trinket?
It's also possible these are the starlings; in the barracks section there's a couple of iron cages. It's possible they were keeping the killer spiders as pets for some ineffable reason, and they got out either immediately before or after the crash. And then dined on succulent starling flesh, because who the hell keeps man-eating spiders as pets.
We'll never know for sure, probably, because there's a distinct lack of audio logs or helpful notes about the place.

- After far, far too long, I find Pahtira in the generator room.
I kind of wonder how she managed that feat; at least Jespar is a spy kinda guy, it sort of makes sense that he'd make it through a dungeon and meet me at the end.
Do the defenses not target starlings? Is that it? Am I the victim of racism?
She has a cute little line where I go 'Why the hell were the defenses still on?!' and she goes 'What, I did turn them off! I mean, a lot of them. If you had to go through it with all the defenses on, you'd be dead. You should be grateful.'
Not feeling tremendously grateful, but that's probably just all the deaths talking.

- She has me open a few valves that honestly feels like busywork. Why am I even here?
Pahtira has me go down and grab the core, when of course the defenses turn back on and fry me like bacon.

Spoiler: my approaching doom is pretty

I needed to be here to get me out of the way, of course.
Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal, Pahtira! Also, curse cutscene defeats.
Pahtira monologues like a Saturday morning cartoon villain as I haze in and out of consciousness, about how Yerai isn't using the centurion right and if she gets to be the glorious golden god-king she'll bring the starlings back to their former glory and so on and so forth.
I wonder if she expects to just show up in a centurion suit and be handed the keys to the kingdom? I dunno, maybe that's how things work with starlings; the blingiest contender gets the crown.

- Now, on the one hand, I appreciate that she understands that I am a dangerous enemy to make, hence turning on what looked like a tiny contained black hole when I stuck my hand into the engine to get the power core.
On the other hand, you guys and I all know this isn't going to end well for her, because I am already dead, bitch.

- So there's what might be a thrilling escape from the ship as the glacier melts and the water levels rise (I'm not sure how that happened with the power core gone, but whatever), except it's not.
There's no heart pumping music, and there's no danger: you just tread water for a few slow minutes until the flood levels rise enough to get in the elevator, and then you head back through the still-dry ship to outside.
This would probably work much better on someone who died when you trick them into sticking their hand into a localized black hole.

- Boy is Pahtira going to be surprised in a minute when I teleport back to Ark.

- I bust in with Yerai shouting, 'What are you doing Pahtira? This is madness!' to the Pahtira-centurion. Oh sure, when you want to stick yourself in a giant robot it's a great idea, but when she wants to do it it's some kind of madness! Typical man.
No but seriously, you're both fucking lunatics.

- Actually, she mostly sounds sulky from inside Horst when I burst in. 'Oh great, I knew I shouldn't have waited', that kind of thing.
Yerai notices me and goes, 'Guile, watch out! Pahtira has taken over Horst!' like I'm some rube who has no idea what's going on and needs explanations.

Spoiler: this is the happiest I've ever heard Pahtira

That's some quality sass, Giant Robot Pahtira.
So I lead her around the room in her big stompy centurion body while Yerai goes to hide in a corner. Centurion fights continue to be a joke to anybody with a bow, so there's no tension at all. Horst is bigger than the average centurion, and he's got a lot of HP, but that's all.
Ping ping pingpingpingping repeat until dead.
Pahtira died as she lived; spouting cliched villain dialogue: "No, but that's– impossible–"

- Actually, turns out Pahtira's consciousness is 'inactive', not 'offline' per se. Yerai can transfer it into something else – he jokes about always wanting a talking paperweight.
I'm gonna be honest, The Adventures of Yerai and Pahtira the Talking Paperweight would be pretty awesome.


The Takeaway:
So that quest had some good bits, but the funny talking bits were spread out like butter over too much bread. It took forever to find the place, and then the Agnod section was at least twice as long as it needed to be. There were at least four zones in the bloody thing; it was bigger than the average city!
I think it might have gone better if the generator room served as a kind of hub with Pahtira sending me out to various parts of the ship on retrieval missions, rather than having to work through at least 50 difficult fights only to get hit by the betrayal almost immediately.
I found myself kind of flagging during the quest and the subsequent write-up, too. Next up is more main questing with Callia and Jespar, but I think I'm going to take a week or two off to recharge my batteries with this mod.
Maybe do some story writing, or try out Witcher 3 or something.

 

[Guile]

Let's see if I can't get back into the swing of this, shall I?


- Back at the plot, Lexil is ready to drop some info on these black stones I'm looking for.
Lexil describes trying to figure out the Beacon to a child trying to reverse-engineer a Starling spaceship, which is a pretty cool turn of phrase. Apparently trying to use the magitech masterpiece of a long-dead race is hard, or something.
If you want to trade places, you could brave the killer spaceship while I look over your notes, Lexy.

- Anyway, after studying his notes we come up with three places to try: the estate of a noble in town, an apothecarius in Undercity, and the burned ruin of House Dal'Varek.
That's right, we don't have to dig through the ruins of my house: we have to dig through Jespar's.

- All the sub-quests have really ominous names, too.
'Black Light, Part I' is the overarching quest, 'All the Dead Souls' is Jespar's, 'Angel' is Calia's, and 'A Song in the Silence' is interrogating a noble in town … Okay, 'Black Light' just sounds like Lexil is directing me to his weed guy to pick him up a dime bag and we're gonna smoke out together later, and 'Angel' is fine.
That one will probably turn out to be the worst one of all.

- I do a bit of investigatory work on all three of them first before I decide which one to go on first.
First up is this fun bit when you go looking for Jespar where he's unavailable because he went to go have a private meeting with a noblewoman. Is it his sister? A contact? Are they fuckin'? The barkeep's money is on her being one of his 'beloveds'. Note the plural.
I wish this barkeep guy had a bigger part, he's fun.
Anyway, I get a letter for him, which I look at immediately because this is a fantasy world where mail laws don't exist. It's a map. I'll need to go looking for clues to… probably find Jespar's missing sister? And presumably Jespar will catch up later somehow? Not sure how, I have his map now.

- The apothecarius I'm to meet in Undercity sets me on the trail of a legendary healer-turned-maybe-necromancer named Dal'Galar.
Well, first she takes potshots at me for being some fancy-pants Order fellow who doesn't like to get her hands dirty down here with the fleshmaggots.

Spoiler: We don't take kindly to your kind 'round here

Lady, I'll forgive you because you don't know me. But these garments you're referencing? I literally pulled them off five different dead guys. I wish it was all ball gowns and parties up there.
I do like her model though. I think this is the first old woman the game has thrown at me. And she's sassy.
... I miss Constantine.

- Calia turns up, and wants to help, thinking this 'Angel' thing is supposed to heal all diseases so it'll heal her… witchiness. I can already tell it's not going to be that easy, but hey, if she wants to tag along, I'm game. She wants her assistance to be under the radar, though, since it would be hard to explain why she wants this thing so bad.
So instead she's just going to go off the grid for days while we track down this legend's castle. Sounds legit. The Order won't suspect a thing I'm sure.

- Calia led me next to a spot next to the apothecary's cellar door to tell me all this, so I pop in to see what's up.
And a 'Lost One in the Wardrobe' pops out. This Supreme Sister Salvina lady literally has skeletons in her closet. Am I going to have to kill her? I think I might have to kill her, later.

- Also I decide to wander over to a bit of the Undercity I've never seen before, since I'm here. It's the orphanage!
What fresh hell shall I find there? Must I face… children?

Spoiler: This is at least the third worst welcome I've ever received at an orphanage

Nope, it's Vatyr. Lots of Vatyr. And some carved wooden hobby horses and teddy bears and stuff, but mostly Vatyr. Why are there Vatyr in the orphanage? Is there some kind of law that says the Undercity can't have nice things?
SureAI kind of missed an opportunity to have you be attacked by child Vatyr, I think. That would up the what-the-fuck factor a bit.

- Anyway, back up into the sunlight! The Del'Geyss point of contact for 'Song in the Silence' is a giant house in the noble quarter that I've gone by half a dozen times. There's an adventurer serving as doorguard out front.
I use Rhetoric to applaud him for being such a stalwart so well that he starts cursing me out and psyching himself up to get back to adventuring.

Spoiler: A believe you, door guard with delusions of grandeur

So of course I walk right in. It's pretty fuckin' fancy in here, I tell you what.

Spoiler: dem pots

Look at all those pots. Man likes his pots.
Anyway, Dal'Geyss assumes I'm here to rob him, because… well that's fair. I did actually help myself to a gold ingot on the way in here. He assures me that his personal bodyguard is a real nasty customer, not like that boob out front. I think he's from the Relata or something?
Unfortunately there's no option to say 'What, that guy? Looks like a pussy to me' and instead I'm summarily ejected from the house.

- Never one to take 'no' for an answer, I pick the lock on the back door and come back in. This is a stealth mission, one that unfortunately resets if a guard spots you in any way. There's no, like, 'stab guard like asshole before he alerts anyone' option.
It's a little baffling why I can't just raid this guy's house with a writ from the Order to make him tell me what's up, but whatever, I'm always up for a little light B&E.
After Solid Snaking my way upstairs, I then end up resetting the mission like a dozen times trying to get over to Dal'Geyss before realizing I need to exit his room by way of balcony, work my way up a ladder to the roof, then work my way over to another balcony and then into a storeroom.
Not exactly intuitive, you know?
So I swipe a birth certificate and you know, it turns out Dal'Geyss is the sort of dick that turns out his kid if they're born deformed, but the mistress gave the kid the black stone thinking he could sell it and maybe live an okay life…?
This is the story I find out after blackmailing him, anyway.

- So those are the three quests, which I can do in any order. I'm tentatively leaning towards tackling this Notre Dame situation first, under the assumption that Calia and Jespar's quests should be more fun and I like to save the best for last.


The Takeaway:
I appreciate SureAI trying to do something different with the stealth section, but it's not really something the system was ever designed for and it mostly turned out frustrating. Also not sure about taking Jespar's mail, but whatever, I'm sure the Prophetess knows what she's doing.

 

[Guile]

I was going through my screenshots, and wanted to share something I skipped over last time:

Spoiler: Pictured: sick burn

I am something of a connoisseur of Endralean insults by now, and I can say that slam was excellent. 9/10, Dal'Geyss.


- Anyway. On the advice of a guy from the Enderal forums, I'm going to actually be doing them in order of difficulty: Calia's, Jespar's, and finally the one I got from Dal'Geyss, Songs In The Silence.
The Angel quest has me meeting Calia in Frostcliff Tavern, on the edge of the Great White North.
When I get there, I find her already questioning two of the locals about that Dal'Guldar guy. Good hustle, Calia!

Spoiler: Sounds like credible info, thanks Random Hunter

I wish this happened more often, honestly; showing up to find the quest already in progress. Jespar could learn a thing or two.

- You can just move on with the quest, but you can also ask around about Dal'Guldar for a bit of extra XP. One customer is convinced he's going to lead a horde of undead rabbit monsters to take over Enderal. One fellow tells a story showing that to a civilian, summoning some ghost-animal is probably pretty damn spooky. The way he tells the story sounds like people have made fun of him for it so much he's half convinced it didn't happen.
Yeah. Summoning ghost animals. What a silly bugger. As if that could ever happen, right guys?

- Due to the bug I spent a lot of time wandering around the tavern talking to people and looking for anything I missed,which involved listening to the minstrel girl play my new favorite Enderalean bard song, as well as a couple others.



The NPC named 'Minstrel', meanwhile, was in the back, stirring a stew pot on the hearth. What is that guy's deal?

- Calia, little ray of sunshine that she is, also has this to say about the war with Nehrim: "They trump us in every aspect - manpower, equipment, siege machinery… Let's just hope the walls of Ark are as durable as they're said to be."
Ark, of course, is the capital of Enderal. She's freely assuming that the enemy will be knocking on the Order's gates shortly.
This is pretty effective story-telling, here: Calia is kind of a downer by nature, but the Nehrimese landed like, a week ago, game-time. When even your party members are expecting your side to roll over in that short a time…
What we're doing right now has nothing to do with resisting the Nehrimese invasion. We're hunting down macguffins to fight the High Ones when we're expecting a wave of purely mortal steel to punch our gates in.
Whatever! It'll be fiiiine.

- The path to Dal'Guldar's fortress is about as far from Frostcliff Tavern as Fogville, that place with all the Arps, but in the exact opposite direction. Along the way almost immediately we're attacked by half a dozen Nehrimese soldiers and a guard dog, but honestly I was fighting guys with the silver swords the Nehrimese are using 10 levels ago.
It's a shame there's only one of me and like five entrances into Ark, I could kill guys like this all day.

- Calia warns me to be careful of a guard tower along the way, but frankly it's right next to the path so I aggro it anyway. Sure, I might have been able to sneak past if I'd stuck to the mountainside and engaged the sneak skill, but after rolling those Nehrimese earlier I'm feeling like maybe I'm actually a big deal after all, and swagger down the path like I own the place.
With Calia tagging along, even 3 wild mages isn't too much of threat. Possibly this is due to one of the mages slipping and falling off the mountain, admittedly.
There are a few kegs of black powder to pick up here, presumably that's going to be useful at some point? Since I've never seen anything like them, I'm assuming 'quest item'.

- More of a problem are a trio of Lost Ones hanging out over a few extremely and thoroughly murdered Keepers on the road.
Lost Ones are some of the highest tiers of undead I've run across except for those Lord of the Lost assholes; a lot of them are naked, but with sweet glowing eyes.
Calia is distraught, and suggests we should search the group for clues. I, of course, am way ahead of her and already wearing the Keeper's baller red cloak.
He did have a written order with him, telling him to go hunt down a local entropist, so we take a brief break to do that. The mine the entropist is hiding in is like 10 steps away, so it's convenient.

- The mine is pretty sweet-looking.

Spoiler: Did they mine ice here?

Not exactly homey, but it has a certain ambiance.

- Elemental wolf bites still hurt a bunch, but they're relatively fragile and never having to fight more than two at a time keeps things manageable.
I learn that the dead Keeper (whose name I have already forgotten) helped Calia during her trial. I like to think that I'm honoring him in my own way; his cloak is going to keep me warm and noble-looking in the cold winter nights ahead, and his boots will finance the Order (I am part of the Order, this fact checks out).

- After dispensing justice at the point of a blade to the no-good Entropist, we come upon an abandoned village covered in fire elementals and elemental wolves. Not entirely sure why. Are they guards? Is something calling them here? The way they're spaced, in ones and twos along the roads of the village, it kind of feels like I stumbled into the Village of the Fire Fairies or something.
Calia informs me that someone has been here recently. Hunters? the Prophetess asks.
No, me. I don't think it's hunters. Unless local hunters know how to tame fire elementals? I don't know, the bloody things always attack me on sight, but then, so do wolves and bears (there are also wolves and bears).

- Just as a side note, wandering off the beaten path a bit after the ice bear leads me to a lonely tower. Abandoned, empty, left open to the elements. At the very top… a book on a pedestal called something like The Life of Whisperwind, Volume 4. If the book is to be believed, this is where the noted murderer and drug (sorry, 'drogae') addict ended up. He joined an ascetic holy order and returned to the right Path. Right here, presumably.
I thought it was neat, anyway. I should probably read more of Enderal's books (besides 'King Lewd and His Maidservant Devotia' and 'Lyrical Gushes And Other Fluids, By Prince Adreyu of Mith', of course, of which I own at least three copies each).

- At the top of the mountain sits the fortress we came here to find.

Spoiler: Castle Dal'Galar seems nice

Next time, I'll actually enter the place. He'll probably be a nice man who will have us in for tea, and we can talk about Calia's curse over biscuits. Or we'll have to fight a bunch of elementals or undead or something.
One of those.


The Takeaway:
Getting to head around the tavern and talk to all the superstitious peasants about the weird things they've heard or seen Dal'Guldar doing was neat, if somewhat buggy. It kind of had the feel of Van Helsing asking about after that mysterious Count in the foreboding castle up ahead. Also, the map is now much more… papery. It's nice.

 

[Guile]

- So the first thing we discover is a locked door. After a quick conference, Calia suggests we blow it up. You know, like you do.
I point out that I conveniently have two barrels of blackpowder on my person from that tower earlier, and Calia makes a hammer-space joke about impossibly-big pockets! I'm so proud.
Nonetheless, we need more, so we go find some in the prospector town down below. It is a small, very dark hole with almost as many giant spiders as blackpowder barrels. I'm not even surprised. Just disappointed. And a little poisoned.
There's a few exciting minutes of stabbing in the dark before all is quiet again and I can spare the time to put up a mage-light.
I'm honestly not sure if the Frost Spider Queen was already dead (she seems to be looking down the business end of a frost-covered cannon) or if all the wild swinging in the dark did the trick.

- Unfortunately it's not all fun, games and blowing up front doors: Calia has a brief… episode almost immediately.

Spoiler: Calia, shonen protagonist, showing off her Mysterious Power

It's kind of cute that she's giving herself a little pep-talk, but since that pep-talk may be the only thing keeping my insides un-eviscerated… you do whatever you feel like you need to, Calia. Do you want a nice back rub? Maybe a soothing tea?
Actually, if the option existed to say 'Hey, maybe take a load off? Wait down at the tavern? Have a pint on me?' I'd go for it. There is no such option, of course.
I figure the pain she'll be saving me blocking draugr sword stabbin's will be balanced out by her almost inevitable demon-transformation-slash-betrayal.
Should I be happy that SureAI is setting that up ahead of time with foreshadowing, or kind of annoyed I can't tell her to shoo and avoid another cutscene defeat? I'm undecided.

- I suspect Dal'Galar may not want visitors.

Spoiler: no solicitors

Call it a hunch.
There's a brief side-trip looking for a way in past the courtyard, which involves me getting vision-y again. Galar learns from a disciple that the Apothecarius have stopped supplies, like a bartender cutting off a guy who's had a few too many. Except with fresh cadavers, not beer.
Calia, who is REALLY on the ball this quest, wonders why you'd be getting visions of Dal'Galar if they're supposed to be visions of ancient Pyrean times.
This keeps the player from wondering the same thing; if SureAI brought it up, there's probably a reason the 'rule' they introduced earlier is being broken...

- Then a blue flame appearing before the corpses scattered everywhere get back up and draw swords. Behold Dal'Galar's precious panacea The Angel, long gone out of control. Or so I suspect.
Calia has this theory that it's my visions causing them to get back up, which… okay, accidental necromancy isn't OUTSIDE the boundaries of my weird ass powers, probably. But it's not me! Probably.

- It's not exactly new, but the main hall and the smithy I find myself wandering through are nicely atmospheric.

Spoiler: You can do a lot with icicles and pale blue mist

It's also pretty neat how Dal'Galar has these bright blue-white lights hanging here and there, and one fell down onto a snowdrift in front of the tower stairs I need to take. Good level design. Understated, but does a good job drawing the player's eye to where they need to go next.
The main hall is big and echoing, with pillars and lion statues and so on, and I can use the navigational help.

- There's also this lovely lady. Fingers set in quiet ritual repose like a Boddhisatva or a Buddha, shawl gathered about her, very noble and mysterious. Good pose.

Spoiler: you can never be too careful

I've had some bad experiences with statues though, so I unload a few arrows into her (for Constantine) before moving on.
Also, note Calia sounding very inconvenienced by a locked door while we break into this guy's house. I'll turn her into a proper Elder Scrolls protagonist yet!

- I need to find two likely passwords to progress, and Calia suggests we check out the two towers off the main hall. The one on the left tells me, courtesy of another vision, that Dal'Galar's most precious thing is above, and he commissioned a starling to build a magic doorstop. Then poisoned him during the toast. Two can keep a secret only when one is dead, etc.
Galar apologizes and promises to take care of the starling's family, but I'm not buying any of the Greater Good shit that Galar's phantom is shoveling.
Calia is pretty bummed that her hero is kind of a douchebag. I knew this was never going to end any other way though, not with the way the blackstones have been built up as being so Elder Scrollsian.

- So up in the tower, Calia gives me a pouch of blackpowder, 5 fire arrows, and the telekinesis spell, and it's time for a physics puzzle.
I mean, I get it. There have been a lot of vision cutscenes already, and there will be more, and game design theory says not to leave the player out of the action for too long.
But why can't Calia do this for me? Seriously. I'll wait over here. Take your time.
No dice. So there I am spending a handful of minutes throwing a blackpowder barrel at the hole...
Before I realize a 'blackpowder barrel' and a 'pouch of blackpowder' are two different items in my inventory. The explosive barrel I've been bouncing off the hole in the wall for 5 minutes is too big to fit. Whoops.
So I manage to huck the pouch in there after a while. Now out comes the bow, and my task is to shoot a fire arrow in there to set it off.
Well, after only having to pick my missed flaming arrows up off the ground once, I do eventually get one in there, things explode, and I'm allowed to progress.

- Right into a kid's room. I don't need the attendant vision of Galar reading a story to the child on the bed and promising that soon she'll be warm again and able to go out into the world and so on to figure out the story beats from here on out. It's a nice scene; Galar has so far seemed a little cold with his posh accent and erudite demeanor, but this is humanizing. Buuut...
SureAI is mmmmaybe hitting the 'turn to necromancy to save a loved one' beat a little hard. This is the third time now! First with Yero, then with the Aged Man, and now Dal'Galar. The scary lengths people will go to for love seems to be one of the biggest themes of Enderal: Shards of Order (whenever it's not 'people are dicks' or 'nature hates you').
The child on the bed is a corpse, you see. He's been keeping her body fresh with some mixture Kileans use to keep their dead undegraded before sea burial. Because of course Dal'Galar didn't do all this just to save people; he did it to save a person. He has a personal stake in this race!
No matter; we have the first password, 'Maya.'

- The other tower is his laboratory.
Well, first is a bunch of corpses gathered around a dining hall, and I'm firmly expecting to have to fight all these undead party-goers (we've been having to fight 'reawakening servants' here and there all throughout) when instead we're attacked by a Wisp on steroids. As long as a man is tall, shaped vaguely like a floating skeletal serpent, trailing ethereal green flames. Totally rad, honestly. I wish I'd gotten a screenshot of it, but it was kind of a pussy and Calia and my ice elemental piled onto it fast.
More visions, more undead. This is Galar's lab, complete with entirely too many man-sized cages, a skeleton spread out atop the table, and a weirdly excessive number of hammers arranged on tables according to size. Also these things:

Spoiler: Probably not Malphas

A serene-faced woman, hands clasped in prayer, with snakes on her shoulders. I'm not sure what this is supposed to evoke, exactly. The serpent-goddesses of Crete and India? The caduceus? The serpent heads bear a more than passing resemblance to the prow heads on the viking longboats full of undead that occupy many of Enderal's scenic beaches...

- The vision has Galar asking his disciple to pack her bags. She was trying to get him to change course, citing that he's not even healing people any more. He's spending all his time 'with this… with this girl.'
So Galar asks her to pack her shit. Not shouting, he's grateful for everything she's done… but it's time for her to go. She sounds shocked, the kind of shock that'll probably transition to heartbreak the second those doors with the crucified corpses close behind her.
Does Galar see the end coming, and trying to spare her? Or is there no thought in his head for anyone except 'the girl'?

Spoiler: kinda wish we knew the name of this disciple

Galar's back looks… tired.

- I'm starting to suspect Maya isn't Galar's child at all, not biologically. Something in the way the disciple talks about the girl, it's almost like they found her in the snow. And everything Calia has ever heard of Galar, it's like he could never find time for women when there was The Work.
Could she be a pyrean like our friend frozen in the ice? Could she be a creation of the black stone?
The mystery is heating up.

- More books. Endless books. Shelves upon shelves. A huge library.
Then on the next floor, a taxidermist's dream house. Snow bears and Lost Ones and trolls all stuffed and preserved. Classy.
And at the tippy top of the tower, corpses preserved in fluid. Like in the Aged Man's house. With little bars on the caskets, in case of sudden reanimation into draugr!
Say what you will about Dal'Galar, the man knows his lab safety procedures.

Spoiler: Pictured: 'safety first' necromancy

The watery coffins are set up in a ring around a dark, dull stone. If it's a soul stone, it's an absolutely massive one. The vision helpfully shows Galar taking energy from the rock and throwing it into the bodies, hoping that the formula is Death + Life energy = Life.
"Energy is life, and energy is death. A trifle less. Not much less, only a little," Galar hypothesizes. So he just needs a little energy to kick the state over from being death to being alive, I guess, like adding a charge to a dead car battery?
Doesn't work, of course.

- We do learn that Maya actually is his daughter, go figure. And more importantly, that Taniysha is the name of his wife. We find a letter that shows she… has no idea their daughter is dead. Galar spirited her away to the north under the pretense of 'curing her disease.' He says the cool air is good for her, and her cheeks are getting rosier…
Rough.

This feels like it's getting long, so I'll break this off here for now, and finish up the quest next update.


The Takeaway:
This quest had kind of a slow start (and a few typos and bugs), but it's finally kicking into high gear now. Galar's phantom is hemorrhaging money and support, sending his most loyal follower away, and starting to sound a little unhinged. 'This must work! It will work!', that kind of thing.
Before you know it it'll be all 'THE FOOLS!' and 'They laughed at the academy!' and then come the legions of bunny Lost Ones to sweep o'er the living like it's Night of the Lepus

 

[Guile]

- Now that I know both passwords, the only thing left to do is to head into the central tower. Right away, I'm face to face once again with Enderal's strong statue game.

Spoiler: Why the grate in the ceiling, tho

Not sure what this guy is either. Some kind of half-human horned shaman and his mastiff dog companion? Great pose and manly pecs, whatever he is.

- It's hard to focus on the statue or the rest of the room though, because I can see red dots denoting enemies moving about. Near as I can tell, the open grate in the ceiling lets all the monsters on the second floor see me and come a-running, including a giant Grotesque Lost One.
It's hard to feel threatened by the Reawakened Servants I've been fighting. Not sure why.
They hurt quite a bit, but then they also die in 2-3 swings of my own weapons, so I end each fight with low health but then I just eat all their souls and heal back up.
Possibly it's just that they don't look like much, just bog-standard Lost Ones in leather armor with steel swords?

Well, before I head up, I investigate the rest of the room. It's another library, filled to the brim with treatises on magic, psionics, history, geography, and… aha!

Spoiler: I knew it

It gets pretty lonely up here after you killed all the servants and drove away the disciples, doesn't it, Dal'Galar?

- The second floor looks like a big open arena type area that would probably be pretty exciting to fight a giant undead monster in. Oh well. It's about that time when I'm wondering what Calia meant when she said people had been through that prospector town, when the portcullis comes down trapping me on one side and Calia and my ice elemental on the other.

Spoiler: I can explode people's minds, btw

Well, it's not… exactly… a cutscene defeat?
Seriously, though. Where the heck were these guys hiding in the fire elemental-and-spider-infested ruin of the town? How long were they waiting for us?

- This brightly colored but surprisingly well-dressed gentleman is apparently employed by the same guys who attacked Lishari in that old ruin whose name I don't remember. He has nothing good to say about the idiots who set fire to the ruin they were inside, and for a moment our minds are in sync on how terrible those guys were.
The merc is apparently being paid like a king to take us out. Since I doubt the High Ones employ a lot of Kilean mercenaries, I'm going to go ahead and assume Coarek is behind this, but I'm willing to be surprised. Maybe it's the Truchessa, trying to smash the magic macguffin so Tealor Arantheal will stop messing around with the Beacon? Who knows.
He's about two lines into his supervillain monologue when Calia tries to stick a greatsword through his face (God bless you, girl) and we learn he's a master of Mentalism.
I'm wishing I'd found the psionic spell to block attacks and telekinetically dangle my enemies in midair, I tell you what. All I could find were books on Panic I through IV.
This does explain why my loyal elemental is just standing there like a lump, though! Psychic mind whammy! Or bad pathing, but I like that first thing more.

- Calia says stuff like, 'Run! Find the Angel!' and, well, she's the one with cutscene powers, so I comply.
But just for posterity's sake, allow me to share some of the things the Prophetess hears as she tries to work her way around back to that room, which I have dubbed the Uncomfortable Offscreen Rape Montage:

Spoiler: Uncomfortable Offscreen Rape: the Montage

So, we're all adults here, right? I think we can all agree this is absolutely a gang rape about to happen.
The game even gives a countdown. 35 seconds, here's some re-awakening servants in your way, go! There's a locked door that none of the roughly 50 keys I have on my person (each servant dropped two) works on, so I turn to the right… right around when Calia has been reduced to pleading with them to get away because we all know what happens when Calia gets wound-up, I smash right through the floor and things get kind of blurry for a minute.
I appreciate Calia's voice work here, but I even more appreciate it when the screams and snarls begin.
As any Left For Dead survivor will tell you, Don't Startle the Witch.

- Once I get back to the room, I have to think in amazement, "Is that thing getting worse??"

Spoiler: Calia was here

I mean, the chunks of former people, sure, that's pretty standard for Calia on a tear… but why is everything on fire?
Calia is out cold on the floor in the midst of all that. And cold. And possibly dead.

- I have the option to make her a bed and a fire ('but where am I going to find fire?' I laugh to myself) instead of leaving her lying there, and that's kind of cute, so I do that.
Then, well. I'm a girl on a mission now, aren't I? Find the Angel, scare up some life energy, pop it back into Calia, bob's your uncle.

- Well, there's a couple more fights and visions to work through, first.
The next batch has Galar going on about how, tomorrow, she'll be all right again! Also, apparently, he expects her resurrection to come with a free batch of superpowers?
Heal the blind and the lame, uplift mankind, yadda yadda.

Spoiler: Maya action figure, now with Savior action

I mostly feel my face pull into a weird sneer-grimace watching Maya's very… action figure pose, there. It wasn't so obvious in the bed, but here, it's all too clear that Dal'Galar is talking to a corpse.
Did he pick her up from her bed, I wonder? Did he carry her to this dining hall and set her up in a chair himself? Did he cook all her favorite dishes and set them in front of her?
Or did the servants I just re-killed do it while he looked on fondly?
Eurgh.

- More cool statues, this quest is full of them! Also, the object of the quest – and one last battle, natch. By this point I've been conditioned to expect the corpses lying around to get back up in a sheet of blue fire, but also I need to fight one of those serpent anomalies (one that looks more like the normal spooky ghost serpents, not that glowing green lad from the research tower)

Spoiler: Well this just looks like a boss battle waiting to happen

And the only time I actually died all quest; my own fault, really, I stopped moving while trying to stab the anomaly long enough for the archers to feather me.

- One more vision to go. Papa Dal'Galar uses the black stone, and Maya… wakes up.
This is Dal'Galar's voice actor really bringing his A-game, too. When he stutters on 'M-Maya? Can you… can you hear me?' you just know that this is all he wants with his whole being, and if it doesn't work again it'll crack him like breaking glass.
And of course the game gives us a second for Maya to seem fine before it brings the hammer down.

Spoiler: Hey Maya, are you okay? Do you want a backrub? Or a soothing tea?

And I go, "Ohhhhhh." That's the shadowy demon thing. Yep.
I don't really need to watch the Veiled Woman explode the poor cleric/necromancer and call Li'l Calia by her name to figure out how this goes.
Because really, if you wind up with a demon attached to your soul, it just makes a lot more sense for someone to have put it there rather than it grow on its own. Unknowingly, probably, although Galar seems like the kind of Faustian bargainer who would consider that a fair trade.
After all, the only one not in danger from the demon is the little girl it's attached to.
Pft! And he thought it was going to give her Jesus powers. Man, don't you know this is Enderal? The continent where dreams go to die.

- It's all over but the crying, now. I'm a little sad I didn't get to see the Prophetess juggling the black stone and the Angel over Calia's rapidly-cooling body trying to figure out how that works, but this is fine too I guess.
You get an option to either tell Calia the truth or snow her. Claim Dal'Galar was killed in a potions accident or whatever.
The comforting lie option is for moms who lose their sons to cults, though, not to a Keeper 4th rank. Why should I be the only one to suffer?
Well, after the smash cut back to Frostcliff Tavern there's a whole conversation tree we can go through to try and make sense of it all. Calia is not taking it well, which, sure. I get that. She's no worse off than before as far as I'm concerned, but Calia's kind of a 'glass is half empty' paladin anyway.
I am kind of glad I didn't try to sell her on the 'You know, the demon isn't so bad, you'd be dead now if not for it' when I get this line:

Spoiler: SUCH GRATIFICATION

And I mean, considering how rape-y that whole segment was, and now this line? ... Yeah. I'm with you on Team Demon Bad, Calia. Yikes.
Nice lighting, though.
Also, collarbones.
… What? I'm allowed to notice.


The Takeaway:
And that's the first quest of three. Woo boy.

… I have so many questions.
What was reanimating the undead, if The Angel is just a tool for transferring energy? Was it really my visions, like Calia said? I am kind of a lich I guess...
Are the visions maybe flooding energy into my surroundings as they seem to stop time for me to have a convenient flashback, causing death energy to kick over into life energy?
What was up with that green-glowing spectral snake?
Why is there a black stone for me to pick up, if Galar stuck it in Calia?

Also, holy shit the Veiled Woman is a High One-tier asshole. Like, she just waited and watched as I got tied to a rock and sunk, and that's kind of shitty, but par for the course for Mysterious Oracles. But she intentionally put Calia in that village like a bomb primed and ready to blow. Just to get her into the Order? Have you ever tried the old 'drop her off on the doorstep with a note' gambit?
Cold, man.

 

[Guile]

Been a while, yeah? Let's do this thing.

- So when we last left our stalwart heroes, Calia was traumatized again and spending some time alone in her room. I had to fight my way across the Great White North again and complete a physics puzzle, but I got a nice cloak out of it and also a plot macguffin so that's fine.
After dropping by Ark again to sell off some stuff and picking up Summon Bow V and Summon Mud Elemental II, I headed out on the next leg of the quest, entitled <All The Dead Souls>.
Now historically, ghosts in this game have been of the terrifying and/or exploding varieties. But on the upside, all three 'clues' are really close to Ark so that's handy.

- The mud elemental is so tiny and adorable! And when he's bored he sits on his tiny haunches like a dog or an internet meme about Slavs.

Spoiler: just taking my mud for a walk, pay us no mind citizens

But buggy. Or … possibly working as intended? Half the time the spell just… fizzles unless I'm on solid land. Bridges and crypt floors seem to be right out. But I mean, he is a mud elemental. So maybe that's how it works?
In which case I would applaud SureAI for attention to detail but then never use the little guy again since Ice Elementals can be summoned anywhere and the only downside with him is trying to train him not to block doorways.

- It's been a while since I've just wandered around the Ark countryside, and it's something of a palate cleanser after trying to chop snow bears and undead monsters to death/re-death up North. The area around Ark is always summer, with plentiful greenery and lakes and misty mountains in the distance. Ark itself looks like a hive of industry with its little waterwheels and mills and the stables and farms everywhere.

Spoiler: Look at that majestic figure - also the statue above the player on the donkey is nice too

And actually pretty defensible, now that I'm looking at it from the angle of Calia's doom-and-gloom about the Nehrimese sieging the place.
The three entrances are over bridges with multiple watchtowers. Every entrance into the city is set into a heavily fortified gate.
Fingers crossed for a siege section, it would be a shame to have this well-designed city and not put it to the test don't you think?
Mind you, the bridges and watchtowers could mostly be bypassed by just sailing into the harbor where all the sailors and fishermen hang out, and the Nehrimese came to Enderal by boat.
But even then every district inside has sturdy doors and mortared walls, and the Sun Temple is on top of a goddamn mountain up about a hundred feet of defensible climb to the very top of the city (carved to look like… well, it kind of looks like some poor slave is having to hold up the temple, but maybe I'm just having Kirkwall flashbacks to Dragon Age 2).

- Anyway. Ark: still beautiful. Moving on.
The first 'clue' (read: minimap marker) takes me to a little cove just south of Ark. Something like an underground river with its own moored boat.
Thank god for the minimap, is all I'll say. Because if finding the macguffin relied on my ability to decode a treasure map...
Well, 'treasure' is being overly generous, turns out.

Spoiler: the eerie glow is some poor bastard kicking back and taking an acid bath

There's something like a suicide note, giving his name and explaining his crimes. Trafficking nearly a thousand souls into and out of Enderal, probably right here in this cove.
He remembers exact numbers, but he does not remember their names.
There's this line about the 'Bonejudge' judging him for his crimes, and I wonder… is this some just god measuring crime and punishment on the scale of a life, like Ma'at?
Presumably this will become clear later, along with the cipher given at the end of the note.

- The next 'clue' is in Ark itself, leading me to a sewer cover I've walked past a couple times.
Inside, well. The first real set piece for the area is:

Spoiler: are his pants falling off? give the man some dignity, game

Really sets the tone, you know?
I'm starting to think the Bonejudge is less 'keeper of the afterlife' and more some mortal authority helping things along. Where the guy in the acid bath was all by his lonesome in a hidden alcove that yeah, maybe nobody ever found before me, this fellow is definitely not lonely.
Ghostly guardians patrol the rooms, and corpses are shackled to walls or left hanging out.
I'm thinking… old prison, probably.
A cart full of skulls, meticulously stacked.
Whole skeletons carpet the floor of a nook at the base of a staircase.
There's this bit, which… I don't even know what I'm looking at, here:

Spoiler: okay, who exploded in here, come on, I won't be mad

Somebody's favorite torture chair?

- At the end is a lonely cage, with food set all around. Good lighting.

Spoiler: I was so happy until it turns out the food around the cage is spoiled

The woman in the cage also has a note penned in her own hand. She was a murderess for hire called the 'black widow'. For her crimes, she will place herself in this cage with no food or drink and starve to death. Which she obviously did.
Is this place hers, then? Because there's at least sixty dead men scattered about in here, if you count up the skulls and skeletons, and … if she were a hitwoman, and this hideaway contains evidence of her work, then she was the Stephen King of the fantasy murderer's scene.

- I'm starting to feel like I'm learning less about this quest as I complete it, not more.
Is this suicide, or murder? Is it divine revelation, mortal mind control, did the Bonejudge force this woman into a little cage and spread food all around just to twist the knife a little?
Is this the Bonejudge's hideout, or the Black Widow's? The human trafficker was left in a place that I think was intended to evoke his crimes, that little underground grotto with the boat...
What does this have to do with Jespar? Because I'm going to be honest, if it turns out Jespar is pulling night shifts as a murderous vigilante of Justice, I think I'm going to have to withdraw all the come ons I've been sending his way. Killing people is kind of my raison d'etre, but sticking them in a cage and starving them to death is a bit much, you know?

- Actually, I've been feeling like the 'Bonejudge' is kind of familiar somehow, but I'm not sure where…

Spoiler: the giant rock face in my brain reads 'Bonejudge', that's not ominous or anything

Oh yyyeah. My skill tree.
Now, I'd like to say with certainty that I am definitely probably not the Bonejudge. 65% certain at least.
But you know… you never can be sure in this game.
If it turns out I'm blacking out and sadistically torturing murderers in my free time, I will definitely take back all the stuff I said about Jespar. And request immediate cuddles.

- Well enough existential dread, I still have one more clue to track down!
This isn't the first time I've plugged the music in this game, but that was the original bard songs. This is just the background music as I'm riding through the local farmlands, a little thing of piano and woodwind… wow, though. It just makes you want to forget the looming apocalypse and just ride on, you know?

- And then from all that auditory beauty right to the murder site in some nondescript farm. It's like Enderal is saying, 'Isn't this place a beauty? But scratch a layer off the surface and it's pain and misery all the way down.'
It fits. I love Enderal but this game is dark as a chasm straight into the center of the earth compared to Skyrim's 'save the world from dragons lol' main quest.

- I remember the endless Vatyr of old Haystacks, so I am kind of terrified when my minimap leads me to the Ark farms and a place called Old Granary.
It's actually pretty low-key, though. Just a bunch of giant rats.

Spoiler: How are these rats not starved to death tho

The corpse's note is penned in a shaky hand, and it's clear the writer is under duress.
This cellar is where he kidnapped children from the Undercity, and so it is the site where he will be eaten by rats while still alive.

- It's pretty clear by now that the Bonejudge is tracking down these people and sadistically murdering them in the places most connected to their own crimes. I was wondering if these were one of those 'ironic punishment' deals, but no. Merely a brutal one.
The slave trafficker, dipped in acid.
The hitwoman, starved to death.
The kidnapper and child abuser, eaten by rats.
And if you put the cipher at the end of each letter together, it's reads: "For my brothers in arms: 'Knock knock, who's there? Come in alone, if you dare.'"

- Now, atmospheric, I grant you!
But I'm not actually too sure how the Prophetess put together a location from the cipher. Were the letters printed on the backs of maps, or…?
Also, it seems a little unlikely for anyone to actually find all three of these murder sites and put together the code without someone (naming no names, just in case the Enderalean post office is onto me) intercepting Jespar's mail. So this is starting to seem like something of a taunt directed at possibly me but probably Jespar specifically.
A 'come find me, if you dare.'

Well, all right then.

The Takeaway:
I appreciate the story-driven nature of this quest, it's just a little weird how mechanically easy it is after Calia's. Like, an hour ago I was battling killing Nehrimese war parties so I could kill bandit wizards so I could kill a village full of elemental wolves and giant spiders for the privilege of battling my way through an abandoned keep full of reanimated corpses.
Now I'm fighting large-ish rats. Which, yeah, they gave me a disease, but a trip to the doctor will clear that right up.
Actually I'm noticing a lot of minimap markers that I haven't investigated yet, so I think I'll take a brief sidetrip before continuing on my quest to track down the Enderalean Punisher.

 

[Guile]

- I'd like to inform the farmer outside that her tenant seems to have come down with a bad case of eaten by rats, but she doesn't even have a name so that doesn't go anywhere.
Think I'm going to take a day off from this saving the world business. Prophets get vacation days right?

- Heading north takes me to a picturesque little town called Bridgehead Farm built hand in hand with one of the ancient ruins.

Spoiler: pictured: brick watchtower, quaint food provisioner, charming clothesline, ancient demesne of monsters and undead

The poster reads, "Once magic runneth through your veins, / Be wary not to go astray! / The Order's help you shall then seek / And Malphas words you need to heed / Else your magic will go wild / And death will soon make you its child."
Now sure this almost sounds like some Dragon Age 'keep the mages contained and docile' plot, and I'd like to learn more, but more importantly...
Hopefully Death is actually an anthropomorph in this universe, or whoever's in charge of posters for the Order is going waaaaay too far to try and rhyme that last couplet. 'Make you its child?' That's awful.
I wish I knew my standing in the Order so I could know if I can fire that guy.

- Crimes against literature aside, if Skyrim's Markarth is 'people living in the ancient ruins (including the Dwemer's ridiculous stone beds)', then this is 'people building their town on top of the ancient ruins.' Equally interesting but very different narrative. Markarth feels kind of stuck in the past, while this little town feels… kind of like a massacre waiting to happen.
Because Enderal.
The local owner of the rustic, hay-filled inn The Red Ox is pretty boring for a guy named – conveniently enough – The Red Ox. A name like that deserves a story more than the innkeeper of the Fat Loran ever did.
But The Red Ox is completely taciturn, and not in an interesting way. Some innkeepers offer rumors and news, or buys and sells goods, but Ox only offers a bed for the night.
It's a shame I can't seem to enter the door to the ruins but presumably they will come into play later?

- Following the next map marker, I find myself in a hella fancy old tomb with the very unfancy name of Grel's Grave.
It's a level of difficulty below where I've been lately, but it looks nice.

Spoiler: nice lighting in this crypt

All the tombs and ruins I've been spelunking lately that made me think, you know, maybe I need to get in on that. I'm undead too; my people just seem to congregate in picturesque ruins with endless waterfalls and stuff. All the Darkhand liches have sweet digs like that. Dzamael Darkhand had that prime real estate in the catacombs under Ark, even.
Grel's Grave is centrally located right in the breadbasket of Enderal, picturesque, lots of open space, all-natural wisp lighting… very feng shui.
Those old Enderaleans knew how to build for the afterlife. I feel like I could learn a thing or two.

- Working my way southeast into the mountains, the way is blocked by a much tougher band of Lost Ones camped out in some kind of unfinished defensive works. Watchtowers, walls, like a half-completed skeleton in the snow where the workers just gave up and died halfway through.

Spoiler: the undead here are pretty well-armed for presumably being the skeletons of dead carpenters

Near as I can tell, there are two passes through the mountains to the eastern half of the continent and they are held by Bandits and Undead respectively.
No wonder you never see Fallout- or Skyrim-esque wandering merchants in Enderal, anyone that's tried is dead as doornails. Some have tried, I think; every once in a while you'll see a busted up wagon along the road with bags of flour or apples or spare parts or whatever.
Considering how careful SureAI was to answer questions like 'but what do they eat?' with Ark's extensive farming community, I have to assume they carefully considered the economy and then recognized that all the wandering merchants have long since been killed and eaten.

- A stone's throw the undead-infested pass, there's a sweet-looking stonehenge overlooking the entire valley.
I boldly assail the historic landmark, defeating its denizens in honorable combat - this is the story that I will be telling around the Order's huge war operations table, later.

Spoiler: pictured: smart adventuring

- Not seeing any more new things to explore nearby on the minimap but not quite having my fill of adventure yet, I dig out the 'Portal To A Strange Place' that's been sitting in my pack since I found it under the city, as part of a little tale of sibling inheritance and what kind of sounds like a pact to enter undeath together.
The 'Strange Place' is just a clifftop peak overlooking what I think is Riverville, of all places. There's a few chests and a handful of wisp enemies, no big deal.
Kind of disappointed at the lack of further story, but I do like gushing about the views in this game.

Spoiler: this side of the mountain; farms. Behind me, dragon.

- Turns out I'm close by that dragon lair I first noticed all the way back from the quest with the Aged Man, so I start the laborious process of trying to scale halfway round the mountain.
I pop out halfway up a cliff overlooking the dragon's lair, which involves the dragon perched atop a triangular sort of ruin like a rooster waiting to crow. He periodically patrols out lazily in a circle before settling back on his perch, which is a pretty sweet idle animation.
I decide to get tricky. I'm at the extreme outer edge of my range, so I stop time (I can do that for 4 seconds at a time, now) and loft a bunch of arrows at him.
Of course, that only does about a tenth of his health in damage, and then trying to hit a dragon in midair is really hard, so…

Spoiler: for thou art crunchy and taste good with ketchup

Things didn't work out.

- Then I realize there's a 'Dead Dragon' skeleton nearby, and I think… a dragon-on-dragon kaiju fight might be just what the doctor ordered.
But unfortunately, Revive III isn't quite up to the task. And he notices. I'm still fumbling for my summons when I eat a fire breath and die.

- Third time, I just make an elemental to draw the flame breath, run up and bury both swords in the dragon's flank. That took care of things.
There is such a thing as trying to be too cute, I guess. It's lucky that the game makes the dragons land to fight you, or they would be really nasty.

- After that I headed for the castle on the horizon that you can see from the peak shot. That looks like a happening place, and I want to be there!

Spoiler: turns out that castle is really good at keeping out the riffraff

Unfortunately, nice sunsets are really all I get out of this little adventure. Couldn't find a way to scale the cliffs, so I just kind of lurk around like some sort of water monster for a while, slowly circling the castle.

- Getting back on track, I meet up with Jespar back in Ark.
Since I don't really want to just come right out and ask 'Hey Jespar are you sadistically murdering criminals maybe?' I engage in some light smalltalk first.
There's some philosophy traded back and forth about who's at fault in a domestic violence situation. My answer, 'society', is apparently the safe answer, on the grounds that it absolves people of responsibility for their actions.
Jespar seems ready for life as a lawyer if his primary job of mercenary-for-hire and his backup job of doom-train-engineer fall through.
Not sure what that's about, exactly, except maybe to lay the groundwork for what's probably going to be some weighty questions about the nature of Justice, later.

- The dropped bomb, of course, is that 'Knock knock' line we put together from the letters is a passcode he and his sister shared when they were looking to go out on adventures as kids.
The Prophetess points out with all the delicacy of a battering ram that the High Ones could have reached through the stone and given his sister Adalia the power – and crazy – to become something like the Bonejudge.
Which, if that's a thing they can do, Why am I still holding onto that one from Calia's quest? Why are we putting it in our anti-High One macguffin?!
This is all going to end in tears.


The Takeaway:
I've reached the point where just wandering around is starting to seem a little same-y. There's only so many undead and bandits you can clear out of ruined towers. I still have a couple of quests saved up in the old quest-log for when the main quest goes on break, but otherwise I think I'll be focusing exclusively on the main quest for a while.
And what an emotionally gutting questline it's shaping up to be! But then… this is Enderal. When is it not?

 

[Guile]

- So I meet up with Jespar in Duneville.

Spoiler: look at that poor bastard, like his world is ending

- The music is, as ever, on point. Arabian Nights-esque violin and some kind of wind instrument, like wind across the sands, a mournful piano creeping in… and here and there, a strain of pure, slithering menace.


- So I head out into the desert with Jespar at my heels… and immediately get distracted by a ruin called Old Ishmartep.
That resolution to ignore the side stuff and finish the main quests lasted long.

- The Tomb Guardians inside are using the models of Skyrim's mid-level Falmer: needle teeth, nonexistent nose, pointed ears, near-blind pink eyes, blue-green veins shining through translucent skin. Loincloth, greaves, gauntlets, the multi-eyed masks. Creepy as shit, in a phrase.

Spoiler: still terrifying

It's a much different feel than exploring a Falmer-infested ruin, though. Fighting the Falmer always felt like putting down some piteous creatures. Fighting the Tomb Guardians feels like fighting a small army.
Part of it's the lighting;
The tomb isn't well-lit exactly but there are cracks in the walls here and there letting in natural light. There are lit fire braziers. No bioluminescent green glowing fungus to be found.
Part of it's in the fighting itself;
Falmer tend to chitinous equipment and armor and domesticate chaurus bugs; the Tomb Guardians are dressed in simple cloth, but well-equipped with silver-steel swords, shields of bone and bows of wood and horn. It's not like hideous pus beetle animal husbandry would be easy, probably! But fighting with well-forged swords and shields makes the Tomb Guardians feel more civilized.

- Most of it is in the wordless storytelling you get from exploring the tomb, though.
You can find bags of gunpowder. Mining equipment. Maps.
I don't know if Old Ishmartep wants to conquer the surface world the way the Falmer do, but they already feel like they'll have a better shot at it than the Falmer.
There's a zone in the dungeon called the Nest, and I figure, "Oh, here's the spider section." There's usually a spider section. Agnod, ancient crashed spaceship, had a spider section.
Well, not exactly; this zone involves the Tomb Guardians fighting off an encroaching sand spider nest. Within a minute the spiders are dead and the Tomb Guardians haven't lost a fighter.
I have to murder spiders all the time too, they get everywhere! It feels like we have so much in common!

- After completing the simple fetch quest to unlock the door to his ornate tomb, Ishmartep himself emerges from his coffin in beams of light, a shriveled king complete with a golden crown upon his head.
Given the way he one-shotted my ice elemental, I assume he's probably at the level of one of the Lost One Lords, but popping the timestop power and double power attacking him a couple times meant I didn't have to find out.
That power is honestly the most ridiculous so far; I leveled twice in this dusty dungeon, and put both points into taking it to Level 3 (12 seconds, Dio Brando ain't shit in comparison)

- Well, a quick teleport back to Duneville to sell an armory's worth of silver-steel later:

Spoiler: whuhhhh

Surmak Saltblow looks ridiculous with his mouth hanging open, you'd think no one had ever jumped up on his counter to talk to him before.
Actually, he just tends to leave his gob open in general, giving him this constant look of gormless surprise, it's kind of funny.

It's also pretty nice that everything in Duneville (except the jail) is in one zone, so you can hear the bard from the tavern as you shop.
Anyway, that over with, I can get back on the road to Jespar's meetup with his sister.

- The old Dal'Varek estate is in the midst of an oasis in the desert, more of a jungle biome than anything. Not what I was expecting.
Aside from being attacked by panthers and lions, I also have to fight some Marauder-type bandits. One of them steps up the usual Enderalean insult game by calling me a 'fucking bitch.'
Welp.

Spoiler: enderal's equivalent of a quarter in the swear jar

Jespar also has this line when he watches me tear the soul out of a bandit and eat it to refresh myself. His reaction is:
"Who needs potions when he knows Entropy?"
Jespar's good people. I mean, for an undead ghost-summoning swordswoman such as myself. It's probably for the best that the game doesn't have Calia react to the Entropy thing, although that would be pretty interesting in its own way.

- Jespar and Adila's meetup spot is in their old kids' hidey-hole, which turns out to be an abandoned shadowsteel mine.
Well, 'abandoned.'
Miners moved in at some point, and were then massacred by Lost Ones when the, you know, Red Madness and everything happened.
Jespar's childhood hideout was built on top of a mine, which was built on top of a crypt.
Welcome to Enderal.

- In fairness, it looks totally sweet, and I'd want to explore it if I were some stupid kid, too.

Spoiler

- So the plan is for Jespar to take the lift down to meet her, and I'm going to have to fight my way through the crypt to come out in the bushes and spy on them.
I'm not even surprised.
Gives me a chance to try out the new Za Warudo power, and wow. Timestop, where have you been all my life?

Spoiler: what you guys looking at

It was pretty neat when the Lost Ones heard me walking around, opened the door and waltzed out of the crypt and into the mine area. But otherwise the crypt is surprisingly small and easy to get through, which I appreciate.

- Anyway! Adila has a new victim – because of course she was the one murderin' dudes, nobody except Jespar believed otherwise for a second – and this one's a little special. One of the guys who killed their parents and burned their house to the ground.
Now, I'm not entirely sure if that means he's from the Relata – the mob – or one of the corrupt judges that Jespar's dad tried to bring down, or what. It doesn't really matter in the end, I guess. He's just a prop in this tale of sibling… whatever.
He tries to talk her down for a few minutes, while I wonder when exactly I'm supposed to pop out of the bushes and shank her in the back.

- Jespar tries to get her to give him the Stone and then leave free, but anyone who's ever seen Gollum and that ring knows that wasn't going to end well, either.
Adila summons up a blast of flame that sets both the victim and Jespar on fire.

Spoiler: the red eyes have the same look as Red Madness eyes

Welp.

Spoiler: that's what you get

Adila's pretty good, but she's no… well, me.


The Takeaway:
It's kind of shocking, how quickly that was over. Constantine's death I saw coming, with the chanting in elder tongues and madman ramblings; Jespar's I didn't. Which I guess is the point, right? Jespar isn't a Capital Letter Emissary, he's just a guy. And when you play with fire, when you involve yourself in big events… sometimes you get burnt. Luck runs out.
I don't think there was any way to avoid that; that would be a pretty enormous story beat going completely differently if I could walk up and shank Adila in the back while they were talking.
But I think it says something that I kind of want to reload and try it anyway.

 

[Guile]

- On the way out, the torch flames turn blue and who should appear?
Not a miniature sleigh and eight tiny reindeer.

Spoiler: kinda wanna pull out my torch and see if it still burns red

I suppose it's possible for her to sound more like a devil looking to strike a deal, but I'm not sure how.

- Now, the Veiled Woman is here to lay some facts on us in the way of all Oracle-type supporting characters, but trying to figure out what exactly she's copping to is tricky.
Presumably part of that is, you know, fifth-dimensional being trying to talk down to a third-dimensional hairless ape. But also she just sounds suspicious as a fox trying to explain why she's in this particular henhouse, but it's okay, she's on your side.
So I'm going to put on my critical reading glasses and examine every word.

- First off, she recognizes that maybe I'm a little peeved about that whole 'getting Sirius and I discovered as stowaways, tied to a big rock, and dumped overboard' thing from the start of the game.
She claims this was necessary, because of course.
She tells a tale where we made it to Enderal only to be found creeping overboard in the dead of night, only to be caught and killed in hopes of a promotion to Petty Officer First Class or whatever. That's what would have happened without her interference, she said.
That could be true. Those of us without extra-dimensional future-senses can't exactly check one way or the other.
But how exactly was getting us murdered faster any better? Why did it need to happen that way? Did I need to doubt my own survival (dumped overboard rather than stabbed through the head) to get this undead Prophetess thing to work? Is it something to do with the tower I found myself washed up on the shore next to? Is there someone or something with their eye on Enderal, and the little life-death switcheroo had to happen in open waters?
Give me something to work with here, lady.

- Aside from killing me (and, to be fair, bringing me back as a sword-swinging, magic-slinging badass... that still dies to the occasional snow wolf), of course, there's also the bit I just learned:
That the Veiled Woman killed Dal'Galar and took Calia to that village she murdered like a chess player setting up her pieces on the board.
I appreciate that the game lets me call her out on it; presumably that's why one of my readers suggested I do Calia's quest first.
Her response is pretty interesting. "You claim I took part in the death of the grieving man… But was that really me, I wonder? Or only a splinter of what I really am? I have many forms, Prophetess…"
Now, aside from being a pretty piss-poor excuse (Was it really me that shot you, or should you really be angry at my right hand? Hmm? Think about it), this suggests that maybe all of the pieces here, at least on the Emissary side of things, have their own Veiled Woman? And this one is mine.

- There's also some talk about the Cycle threatening all parallel realities, what she calls 'branches' of reality, of which this is only one. But that doesn't really hit home; I mean, I have enough trouble looking after this branch. Those other branches' Prophetesses can pull their own weight, thanks. The slackers.

- One particularly noteworthy line is, when asked if she is one of the High Ones, that "High Ones, humanity, the Emissaries, ... are all just pieces of the same game."
It's said in a tone that suggests the Veiled Woman is above it all. A player, not a piece of the game.
I imagine she's trying to suggest she's the player on 'our' side, but frankly for all I know she could be playing this game against herself.

- But she "doesn't like being seen as a destroyer … Which is why I will wipe away my debt, which was never there to begin with."

Spoiler: this is the same animation that my 30-second duration Revive Corpse spell has

Boom! Jespar, back to life.
So apparently for every two people she has killed, she can be talked into bringing one back! Or maybe I hurt her feelings?
So she refuses to take credit for that other Veiled Woman that killed Dal'Galar, but on a whim she decided to make good on it anyway. Pure whimsy.

- Hey Jespar, you doing okay buddy?

Spoiler: hey Jespar. Jespar. Buddy. Hey.

He's fine.
He asks after his sister first thing, and… yyyyeah, I killed her really dead.
So Jespar gets his alone time, while I head back to Duneville and sell off all his sister's worldly possessions. Her robe is pretty sweet-looking, with a design like a hand grabbed the red tabard bit and charred an imprint into it.

Spoiler: Bonejudge had style, I'll give her that

I give it even odds whether that will turn out to be important – the sign of the High Ones or something – or just something to give a little flair to her character model. Of course, I sold it away immediately.


The Takeaway:
As quickly and senselessly as Jespar died, the man's back in the saddle. I wonder if he got superpowers from it like me and Calia did? We could be like, the Three Amigos! Sounds better than 'those three freaks', anyway.
So that makes two Black Stones accounted for. A quest popped up to track down Calia, and I'm thinking I'll do that before turning these stones in to Arantheal, in case she wants to try using it to heal her demon after all.
I mean, it'd probably be a terrible idea and result in horrible consequences for everyone involved, but everybody's free to make their own mistakes. I know I make enough of them, starting from coming to Enderal in the first place on down through things like getting sucker punched and trapped in a rapidly-flooding Agnod, down to today when I let Jespar go up like a Roman candle.

 

[Guile]

First off, sorry for the wait. I've been doing a Final Fantasy XIV quest over on anonkun and that's been eating a lot of my free time these last couple weeks. Anyhow, onward!


- Heading back to Ark, I'm struck by the absolute beauty in some of these loading screens. It looks like something out of the Thomas Kinkade gallery. They must have an artist on staff that does this, right?

Spoiler: its part of his disney collection

I'm not sure I buy Enderal being less prejudiced against anyone or anything, though. Was this loading screen painted by the Enderal chamber of commerce? Trying to get those tourism dollars?

- The plan is to go track down my poor heartbroken companions while they pour out their hearts to me, and in exchange I will complete quests and gain XP. But that can wait a minute while I check in with my magic connection.
Absorption VI and Soil Elemental II are straight up upgrades to what I've been rolling with (16 -> 24 damage/healing and level 36 ice elemental -> level 43 soil elemental, respectively).
Paralyze II is starting to sound worthwhile: paralyzing an enemy mook for 6 seconds? I'll give that a try, sure. With my luck it won't work on giants or liches or whatever crazy stuff I'll have to fight next, but whatever.
Also, I went ahead and bought a house in the noble quarter. No real reason not to pay 4500 gold pennies for something like that when you have 37,000 of them sitting in the bank.

- Now appropriately equipped, I track down Calia first.
I find her beating a straw dummy to death with her fists. I have never seen one humanoid that actually tries to punch people with bare knuckles except for that one crazy fight-picking drunk in the foreign quarter, but who am I to get in the way of stress relief?

Spoiler: I know its been like two weeks, but Jespar had this thing with his sister

Oh yeah. I am that guy.
Well I'm sorry for getting in the way of her training, but at least Calia's voice actress is getting in a good workout. Usually whoever they've got voicing her has two modes: stalwart determination and quiet 'everything sucks but I don't want to talk about it.' But she's got a vibrato going on that would do justice to some of Jespar's best 'I'm on the edge of tears but am too manly to not pretend I don't care' work.

- The content is pretty standard for her, just dialed up to 11. You know, 'I don't need your pity' followed immediately by 'I'm a monster!'
There's this bit where she calls me caring about her the biggest joke since Starfall, and sure, it's sad and all, empathy right, but all I can think is: What the heck is Starfall?
Is it when the Lightborn died?
Is it when Agnod crashed?
Or were there actual meteor showers at some point?

- I tune back in about the time she lets me know that the time I got cutscene-defeated in Old Dothulgrad she only barely kept herself from doing stuff to my paralyzed corpse.
I am allowed to ask 'What were you going to do?' but I decide not to do that. It seems pretty clear from context when she talks about what her 'impulses' were when she's talking about the blood on my face and how helpless I was.
I dunno, maybe her demon was trying to convince her to hold me in her arms and never let me go, but I'm kind of doubting it.
Calia, channelling her inner undead teenager, also bursts out with 'I never asked to be brought back from the dead!' which, yeah, join the club.

- So there's Calia, heartbroken, doubting herself, considering removing herself from all civilized company to keep people safe from herself. I kind of get the idea that her last quest is going to involve facing her demon and coming to terms with it.
And I'm probably going to have to hold her hand through it. Eesh.

- Since I'm already in the Sun Temple, I swing by and hand off the Black Stones to our favorite fop, Archmagister Lexil.
Pretty standard stuff here, too: flashes of light when the Black Stones are plugged into the machine, beams of light illuminating the gyroscope eternally spinning in the center, yadda yadda.
One interesting tidbit, the Prophetess just lies to Lexil's face as a matter of course about Calia's true involvement in events; Lexil has this line about 'I wonder where that poor girl got off to' or something like that.
High five, me.

- Lexil also uses the phrase, 'half a chicken doesn't make a cake.' What.

Spoiler: just. what.

I mean, obviously from context it's taken to mean the job is only half done, but… generally my cakes do not involve chicken at any point.
I'm not sure if this is a weird mistranslation from his Aeterna side of the family, or from the original German. Like, should it be pies maybe? Like a meat pie?
I have no idea.

- Oh, and I was somewhat worried by that black smoke coming off the machine there, but it turns out there's a torch contraption on the other side of the platform giving off that smoke.
Whew.

- Anyway, time to track down Jespar. The first place is, of course, the Dancing Nomad tavern where I suspect he's rented out a room long-term. I ask the bartender.

Spoiler: if I mention the oddly shiny meats, can you ever look at anything else?

Yes, that sounds like him, have you seen him?

- It turns out that not only was Jespar drowning his sorrows, he already left with the intention to do some bar hopping.
Time to check every bar in the city, including several I wasn't even aware existed.

- On the way I actually bother to check South Ark in depth for the first time, since my minimap is pointing that way. It turns out to be a false lead and it's actually leading me into the Undercity, but South Ark is pretty nice.
The museum.

Spoiler: the lost one exhibit looks like its scented blood and is about to pounce

I learn that apparently these glowing crystals I've been noticing just grow around the ruins, even when the ruins are transported as a museum exhibit. That's pretty rad.
Also there's an exhibit talking about energy concentrators, artifacts of the highest order that turn memories and experiences into energy (I wonder if the crystals are a similar phenomenon?) but to draw it out you need some heretofore unknown gewgaw.
Assuming that'll be important to our ancient relic beacon tower thing at some point, I go ahead and steal it preemptively.

- There's also a very extensive art gallery (/house) whose owner gives me a sidequest for later to go check in on her mom in Dark Valley, which sounds just lovely this time of year.
And finally, a brewery that is way too attractively set up to merely house one unnamed laborer.

Spoiler: nice lighting, unnamed Laborer

- In any case, off to find Jespar. There's a couple of misses, before I find my way to the deepest possible tavern in the underbelly of Undercity. Red curtains and lanterns abound, as do prostitutes with extremely unlikely perfectly sculpted (and oiled) abs for a place as poor as Undercity. There's probably a better metaphor for Jespar literally hitting rock bottom than this place, but none immediately occur to me.
I do find Jespar here, and he looks right at home.

Spoiler: nice throne, jespar

Jespar has abs that won't lose to any of these prostitutes that never miss gym day, that's nice to know.
You can't really tell from the picture, but Jespar's foot is resting on a wine bottle and three shallow bowls of glimmerdust litter the ground.

- I kind of love that the prostitute calling herself 'Leandra, Queen of the Desert' actually laughs in response to one of Jespwqqar's jokes, and it's subtitled as '(Artificial laughter).'

- So after I tell the prostitutes to take a hike, me and Jespar have it out.
If Calia was trying to convince herself to cut and run, then Jespar is trying to convince himself he doesn't care.
Because he's a bad man that betrays and runs away from all his commitments, right? He saw his sister withdrawing from the world into their father's law books and didn't confront her, because it was easier. He left his first girlfriend to the mercy of bandits rather than try to save her, because he was afraid. He assures me that there are many more stories like those two, where he failed to live up to any kind of heroic self image.

Spoiler: I want my house to look like an Undercity bordello, please

I really like the red lighting here, shining on Jespar's face with his shadow cast like a hulking monster on the wall behind him. I wonder if I can score some red lanterns for my new house?
They'd be great for all my tortured, half-naked lounging needs.
Obviously I'm falling behind the curve on that.

- Jespar and Calia are both trying to convince me that they'll kill me one of these days, which is a little bit funny. I mean, we're all dead men here.
You know, I don't think I've actually told anyone about my own lichdom. Kind of a dick move now that Calia and Jespar have joined me on the other side and could probably do with a little (in)human understanding, but I get it. The zombie apocalypse is not the best time to come out of the Lich closet.

- Jespar peaces out by way of teleport scroll (still half-naked; the Ark Marketplace is going to get a treat).
I steal his glimmerdust on the way out.
Filthy habit, he should thank me.


The Takeaway:
Whoever does the writing for Enderal knows their way around a leitmotif. Obviously I'm a silent rock who feels no pain or worry about being an undead monster clothed in the flesh of man! My MPD mind-buddy Axion was totally off-base when he claimed I was some kind of whinging coward out of my depth, naturally. But now I can point at my pals and go, 'Wow, they are not handling this well at all."
And these poor bastards have to save the world? Hopefully this is just the nadir that will build us back up into the world-saving badasses we always knew we could be, like this is the third act of a Disney film.
But I'm not holding my breath.

 

[Guile]

Well, time to go 3 for 3 on Black Stones! But first, some things I learned from loading screens today:

- The 'Black Guardian' lives in the deepest depths of the Undercity. I thought I'd gotten as deep in there as one could go, but apparently not! After all, everyone knows that ancient legends of dubious origin are as good as gold, especially if they come from the mouths of cloaked old men in taverns.
- The Starfall that Calia mentioned last time? Turns out it's a meteorite impact that split the continent of 'Pangora' in year 0. So when she says she's the biggest joke since Starfall? That's all of recorded history. Just making sure we're all on the same page regarding her level of self-loathing.
- I knew that the dead are incinerated in Enderal, but it appears that it's a whole production. During the 'Last Journey', the deceased are taken to a special place in their lives to attend one last sunset there. The body is then cremated and its ashes spread over that location.
Wonderful world-building, although it makes you wonder… so like, the local church or midwife's residence probably just have to deal with having their front stoop covered in ashes semi-regularly?
- "Beautiful and proud, the ruler of the Undercity. Her sinful womb bore fruit and horror grew along." - Song of the Vatyr
I am pretty glad the tavern bards don't sing that one.
So, allowing for artistic license… the Vatyr are mutants or something? Born from humans? Really puts a creepy spin on the Undercity orphanage being covered in Vatyr. Enderal is really just a deep, dark hole with no bottom, isn't it?

- Okay, so the last Black Stone is in the possession of a noble's bastard son, shipped away so that he wouldn't shame the Dal'Geyss name. Naturally, my map marker is pointing to the very easternmost tip of the continent, across the mountains, at the end of the Powder Desert, well past Jespar's family home.
Saddle up.

- There's actually a fair amount of difficult side nonsense on the way.
There's another ancient ruin, Old Askamahn. I feel like there was a quest about this place from the smuggler town in Powder Desert, something about a man heading off to steal the riches out from under the Order's nose and inviting his friend to catch up? (I stole the key he left behind, natch).
I'll swing back by and do this one if I remember, but right now it's mostly noticeable for me being attacked outside it by two lions, two black panthers, and an actual gorilla called 'Old Tyarge' that knocks me off Whirlwind's back with one swing. Considering that you can't ride with summoned weapons, this puts me in the thick of it while unarmed, which is not a fun place to be.
That thief power that stops time is still the best thing that ever happened to me; it's got a long cooldown but it's basically (now that I've upgraded it twice) two or three free kills in any big fight.

- Beyond that is a place called the Powder Mine.
The fort topside is peopled by bandits and a lot of dead guards, which is always fun to see. I mean, not that I'm a sadist or anything, but I appreciate that some of these valuable mines weren't taken without a fight, you know?
At first I thought what I was seeing was the Nehrimese taking over a mine only to then be murdered back by bandits and wild mages, but the heraldry is wrong. Griffin standing upright, not phoenix.

Spoiler: at first I thought maybe I did it, but no, they have all their clothes

I'm not sure who these poor schlubs are; the only city in the Powder Desert is Duneville, guarded by those Watchdog guys in black leather.

- I figured it wouldn't be too tough to poke my head in for a minute (I was wrong), mines are usually much smaller than those old ruins (also wrong).
The air is hazy and wavery, like heat mirages in the desert. Probably not terribly good for living people, but I appear to be fine.
Looks like this is where sulfur and whatnot is turned into blackpowder, which means that yes, the bandits also control the continent's major source of blackpowder.
The bandits are at least half made up of mages, including an Oorbaya summoner and a couple of guys with fireball staffs. I dunno how staffs work exactly, but as far as I can tell there's basically no wind-up casting with them. A mage with a fireball staff will simply explode you repeatedly until you are dead or his staff runs out of energy. The constant explosions serve as their own kind of smokescreen, which makes those guys a bitch to actually find and stab in the midst of all the fire.
There's a box full of 'confiscated scrolls' of fireball which presumably are meant to be used at the big throw-down at the deepest levels (there's an oily multi-colored substance all over the place that usually catches on fire when fire spells/arrows are used on it), but honestly I'm kind of afraid of blowing us all to kingdom come so I just wade in and stab people until I win.
On the way out, I notice that there's a lot of people in nice robes called 'Scientists', bloody and dead at their desks.
It's not like this is news by now, but it's nice to see the Skyrim-like wordless storytelling tradition is alive and well. I do wish there was some writing explaining who these guys work for, though! I did spot one corpse wearing Order novitiate red, though, so probably affiliated with the Order somehow.

- The next setpiece appears to be a village of gorillas! Gorilla-like things called Tyargs, anyway.

Spoiler: is that gorilla contemplating the ennui of existence or is he like 'nice boots'?

The buildings are of a unique adobe-like design, rounded and bright yellow stone.

Spoiler: I guess they could be made of dung, who knows

The gorillas appear to be willing to live and let live as I ride through, though, so what the hey. I ride on.
Immediately afterwards, however, control is taken away from me and the Prophetess decides she has had quite enough of riding and dismounts.
Things get wavy like it's time for a Future Vision, but instead I just hit the floor like the tail end of a 6 hour marathon drinking session.

- The ground behind us has been the subject of a sudden and inexplicable rockfall.
There's a 'sudden, sharp pain' if you try to use a teleport scroll.
All right, Enderal. Show me whatever weird-ass thing you've got up your sleeve.

- I actually meet a fellow human being, which is already promising. 'The Guardian' suggests that at night the Bonerippers (remember them? Man-sized lizardfolk? From all the way back in the Kor side-quest!) come out of their caves, and if I don't want to meet them I should take shelter inside.
My character rightfully points out that, as a heavily-armed woman with a skull for a helmet (Skaragg armor being what it is), wielding two ghostly sabers and trailed by a lightning-wreathed elemental like a faithful hound, perhaps just letting me inside is a little careless?
Look, self, there's no point in being self-aware now. Ark and Duneville let you in without a peep, and my night would not be improved any by having to fight off more bonerippers.
Anyway, the Guardian is of the opinion that "trust has to start somewhere", and I applaud his determination to keep my bones inside where they belong.
As he throws the switch, he mentions they're living very well after some boy found a silver vein. Now that sounds plot-relevant. How much do you want to bet that's the one I'm here for?

- Silvergrove is looking very nice. It's got its own little oasis biome, with watermills and ruins and things (most with locked doors).

Spoiler: 10/10, would Future Vision into again

Several buildings in town are also locked. Not entirely sure if that's to give the appearance of an expansive area without needing to work on the particulars, or if something else is going on.

- Okay, so tinfoil hat time.
First thing you run into when you get to town? You meet a little girl who says, unprompted, 'Ryneus has the greatest father in the world! I'm really jealous!'
At the general store? The owner gossips, 'Have you heard? Ryneus's father patched up a weird sphere his boy found in the old ruin.' and after a short conversation his girl pal concludes with, 'By the righteous path, thank goodness I live here instead of that stinkhole of a city, Ark!'
At the tavern? The innkeeper tells the founding myth of Silvergrove: a rich family moved out to the end of the world, and were blessed with a brilliant young son, Sunaeri. You know how it is in myths, where the myth hero can talk at 6 months and wrestle bears by the time he's 3 and all that? That's this kid.
So due to a rockslide or something, the couple found themselves starving. When the parents were emaciated and dying, for they gave all their remaining food to their son Sunaeri, Sunaeri cried, begged the gods for help, and from his tears sprung flowers and greenery and the oasis as it is today. And with a smile on his lips, Sunaeri died.
The last data point: the innkeeper, when asked why her place is named the Silent Moon's Inn? She can't remember. Blurry, like a dream. She blames the brandy, of course.

- So. It occurs to me that, if Dal'Geyss ever told me his son's name, I don't remember it. But I wonder, if he'd told me before I left, would it be Ryneus… or Sunaeri?
This little town seems to revolve around this boy and his father. The little girl who tells everyone she meets how jealous she is about Ryneus's father. The boy finding a silver lode and making the town rich as Croesus. The father being able to fix up a piece of Starling tech.
How special! How… main character of him. And what would a boy who is sent away as the shame of his noble father want, more than anything?
Fame. Money. Specialness. A father who makes all the little boys and girls jealous, instead of that cock Dal'Geyss.
One possibility.

- Consider the myth. The rockfall that cut them off from the world, just as the Prophetess has been cut off.
Dal'Geyss's mistress died of sickness, emaciated and weary just like the parents in the myth, managing to send him away with the Black Stone as a little bit of rebellion before she died. A boy who, lost, despairing, alone… wept an oasis into being. A lost child, what better time and place for the High Ones' influence to creep in?

-The tavernkeeper who doesn't remember her own history. If someone sprung fully-formed from a young boy's tears to populate an old building named the Silent Moon's Inn… she wouldn't know where the name came from, would she?
The woman at the general store talking about 'that stinking hole, Ark' sure seemed deeply anti-Ark, which might be nothing... but it would also be just what some poor kid sent away from the capital to live in disgrace would think about the place he was forced out of. 'I didn't want to live in your shitty town anyway, dad!'

Guess I'll find out next time.


The Takeaway:
Very promising start, and at this point I have full confidence SureAI is going to deliver something fun. The sidequests can be hit and miss, but Enderal really does shine best when the claws come out and it's time once again to fuck with your head.

 

[Guile]

- Anyhow, time to get this show on the road.
My minimap markers take me to an unassuming (though admittedly beach-front) house. In the front room is a man beating a very fancy toy horse into shape. He seems a nice enough chap, although…

Spoiler: Jespar does not realize the mess of daddy issues he is about to step into

Yeah, I'm not going to call you that. I only call very specific people 'Daddy', and you don't have any kind of glistening six pack or flyaway silver hair, okay?
The Prophetess actually has a very minor freakout over the fact that 'Daddy' looks very much like her daddy. You know, the monster from the dreams who wants her to join him in death.
Which, with a Black Stone involved, who knows what's possible and not? I'm just kind of glad Ryneus's Daddy isn't like the Prophetess's; if Ryneus dreamed Silvergrove into being, it's sure as hell nicer than her usual dreams. … So far.
My first inclination is to assume the 'Daddy' is some kind of standard template the High Ones use for their visions and her dreams are Black Stone related too, but that's kind of reaching.
Just… watch out for sudden spontaneous combustion, Prophetess. And don't ask what's for dinner.

- Ryneus's room is honestly totally awesome. I want, like, all of this shit for my room back in Ark. Captured butterflies fluttering away? Posh pillows and rugs in bright colors? Books and maps spread carelessly over the desk nearby? A wooden rocking horse compatriot of the new fellow being worked on in the front room? There's just so much… stuff, it feels eminently comfortable.

Spoiler: I wish I lived in that room

Totally sweet. This is the room of a main character, no doubt about it.

- We talk for a bit, and I get the feeling that Ryneus isn't cut out for a life of crime.

Spoiler: oh yes, my backstory doesn't hang together, hm? Well, I, don't remember, what is the linear progression of time anyway, really, can we just go look for butterflies?

Ryneus wants to play in exchange for giving me the Stone, natch.
Well, there's this bit where Ryneus's dog grabs a toy and runs off right in the middle of my asking for the Stone, and I have to chase him down.
High One with the furry fetish, is that you?
Well, the dog runs all over town but never does turn into glowing red smoke and talk shit at me, so it's probably fine.

- We get back to talking about the Stone without further incident. Ryneus wants me to grant him three 'wishes', which is Pretentious Kid talk for 'do fun stuff with me.'
Now, I have the option to be a cunt about this and say stuff like 'Ain't nobody got time for that, give me the stone kid, now!' but of course I play nice on the grounds that for all I know, Ryneus could turn me inside out.
So I chase a dog around for a while and show off my bow skills and catch him some butterflies. I go for the optional 'catch all fifteen butterflies' when I could have stopped at 7, on the grounds that if Ryneus turns out to have ultimate power over life and death I should be the best big sister I can be.
It's around the first 'wish' (skeet shooting on the beach) that my suspicion is pretty much borne out: the sun never sets in Silvergrove. It hovers over the horizon in a determined sort of way, giving plenty of light at all times and fantastic sunsets over the beach.
The Guardian said I could stay the night while the Bonerippers prowl outside, but I have all the time in the world.
After all, what kid, given infinite power over all he surveys, would wish for anything as lame as rain or darkness? Let summer reign, and the good times last for-ev-er.

Spoiler: also Silvergrove has some p cool statues

- I wonder, is it just my suspicious mind, or are these two intentionally voice acted poorly?
I mean, it's not the worst voice acting I've ever heard, but this game normally has such tight voice work for its main characters. Then you get these guys who are just so happy and tranquil and taaalk sloowly and enuunciaate their woords.

- Ryneus does have this cute hopping animation while we're talking in his room, though.
Kind of weird when I'm trying to be all 'I need the Stone for world peace' and he's hopping back and forth and stuff, but yeah. Cute.

- So for the third of Ryneus's wishes, he wants me to go to a hidden cave under a waterfall, containing a locked door.
Well, he's either got something cool to show me or he's already plotting where to hide the body, but either way let's get 'er done.

- Turns out he just has a really nice painting of us on the beach backlit by the sunset to show me! It's really nice.
When did he have time to paint this exactly? Stop asking questions, human.

- Ryneus's third wish is for me to stay with him forever.
Which is kind of sweet but also … well, we all know how it goes from here, right?
The world outside is dark and cold, but here in Silvergrove it's always great and everyone's healthy and there's no rain or clouds and I'm tired of being alone, you know?
The Prophetess unfortunately needs everything spelled out for her. Because of course the kid is alone, everybody else is people puppets or something! He lays it all out for me, that playing tag with the townsfolk is like playing tag with himself.
He is himself, but they are also himself. Like that.
He's scared, though. Even a normal little kid can have that nonsensical fear of everyone just… going away, for no reason, and never coming back, and it all being your fault. And most little kids haven't been unwanted, tossed away by a father who never wanted him because he was born malformed.
But then you contrast that understandable, irrational fear with lines like "I never wanted them to be trapped here, but it was the only way to make them love me, you know?"

- The whole backstory comes out now, about a Silvergrove afraid of the malformed youngster dropped on their doorstep.
Endraleans aren't exactly the most understanding of folk, you may have noticed.
The story begins with an old woman dying in front of Ryneus's house. Of people coming in the night and dragging Ryneus out of bed. Of his stepfather trying to fight them off, and getting knifed in the dark.
And of the stone whispering, whispering…
And then things were better! The next morning, his father was alive. Ryneus was normal, just like all the other boys and girls. Everyone was nice to him.
Because it's what he wanted, and in Silvergrove, what Ryneus wants is what happens.
Except with me.
Ryneus can feel the Prophetess's difference. That it feels like part of me is far away (hopefully not trapped in that dream prison with Aixon, but who the fuck knows).

- I still need that stone, though. And of course, there's a hook hidden in the apple. This is Enderal.

Even if removing the stone brought back their free will, the people of Silvergrove haven't eaten real food in years. The stone tells Ryneus that. And Ryneus's body is a product of the stone.
So, Prophetess. How much do you want it?
Enough to end this land of Always Summer? Eh. Into each life some rain, etcetera.
Enough to kill a few dozen people? Sure, I do that before breakfast some days, and most of the villagers don't even have names.
Enough to consign a poor kid to a twisted and painful life as the local version of the Hunchback of Notre Dame?
I look inside my heart of hearts and think, the Order will probably take him in. Bad things happen to good people all the time. C'est la vie.
The connection isn't quite there, the way it is with Jespar and Calia. Ryneus is still just a video game character.

- Silvergrove without the stone is, of course, darker. Overcast and gray.

Spoiler: I like the town sign curving drunkenly

Corpses litter the streets, gray and wrinkled, starved to death in an instant.
There's one sitting on 'Daddy's' favorite bench outside their house.

Spoiler: really young lady, coming home at this hour- shut up, you're not my real dad

Inside the house, there's no sound. No background music. Only a quiet, intermittent cough from the back room.
The house is… less, than it was. No metal toy horse, no warm yellow light from hearth and candlelight, no hammering. I gird my loins and enter.

Spoiler: somebody get this boy a Phantom of the Opera mask, stat

Oh, I think. That's a really good character model.
The warm and welcoming room is lesser, colder, and covered in spiderwebs.
The quiet 'We did it, sister' hits pretty good.
He can't walk. By the time I come back with a horse for us to ride, he's almost gone. One of his last lines is a delirious 'You were right, [Daddy]. Sometimes all you need to do for a wish to come true is to hold on to it long enough.'

Oh, I think. There's the knife. I was waiting for you. Yes, yes, through the ribs and up into the heart, you know the drill by now.


The Takeaway:
This was an interesting quest.
The 'run around town doing little errands for the kid' portion was filler, but I wish it had actually been longer! If I'd had to run down to the tavern for date pies and listen to what's-her-name talk about what things were like when she was young ('I dunno, they were nice I guess, not as nice as since Ryneus came though') and play hide and seek with Ryneus and his little kid friends and actually meet the villagers properly, that would have helped form a connection that SureAI could have used to make it hurt more.
I felt kind of bad for Ryneus having to go back into a monstrous body, but the villagers? I could give a shit.
I was actually kind of worried when the emotional punch in the cave behind the waterfall just… failed to land? Maybe because I'd figured the broad strokes of all this out ahead of time.
Heading back into the village and listening to Ryneus breathe out his last on the bed finally did the trick, and I'm not sure what changed between those two points that got the emotions rolling. The character model curled up on the bed? The house itself being bare of all the fun little kid things fake-Ryneus had? The kid's VA bringing his A-game right at the end?
Not sure, but it did a lot of much-needed heavy-lifting on the emotional side of things that was missing while I was convincing this kid to give up his perfect fake world for a much shittier, crueler, if realer one.

 

[Guile]

- Before heading back to Ark and turning in the last Black Stone, I swing by a dungeon in the Silvergrove area called Old Yogosh.
Going by the dead miners, the one Keeper draped artistically over a fence, and the many (before I got to them) living mercenaries, I can guess what happened; the same thing that always happens to Enderal's poor working class. The mercs seem to either employ or are employed by a Nehrimese scientist brooding over a book about Skaraggs.
Skaraggs are the barbarian types who made my armor, so I'm pretty interested: the book is actually a great little story right out of Lovecraft's playbook. I wish I'd taken screenshots of the book, but from memory:
The book is an autobiography of a soldier, captured by the Skaraggs during war. Mostly through raw sex appeal he convinces them to spare his life (that is, one of the Skaraggs falls in love with him). In time he finds his way into the forbidden caves, discovers a mural containing the faces of his fellow soldiers who have gone missing. Well, as anyone who has starred in a Lovecraft mythos story would tell you, reading about the Dread Old Ones is your first mistake. He starts losing time, fugue style, and the Skaraggs figure out that he was a naughty boy who went where he oughtn't.
I'm not entirely sure if the Skaraggs were feeding prisoners to whatever monster was inside the mural, or if they'd sealed it in there. Considering he woke up from another fugue state with the entire tribe murdered after they were planning to murder him for his trespasses, I'm leaning towards the seal thing.
It actually ends pretty well, as so few archeologist protagonists of Lovecraft do; he managed to make his way down the coast, and the farther he got from the cave, the more he came back to himself. After stumbling into a village, he basically spent the next few years piecing himself back together and… that's it. Happy(-ish) ending!

- I was trying to figure out if the book involved Old Yogosh in any way, but as far as I can tell it's just a cool story.
In the process of working my way through the dungeon I do a miniquest that partially floods the place in the process of turning on the water for all the Powder Desert. Kinda hoping this is going to result in trees and oases sprouting up next time I ride through, but I suspect it'll be like when I gave a bunch of Red Vynroot to the Order but still see 'fleshmaggot sufferers' all the time whenever I wander through Undercity.

- At the end, there's a great deal of fire (ever-burning and pressure plates), and charred-black corpses (in funny existential torment poses, stuck in burning, hanging cages, and piled in - well - piles).

Spoiler: I call this piece 'why god, why'

Poking one of the piles (because, you know, that's how I do) causes this new friend to emerge.

Spoiler: insert ominous latin chanting here

Mildly terrifying, but you know. 6 seconds of timestop goes a long way to taking the bite out of single boss encounters. Stab stab stabstabstabstab done.

- Back at Ark's sun temple, I overhear a tidbit from one of the rank and file: Sakaresh (that's Calia) has been consecrated to the First Sigil. Has she been moving up the corporate rankings while I was away? Good for her! Not everybody gets a fancy title out of the gate like yours truly.
Order titles go from Novitiate through First Sigil to, I think, Fourth Sigil for guys like our dear old disapproving jerk-dad Signet Leader Jorek.
But of course, because nobody in Enderal can just say a nice thing about anyone, the guys I'm listening to add, 'Good for her' and 'Dunwar would have deserved this so much more, but well, who am I to question Malphas's will?', both in the smarmiest, most passive aggressive tones ever.
See, Calia? This is where keeping the fact that you can turn into an ass-kicking demon quiet comes back to bite you; maybe fear isn't as good as love, but it's still better than naked contempt.

- I also notice in my inventory is a butterfly in a jar: a Moonglow Moth, the kind Rynaeus had be catch for him.

Spoiler: I wonder when...?

- I trot over and me and Lexil the Archmage pop the last Black Stone into The Machine. Flashes of light, rumblings, Lexil getting knocked ass over teakettle, all that.
He assures me that with this… with this, this might just work!
Obviously, things can't just work, it's not good storytelling. Magic seems to be… not working at the moment. 'The sea of eventualities', Lexil calls it, which is pretty rad in a bookish sort of way. I'm to go find Yuslan Sha'Rim, who was supposed to be magically sealing the gates before the Nehrimese get here. Apparently we can do that!
Yuslan, remember, is basically the last Order Nehrimese mage of note after Constantine and Lishari got murdered. The one that seems to be haunted by an old girlfriend or something. It kinda reminds me that we never did figure out who murdered her. That plotline seems to have fallen by the wayside with Coarek invading and the Beacon and so on.

- Now I'm kind of amazed we can do it at all, but obviously we can't just seal Ark away from all danger just like that! S'not good storytelling.
No no, what we need here is an invasion. The Nehrimese, sailing right into the harbor, just as I always wondered why they hadn't already. I like to think that the inlet full of giant spiders, the beach full of soil elementals, the graveyard of undead and the beached ship full of bandit marauders to the south of Ark bought us some much-needed time.
Tealor joins Yuslan, me and some guard captain whose name escapes me.
Tealor Arantheal turns out to have some magic after all: for our little pow-wow, he puts up a spooky green barrier, presumably to keep out the cannon shells dropping down on the Noble District.
I suspect maybe it's been awhile since Tealor Arantheal threw up his last barrier spell. I mean, this thing seems to have holes like good cheese.
Dogs?

Spoiler: dogs

Guards who seem to think they're under attack by the air around them?

Spoiler: panicked guards

The important thing is that you tried, Arantheal.
We have a quick huddle, decide it's time to murder us some saboteurs, throw back the invaders, bar the gates, have Yuslan bring up the barriers, and then it's just taunting Coarek from the battlements about how he smells of elderberries.

- Me and Tealor team up to wander through the marketplace, killing an infiltrator who seems to have killed one of the two chickens that wander around the bounty board (also a few nameless NPCs, but I walk by that chicken every time I visit the magic box that holds all my shit, our bond is much deeper). He gets my sword all up in his guts, as is the fate of all chicken-murderers.
Around the back, two infiltrators are dead and already stripped of their gear. Weird. Maybe there's another Bethesda protagonist around here someplace.
We link up with a small squad led by some guy named Harlejan. He's appropriately surprised to see Tealor Arantheal down from his little mountain and breaking heads, which, you know, fair enough. There's some speeches.
More fighting, working our way through the harbor district, this time against proper Nehrimese soldiers led by some named lady mage. Considering I cut her down though, I'm not going to remember her name. I'm pretty sure it's not Coarek's righthand woman, she seemed like more of a rogue type.
Also looting; Nehrimese Shields are worth a lot of gold, but so are City Guard Cuirasses, and the infiltrators each pack a pair of rune daggers that aren't tremendously valuable but are light and easy to carry. Looking back at the many naked looted corpses strewn here and there across the harbor district, I can't help but feel the moment is undercut somewhat.

Spoiler: moustache is Harlejan, by the way

- So we go push some levers to bring the portcullises down (why do we need the portcullises down for Yuslan to put up a barrier? Who knows), you can hear Harlejan bringing up the cannons through the walls somehow, at one point I have a brief Future Vision flash of a bunch of voices shouting stuff like 'You heard him, go!' and 'Retreat!' and 'Gah!' and such...
Busywork, basically.

- Somehow or other, Harlejan and one of his nameless Guardmooks get trapped on the other side of the magic barrier when it goes up. He's all 'Grandmaster, open the gates' and Arantheal looks down and says '... No.'
Which, hey, I'm in full agreement with the hard choices, because I see who's stalking up behind them.
So Harlejan pleads at us for a good five seconds, and then… yyyyeah.

Spoiler: duh-na-duh-na-duh-na-duh... sephiroth

That asshole. Samael, Coarek's evil-looking executioner pal. Well he tears the souls right out of Harlejan and Guardmook #1.
And then Coarek strolls up like he's late for a Sunday brunch.


The Takeaway:
As great as Yogosh's character model is, I kinda wish he'd come out of a painting or something, to link up with the story. Oh well!
The invasion isn't bad. Yuslan gets to show some spine, Arantheal gets to take charge, I get to murder a bunch of guys. I mean, it suffers a little from being compared to the last three quests I went on that had real character beats and cool plot twists and such, but it's not bad.
I do feel like it stretches disbelief a little that Coarek can just walk up to our walls for a chat when we know Harlejan has been readying cannons and 'firespitters' and so on while me and Arantheal were pushing buttons. It might have been cooler if, say, Harlejan got to turn the cannons on him and Samael blew them the fuck up or something with his naughty black smoke magic. It'd hype Samael up more and make me feel bad about such a badass getting trapped outside and mined for cheap drama.

 

[Guile]

- The Nehrimese mage Yuslan Sha'rif put up the entropy barrier, Samael on the other side tore out a couple of souls to set the mood, and I killed a lot of infiltrators, but now it's Coarek and Arantheal's show.
Coarek makes the first shot across the bow, claiming surprise that Arantheal is even here getting his hands dirty.
It is true that I've been the one actually schlepping Black Stones around and killing entire villages of monsters, but Tealor Arantheal has also had the unenviable job of corralling a bunch of hidebound Endraleans to do what he wants them to do, and that's a Herculean feat in its own way.

- Coarek has this habit of saying things that sound fair and reasonable on the surface but are also not really those things if you think about it for a minute.
'Don't make this conflict bloodier than it already is'... after sailing into our harbour and trying to murder everyone. So his rhetorical strategy makes it sound like we're the bad guy for trying to resist the invasion. For a story about fighting ascended smoke monsters and the end of the world, some bits of Enderal feel way too real.
Arantheal fires back with overflowing sarcasm.

Spoiler: I know you are but what am I

Pretty fantastic tough guy lean on Yuslan's part. His head turns back and forth to watch who's talking, it's neat.

- Yeah, so obviously Arantheal isn't opening the gates any time soon.
Coarek says that in that case, he wants to see every prisoner crucified by nightfall, and all Endraleans are to be killed on sight.
Not that he takes enjoyment from this, you understand! Coarek considers himself a rationalist; it's those religious people who choose dogma over reason that bring this on themselves.
Arantheal refusing to submit to Rationality (and by extension, Coarek, its advocate) is the last proof he needs that Enderal is beyond saving.

- Tealor Arantheal is not happy when we head back up to the Sun Temple, natch.
But his day is about to get worse: our old disapproving pal Sigil Leader Jorek is laid out on the ground when we get back, with a small crowd standing over him. According to Natara (that's the third leg of the leadership of the Order; Tealor as grandmaster, Natara the Tuchessa his 2IC, and then Jorek mostly by virtue of being there from the start with Natara and Tealor) he's the one who let the Nehrimese invaders into the city.
I could see this going either way, really.
Jorek is just as old a hand in the Order as Natara and Tealor, he could have felt slighted that they got to be the heads while he's still out leading patrols and doing initiations and stuff. He's been played as being kind of bitter about the whole thing.
But then, if the Tuchessa was the one sliding help under the table to Coarek, she'd want a convenient patsy to take the fall. She's been bucking Tealor's commands to focus on the Beacon as superstitious hoodoo when they should be focused on more earthly concerns.
Arantheal, sounding at the end of his rope, orders Jorek imprisoned.

- The good news keeps coming; Archmage Lexil and an elderly lady named Magistra Yaela are arguing about a 'Numinos'.
I think Yaela's new to the plot, presumably because Yuslan has never shown any interest in the Beacon and aside from him and Lexil all our name-worthy mages are dead, and we needed someone to help hold up this conversation.
She's got some fire, but she's no Constantine Firespark, I'll tell you that.
Apparently when we rebuilt this thing we neglected to acquire the very heart of the machine. All that stuff about getting the black stones for power? Without the Numinos to aim the energy, we basically just built a giant mystical bomb at the top of our city.

- I also get to listen outside the door while they interrogate Jorek! That happened a lot faster than I thought it would.
So turns out Jorek is a drunkard and a cap dust addict, and Tealor Arantheal and Natara have been covering it up for him. That seems like the sort of corruption I'd expect in the highest offices of the land here in Enderal, sure.
A bottle of cap dust was left by Lishari's dead body, remember. Jorek denies the charge, and to be fair that seems like a pretty easy frame job.
Jorek also doesn't know anything about the mercenaries Coarek has been hiring, but maintains that letting Coarek into the city would have been better in the long run. Just stop building the machine, sue for peace, live under Coarek's benevolent rule, like that.
I mean until the High Ones blow up the whole goddamn world, but in fairness I was there for all of that and I'm still not 100% sure I believe it. Jorek and Natara are kind of the sanest ones in this story.
They give Jorek some good lines:

Spoiler: damn it jim I'm a warrior not a sage

Jorek actually seems kind of concerned about the fate of all the little villages and farms now that we've refused to let Coarek into the city, but I say if they've managed to survive the dead rising and the pirates and everything else, one more murderous threat in Enderal isn't so much.
Also, some spicy accusations about Tealor sharing Natara's bed, you know how it goes.
Tealor fires back, calling Jorek a 'hollow man' without talent or principles. And then, uh.
Well, Sigil Leader Jorek isn't going to make it to stand any kind of trial.
Tealor just cut him down right in the middle of a 'You'll all see I was right!' rant.

- Tealor Arantheal told me to take a nap, and…

Spoiler: oh. good. this place.

Yeah, naps have historically been a pretty bad time for me in this game. Guess it's time to go see Daddy again.
Kinda puts things in perspective, in a 'it can always get worse' kind of way.


The Takeaway:
Just cleanup from the invasion and setup stuff for the next round of quests, seems like. I appreciate that Jorek has half a point, although frankly I wouldn't trust Coarek as far as I can throw him. Although I'm willing to be convinced on that point, given say, 5 minutes alone with him and a steep battlement.
I don't like him. Villains that talk about peace and rationality if you just do everything they say and believe what they believe kind of tarnish the ideals they espouse.

 

[Guile]

So, dream sequence time.

- I kind of wish you could scroll back out at this point and your character model was replaced by a small child, but I guess locking it in first person is a good step in the right direction.
On the other hand, it's not like being level 45 and covered in heavy armor would save me when my childhood house inevitably catches fire again, maybe that would be a good option too. Embrace the contradiction.

- Daddy is still hairless, burned, but not as crazed as usual.
We have a pretty civil conversation, where Daddy thinks I'm as lost as all the others. 'I know you still didn't find it,' he says.
My line is, 'You're wrong, Daddy. We found the torch, and I found the fire.'
I'm guessing this is the Beacon and the Black Stones to power it? The Beacon kind of looks like a torch, we just gave it power...

Spoiler: I kind of just want to respond to everything with 'We found the torch and I found the fire' now

'To listen,' he adds.
Pretty good zinger there, Daddy.
Me and Daddy have a seat at the table in silence – the bagged corpses of Mommy and Sister are thankfully gone – and listen.

- See, in the next room over, we get to hear Daddy and Mommy having an argument.
'You make me very, very unhappy,' Daddy says. And then…

Spoiler: boom zoom to the moon

It's not muffled at all, no matter what the subtitles claim, and actually sounds like an extremely satisfying meaty thud. Daddy wants to know whose child it is, growing in her womb. She claims it's his, of course, but… well.
'What am I to do, Lord?' He asks.
'Oh, thanks, Lord,' he says, in the tone of someone who has received a revelation. I give it 50-50 that he's either hearing the voices of the High Ones, or has just gone off the deep end into full religious mania.
A child born of sin is tainted, you see. That's why, when it's born, he wants to drown it in the trough outside.

- Yikes. If 'I' set that fire after all… I can see why. To be so powerless to do the right thing…
Daddy – the Daddy in front of me – claims that there's no more time. He has to go. He's craving it, you see. Crisp, bloody meat.

- The Prophetess wakes with the line 'Save them… we need to save them… Light the Beacon…' on her lips.
I'm not sure what's going on there either, unless… unless she considered 'saving her family' to be 'lighting the torch', and is relating the fire of her childhood with the 'torch = Beacon' idea raised earlier and her helpless family with the Order members still living?
I dunno, bit of a stretch, but probably something metaphorical like that.
I am suspecting that lighting the Beacon is either not going to save the day, or straight up bring about the Apocalypse all the faster. In a genre like this, suspicious dream visions are usually pretty spot on, and Daddy has no faith in the Beacon at all.
Plus… well. We miraculously find a mysterious old blueprint from ages past, we acquire the power stones that we already know have the High Ones whispering their lies through it… I'm seeing a lot of ways this could go wrong.

- Jespar is waiting for me when I wake up.
He's apologizing for that thing from last time, presumably when I found him surrounded by prostitutes and he told me he'd sell me to Coarek for a gold piece and shit.
There's an option to ask about that line, but I figure it's all water under the bridge by now.
I mean, I'm not 100% sure he wouldn't, but it's kind of like 90% believing in him and 10% percent believing that even if he sinks the dagger I do wear a lot of armor and can stop time now.
… Maybe 80-20?
I believe in him more than not, anyway.
He asks about my relationship status with Calia. Unfortunately for my OT3 (why have Calia and Jespar not been on a quest together, I need that snarky rogue/virtuous paladin-monster combination in my life, SureAI) I'm pretty sure I can't just romance everybody.
Heck, get Tealor Arantheal in on this, my heart is big. It can contain multiple waifus.
Anyway, I go ahead and claim me and Calia are just friends (she was pretty clear about not starting anything because she's a monster and I'm… kind of also a monster, but I still haven't told anybody, what the hell, me)

- I swing by and meet Lexil the Archmage and Yuslan to get my new marching orders. Yuslan isn't sure this is wise, which sounds pretty credible when I learn that Lexil's plan is apparently, to put me on a spaceship.
See, what happens is that a Starling broke into an Order storeroom looking for materials to finish constructing his spaceship. The name's Kurmai, which turns out to be the starling you meet when you first show up in Ark. He gives you a quest for hammerbird eggs.
Mostly at the time he was notable for referring to himself as 'he', as in: Kurmai says, 'He wonders if you're quite well in the head.'
But when the Order went back to his workshop, they noted a lot of similarities between his work – which he claimed was done using ancient Starling blueprints – and the Beacon. So he didn't even get horribly murdered for being an infiltrator or whatever!
The plan is to finish the spaceship and send someone – let's be real here, it'll be me 100% – to the goddamn moon along with Kurmai.
Well, they call it the Star City, where Starling lore says the Ancient Fathers came from. But basically that.
On a hunch and a prayer that the Beacon builders and the Ancient Fathers are one and the same, or coworkers or something.
Woo boy.

- Also as a side note, Lexil says that 'the nightmares' are becoming worse (did I know everyone was coming down with a bad case of nightmares? I don't think I did), Red Madness is catching, and the Nehrimese are setting up guard posts throughout the land. They seem to be settling down for an occupation.
I suppose it's too much to hope that the Red Madness and the Nehrimese problems will solve themselves? Or rather, that the former will solve the latter? Probably too much to hope for, yeah.
RE: Red Madness, Lexil hypothesizes that the High Ones are drawing strength from the chaos, or the Cleansing is approaching (or we activated the Beacon recently? Bit of an out there theory, but it does fit the evidence...). Civilians are vanishing from town – through the entropy barrier? – and showing up out in the wilderness, crazed and murderous.

- Wandering about the city on some last-minute business before heading out, I notice laborers with city guard overseers here and there fixing the city, and that all exits are thoroughly barred.

Spoiler: kinda feels like it should have its own sound fx, like 'bwaum!'

The only in and out of the city is by teleport scroll. I was wondering about that, honestly.
Also some of the civilians that hang around to give the zones of Ark more color remember me and Tealor fighting back to back through the marketplace, which is kind of neat.

But now it's off to the Powder Desert to visit Kurmai's workship.


The Takeaway:
The day after the siege, my nightmares might be over (if the figments in my dreams can be believed), there was some serious broken home stuff going on in the Prophetess's past, I picked Jespar as my waifu, and now I'm guess I'm flying to the moon and gonna play among the stars.
This reeeaaally feels like Lexil is stretching. Possibly because he's half-Starling himself, so the idea of the Star City is really appealing to him? Have we really exhausted all other options here?
…
Yeah, yeah, I'm going...

 

[Guile]

- The first step in getting to Kurmai's workshop is taking a teleport scroll out to Duneville in the Powder Desert. How did Kurmai travel to and from Ark and his workshop halfway across the continent? The man must pay a fortune in teleport scrolls.
The Nehrimese are also invading Duneville, but just a little. You know, just enough so one passing adventurer can tip the scales and assist in murdering all the invaders. More of aLuckily they don't bring the boats they used to invade Ark, since Duneville is built half on stilts over the water of their little cavern grotto.
It is a smuggler town, so possibly it's really hard to find their hidden cove from the sea?

- Wandering up the coast in search of the workshop, I run into:
1) That little building called the Hollow Hand from ages ago, with the crucified corpses out front to discourage visitors. It turns out to contain two wizards and half a dozen marauders. It appears to be half tavern, half brewery, and half… hookah den?

Spoiler: ... and half pagan ritual site

They'd probably do better business if they didn't attack everyone who comes in the door and nail their corpses up outside as a warning to the others, but who am I to oppress the local small business owner?
2) A ship come aground with, for once, non-aggro people in it. They don't have much to say, but apparently this is Duneville's Fruit Corporation. I assume this is a polite way of saying 'smugglers of same', but who knows? All I really know is that they're a little confused about how the logging profession works.

Spoiler: how I mine for fruit

3) Of course, a little further down the coast is the DFC's warehouse, which will try to murder you on sight. Getting a lot of mixed messages here, guys.

I am digging the jungle biome with dirt brick house motif, though. Looks like it's not just the giant apes that like that building style, everybody's doing it!

Spoiler: desert to jungle to desert again. you know, like you do

4) A cool little grotto call Kynea Grotto, equal parts shallow water (I appreciate the ripples as I move about), glowing crystal, rudimentary buildings and scaffolding taking advantage of the crystal, and the occasional vein of shadowsteel ore. Also, fire and soil elementals, and a mage hobo.

Spoiler: welcome to my completely normal grotto, wanderer

After killing the crazed mage, I get to read a tattered diary that sheds some light on things. It seems that all these hidden caves with crystal growing everywhere I've been finding are also Pyrean ruins.
If the statue the man has been worshipping can be trusted to be a factual historian, anyway. It's been telling him stories of the Pyreans, and he keeps the tales tucked away so that he might someday 'fulfill her wish'...
There's probably something to it, anyway, since after killing the mage an Oorbaya manifests itself and tries to punch my face in with its hideous hand-fist.
Was that the spirit in the statue, trying too late to save its only worshipper?
Was it like, his ghost or something? I seem to recall mages who reach too far (arcane fever 100%, perhaps?) turn into Oorbayas.
Or… I think in Silvergrove when things came to a head there with Ryneus, an Oorbaya showed up like a mini-boss, do these things come from the High Ones?

- Actually, thinking about it, I'm wondering if all these spooky-ass Lovecraftian statues tempting men's souls – this one, Kor from that side quest in the tropics, the one that got Constantine, etc. – aren't just small heathen gods in Enderal's fucked-up cosmology, but rather Pyreans. I'm suddenly reminded of the temple where Constantine went full cultist, and the old goat telling us how the Pyreans could stick their souls into objects, and how crazy such a being would likely be after thousands of years…

- Kurmai's workshop is located in a cave amongst pumpkin-shaped cacti grown to huge sizes, and the occasional Red Madness'd individual. I appreciate that they have unique soundbites that make them sound fucking nuts ('Bring him back!' and the one who's just counting prime numbers or something), and how they run the gamut from a level 1 unarmed peasant-woman to possessed bandits with rune armor and axes.
I'm much less enthused about the Myrad sitting on the nearby cliff. I mean, after a while in this game the sight of those creepy cow-bird-insect things is synonymous with safe travel and the bank boxes that let you store loot. I figure, 'Oh, new fast-travel point!' and walk right up to it.
This, of course, is a wildMyrad, and it turns out they're kind of like fluffy black-eyed dragons. They fly around and have a glowing green breath weapon and… well, it's been a while since the game murdered me, you know? You almost start to miss it, after a while…

- Aaaanyway, Kurmai's workshop!
There's a nice little ledge from which you can see the mighty vessel moored, which… appears to be an honest to god steampunk airship. This is what we're going to be flying into space in?

Spoiler: are the sails to catch solar winds?

The Agnod, that beast of a sidequest crash-landed in the frozen north, was a flying saucer of 100% ancient metal. This one – and to hear one mage underling tell it, a similar ship being built in Anku, the Starling city – is made of wood and a canvas envelope.
We Spelljammer now, lads.

- The Order beat me here and have sent mages and laborers. It's pretty busy with people down here actually. I'm not entirely sure what the Order folks are doing, because I'm quick to learn that most of the actual work is being done by those little Starling machine critters that look like spiders and are filled with cogs and meat.
They're underfoot in the walkways, poking around here and there, doing their thing.
I actually meet Kurmai in the middle of an argument with one.

Spoiler: i'm not crazy you're crazy, isn't that right Bot #35

Cute, right? Any entropy mage that had to brave Agnod is also probably pretty fond of them. As the only beastie in that junker that could be controlled by Entropic Blood, they were extremely crucial in me managing to brute force my way through that horrid place.

- Kurmai needs materials for 'Gertrude' (all ships are girls you know), and apparently I'm the only one around here who can go dungeon diving for him. I was kind of hoping it would just be like, shadowsteel or something. But no, there are some very specific old Starling mines and camps I'll need to hit up.
Most notably, Thalgard, which appears to be the local name for 'hubris' and 'overreach.' Also, 'toxic mist.'


The Takeaway:
Questions about why Kurmai built his workshop across an entire mountain range aside (maybe Duneville smugglers have dynamo cores on the cheap or something), I'm liking the quest so far. The possessed people and Nehrimese attacks sprinkled throughout familiar old locations do what they can to ratchet up tension, we knew about his material issues from minute one so the fetch quest follows logically, and 'sail a wooden ship to the moon' is at least interesting.
I'm already assuming I'm going to have to do battle with the undead ghost of Dal'Marak in the toxic ruins of Thalgard over that stupid drive core, but I've been hearing about Dal'Marak in loading screens and in the hushed voices of tavern-goers for a while so I'm kind of looking forward to the forced side quest rather than dreading it.
I do feel like these nested quest chains can really bog a story down if the links are too tenuous ("So I need the drive core to finish the ship to get me to the moon in the hopes of finding the Ancient Fathers who might know about the Numinos which will let me aim the Beacon to destroy the High Ones? Got it!"), hopefully that won't be the case here.

 

[Guile]

Sorry for the long break, y'all. Got a new job so my priorities have been elsewhere. Let's continue with gathering supplies for our moon trip, shall we?

- First stop on the old Starling mine tour is maybe a little too easy? Feels like filler.
Work your way through a few spiders (for there are always spiders), a few Starling robots (how else could you know it's a Starling mine?), grab up a few chunks of ominously glowing metal doo-dads, and Bob's your uncle.
- Nearby on the other hand, is the ominously named 'Soulbed.' This presumably optional dungeon is a party mix of undead types, and some cool set pieces.
Every sort of undead I've run into so far, from basic archers to advanced magic-using ancestors, except – funnily enough, considering this is the desert – Sere Lost Ones.

Spoiler: its probably fine right

That's a chest set beneath a beam of light, charred corpses reaching towards the light like it's salvation or destruction or both.
I'm a little disappointed when edging gingerly into the beam of light to click on the chest doesn't set me on fire.
Maybe that's weird? It's probably weird to be disappointed.
The next zone inside the Soulbed is called the Open Graves, and I work my way through half a dozen middleweight undead before charging headfirst into a Lord of the Lost Ones, who chops me down with his two-hander.
Not like, one of those stubborn hardwood trees like an oak or anything. More like a soft wood, like a soft pine or something?
An inch of balsa wood, maybe.
Welp.

Spoiler: see ya

- So, off to Thalgard. Fairly dim and gloomy, which I suppose is only to be expected from an area supposedly steeped in toxic mist or whatever. Bright green crystal bits dot the landscape, suggesting there's Pyrean ruins around. Towards the end of the path there's some lighting in the form of giant… well, they kind of have the aesthetic of paper lanterns, if paper lanterns were round, larger than a man, and shod in iron instead of wood. That helps a bit with the general gloom.

Spoiler: gettin castlevania in here

I was warned that stepping off the path is only for 'ard bastards, but the instincts of an Elder Scrolls protagonist are strong. There could be treasure in there, you know? I don't even know what I'd spend money on, considering I've already bought the two houses in the game and tear all my gear from the unfeeling hands of double-killed Starling liches and stuff. I just… I just want it, okay?
Maybe I can make a Scrooge McDuckian vault and swim around in my gold pennies when I'm not out saving the world or flying to the moon.
Well, while the Destroyed Abbey doesn't have an overabundance of treasure, it does have an abundance of are Monks. Contrary to the peaceful, pleasant title, Monks are rough customers. The base form of a Monk is one of those ghostly lightning-and-ice magic user types, like the Alchemists from the plague mushroom sidequest way back in the day. But pile on more Elementalist stats and pour a boatload of HP on top and you have the idea.

Spoiler: class is in session

This is a pretty rad setpiece, though. The Monks walk the aisles and man the lectern of this open-air lecture hall that probably didn't start out exposed to the elements whenever this Abbey was actually in business. The ground is coated in waist-high ferns, and the skeletons posed on their benches appear to be growing antlers or horns or something.
The inside of the Abbey is more vanilla. The main hall and sleeping quarters are do-able with a little luck (and a timestop comboing into Rocksolid to soak up 90% of a magic-user's ability to drop serious damage on a poor old Prophetess), where the rooms contain at most a Monk or two supported by archers or mighty wisps. I pick up a fair number of skillbooks and a few spellbooks, which is kind of nice.
The library contains no less than four Monks, backed up by at least as many lesser undead archers.
Welp.

Spoiler: regret.jpg

- Clustered around the Abbey – which I find the first time, regretfully, by running off a cliff while being chased by Monks – is the remnants of a small town. Well, actually a pretty big town, for Enderal. Bigger than Arp Central over on the western side of the continent or the weird town-zoo of elemental wolves around Calia's dad's old place.
Smaller than Ark, thank God.
Aside from the usual undead types, this place has a monster called an 'elemental ghost.' That's a soil elemental that somehow became undead what.
On the sliding scale of undead threats that tops out at Lords of the Lost Ones, those giant-sized Grotesque Ones and, just below them, Monks, these guys are the next rung down on that ladder. They have tons of HP like Monks and throw lightning (natch), but they don't tend to run as much and their magic doesn't seem to have the same punch. Do-able.
I also run into a little door reading 'Thalgard Crematory', but I'm still stinging from the Abbey and would rather walk up the normal way thank you very much. With my luck the Crematory would be filled with flaming corpses that throw fireballs or something.
As something of a connoisseur of getting blown up by magic by now, I would rate fireballs as the scariest type of magic in Enderal, since suddenly you just explode and your world is a fiery hell for multiple steps in any direction. Ice meanwhile is the most annoying magic for a swordsy sort of girl, since the mages seem to be programmed to fire and run away a lot, and you can't exactly catch up when you're slowed by cold. Lightning hits you in your mana bar, but since I do all my summoning before the fight I could give a shit.
- So I work my way around and up a small hill, chasing the minimap point, and run into a shining white figure on the hill called the Steel Guardian. Turns out he's one of Enderal's five hidden monsters. There's a book series that describes these 'myths and legends', that explains he once was Dal'Marak's trusted arcanist Ibrael. Yadda yadda tried to kill his boss for straying from the path, yadda yadda too late, yadda yadda cursed to roam the land and so on and so forth.
He hits like a truck with his giant axe and has a huge HP bar, which is to be expected of something the size and general disposition of a Starling Centurion like our old buddy Horst/Pahtira. Single enemies are the easiest to bring down with timestop though, since I don't have to waste valuable time running around. Timestop Power Attacking his face like a lumberjack with a stubborn tree does the trick, and then it's just cleaning up a couple of his Monk buddies.

Spoiler: less majestic on the ground

Although I have to say, for being a secret boss the loot is uninspiring. A couple of books I've already read and 1000 gold pennies. Why can't I get that giant glowing white axe as large as my entire body?! Even if I can't use it I could put it on my wall and tell stories about it to wide-eyed Ark kids.
- Just outside the 'Starling workshop' I'm looking for are a handful of 'Sunborn' which, going by their armor, appear to be Skaraggs, the local barbarian archetype.
Just squatting in a ruined house out in the ass-end of nowhere, with ruined Viking warships crashed against the shore outside. It kind of looks like they came to plunder Enderal, then spontaneously decided to give up the Viking raider life and become fishermen. Armed with axes and heavy furs.
I wonder. We know there was some unspecified disaster out here in Thalgard. Could it be in response to a Skaragg invasion? Could it have originated out on the water, driving the Skaraggs to beach themselves to avoid worse disaster? Why 'Sunborn'?
I hope we find out.


The Takeaway:
The Thalgard region is just as tough as advertised, but fighting hard stuff for the sake of difficulty isn't really my jam. I'm much more interested in the lore implications. I have faith that Dal'Marak didn't just go mad and poison himself and everyone else in a vacuum, and I'm looking forward to learning just what happened here.
Enderal is a hundred stories of good intentions gone awry and foul. Of love turned to hate, of lovers turned to necromancy, of murder born from fear, of religion turned to blind zealotry and freedom-loving rebels turning to Madame Guillotine to sort out their problems. Well, there's a few stories of greed and malice and human stupidity in there too, but that's humans for you I guess.

 

[Guile]

Where were we?

Oh yes. Getting-my-ass-kicked Alley.
Actually, the starling workshop is a wet fart compared to what I had to do to get here. Difficulty-wise, I mean; it actually looks really nice.

Spoiler: a little bit of me was sad when it didn't break away from the rigging and turn into a boss fight

It's probably just the fact that Starlings in this game keep making giant robots for me to fight, but does this look a little like a giant robot to anyone else? The pipes coming off a barrel-like torso with three glowing eyes and grain silo-like legs holding the whole contraption up.

Spoiler: where's the light coming from? its dark as hell outside

The crystals overhead filter through the Starlingstuff to throw bluish light on the walls in thick wide stripes.
A couple of starling guardians pop up as I work my way up the crazy tower, but they're basically nothing. I do some platforming segments and snag the pyrean cube right off the top.
I do appreciate how the hums and whooshes and hisses of the tower almost make their own music.

- I believe Buccaneer suggested that up the stairs from the workshop is one of the hardest areas in the game, and I should go on up and take a peek?
Well, turns out the Sunborn aren't just stuck on the coast; they've taken over Thalgard, and there's a lot of them. This isn't a lost or stranded crew, this is looking more like a village. Or a cult. Possibly an army.
Hard to tell, exactly.
3 of the Sunborn wasn't too bad, down on the beach. They're hardy, but not one-hit deadly, the way a Lord of the Lost is. 7-10 is a little trickier, plus they brought a freaking Oorbaya. Well, turns out summoned monsters are starting to lose their efficacy, but Entropic Blood is paying real dividends! One Sunborn suborned (heh) to my side, which then explodes once they've taken enough damage? A+, gold star.
I got a level up at some point, and rank III of that talent is definitely where that memory point is going.
So, after some yo-yoing (run in, Entropic Blood, stab a bit, nearly get murdered, run away; repeat), I make it close enough to touch the actual door to Thalgard, which… you know, that's probably good enough for now, right? Go me!

- Well, I also poked around and found a pretty sweet tower called the Sun Fire, which I assume Dal'Marak dropped his nuke from when whatever happened, happened.

Spoiler: sun fire. sun born. hmmmm.

It glows with its own inner light, and looks totally sweet after the endless dimness of the rest of Thalgard. And piles on the arcane fever, because of course.
Still glowing strong after however many years it's been. It doesn't really look like the Beacon, thankfully; thinner, with the chalice shape up top to catch the light rather than three nodes for the Black Stones.

- There's also one of those unique beasties, the Crystal Widow, here. Vaguely woman-like, but covered in whorls and knots and crystal growths, like a soil elemental mixed with an Oorbaya plus lady bits.

Spoiler: honestly? put a wig on it, and I could go for it

I actually just hit her with Entropic Blood and wandered around with her as a pet for a while, but unfortunately I had to put her down eventually. Rabid, you know how it is.
A little pitiful, to be honest. Like putting down Old Yeller.

- So, job done, anyhow. I head back to Ark for a minute to gather up anything new - check up on the new spells, sell off goods, buy skill books, all that. The city is still locked up tight, of course; nobody in the Order managed to figure anything out about the invading army while I was gone.
The Soil Elemental has once more fallen out of style, and the Oorbaya is back in. Level 50, the new hotness, still viscerally terrifying. I'm pretty sure it's not just my imagination that the aura of purple mist is thicker than the old lad back at level 30.

Spoiler: gaaaahhh the light makes it worse, not better

Presumably the fog is created from the Oorbaya, but it kind of looks like whatever fell portal he climbed through clings to him, and all hell might follow after.
Good shit.

- I also finally got around to buying the house in the noble quarter. It's nice enough; roomy, with a crackling fire and a trophy room. If I actually could invite friends over (if my friends didn't have a bad habit of dying ugly deaths), that long table would be really useful.

Spoiler: still wish I had a baller crypt, but this is pretty nice

It has a forge, alchemy and enchanting table on-site, but crafting is still kind of crap so the marketplace hovel is probably ultimately preferable just for saving a loading screen between me and the merchants.

- Other things of note: the invasion is on everybody's lips, as it probably should be. Not just marketplace peasants being all "holy shit you were with the Grandmaster killing Nehrimese bastards down at the harbor gate, did I dream that," but I noted Nehrimese racism is on the rise. Enderaleans' favorite pastime, hateful xenophobia, has been proven 100% accurate now that the evil foreigners have invaded, or so the locals seem to think.
"I always told them those Nehrimese are dangerous, and now this happens!" and "You dare to show your face around here after what your countrymen did?" and the town crier assuring people that Ark is safe and will be that way forever, and so on.

- Well… sucks, but morale is the Order's job, not mine. I'm off to the Gertrude to drop off my stuff.
On the way a novice Keeper makes a point of saying the 'Blue Islands Coalition' sent an emissary despite the wars. The man almost admires their balls. I'm pretty sure that the Blue Islands hasn't come up yet, but I expect we'll meet before all this is over.

- Kurmai has a uniquely Starling-centric viewpoint about this whole 'Ancient Fathers hanging out up on their moon while we all suffer down here' bit. He figures, the Beacon? Maybe the Ancient Fathers made it, did you ever think of that, huh?
And anyway, with the way humans have bollocksed up the world, is it any wonder the Ancient Fathers are non-interventionist? Like some kind of environmentalist bent to his rhetoric. Or maybe they're the Federation from Star Trek. Prime Directive, sorry humans, our hands are tied.
'Don't judge them before you have met them', Kurmai insists.
That just makes me more and more certain they're going to be dead, crazy or (/and?) murderous when I actually make it up there to meet them. But hey, maybe they'll surprise me this once.


The Takeaway:
Bit of a short and unimportant one this time, in all honesty. Thalgrad was atmospheric, filled with danger and history, but a little too 'ard for me to go exploring just yet. Comparatively, the Starling workshop - the actual reason I was here - was just an in-and-out fetch quest.
Ark feels… weird, right now. The NPCs acknowledge their close call, but they don't seem especially worried for the future. It doesn't feel like a city under siege, you know? This attitude would feel more appropriate if the city had a close call and then emerged victorious, but as far as I can tell the Nehrimese invasion barely received a bop on the nose and there's precisely one failure point keeping the Nehrimese from invading the city again: Yusif Sha'Rim's entropic barriers.
I can't help but feel that guy's days are numbered, and he's going to find an assassin's blade or a whipped-up mob or something waiting for him whenever it would be narratively convenient.


Anyhow, hopefully the next update will come out pretty quickly, it seems to mostly be hanging out with the Order crew and investigating the starling city.

 

[Guile]

- Okay, went back a little ways in order to get my husbando on lock. Restarting from balloon lift-off, basically.
A few things.
First, Arantheal's kid, whose necklace I'm now wearing? His name is Narathzul, a name I've somehow gone through the entire game up to this point without hearing. Honestly the name belongs on an orc necromancer, but what do I know about names, I named myself Guile.
Second, the moon down in the hold? Still ominous as shit. I didn't quite grasp the… halo, the corona of power around this thing until I got a closer look.

Spoiler: ominous hum

That's like, end-boss-of-a-JRPG levels of ominous right there. Third stage, at least, right after the 'normal' and 'one-winged angel growing out of the prow of a biological airship' levels.
Third:

Spoiler: does kurmai just need to unwind some days? did I find his stash?

I cannot escape the mushrooms even here! That can't be good for the pipes.
I think that's dirt the 'shrooms and the pipes are nestled in, actually. This ship is far more biomechanical than I expected, even considering the jungle nightscape down in the cargo hold that's powering it.

- Anyway, talked to Jespar again, and selected the 'Only friends, tho?' option.
Surprising no one, our favorite free spirit doesn't want to put a name to this thing we have.
Actually, first he tries to friendzone me, and look. Nothing doing, okay, pal? I gave up monster-paladin snuggles for this, and I will have it.
I mean you. I mean whatever.
I don't care.
This girl? Cool as a cucumber, yeah.

- Actually, he wants to make sure that if we're going to do this, he doesn't want to call it a relationship. He doesn't want to get locked down, to deal with jealousy and possessiveness. He stresses that I'll be free to play the field as long as he's the one I always come back to, and vice versa.
SureAI, it's not nice to tease my Prophet-Jespar-Calia OT3 like this when you have no intention of following through, okay? Not nice at all.
Anyway, so Jespar talks about freedom and stuff for a few minutes, which appears to get him hot enough to share a kiss out under the Aurora Borealis.

Spoiler: whoops

… Jespar, hon, I think you have a… you have a little fire in your hair. Jespar, you okay? He's okay.
Look, it's night time, all right? I carry a torch. I like being able to see.

- Anyway, sexy times back in my room. Except...

Spoiler: don't you dare dump exposition all over me right now

Jespar, look, I know you probably took philosophy as your major in college, but there's a time and a place, okay?
Nevermind, he's off and speechifying, anyway. Jespar, don't ever change, but sometimes it's a good thing you're sculpted like Adonis, man.
He recognizes me as 'a woman of dark gifts'. I assume that's not a crack about my skin tone, but rather all the entropy magic I've been throwing around? Or he knows more about the 'probably a lich' situation than I've been led to believe. Interesting!
More quality voice acting, of course. The amount of pathos the guy can put into a tortured whisper of 'I'm a winner' is astounding.
For a while we talk back and forth about how his sister Adila – that's the one who went nuts and became the Bone Judge – deserved happiness like this more than he does. Because he's still traumatized, of course; it was really just a few days ago that he found out his sister was murderin' dudes as Enderal's answer to The Punisher. And she actually factually killed him. And then he got brought back to life by that annoyingly vague god-woman who appears now and then.

- There's this bit I like a lot in particular. The tone of his voice says he'd despair enough to throw himself off the goddamn skyship if he wasn't so completely frustrated by the whole thing:
"'Bone Judge'... Such lunacy. Such idiotic, fucking lunacy. I mean, are we so easy to break? Is placing some magical stone in our hands all that the High Ones need to do for something like that to happen?"
Signs point to yes, unfortunately.
It's probably just how people are, though. Given infinite power, some break harder than others (Adila), but anyone would go a little screwy.
Probably healthier in the long run for him to be angry than depressed, although depressed Jespar just gets naked, hits the cat houses and gets high off glimmerdust. I've heard of worse coping mechanisms, like staging elaborate, ironic murders.

- Finally managing to get vertical (and pants on), we pick back up where we were before, with the empty Star City spread before us.
One new bit is Yaela noting it's nice to see people 'finding ... common ground, even in these times.'
You sassy old person, maybe we'll make a Constantine Firespark out of you yet.

- This area is called the Valley of Clouds, because the Ancient Fathers were apparently very, very literal.

- Kurmai pulls his runner act again, but we catch up to him in a minute to find him shouting at a door sized for giants: "Father Yurelai! Father Jotanax! Father Raijimon! He is here, he has found you, just as your prophecy foretold. Now open the gates!"
It's interesting that he has actual names, people from the passed down lore of the Starlings, that he was expecting to still be there waiting for him. Those old legends are surprisingly specific.
Also, something about a prophecy? Those never go wrong, amirite guys.

- Well, Kurmai's pretty much broken. He's convinced that he should never have taken us here, and yeah, I can kind of see his point. Yaela takes charge, sending people out in groups to find a way in, Jespar flirts a bit ("This place is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen – no offense.") and in no time at all we've found a side door.
Of note: going the other way reveals a single, solitary skeleton on a lonely lookout, with a book on Rhetorics and light magic. Which is the opposite of promising.
Lejam and Calia have to stay with the ship, and be prepared to cast off if we're not back in 12 hours. Not a call I would have made, considering all the crazy things we could run into down there up to and including time travel, but I unfortunately wasn't consulted.
Not to mention leaving Calia behind with the redshirt! What if we need something demon'd? You know we're going to need something demon'd before this is done.

- The city itself is overgrown, and the only thing we find are empty workshop after empty workshop, occasionally filled with rats. Mad Rats are not particularly threatening to me anymore, but I also notice Jespar isn't really pulling his weight anymore. I have to step up and kill most of them for him and Yaela.
It's okay hon, I'm sure this happens to a lot of rogue companions!

- Not a whole lot to talk about in this section really. There's some cool lighting effects...

Spoiler

The Ancient Fathers seem to go in for a mix of cool blue laser-y light and more traditional candles that have a similar but different greenish glow to the old Pyrean Doom Train.
Some nice statuary…

Spoiler

There's also some of those mother goddess type statues, which have a pretty hilarious exaggerated sneer on their faces, like they just smelled the worst thing they've ever smelled in their statue-y lives.

- The workshop where the Ancient Fathers met was apparently called… the Sureai. Heh. I guess I've been pronouncing that wrong the whole time, huh? Sure-ay, not Sure-A.I. like Artificial Intelligence.
- We eventually make our way to the 'tower of memories', and the elevator kinda… screws its way down deep into the earth. Each layer seems to tell its own six panel story about a civilization, of which the Ancient Fathers have seen… let's call it 'a lot.'
We head down to the Pyrean level. We see them:
1) grow ('life emerges from nothing', as Yaela puts it, I wonder if that's significant?),
2) thrive,
3) develop a theocracy (sun-priests, in the Pyrean's case),
4) kill their gods (apparently Arantheal's kid and something called the 'shadowgod' did for the Light-born, the pyreans had a general called Jakil go rogue and wipe them out),
5) then the Cleansing, madness and death orchestrated by the High Ones who sit far above,
6) and finally everyone starts floating upwards like the Rapture is happening.

- Yaela has a 'Eureka!' moment that feels only slightly unearned. Here's how this goes down:
The Cleansing is the process of killing a civilization and harvesting their memories to form a new High One.
(Does the resulting High One have traits of the civilization that composes it? I suspect it's (child of the 90s that I am) like a vampire from Buffy the Vampire Slayer; the resulting creature has the human's memories, but feels completely differently about them. Otherwise, at least a few of these High Ones would have presumably been very, very angry with the others for murdering their entire civilization to use their corpses to make a smoke-monster.)
(... I wonder what civilizations made the three High One Furries? Like, when the dreams and secrets of your entire race congeal into a single form, and that form goes 'Yanno what, Imma be a bear'... or even worse, the guy who decided to be a giant spider for all eternity and then expected us to be able to take him seriously.)
The Numinos is less 'a macguffin you find' and more 'a macguffin you make.' Basically, we need to use the Word of the Dead scroll we got from the Aged Man to go inside a High One's memories, find some kind of essence there, and stick it in the machine. The Word of the Dead can visit the memories of the dead, the High Ones are the dead given form into some higher being, this hangs together pretty well. Good Chekov's Gun!
The machine uses the essence you stick inside it as a kind of pattern or homing device so it can aim it's bomb or disintegration ray or whatever in the right direction. Also pretty logical.

- Damn it, does that mean Coarek is kinda right about the Cleansing being about advancing humanity to a higher plane of existence? I mean, he's still wrong, but he's closer to being right than I first thought.
That's just good storytelling, though; making your villain understandable to the audience is the first step to making him relatable, which is how you get people to care about him.
It's really human to want something to be true really, really bad and then twist everything until the thing you want seems (to you) to be the only possible choice. But there also needs to be some truth (or some lie) buried in there to get twisted, or Coarek's just fucking crazy. And crazy people can make good villains, but usually not relatable ones.

- Does that even make sense outside my head? I dunno, I'm going to split this one up here, this is getting long.


The Takeaway:
The romance isn't exactly blowing me away yet, but I'm always down for Jespar's voice actor to wind up and go. It's not like we're done yet, presumably, so there's still plenty of time to wow me.
I do appreciate the Word of the Dead coming back into the story again. It's a great plot device. Not exactly something you get to use every day, but it's a really cool power particularly for these 'search for knowledge' quests. It does get undercut by Prophet's schtick, I guess. Like, you have this scroll that can visit the minds of the dead, but also your protagonist can just throw up visions of stuff that happened without it, so whatever.
I do wonder if the Aged Man himself is going to be involved again at some point. 'Mind meld with a High One' is a tall order, if he turns out to be a High One that went back down to slum it with the mortals or whatever that would be super handy.

 

[Guile]

I'll get the complaint out of the way first:
This whole Star City quest is brought down somewhat by bugginess. Enderal is built on Skyrim, and that basically guarantees some bugginess, but usually I don't have to restart the game at least three times during the same quest.
At times Yaela will bug out when trying to get on a lift or move through a secret passage or whatever, and I'll have to restart the game to get her un-stuck.
I need to get used to moving at old person speed more, I suppose.

- Oh, did I mention Kurmai wandered off again? Yeah, he wandered off again, back in the workshops. Yaela had us split up to search for him (which horror movies conditioned me to think was going to be a lot more fatal than it actually was), it was this whole thing. Luckily, my Prophetess can tell when a lift lever has been used recently, so she knew that somehow he got out ahead of us.
This is going to be important in a minute.

- So anyway, Yaela has dropped the exposition bomb on us. Find High One, go into High One's brain, stick High One essence in The Machine, win forever.
The elevator begins corkscrewing its way back up the Tower of Memories. Yaela and Jespar trade a little witty banter as they do that juddering bounce Bethesda characters do on lifts all the way back up to the main floor.
They do bring up the Coarek thing (that he's kinda right about the ascension, if you turn your head sideways and squint), which I appreciate. Always nice to see us on the same page. Jespar, in keeping with his more optimistic turn lately, Jespar suggests that if all goes bad at least humans will have some kind of continuation of consciousness as the resulting High One.
Yaela is the one to crush his hopes, pointing out that just because the resulting High One would come from us, didn't mean it would be us. Maybe High Ones just eat memories or something.
It's a fair point, if a depressing one. If you build a ship using people as lumber and nails, that doesn't mean the guy at the helm is those people.

- And then… damn it Kurmai, come down from there! You look really silly up there.

Spoiler: what? I said come down! what, I can't hear you, maybe I should come down

- So yeah, he thinks it's our fault the Ancient Fathers won't come out, surprising no one. Well, maybe Yaela; she seems more of the ivory tower academic type, she probably hasn't experienced the myriad betrayals that come with trying to get shit down here in Enderal.
Hm… when was my last betrayal? Disappointed Order Dad Jorek's betrayal wasn't really focused on me, I just happened to be in the city he was betraying. Jespar's sister Adila being the Bonejudge and Ryneus being the local God weren't personal either. They were just, you know, gifted with ultimate power, wound up and sent on their way. Calia's demon form never carved me up like hamhocks… heck, is it going all the way back to Pahtira getting me to stick a hand in a black hole? And before her, Constantine getting Cthulhu'd by the Living Temple?
Heck, that was ages ago! I guess I was due. I'm kind of feeling nostalgic for it, even. There's been far too much camaraderie around here lately, even accounting for somebody in the Order murdering Lishari and pinning it on Jorek.

- Anyway, I can't really say Kurmai's wrong. I mean, the Ancient Fathers are the kind of assholes who have watched civilizations rise and fall from their floating sky-fortress, and did nothing. They would totally be the sort of people to refuse to come out until we go away.
I'd still rather not be murdered to get them to show, though! We were leaving anyway, jackass. Give us five minutes and we'd be back on the ship!
No reasoning with a crazy person, I guess.

- Random thought:
I kinda wonder about the sequence of events vis a vis the Starling crash landing. I mean, did something happen to the Ancient Fathers and that's why the Starlings came down, and the prophecy was just some way to hold onto hope?
Or was some of them coming down the way the High Ones clued in about the race living up in the clouds, and that's why Star City is empty?

- Anyway, he claims he regrets what is about to happen. Then he immediately and gleefully turns on the defense systems. Pahtira is still one up on this joker, since she kicked off her betrayal by getting me to stick my hand in the fusion reactor and turned it on, which is pretty quality as betrayals go.
Plus he's started calling us 'Soil-born', which might actually hurt my feelings if I hadn't spent the last 30 hours fielding a wide range of insults against my race, gender, foreignness, personal character and sexual preferences. So he's way behind there too compared to the average Enderalean peasant.
On the upside, he does have a giant mechanical bird or dragon or something that shoots lightning, so that's something at least.

- Yaela throws up a magic barrier and tells Jespar and I to go go go, which I'd feel worse about if we'd shared more than half an hour of screentime. Gonna have to do better than that by now, Sureai! Considering how many of my friends have died by now, she might not even crack the top ten! Hell, I cared more about Sigil Leader Jorek's death than hers, and he was the kind of Order Dad who told me to my face that he liked Calia better.
Goodbye, Magistra Yaela. For a while there you looked like an adequate replacement for Constantine Firespark, and no one can take that away from you.

- So we leg it down the tower, killing a few centurions and Starling spiders and stuff. No big deal.
And, well, Jespar said it best, so:

Spoiler: welp

The ship is gone when we get out, because why should anything ever be easy?
My first thought is 'damn, how long were we down there?' but Jespar's brain leaps to 'mecha-dragon got here ahead of us.'
Lijam is definitely dead. More dead than anyone. Deader than disco.
Calia… I wonder? I mean, on the one hand, nobody gives a shit if Lijam eats a lightning bolt off-screen, but if one of the romanceables bites it you expect her to only go down in like, a cutscene thing with the dragon attacking the ship and Calia and you sharing a Significant Look across the distance as the ship goes down, all afire – perfectly placed, of course, too far for you to help in time but not too far to watch.
On the other hand… I wonder if Calia stays back with the ship if you pick Jespar, and vice versa? So whoever you don't pick gets a Kaiden-and-Ashley moment-on-Virmire moment.
We'll find out before too long, I guess.

- So we trudge back into the tower, fight some mechanicals, you know how RPGs do. We can't just go from one place to another without dudes to murder, t'wouldn't be natural.

Spoiler: that's m'boy in the back btw

If anything has shown me how far I've come, it's being able to Entropic Blood a Starling Centurion into fighting for me as the three of us (me, Jespar and mind-slave) duke it out with 6 other mooks and another Centurion in a mildly frantic melee. But at no point am I particularly worried for my health, just chaining end-game talents into one another like Entropic Blood – Timestop – Rock Solid – Devour Soul.

- There's some nice biomes throughout the tower, surprising no one by now.

Spoiler: jespar makin' conversation, like you do

That last one is especially nice. The smoke from one end mixing with the red crystals. Great set design too, since it draws your eye to the left, where you have to go and run the gauntlet of security features.

I'd say my last Starling doom fortress has the edge though, old Agnod from the Apotheosis questline. More harsh colors, more crazy designs.
The orange trees and moss growing through the Starling tech is a nice touch; there are pools and topiaries and stuff that suggests it's the Ancient Fathers grew their food in neatly-maintained gardens that have since all gone to pot.

- Wait a tic. Why is there Riverville Mead in this chest?
I'm stuck with the mental image of one of the Ancient Fathers loving a particular bit of Sun Coast moonshine, and buzzing on down in his UFO to pick up a batch of the stuff twice a month.
Everyone ignores the crazy herb lady from Riverville when she claims to see lights in the sky while that nice Starling man pays for his bi-weekly order with 'your human moneys' and praises 'soil-born ingenuity' in getting the hops just right and so on.

- Anyway. Jespar has deduced that the big pulsating crystal giving off alarm-like red light is setting off the alarm – despite this not being the same room as where Kurmai turned them on. And I mean, yeah, red light and klaxons sounds like the right alarm-stuff to us modern people, but how often does this come up in the fantasy world of Enderal?
So I shouldn't be very upset when it turns out he's wrong, and trying to disarm the alarm – or whatever I just did – set off some serious lightning-based defenses.
Jespar notices and shouts 'RUN!' before the lightning turret even warms up.
That Pyrean expertise comes and goes at the whims of the plot, huh? Enough to drive an ancient Pyrean Doomtrain or to notice the purple lightning shooters, but not enough to figure out how to shut off the alarm system.


The Takeaway:
Yaela and Lijam might well be the least impactful deaths of the story. This is less of a complaint than it seems; Enderal's death game has been really strong up to this point (Constantiiiine), they didn't get a lot of screen-time, and they just didn't have very impactful personalities.
Lijam in particular was just a nice-ish young man. How much more impactful would it have been if, say... he was your dogged nice guy defender against the unending tide of Endralean racism? Out in the courtyard, when half the Keepers are sneering as you walk by, he could be like 'Wow, heard about that thing with the Aged Man. Good job!' or 'SOME PEOPLE appreciate not succumbing to Red Madness, okay?' and then the nay-sayers could sniff and that would be the end of it. Until now, when he got to go on a mission with The Prophetess, and BAM! Dead.
I would be hungering for that mecha-dragon's death.
Just a thought.

 

[Guile]

- Conveniently, Calia pops out of a tunnel nearby. Conveniently, this tunnel leads out of here and to where we need to be. Conveniently, Calia thinks she knows where we can find a map to lead us to the capital of the Pyreans (we needed one of those?).
At least Calia recognizes that this is all very convenient. If you can't hide the hand of the GM, at least hang the lampshade on it.
Basically, she was investigating another way into the tower that we hadn't noticed (these access tunnels we're walking through now) when the mecha-dragon lightning-breathed the ship. Lijam is totally fucking dead, though. Good thing we don't have to break the news to Mistress Yaela, huh? Small blessings.
I mean, it's nice that Calia's still alive! But I was pretty sure she was gonna be (and also I'm not 100% sure any of we Three Amigos can die, considering the various powers involved in our various resurrections), so.

- Got some nice landscapes along the way, other towers in that signature overgrown-with-greenery Aztec chic style the Star City likes.

Spoiler: know what this game hasn't thrown at me in a while? jumping puzzles

We run into a circular arena-y area on the way, and I'm not especially shocked when Calia is like 'Holyshitdragon!' It's like if we were in a cover shooter and we started running into evenly-spaced chest high walls.
I pop Timestop and give him a few power attacks, and chip about a twentieth off his health bar. I appreciate that they didn't make him immortal, just really really tough. Like, I could hypothetically kill this guy if he held still long enough! Which is nice, since I've already killed real actual dragons and I feel like I'm kind of a badass by now.
(Admittedly, the dragons killed me back like 3 times, first, but their deaths stuck and mine didn't, so.)
He takes off long before we can make a proper fight of it though, doing that circling thing dragons like to do in Skyrim. I turn around and notice Jespar and Calia have long since shouted 'Run! Into the tower!' and ran into the tower. Whoops.

- So into the tower we go. It's covered in papers and escape pods.
Which is good, because the dragon starts headbutting the tower – WHAM. WHAM. WHAM. – and a little timer pops up with three minutes or so on the clock. The plan: Find the map, jump in one of these suspiciously bathysphere-from-Bioshock-shaped escape pods, and GTFO.
Pretty effective timed puzzle, really. I got down to around 100 seconds running along the outside of the circular tower checking tables and dressers and escape pods and such, which still left me enough time to run around the inside pillar and find the map without having to restart the game or anything. Calia and Jespar pretty much just checked some suspicious rubble the entire time, but I'm not sure I would have felt better if Calia was like 'okay here, have a map' after leading us right to the escape pod tower. Gotta pretend like I'm the protagonist on which the world turns, now and then.
Then it's into the escape pod we go.

Spoiler: look at that bioshock ass capsule

I'd rate the escape sequence better than Agnod's, which had the tense music and blaring red lights but was basically just a leisurely float to the top of the crashed ship.

- So I screw the hatch closed and we jettison off. I wonder how this works? The bathyspheres probably aren't ships themselves, considering the way it crash landed.
Although it's possible I just have no idea how to pilot it. I mean, Starling tech sometimes seems to run on 'asking nicely,' if Kurmai's Gertrude is any indication. For all I know, the Ancient Fathers could be controlling this stuff with their minds. I don't know.
But let's assume these things aren't full-fledged ships. That one Ancient Father with a fondness for Rivervale Mead wouldn't be using these things to pop round and get his fix, these things seem to be one-way rides.
Does that mean Star City is an actual spaceship? I mean, no reason why it can't be, I guess. The line between 'get your city to float' and 'piloting your city like a spaceship' is probably pretty slim.
And the name of Enderal's capital is 'Ark.' You know, the boat Noah used to save the survivors of the flood. And it is getting all kinds of Old Testament up in here.
I guess what I'm saying is, if we don't pilot Ark into the stratosphere at some point to escape the Cleansing or to take the fight to the High Ones, what are you even doing with your narrative, SureAI?
Fingers crossed.

- So, we crash land back down to earth. The fact that we land back in Enderal instead of some random continent or the ocean argues that the Valley of Clouds is just hovering up in the stratosphere somewhere instead of on the moon. On the other hand, we've managed to cross the entire continent in the time we were up there, so maybe Star City is orbiting around the planet and we just got lucky?
Hard to say.

- Jespar is fine, bitching about how hard the seats were, you know, like he do. I appreciate somebody in-universe finally noticing that the Dwemer/Starlings made their chairs out of metal and their beds out of stone. What technologically advanced race hasn't invented the fluffed pillow? Barbarians!
Jespar posits that the Ancient Fathers had asses made of metal, which. If they all stuffed their consciousnesses into giant Centurion bodies the way Pahtira did, might not be far off?

- Also, I accidentally managed to lock Jespar back in his pod, which I have now nicknamed 'the doghouse' for that hangdog look of his.

Spoiler: do you want to go back in the pod again? 'please don't put me back there'

He just… he just looks so sad.

- Calia is… less well.

https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd....982/DC9A7B5ED3C5E858C5FAD28929B55EBECB92A2D7/

Jespar diagnoses her as having minor lacerations (seems like a lot of blood for a 'minor laceration', to be honest), and maybe a broken rib, probably from her pod hitting a rock on the way down and getting thrown against the side of the pod.
And yeah, there's a rocky outcropping her pod is resting against, but… Jespar, we came down from the upper atmosphere in metal balls! We should all be dead as doornails.
I guess we should just all be grateful we didn't pop the hatch and find the Demon waiting for us, pissed off at its host body getting mangled again.
Well, teleport scrolls work again, so we're not going to have to schlep Calia back to Ark the hard way, but we also dropped down on the doorstep of another Pyrean ruin, so let's check that out first.
She'll be okay.

- Turns out this particular ruin (Old Hatolis) is crawling with Nehrimese soldiers. Because when I'm out at the ass end of nowhere, in Enderal's snowy white North, I think 'This is definitely a key strategic stronghold, we must take and hold it For Rationality!'
Inside, there's a few dead Order and Nehrimese, including one of the Order's Keepers in full plate and red cape. Turns out the Order had a hold of this ruin first, then got their asses kicked by the Nehrimese. Not totally surprising, since these two or three Order corpses are the only ones we see in the entire dungeon.
And then in the next room… spiders everywhere! Frost Spider Queens and such. Ahh, Enderal, I missed you and your irrational love of evil spiders.
The plan, according to a handy note I find later, was for the Nehrimese to kill the Order and blame it on the giant spiders. Which, yeah. How's that been working out for you guys?

Spoiler: welcome to enderal, gentlemen

Mm hmm.

- Honestly, I'm surprised these Nehrimese are even in what passes for their right minds. Turns out Old Hatolis is basically the back end of that Living Temple where Constantine got mind-whammied by a crazy old Pyrean soul they stuck in there.
With a thing like that nearby, 'the poor dumb humans called up something they couldn't control' is a natural narrative, but… giant spiders? When you have a perfectly good, murderous Elder Being up in the temple proper?

- The last interesting bit of Old Hatolis is in the last room, after killing a soldier and a Nehrimese Scientist (I just put together that the Nehrimese call their mages Scientists. How perfect is that?) you find the Ice King's Hall.
Complete with (I'm assuming, going by the naming schema of Old Miskamuhr) Old Hatolis himself, a corpse clad in ice armor sitting atop a throne. The light from a door-sized cut-out falls perfectly upon him, and I'm a little surprised when he doesn't get up and pick up his hammer to greet me.
It's a little hard to tell with the throne on a raised dias, but the Ice King's corpse looks fairly gigantic. Not as giant as the Grotesque Lost Ones, which are actual Giants. Just very large.

Spoiler: for once, did not immediately shake off death's cold grasp in order to beat my face in

Non-human, perhaps? I don't think it's just that Pyreans are naturally larger than modern-day Endraleans, since I don't remember Old Miskamuhr being particularly big.
But this fellow was clearly in a position of power at some point. They don't hand out titles like 'Ice King' for collecting bottlecaps.
I mean… probably. Who knows, maybe the Pyreans had a rich culture in which bottlecaps feature prominently.
The Living Temple probably took care of itself, so I'm not sure what they would need the big guy for. He doesn't look much like an administrator. Security detail, maybe? Some kind of living companion to keep the Living Temple grounded?
On the other hand, between the Living Temple complex having three or four zones (included the flooded housing down below) and Old Hatolis itself having five (two of which were outside), this place was pretty huge and it probably wasn't all empty space and frost spiders back in the day. You'd need more than just a heavy mallet and a strong arm to keep all that running.

- Anyhow, ruin survey complete and everything alive now quite thoroughly murdered, I head back and Jespar and teleport Calia home.
Looks like the game is giving us a cooldown period with plenty of sweet, sweet talking.


The Takeaway:
Star City was pretty solid, barring some bugs. I feel like it could have been a bit tenser; there was a fair amount of wandering back and forth both before Kurmai's heel-face turn and afterwards, but not as much lore as I'd like to fill the empty spaces. We never meet an Ancient Father, or even know what one looks like, or find out what happened to them. We know that, like the Pyreans, the Starlings can put their consciousness into items. Wouldn't it have been neat if we'd met talking Centurions or workshops or something?
And the trees and shallow pools of the botanicum interspersed occasionally by clockwork horrors kind of ratcheted down the tension. I think you could have had more of a running battle with the mechanical dragon instead of having it kill Yaela -> kill the boat offscreen -> fight for twenty seconds before running away -> headbutt the tower as you fly away. That would be significantly harder to code and balance, I imagine.
Old Hatolis is what I'm coming to recognize as standard for Enderal's non-quest content: generally atmospheric, usually interesting, but a bit of a missed opportunity (heading back into the Living Temple to beard the statue that killed Constantine could have been amazing!). Ah, well.

 

[Guile]

- We're back to sitting around that long-ass wooden table strewn with Interesting Stuff.
Archmage Lexil is distracted almost to the point of catatonia. He mumbles an agreement to Tealor about something-or-other and shambles off. I assumed it was because of Ancient Father stuff (he seemed really excited about this Star City stuff before we left), but apparently Yaela was his mentor in magic stuff? So, you know, mourning and all.
Sorry SureAI, still don't really care about Yaela. I mean, it's great to connect your NPCs to the world around them, but I feel like this needed to happen before she died.
Poor Lejam, though; he didn't even get that much. At least Yaela went out like a hero, saving my life (maybe).

- Tealor considers this a success; the tidbit of info we got will lead us to the City of a Thousand Floods, the old Pyrean capital. Where… something something use Word of the Dead on a High One?
Presumably it will all make sense once I get there. Hopefully.
Natara (i.e. Disappointed Order Mom) is counting the cost. She also seems to suddenly regret Jorek's death, which is… not really how I remember that going down. It's been a while I guess, but I definitely remember thinking at the time that Natara could turn out to be throwing Jorek under the bus to disguise some wrong-doing of her own and I wouldn't have blinked.
Tealor tells her to sit down and shut up, and I'm paraphrasing only slightly there. She does, but she is Not Happy About Things. I'm not sure if Natara is ever really happy, but… more not happy than usual.
On the one hand, I kind of get why these wild tales of the world being locked into cycles and fighting pre-Pyrean smoke monsters made of civilizations is hard to swallow for Natara. Tealor is kind of ignoring the army blockading his capital city in favor of focusing on this 'go to the moon to find the map to go to the Pyrean capital to find the gew-gaw to finish the machine to blow up the evil gods' plan.
(To be fair to Tealor's lack of worry on that front, I actually walked outside the capital and visited my old buddy the Hunter vendor with no legions of non-believers in sight. I'm not sure where they're camped, but it's definitely not on our front doorstep. The local farmers don't appear to have been put to the sword. There's one crucified corpse that I saw, that's it.)
On the other hand, if a guy as cold as Coarek travels halfway across the world to land an invasion force on your shores, blockades your capital and starts crucifying your men until you give him this machine your boss made to save the world… odds are good there's something to the machine thing, right? Like, just giving him the savior machine starts to sound like a bad idea.
Out of spite, if nothing else. Coarek is one half Spanish conquistador, one half militant atheist and one half smarmy jerk.

- After the meeting, Tealor explains that she's just afraid. Natara is another Pathless like me and Calia, and she's afraid of all that hard work fitting in and toeing the company line to be for naught if the Order falls. You just know it was a lot of hard, thankless work getting up to the second-in-command position of an Order that hates you. A lot of rough edges probably had to get sanded off to fit herself into that hole.
Of course she dislikes me, because I'm some asshole Pathless who got into the Order without having to study their history and ape their mannerisms and practice their xenophobia until they have it down pat and so on and so forth.
Tealor also plays coy when I ask him if they were sweethearts back in the day (or perhaps a bit more crudely put). He says something like 'What do you think?'
Oh yeah, they were fuckin'. No doubt.

- So I'm on the back-burner again for a day or two while they decode the map. The game gives you a few bits of optional content here, visiting people and such, so I'll go do that.
But first, look, did Jespar move into my house in the Noble Quarter when I wasn't looking? Did I always have all this… this in the cubby hole next to my bedroom, closed off by partition screens?

Spoiler: feelin pretty fancy

Some kind of red velvet chais lounge/fainting couch thing, a violin, and piles and piles of scrolls?
I don't know, just seems like a weird thing to have when the rest of the house is like, Viking mead hall sized for 10.

- The first tidbit (by dint of being closest) is visiting Calia in the infirmary (or 'Curarium,' because Endraleans like to fancy stuff up). She's up at the top of a winding path that takes me up past the chapel where she and I got ordained, because up three flights of stairs is where you want to put your injured, amirite?
It's the same room they put us in after our initiation thing, currently only occupied by Calia, a nameless Apothecarius, and bloody bandages on the table. I wonder where the moved old what's-his-face from back then? Coma guy.

Spoiler: queue up the sad music, maestro

There's something about being curled up, sitting up, in the middle of a bed that looks very vulnerable. The knees up to the chest and the bare feet, maybe. Calia's model really nails that.
She looks like she's thinking deep thoughts. Or is trying to avoid the monster under the bed. It could go either way, really.
She sounds surprised to see me visit, and our conversation is brief. She says she'll be up and around in a few hours, ready to defend the temple. The damage – that's 'coming down from the moon in a metal rocket ball, hitting the ground like the fist of an angry god, and landing on her head, on a rock,' for those of you keeping track at home – apparently 'wasn't as bad as it seemed.'
Lich buddiiiiiies.
- There's actually a nice bit of prayer I get to hear in the chapel on the way out. Very spiritual sounding, but nothing I recognize, which is probably as it should be.

Spoiler: thou art my lighthouse, my guiding light, my kiss from a rose

This little one-line monologue is very well voice-acted, actually. It sounds rote, but the actor imbued it with deep meaning. Like the 20th or 30th Hail Mary working your way through a rosary. Very nice.
- On the way out, there's a random line from one of the Keepers that suggests 'that Peghast woman' (that's Lishari, pretty sure) looks like a Skaragg. It's not pronounced how it looks.
More importantly, I kind of love Skaraggs. They're maybe-evil barbarians that wear skull masks and the heavy armor I'm wearing right now and keep bad spirits trapped in cave-paintings. You cannot just give me a tidbit like that in a throwaway line on a random NPC, SureAI! I'm serious. I want to know everything about Lishari's background now, and I can't, because she's dead and none of the Nehrimese mages talk about themselves.
Shit, did we ever find Lishari's killer? I feel like Sigil Leader Jorek got fingered for that, but that seemed like such an obvious frame-job. I mean, who leaves an obvious clue like a capdust bottle at the scene of the crime, when you're a capdust-addict? It should be instinct for Jorek to grab any and all capdust to go home and snort it or whatever you do with that.
Not to mention that now that I know Lishari is a Skaragg I kind of feel like no aging Keeper like Jorek should have been able to get one over on her. I guess that could be the bias talking. I don't know, maybe she and Jorek got naked and did drugs together on Thursdays, and he stabbed her while she was high and in her 0-armor rating wooly underpants.
Maybe it's for the best that we never got a questline to follow on that one.
- I can go to Yaela and Lejam's funeral.
Their funeral is attended by a dozen nameless NPCs. Yaela gets a few titles, but Lejam is just called 'Lejam, a novice.' There's also a third name being read off (Stalwyn Willowsong), and I have no idea who that guy is. Was there a third Keeper on the Gertrude when it went down, or did they just shove him in with Yaela and Lijam to save space?
Nobody gets up and tells stories of the deceased, and it's not like they have bodies to do the 'pose the body for one last sunset at a place significant to the deceased, then ash it' thing. Just another unmarked grave (mass grave?).
One Keeper in the back is getting a little shout-y in her crisis of faith (she thinks the High Ones are a punishment for letting Malphas the Lightborn down). She is removed, and the service continues. Business as usual, nothing to see here, pay no mind to the specter at the feast.
- Jespar does take me to the Dancing Nomad. He notes that the Nighthawks are playing, a band all the way from Duneville.

Spoiler: three of the band members find it weird I'm up here with them. flute and bagpipes don't care

Woah, woah, woah. Hold on. Duneville has a band? A five-man band with a bagpipe-player and a guy on lute called Nikolaos the Archaic One? Where were these guys when I was, you know, in Duneville?
Mind you, 'the Nighthawks' is a cool-ass name that sounds like the sort of faux-gang punk rock aesthetic I'd expect from a Duneville band. They've probably got hits on the Endralean Top 40 like 'Grave Digger' and 'I'd Fight the Law (If We Had Any)'.
Still, you can't just drop this stuff on me out of nowhere, SureAI!
- Oh yeah, Jespar told me to come to his room after I'd listened to enough of the Nighthawks.
… Is this the room Lishari got murdered in? I think it is. Jespar, dude. Spring for the master room next time, okay?
Anyway. So it seems a new continent was discovered, a full year and a half's voyage east of Nehrim. And Jespar is thinking about being on that boat. With me, preferably. After all this stuff with the apocalypse, anyway. He likes the idea of something to look forward to.
Sounds like a sequel hook to me, I can dig it. But I mean, but how could I possibly leave Enderal, Jespar? There are so many nice people! Hahahahahaha
I guess we could pack Calia onto the ship too, if she survives.
- And then we fuck. To a soundtrack with bagpipes from the band downstairs. It's weird.
It's also kind of weird that unlike our last encounter on the Gertrude, when I wake up this time Jespar is in his full outfit, asleep on the bed. I'm in my undies, so I'm still pretty sure I got laid, but…

Spoiler: no pillow talk this time I guess

Is this some high level play I'm not familiar with? I've heard Mandaloreans do it with their boots on, but this seems excessive. Where are those weirdly slick abs from that night on the Gertrude?
- Anyway, I'm still on downtime before the next story mission, so next time maybe I'll check out Dark Valley and look for that painter's missing mother.


The Takeaway:
Natara's backstory is solid. Especially compared to Jorek, who was a jerk just because he's a bitter old capdust-addict. I like it a lot when NPCs in some way hold up a mirror to the protagonist, and Natara nails that.
I kind of liked the funeral, simple an event as it was. Bit of a missed opportunity to flesh out the dead pair, though. Have some named people in the audience, let you talk to them about the dead, stuff like that. Even I feel a little bad that Lejam's last moment wasn't even about him and instead used to world-build the Cleansing, but I guess he died as he lived.

 

[Guile]

It's been a while, huh? But I have a new Black Friday computer, so it feels like it's time to get back into the Enderal mines and finish this Let's Play.
Of course, saying that, I begin by immediately digressing, because I'm in the middle of one of those main story blocks where the game tells you to go do something else for a while and come back later. I think I'm waiting for them to decode the map I got from the moon on where to find the old Pyrean capital?
Like I said, it's been a while. … Onward!


- One of the few quests I have left in my quest log is to visit the Dark Valley to track down Erica Braveblood's mother (also a painter, named Andrasta Braveblood) who for some godawful reason decided to go live in the middle of an old, haunted battlefield or something.
Basically, whenever someone mentions the Dark Valley, it's in the context of 'that place with all the skeletons,' more or less.

- The Myrad keepers have an option to take you to the Dark Valley, which is great!
Unfortunately, they drop you off at the other end of the valley, which apparently stretches over half the main non-Powder Desert part of the continent. Typical.

- Along the way, I run into a burned out house with a readable note left on the fireplace mantle reading 'How to get out of debt!'
He burned it down to collect the insurance money. Heh.
Then I notice the burned corpses next to the bed.

Spoiler: aww, man

… Damn it, Enderal. Why you gotta be like this.

- I picked up a little spell called Death Storm last time I was in Ark. Off the Order mage supplier. Sometimes I wonder about this place, but there's that saying about gift horses…

Spoiler: time to get my Sith on

Verdict: not really any better than summoning up a sharp bit of ectoplasm to stick in some bandit's guts, but it does pretty good damage if the enemies bunch up. Three seconds in the storm is enough to murder the average marauder or wild mage, but it does eat your own health and mana, which is unfortunate.
Mostly, it's nice to have variety sometimes, and I can appreciate throwing green lightning storms at people just as much as the next lich.

- I also wander by the Westpoint Monastery.
Naturally, I head right inside like I own the place.
Marauders and wild mages put up moderately stiff resistance, but I feel like I'm around 5 to 10 levels above what's needed to crack this place open. Nice looking place, I'll give it that.

Spoiler: what animal is that, seriously. mmaoth? ancient tusk-fish?

Although the scholars seem weirdly obsessed with books about a type of crystal jellyfish whose venom causes loss of appetite, melancholy and 'notorious' rage attacks, and then six hours after the sting the patient begins to rapidly age. Healing magic and tinctures prove ineffective.
That's metal as hell, holy shit.

- There's a spot where ballistas have fallen inward off the walls and cracked the floor, letting me squirm inside and drop down. Well, who am I to avoid an invitation like that?
Down below is a partially submerged room with an attractive layout. Very clean, very symmetrical. I like it. Pretty standard skeleton residents, nothing fancy like ghost monks or alchemists. A rather badass note reads:

"Here we sing to honor the dead. May they live on in our voices for all eternity. We are the liable carriers of an inhuman burden. What once was, shall sink in the sound of chaos, the old order lie before our feet in shambles. We will stride across mountains of humans and know no mercy."

What inhuman burden? Why do you talk about 'striding across mountain of humans (presumably corpses) like you don't belong to the species? Did a skellington with a poetic soul write this? Are we gonna find vampires in this joint, waxing lyrical about their dark burden?

I wish there was some follow-up backstory explaining this, I'm feeling slow today.
Following a light swim and a grate-and-lever puzzle (the puzzle is 'find the underwater lever to open the portcullis'), there's a proper castle area only lightly choked with what look like grape vines just turning colors for the autumn. I wonder if the old monks-or-whoever grew grapes and it got a bit out of control, or what. I mean, for all I know the grapevines murdered all the old inhabitants and used their blood to water its fields. Who can be sure, with Enderal?

Spoiler: classy as fuck

It's pretty, however it got here. I'm starting to feel crypt envy, and when that happens I know what comes next.

Spoiler: hey neighbor

Yep, another one of the Darkhand clan. Sabat Darkhand, this time.
I kinda feel like among lich-kind, these are the Joneses. You know? Like, sure, my place in the noble quarter is nice enough, but this place has character.

- … Does that mean the poetry in the note earlier is Sabat's? He's not bad, if so. I mean, Prince Adreyu of Mith (of the poetry anthology Lyrical Gushes and Other Fluids, natch) is nice but it's good to have variety.

- Getting into Dark Valley proper, it has something of the character of say, New Hampshire. Mountainous and studded with evergreens like pines or fir trees, wooden buildings (abandoned, natch) that look like they were built by lumberjacks, like that. It loses out a bit to more extreme biomes like Goldenforst, The North or the Powder Desert, but nice enough I suppose.

Spoiler: you know, if New Hampshire had more ancient ruins

Lots of Wood Elementals.
I'm still not entirely sure how the Enderal Spriggan-equivalents work, but they seem to get a one-off Charm spell, which would explain that one time my Elemental Wolf went Brutus on me in the middle of a fight with a Goldenforst Matriarch.
After killing one, I'm often assailed by a green-veined undead, bandit or, in one notable case, bunny rabbit.

Spoiler: the Rabbit of Caerbannog, he aint

If I move, it follows. Is it… is it trying to nibble me? I don't think SureAI gave it a bite attack. It's adorable, whatever it's doing.

- Following a sidepath lit up by Wisps, I find an Abandoned Alchemist Camp with an interesting note:

"My investigations bore interesting fruits. The cave near my camp … houses a much older, apparently undiscovered complex of ruins. Maybe there the last ritual ground can be found. How exciting! … I could trace the magic spell to the deserted cloister very close by. If I get to visit all ritual sites the gates could open up by chance. What will await me beyond? What's the purpose of this ancient building? Soon I will know."

It feels like a quest hook of some kind, but nothing got added to my quest journal. I wonder if this is sidequest material, or could this be something to do with the main quest's endgame? Travel around the various Pyrean ruins activating ritual sites to open the 'gates' to the mysterious beyond?
I could dig it.

- The address of the painter I'm given is a moderately ruined-looking home butted up against a cliff, with tattered banners but a neatly-kept frog pond complete with lily pads and croaking SFX. Nice.
Inside is a fire elemental and the painter I'm looking for hiding behind a portcullis. She doesn't care for visitors, but I'm a little impressed because at least she's still alive. A cut above the average kooky hermit; that poor guy out in the Powder Desert who accidentally wound up sharing his library with a Desert Spider Queen could learn a thing or two, if he hadn't been horribly murdered even before I got there.
The elemental is her idea of a trap. I'd dock points for putting a monster made of fire in a room with rather a lot of presumably-flammable paintings, but since the paintings are part of the background they don't even get jostled by the fiery explosion of the elemental's end. Convenient!

- She sounds surprisingly sane, for a middle-aged lady touting the merits of a haunted battlefield as an artist's inspiration and an infusion of dawnflower and children's blood applied to the skin as a moisturizing tonic.
(A joke, probably, unless she tries to exsanguinate me later. These are the risks you take, visiting Enderal's scenic vistas).
She doesn't sound very complimentary about her daughter and son-in-law, although she seems to think selling all of her paintings is somehow a mark of poor business…? Maybe she's in the painting business for the love of the game, and trying to get rich off it offends her artist's sensibilities.
Anyway, she wants me to get back a painting some jerks stole (and coshed her on the head during a sitting, in the bargain). This sounds innocent enough, except that the quest marker says 'Locate the effigy.'
If this turns out to be some Dorian Grey thing and I have to retrieve a painting of an old lady who is slowly getting older… well, I guess it's fine? As long as it doesn't try to eat my face or something.
It's pretty hard to throw shade, these days. Rocks, glass houses, etcetera.


The Takeaway:
Nothing much going on here, just wandering around taking in the sights and getting my bearings again. I wish these random open-world worldbuilding tidbits had some more meat on the bone, but there any worldbuilding at all in my random side content is welcome.

 

[Guile]

- Anyhoo, after wandering around some more fighting, in no particular order:

• Skaragg soldiers in a literal hole in the ground
• Skaragg soldiers in a rather nice hole in the ground, complete with a well-stocked modern alchemy room and of course, the room where they placate their probably-evil gods with human hearts. This room is, for some reason, underwater. Seems inconvenient as hell to take a long underwater swim every time they want to do their ritual sacrifices, but who am I to tell you guys how to live? Maybe the upper altar is for everyday sacrifices, and then the arts and crafts project one in the secret room is for special occasions.

Spoiler: I like the centerpiece, its like using ALL of the human sacrifice, like the Indians with buffalo

• An ancestral mage-ghost in the cellar of an abandoned general store

Spoiler: shiny

• A cellar with a note explaining that some asshole played a cute practical joke and hid the key to the Massive Chest up high, and you have to shoot the bucket it's in with an arrow to get it down
• A vatyr camp containing two tents but only a single, solitary (purple-furred) vatyr
• Vatyr running some kind of, and I shit you not, logging operation. Who is buying the wheels you're building??
• Soil elementals in an area with trees that look suspiciously like crystal jellyfish. Just in case, I try not to touch anything likely to magically envenom/grandma me, which is probably everything

Spoiler: pretty crystal growth, or deadly poison?

• A jaunty skeleton taking a nap using his overstuffed backpack as a pillow

Spoiler: how YOU doin

• The Bone Farm, which I'm a little sad to say is a graveyard and not some kind of necromancy-powered organic produce situation
• At least two separate bandit camps. A wild mage says 'Crocco ain't gonna like this', who I assume is some sort of local bandit boss or something? Nobody I've met yet, as far as I know

At this point, I'm practically to Fogville already. I've run across most of the middle part of the continent, east to west.

- Regardless, I do find my way to the particular bandits that took Braveblood's thing. God bless the minimap marker.
One thing I notice is that there are some surprisingly nice chandeliers in this mine, situated just above a perhaps unnecessarily large stockpile of black powder. Enderal presumably doesn't have OSHA.
There's also some running streams feeding into a bog at the bottom of the mine, with what looks like more Pyrean statuary, or a carved wall or something, complete with the crystal that keeps sprouting up around all the old Pyrean stuff. The Pyrean Stuff is blocking any path forward though, probably why we have the standing pool of water down here in the first place.
There's a notebook explaining that these guys are either in league with the Arps over in Fogville, or haven't noticed Fogville is Arpsville now; they plan to transport 'the next shipment' to the Fogville port and then away from Enderal. I wonder where it's going? Nehrim, or any other part of the world that isn't invading us right now? More importantly, they call the Order 'the Steel Crabs', which is adorable.

- Also, at one point a painting starts talking to me. Of course Andrasta is sealing people into paintings to secretly murder them. I'm not even surprised at this point, I do have basic pattern recognition.
Apparently the two thieves were a pair of 'witch-hunters from Arazael'. You'd think I'd have heard of every major country in this world by now, but no.
The witch-hunters were, naturally, there to kill her for sealing the nobility of Ark into her paintings.
Also naturally, they decided to get her to drop her guard by… agreeing to a sitting, to be painted.
… Rys, I have no sympathy for you, man. How did you think this would go, exactly.
Well, a little sympathy. They did some autotuning or something to make his voice all echo-y, but he is pretty broken up about his partner/lover Lyf getting killed by bandits. Good emoting. A little overblown, but you kind of want that in your 'I got turned into a painting and my lover got murdered by bandits' scene.

- One interesting tidbit Rys drops is that the people she paints behave like normal, but they're naught but puppets. Like Lost Ones, is how Rys describes it.
Now honestly, I kind of assumed the Lost Ones came back hating humans for still having everything they aren't, or something. Rys seems to think they're just going through the motions. Their motions just happen to involve murder, but then, this is Enderal.
Murdering everything that crosses your path out there is basically just a defense mechanism.

- Welp, not sure how this is gonna go down, but I head on back to Braveblood.
Rys recommends I ignore her honeyed words and stab 'er, but I like to give my psionic murderesses a little time to chew the scenery before I whip it out.
Now on the one hand, she's murdering Ark citizens. On the other hand, they're nobles and in Enderal. So odds are good they're god-fearing, slave-keeping, xenophobic assholes doing something to deserve it.
She also goes on the attack against the witch-hunter, talking about the Purge of 8182 or so, where thousands apparently died for following a woman who disavowed the Lightborn Order. Of Free Folk boys and girls hunted down for ancestor-worship instead of following the Lightborn.
Now, it'd be super nice to be able to ask about ALL of this, but she's not really giving me much to go on and forced Rys back into his painting so he can't talk either. I have to make the decision blind.
You'd think there'd be some kind of middle ground, you know, vet her choices. 'Only go after nobles like that one who's got a stranglehold on the farms', like that.
But I am busy I guess, can't just be taking time out of the busy schedule to fact-check some potential murders. I mean, I've got a couple friends in the Order now, and Tealor Arantheal has a goddamn statue. He's totally the type to sit for a painting.
So in the end I have to go with the 'less murder' crowd, and stab her good.
(This one doesn't count.)

- Rys wakes up back in his body, which is one of the better ways this could end, really. Because I certainly don't have any spells to drag a soul back out of a painting. I guess I do have Soul Trap, so I could maybe stick his soul in a rock instead…?
He does sound regretful about the child-murdering, but we can't really hash it out much there, either. He just wants to take his lover's corpse and GTFO.
Mannn, and I'm gonna have to come up with something to tell Erica later, too.


The Takeaway:
Not a bad sidequest, certainly. Better than, say, the one with the brother and his druggie sister, or the one with the plague mushrooms. But there's not quite as much meat on the bone as I'd like, you know? You get some moral choice I guess, hints of some good old fashioned Spanish Inquisition stuff, but we don't really dig down into it. I got more depth out of Arantheal regretting the riot than this bunch.
You could get a real spirited (geddit? Because one's in a painting) debate between these two; was Braveblood there for the Purge? How long ago was 8182, anyway? Rys could give some reasons for why murderin' Free Folk mages was a good thing, or at least morally gray. I mean, considering the number of small gods like Kor in this setting, there's probably a good argument that could be made for not leaving mages free to contract and do who knows what for/with them.
But we don't. So it all feels a little… fizzle-y.

 

[Guile]

- Back in Ark, I lied to Erica about her mother's untimely murder. Bandits, terrible, just terrible. Such a nice woman. Yes.
I feel like I used to be lying about these people's gruesome deaths because I didn't want to tell the poor NPCs what their significant others REALLY got up to, but either it's been too long a break since the emotional punch of the story or I never cared that much about this quest, because honestly I'm just lying for convenience's sake here.
Erica sounds fairly sad about her mom, but also notes she has no money to pay me. … Woman, I could have got turned into a painting!
Whatever. Who cares about money?
(Me, if I have to pay the highway robbery prices on Master Skillbooks around here. Good God.)

- Erica noted she'd have to pay somebody to bring her mother's body back to Ark.
I wonder if they'll notice the mummified corpses in her mom's back room, where she'd stashed the Witch Hunter's body after she stuck him in that painting. He got up and moving again after she died, but there were at least three other corpses back there that didn't (thankfully).

- Well, I appear to have reached the point of no return, which the game is kind enough to tell me via pop-up window.
Checking my Journal, I appear to be 27/30 on 'Knowledge about Enderal' checks, 6/? On 'books read about the Butcher of Ark', 1/5 on 'myths and monsters slain', and one last quest about Old Soltyris out in the Powder Desert.
Well, that last one seemed do-able, but the minimap marker doesn't appear to be working for it. I wandered around the Powder Desert for a bit, ending up in a fairly posh tomb called the Duneville Crypt.
Absolutely covered in ghostly undead with a Lord of the Lost Ones hiding in the back.
But I have to give it props for some nice statuary and nice lighting.

Spoiler: i really like this one

Not sure I've seen this one before. There's also more offerings in other alcoves with some kind of prayer up on the walls.
I'd have guessed the Lord was some devout Order Sublime when he was alive, but way out here in Duneville, land of the smugglers?
Weird.
And off to the side is a skeleton that didn't get up and start lusting for the flesh of the living, still buried with rotting grave goods; a red blanket with gold filigree and a big-ass sword. Presumably he had other goods with him, but... well. Duneville. Dude was clearly ransacked at some point.

- The statue at the entrance is actually covered in scaffolding, like they're building or cleaning it or something. Not sure what that's about.

Spoiler: this one is pretty clearly the Virgin Mary, tho

It's also got some fresh fruit placed as an offering. Which kind of makes sense, since we're really close to Duneville, but at the same time, the very next room is covered in bloodthirsty undead. Who is keeping this place kept up, and why? Do the Dunevillers not know this crypt is home to the most undead this side of the Soul Bed, conscientiously keeping the front looking nice without ever looking downstairs at the ghostly menagerie? Do the regular votive offerings keep the blasted things calm?
A Lord of the Lost Ones can kill me in a hit or two, they could certainly murder the hell out of some Watchdogs.
As usual, the worldbuilding provides you with a cool thing with absolutely no explanation.

Spoiler: love the feng shui in here

I own a bunch of solar walkway lights just like this for my backyard. Just because you're a red-eyed wight with an axe doesn't mean you don't know how to accessorize your lair. Good on you, mate.

- The only map marker up for Soltyris is an odd bluish one, but what the hey, I'll follow it. It takes me southeast of Duneville and out into the ocean, but I figure, there's an island on the map, maybe that's it?
Nice day for a swim, anyway.

- That is apparently that one tropical island with the cultists and their evil sea god Kor.

Spoiler: yesssss...

I do get some extremely lategame revenge on that Desert Spider Queen that was such a bastard back in the day. So worth it.
- The map marker keeps pointing southeast, though…welp.

Spoiler: there was a point where we should have stopped and we have clearly passed it

https://imgur.com/a/ziruc6D

I have made a mistake.


The Takeaway:
It was a looonnngg swim back to the mainland.
Next time, I actually get back to work on this Let's Play now that the holidays are over, and we get this endgame done.

 

[Guile]

So apparently it took me around 20 days to make it back to land. Nevermind. Into the endgame we go!


- Well, first I happen to wander by a Keeper who tells me "I've heard some rumors about your favorite school of magic… Dangerous waters you're treading in, be careful."
That's pretty rad. Like, somebody finally noticed I've been summoning monsters and ripping the souls out of people and stuff! Riiiight at the end. But good hustle anyway, you random Keeper.
I wonder if there are different lines for when you're NOT mainlining Entropy magic. Like, "Oh, you seem to like fireballs. That's cool I guess." or "Why would you even pick Alteration magic, that was a terrible idea."

- Anyhow, off we go to another meeting at the Big Table. It's just down to Sha'Rim, Tealor Arantheal, Your Waifu (mine's Jespar) and yourself. We're not even sitting around the Big Table anymore, more clustered in a corner as we hold the briefing.
Points of interest:
1) Tealor says: 'I suppose you already know that Vyn hasn't always been like it is now. In the time of the Pyreans it was one big continent, which they called Pangora.'
And… no? Was I supposed to know that? That seems like a pretty huge thing to have tucked away in the cliffnotes somewhere, although to be fair you don't often go up to people in real life and say, "So as you know, the continents used to be one big super-continent called Pangaea…"
2) The City of Floods has been found! It is, conveniently, directly under our feet, in the depths of the Undercity somewhere.
Tealor frames this as 'It was always thought that the City of Floods was located somewhere in Qyra…' which suggests that the Order leadership were planning to maybe charter a boat and make us travel to another continent to find the Numinos? I mean, I'd be fine, we'd probably just timeskip loading screen right to it, but that would have been super inconvenient for the characters in the story.
3) Endraleans believe that the Black Guardian is a demon that exists down in the depths of the Undercity, and you can hear his scream if you listen carefully.
Sha'Rim believes this to be wind whistling through the caverns, but how much do you want to bet I'm gonna have to kill an actual Black Guardian before this is all over?

- Tealor wants to leave immediately.
There's this cute bit where Sha'Rim is like 'Are you sure you don't want to think this through-' and Tealor just repeats, stone cold, 'Ready your equipment. We'll meet at the gate to the Undercity.'

- I'm sent to talk to Archmagister Lexil Merrayil like a gopher to pick up the Word of the Dead and some thing related to the Numinos. He's not nearby where the quest marker takes me, and the novice there is like 'Don't worry, he'll be back in a minute.'
And I immediately think, 'Fuck' and start summoning my swords. This character build is kind of weak to ambushes, and there's basically no reason for this to happen if it's not going to be Plot Relevant.

- The Novice seems to be a fan, and her voice is noticeably young and, well, cute.
She swiftly segues into telling her Tragic Backstory, where her parents and sister got butchered by Coarek and she arrived to watch them burn along with their house.
I feel like this would actually be more impactful if this was Elia, the named Novice from that tiny sidequest from back at the beginning. Especially since...

Spoiler: I dont like where this is headed

That's right, crisp, fresh meat, just like Dream Dad always liked.
The High Ones proceed to speak through the poor girl, all 'The Beacon won't burn, it never will! Thousands have tried it before you, and they all failed!' and 'The Light will burn you, it will devour you until there's nothing left!'
So I suppose all the dreams of fire and Dream Dad were a metaphor for the Light, which is apparently the Cleansing. Or possibly the High Ones.
It's a little unclear, because the novice takes this opportunity to explode into bones and ectoplasm, the Beacon catches fire, and Lexil and I have to kill a few possessed Keepers.

Spoiler: does this count as lighting the beacon

- There's a nice feeling of uncertainty here.
Did the Sigil Stone stop protecting us, or did it never do so to begin with and we just deluded ourselves with thoughts of safety? Could the High Ones have reached out their hand and taken us at any time, refraining only from some alien amusement or sense of fair play?
Lexil is a good choice for this bit I think, above and beyond that he can check the Beacon and make sure they didn't damage it too much. If this was Jespar he'd be taking a cavalier approach; if it was Tealor, he'd be speaking in his Reassuring Dad Voice. But Lexil is an intellectual, he seems like kind of a worrier, and he has this alto type of voice that comes across as an 'Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear' sort of guy. He's never been a party member, so I have no idea if he can even throw down if he has to.

- Oh, and the Nehrimese are in the city again. Lexil runs to the outlook and you can kind of see a reddish light like firelight in the dark clouds down below; presumably, the city is on fire.
It turns out the Truchessa betrayed everyone, took the Sigil Stone and a third of the Order's Keepers down to Coarek and let him into the city in exchange for a promise not to harm anyone.
That worked out just about as well as you would expect, and she probably got hard murdered by him. She probably should have expected that when he crucified everyone he could catch outside of the city, but desperation can give people some weird ideas.

- I think we're supposed to assume the Sigil Stone being gone is why the High Ones can possess us, although the way that worked was that Constantine and Lexil shattered the stone and gave us all a piece of it, so hypothetically we all still have our Sigil Stone chunks and should be safe as houses?
Maybe without the main Stone the little bits don't work, or once Coarek got the Stone (or his High One masters did) he could somehow shut off its protection. Magical law of sympathy where something affecting the main Stone affects all the little ones, I don't know.
Point is, anyone can get possessed at any time, probably. Lovely.

- There's a Keeper bleeding out against the fountain who explained the whole Truchessa plot. Credit where it's due, she is a fantastic voice actor. Not just the lines themselves, but the slow pauses… there's something in her tone that really feels like she's about to start choking on her own blood.
There's a particularly cool line where she begs Tealor to forgive her, because she doesn't want to die Pathless. Apparently Tealor is the local Fantasy Pope, and can absolve her of sins or excommunicate her at will.
Cool sprite, too.

Spoiler: got everyone killed, probably. dont worry, nobody's perfect

I just wish this was Natara rather than a nameless Keeper, trying to account for herself before death claims her. Tealor's pain would have been delicious. Having Disapproving Order Mom axed offscreen, as this Keeper suggests Coarek did, is kind of disappointing.

- There's a big rousing speech from Tealor, how the three-dozen or so Keepers and Arcanists here have to hold the line while we descend into the bowels of the city to find the Numinos. He says up front that there is no winning endgame that gets us out of this alive. Killing Coarek's delusional soldiers is pointless; the High Ones are all that matter. Once we light the Beacon and burn away the High Ones, Tealor intends to surrender. Coarek will probably kill us all, but Tealor considers this death to be meaningful, to be a sign. A sign of what or to whom, I'm not sure. To other faithful, or rebels against Coarek's mad rationalist dogma?
Whatever the case, I'm kind of hoping we get to do it that way. Killing all the High Ones and then surrendering to Coarek after his masters are dead and any hope of 'ascension' pointless would be pretty amazing. Maybe his blood pressure would sky-rocket and we can make him stroke out from sheer rage.

Spoiler: Merrayil doesnt applaud cool speeches

I also really appreciate the Keeper helmet you can see on the right there. Did they get a design upgrade recently? I feel like I'd have noticed if they were rocking a Roman-esque laurel leaf design with snarling great cats on their pauldrons and the top of their helmets.

- Anyway, Tealor gets a rousing cheer, and everyone (left) is down for a heroic last stand.
Apparently there's a secret way down into the Undercity we can take, too, since the city is full of enemy soldiers.
Back during the last Undercity riots the Order dug some tunnels to pump poison gas in and end the threat that way. Yikes. Score one for ruthless paranoia, I guess.
Well, there's our route secured.
Let's go digging into the depths, shall we?


The Takeaway:
Overall, very dramatic and almost cinematic chain of events, even if the logic connecting events is a little shaky. Why did handing over the Sigil Stone lose us the protection of the chunks we carry? Why would the High Ones possess a couple of us and then let the rest of us go? How did she get out to meet Coarek through Sha'Rim's entropic barrier? How did she let Coarek in through the barrier? If there are thousands of Nehrimese like Tealor suggests and there's no point in trying to throw them out of the city, how did we do that very thing like 3 days ago when they sailed into the harbor and started murdering everybody last time?
Possibly this will all make sense at some point. I mean, I could probably take ten minutes and come up with satisfactory (-ish) answers to all of them. Guess we'll see!

Gonna try and get another update out shortly, since I'm off tomorrow; we'll see how that goes, I guess.

 

[Guile]

- Just as a side note, it's weird that the same old Keepers that have always taken up guard positions at doors or in the hallway leading to the Big Table are all 'Leave this to us, but hurry'… yet are still guarding random doors. You'd think they'd be over there, holding the gates to the Sun Temple.
Who knows, I'm not some kind of expert in heroic last stands.

- There's a brief aside with Jespar, who wants to know if I'm really down for Tealor's glorious symbolic surrender.
Since there's sadly no 'But it would be funny watching Coarek's face turn purple wouldn't it' option, I have to admit if there's a way to duck out before the curtain call, I'm for it.
Hopefully Jespar isn't going to try and cut a deal with Coarek or something, that never ends well.

- So down into the depths we go, finding something like a small three-way war between the possessed, plunderers out for a quick buck, and Coarek's army.
Everyone has taken a level or three in badass when I wasn't looking; even the rando plunderers are pretty hearty. Deathstorm's self-damage tick is too high and its output too mediocre (albeit area-of-effect), so I have to leave that to Sha'Rim and wade in, swinging swords and popping potions.
It does a pretty good job of proving the wisdom of Tealor Arantheal not sending us all out for some last glorious sally like Commander What's-Her-Face wanted; even fighting like 15 of these guys is pretty hard. Trying to fight a city full of them would be impossible.

- There's also quite a few ghosts, wisps, and ghost-serpents here and there.
Life in the Undercity must be hard as hell. Not only are you probably suffering from flesh-maggots, not only is the orphanage run by Vatyr, but goddamn ghosts all up in your business.
Oh, and everything is on fire.

Spoiler: we should probably all be dead of smoke inhalation

- There's this cool mini-cutscene on the way, with a Nehrimese soldier standing over a pair of Undercity dwellers with an axe. It's not just murder, though; it's like a religious debate, just with axes.
This guy came fucking prepared for this, okay? When the girl begs, 'We're a peaceful order!' he actually has his bible or chant of light or whatever the heck the local holy book is called, and he can quote it chapter and verse. All the parts where the Radiant Being Which Was Malphas decided to smite some heathens, you know, 'And thousands of lightning bolts crashed down onto the wretched city, destroying everything,' like that.
This small piece of dialogue is actually what I love about Enderal. Because look, make no mistake; this Nehrimese guy is wrong, because people who invade their neighbors and put them to the torch are never right.
But SureAI was confident enough in its players' intelligence to allow him to have a point. You can see where he's coming from; the average Path-abiding citizen is a good person (/occasionally hateful xenophobe), but the Order is a monolithic entity that rules much of the world, and that's a situation ripe for abuse. And the Light-born were apparently of the 'rain of fire' variety of conversion strategy, as you would do if you were some kind of near-omnipotent wizard-god-king.
The Nehrimese are murderous assholes, but widespread revolution doesn't just spring up without a cause. They got that way in response to systematic abuse from a strict caste system that allowed slavery and who knows what else under its rule.
This? This right here? This is my jam.

- I ding Level 58 on the way to Sha'Rim finding just the right rocky wall to entropy into dust to get access to the City of a Thousand Floods.
… How exactly did you know to do that, Sha'Rim? That map we got from the Star Fathers would have to be really specific.
Also, you know… I'm wondering about that name. City of a Thousand Floods. Why would you name your city that if I'm not going to have to be doing a lot of swimming and/or drowning?
Or some kind of Noah parallel, I dunno.

- Solid art (architecture) direction for the City of a Thousand Floods. SureAI doesn't just throw a crumbling city at you when they can throw an overgrown crumbling city full of waterfalls at you instead.
The waterfalls kind of remind me of the building complex beneath the Living Temple; it makes me think this was just an architectural style for the Pyreans, rather than rising water levels or climate change during the 50,000 years in between their time and ours, or something.
The Pyreans just appreciate a good waterfall.

Spoiler: also, taaaall-ass towers, we're like 10 stories up

- Now that we're in the Pyrean city proper, there's rather a lot of Lost Ones down here, which the High Ones possess and fight us with.
I don't think these are Pyreans, since those appear to have charcoaled into black carbon statues all over the place.

Spoiler: it kinda looks like the Cleansing fire came from INSIDE the temple at the top of the stairs

I wonder if these are the remains of adventurers and grave-robbers that have found their way to the Pyrean city only to meet their end, or if the High Ones have been secretly moving Lost Ones down here to use as a small army.
Either option presents pretty interesting follow-up questions: 'How' and 'Why', respectively.

- All the way down here, Tealor has been the pillar of strength. When the visions cause Sha'Rim to wonder if we're still part of the Cycle (oh hey, by the way, the visions are back), he refutes him. Tealor is certain: We're closer than any have come before to lighting the Beacon. We will succeed. The High Ones are running out of tricks, reduced to throwing possessed corpses at us.

- So of course, that's when the High Ones show up to throw a trick at him. They tune up the video reel, all the carbonized Pyreans' eyes light up (are they a power source? Is this the Pyrean High One speaking to us?) and it's movie time.
Apparently, Young Tealor (with a glorious head of hair) was a bit of a dick. He had a kid with one of the Light-born (and boy, wouldn't that be a story all on its own), and rather than taking the child away himself as she asked, he refused to abandon his position and title and had one of her assistants raise the kid instead.
And didn't get smote for his arrogance. I wish I knew literally anything about this Light-born Indara. I don't think this is the one that managed Qyra, where Tealor accidentally a war...
This kid, of course, is the one (Narathzul?) who killed all the Light-born, including his mom I guess?
So the child Tealor refused to abandon his position for made his position superfluous by killing all Tealor's gods (plus throwing him in jail for like 10 years).

- Tealor is… upset. 'Swinging greatsword at phantom of younger self' upset.
I wish there was time to talk to him about this, because holy cow would that be a conversation. Young Tealor is such a different person. Not all the way, Current Tealor is still pretty arrogant and high-handed at times and he would be an inflexible and implacable enemy. But these days he couldn't give a fuck about the office and his high position. A decade or two in prison really mellowed him out, and taught him more humility than the average Keeper. He takes the long view, but he's at least aware of the cogs that make up the grand design.
The High One clearly thinks this was the 'and that was when it all started to go wrong' moment, and I wish I knew if Tealor agreed. Given the way he just about bisected his younger self with a greatsword, I'm thinking he does.

- And then, having gotten the last laugh by dragging out Tealor's dirty laundry, only then does the High One try to kill us all with red glowy phantoms. I mean, why just murder a guy when you can fuck with him and then kill him, amirite? I'm right.
So we start fighting our way up the stairs to the Pyrean temple in a pretty badass sequence. Most of the phantoms are swinging ghostly swords, but there are at least two lich-type guys (like the Darkhands) and a giant.

Spoiler: why is the Cleansing armed with axes and horned helmets

- And then, while we're all congratulating ourselves on being stone-cold badasses who don't give a fuck, the High Ones bring in their Heavy: a phantom dragon who spits very real fire.
The front façade of the temple collapses on us (the game takes away control to have the Prophetess look up as the giant cyclopean masonry blocks come crashing down), and then… darkness. Darkness and fire.


The Takeaway:
I'm really digging this segment so far. Going from secret passage to afire Undercity to the picturesque (if corpse-y) City of a Thousand Floods keeps things visually interesting, and each leg of the trip is only three or so vistas (fights or scenes or whatever) so it doesn't feel like a slog.
The enemies look really cool, both the Lost Ones with the glowing eyes and the red smoke monsters.
They're still fleshing out their goddamn characters with unique, interesting character beats, even this late in the game. Hopefully Sha'Rim gets something next, because I can never read that guy.
But my favorite bit is probably that one little conversation between diametrically opposed viewpoints, irreconcialable differences settled with the axe. I'm not sure if SureAI has something concrete to say about all these themes they're throwing around, but even if they're just using them to flesh out their world, this is the good shit, fam.

 

[Guile]

- We wake up on the other side of a pile of rubble, Tealor, Sha'Rim and I. Their models are spattered with blood, looking pretty cool. Jespar is nowhere to be seen.
Tealor tries to soothe me that we'll look for him on the way to the Pyrean Beacon, but I get the feeling it's mostly a sop to my feelings. Tealor's a rock; the only part he cares about is that we're down one of our four-man party, I think.
I'm not sweating it, though. I'm pretty sure Jespar is on the same immortality train as Calia and I. I'd be pretty damn surprised if he died offscreen like a mook (poor Natara).

- The ruins are largely empty save for dozens of the carbon-black human figures, almost all looking or running forward in the same direction I'm going. It gives a weird feeling of being dragged forward to your destination, like you're a salmon swimming in a school of fish.
Whoever on staff was responsible for cute skeleton placement is getting to flex his design muscles here, I bet.
For example, I appreciate the one guy who, when the world was ending, said 'Fuck it, Imma have a seat.'

Spoiler: OH GOD THE HUMANITY- Fred, the fuck are you doing over there

- The ruins are empty except for the black figures, one Conjured Guardian and approximately three Mad Rats. The ghost-like guardian, sure, no big deal. But what the hell have the rats been subsisting on down here all this time?
I guess SureAI just wanted to get us to flex our trigger finger now and then, to remind us during this cutscene-and-walking segment that we were playing a video game instead of a movie, but still. Why rats?

- The lighting is weirdly good, considering we're in the ruins underneath the Undercity which is underneath Ark. The purple braziers are a given (although I wonder where the crystal that has always plagued Pyrean ruins until now got to), but also there's a lot of light streaming down through cracks in the walls and ceiling.

Spoiler: nice feng shui

I'm wondering how far the City of a Thousand Floods extends. Are we under Ark at all anymore?

- This close, it's not just me getting the visions. Everyone does.
That's inexplicable, but neat. Something something approaching the endgame, something something Cycle, something something the time-space dimensions are thin, I guess?

- So we wander on down to a Beacon, identical to ours save for the ravages of age. And Tealor tells me I need to induce myself into having a vision here, and somehow that'll provide the connection to the High One for us to do our thing. I'm kind of just going along with things, now.
Also I feel like he's maybe not 100% sure how being the Prophetess works, but that's fair I guess. Neither do I.
So I wander around the room for a minute, point-and-click adventure style, clicking on discarded helmets and interesting bits of crystal that provoke bits and pieces of visions. Mostly just reiterating how eerily similar the Cycle is to the one that came before it. They had a Coarek, and a Natara who let him into the city, and a female voice who has more than a bit of a Tealor vibe to her.
And off we go! Tealor directs Sha'Rim to use the Word of the Dead, now that I've got the right Echo.
There is a scream, not endless, but fading in and out of existence, intercut by a woman weeping, or maybe laughing. A heartbeat begins to sound, slow at first, before getting louder and louder.
And then… well.

Spoiler: I like the little floaty corpse guys in the background

Kansas, it ain't.
The High Ones are apparently weird red stuff all the way down. It is pretty interesting that we've taken on a similar ghostly red glow to the way the High Ones appear.
Also it sort of looks like Tealor has black hair again, like he reverted to a younger self, but I think that's just the weird lighting.

- Tealor orders Sha'Rim forward to try and collect the High One's consciousness in the Word, but Sha'Rim has decided it's time to get some character growth up ins.
The thrust of his question is: 'Do you regret it?'
The thing with his son. I am suddenly reminded that Sha'Rim, as with all the other Nehrimese mages, was a follower of Narathzul first. And that Sha'Rim, as the last living member of that order, might have something to say about that at last. I can't say he didn't pick his moment, standing on the cusp of triumph or defeat for all Enderal and going 'Now let's talk about our feelings, Arantheal.'
Sha'Rim is of the opinion that that Arantheal doesn't regret. That it was agitation at being reminded of his failures, not true regret or anger, that colored that exchange with the High One in front of the temple.

- That's a pretty strong and subtle point about Tealor's character.
Anger at the High Ones for throwing his failures in his face, absolutely. But regret… yeah, I think Sha'Rim's right on that. Tealor feels like the kind of guy to regret a lot about everything that happened, but regret at the result, at the fallout his choices had, rather than regret at ever having made the choice in the first place.
For a guy who recognizes he's made as many mistakes as he has, Tealor doesn't tend to doubt himself much. Equal parts virtue and vice.
Okay, Sha'Rim, where are you going with this in the end? I feel like this is the prelude to a betrayal, but I'm not sure if there's room for vengeance here, at the end of the world.

- Of course, turns out there's always time for vengeance.
Sha'Rim was the one who hired those mercenaries to set fire to Lishari's research, and then he killed her when she caught on. He's been working against us from the start, and even before then.
Huh. The man's a better actor than I thought, that's for sure; he seemed genuinely distraught back then.
I thought this was about Narathzul, but it's not: it's about Tealor, and his fuck-up in Qyra that led to the civil war. Apparently, Sha'Rim was one of the very few survivors of that first purge, when the farmers were whipped into a rebellion and Young Tealor commanded them to be put down; his wife and daughter weren't so lucky.
Why Sha'Rim brought his wife and daughter to an open revolt against the tyrannical god-kings, I have no idea. Presumably there's at least a little more to this story than I'm getting.
The point is, Sha'Rim has been trying to sabotage Tealor all this time and has been mostly failing at it, Wile E. Coyote style, thanks to yours truly.

- Now this bit is clever. Tealor straight up asks why the hell Sha'Rim is doing this when Coarek would be killing Tealor within the day. Why kill the whole goddamn world just to kill a guy who's going to die anyway?
Sha'Rim though… he thinks, doesn't it taste sweetest this way?

Spoiler: should we stop him? no? okay

Tealor wants to be a martyr. Tealor Arantheal, savior of the world. What a nice ring to it.
But, uh oh, look who's here right at the very end to spoke his wheel at the cusp of his great triumph against the High Ones? Fucking Sha'Rim.
He could have exploded Arantheal in his sleep years ago if he just wanted to kill the man, probably. Sha'Rim is stupidly strong; he's been holding off the Nehrimese invasion by himself for weeks.
But no, Sha'Rim doesn't want Tealor to die. He wants him to hurt.
You kind of have to admire spite like that.

- So Sha'Rim does… something or other. Merges with the Numinos, or wakes it up, or… something. He vanishes in an explosion of energy, the red of the High Ones with a touch of the green lightning of Sha'Rim's Entropy magic, and we get kicked back out into the waking world.

Spoiler: his corpse looks SO smug

Oh, also, Sha'Rim is possessed by the High Ones. Just now? All this time? Hard to say.

Spoiler: haa, no you werent

What's easy to see is that this High One is one of the sassy ones. Some High Ones just have such a good time fucking with the mortals. Lots of good sneers and smirks and such in the conversation ahead.
We must make this guy's millennium.

- Arantheal reckons he's not out of this race yet, though. See, we're doomed. Sha'Rim won… up to a point. We have no Numinos, so we can't aim the Beacon. What we can still do, though, is turn it on.
That's going to basically nuke Enderal. But Tealor reckons that's a risk he's willing to take.
He believes – hopes – that there are other people out there like us. Somewhere, on some other continent-nation, there's somebody who can figure this High One thing out.
He thinks there's a reason the High Ones sent Coarek here, that if he gets to the Beacon he can somehow steer it into the ending he/the High Ones want, and birth a new High One. But if Coarek and the Beacon and everything else are wiped off the map, maybe the High Ones won't be able to complete the Cleansing on their own, and we buy the rest of the world time to get its shit together.

- I'm feeling not so good about this course of action, of course, but I'm still mostly dead and Tealor has no time to drag me to the surface with him. He needs to get to the Beacon and activate it before Coarek punches through our guards up topside. It's a cause worth dying for, but Tealor is sounding just a little too eager, you know?
I have a couple of conversation options, the 'Go on, Tealor, you can do it!' or the 'Are you fucking nuts?' option, neither of which quite fit what I'm thinking. Which is that he's basing a lot of his reasoning on guesswork and hope, and he came up with this plan in about 30 seconds while being heckled by Sha'Rim's corpse. But Tealor doesn't really care what I think, anyway. Tealor has a plan.
We? We are gonna be heroes, Tealor assures me.
All aboard the Martyr Express, I guess.


The Takeaway:
I do feel like this would have more punch if we knew more about Sha'Rim prior to this. If we'd previously talked about his family, or life in Qyra, or something that would make us go, 'Ohhh' in hindsight. Instead, most of his conversation options around the Sun Temple were questions about how various disciplines of magic works.
I mean if this was Archmage Lexil pulling this betrayal, I'd be feeling it more. But it's still good stuff.

Tealor's character pivot was even better. Because I still like him, even if it's starting to look like we're going to have to duke it out over the Beacon. The character traits that made him such an unflinching badass in the face of the Red Madness, the Reapers showing up and the end of the world are the same ones that are causing all his problems now.
... Well, not that I think Sha'Rim would have stopped his 15+ year revenge plot if Tealor had seemed more sensitive and regretful, but you never know.

That edge of martyrdom that was in Tealor's heroic speech up in the Temple has broken open and revealed itself to be just as much vice as virtue too. It's kind of like a depressed person thinking suicidal thoughts about how the world would be better off without them. When you can't see any other way out, then dying well doesn't sound so bad. Maybe people will think well of you, afterwards. Is it a legacy thing, I wonder? Or is he so sure it's the right thing that he's getting tunnel vision? Or is it just that in this floundering Order dedicated to a God-king that no longer exists, with all his old friends and lovers turned traitor or dead, you might as well go out with a bang, saving the world?
What a Hero, they'll say of us after we die saving the world. Tealor almost can't wait.

 

[Guile]

- When I jump back into it, the loading screen helpfully informs me that gamblers that win at the card table only take a portion of their winnings home with them.
SureAI is sure that anyone who loses at the gambling table is going to follow the winner home and beat them to death in an alley, and is warning them that they will only get part of their lost money back.
That's kind of awesome.
But now, buckle in, children. We've got some heavy exposition to work through.

- So Tealor leaves and I fall over and presumably die again, only to wake up to the Veiled Woman doing her hoodoo.
She informs me that it all begins with dreams, which is clear as mud, but about par for the course with her.
She throws up a portal, and in the process of heading to it there's some visions – well, auditory hallucinations – that make it pretty clear that last time with female Tealor is exactly the same as this time. They headed down here, they were betrayed, and female Tealor resolved to set off the Beacon without the Numinos.
Looks like we're doomed, probably. Ah, well.

- At first I think the portal takes me to the surface, or perhaps to the Great White North, since it appears to be cold enough for snow.

Spoiler: ordered: (1) portal

- And in the depths of the earth I run into this.

Spoiler: he's like a centurion stacked on top of a dwarf ball mated to a spider, it's creepy af

And I thought Horst was a big fella.

- The giant centurion talks, too.

Spoiler: note the leetle guy in the chest cage

It's a good thing his voice has something of the quality of melting chocolate – possibly the best voice talent in a game packed with it, or at least the most attractive voice – because this is a looooong conversation and you can't skip any of it.
He's kind of our Star Kid, to go back to the kinda unavoidable Mass Effect comparison. He's here at the end to exposit all over the place and wrap up any loose threads.
Well, most loose threads. Still no word on what the hell the Aged Man was about.

- And he's the Black Guardian. God damn it.
I wonder if he sometimes passes the time in between the endless aeons with mindless howling in the depths, or what. It kind of sounds like he was asleep, but then he also claims that with the "Eye" (his equivalent to my Echo, so he's also an Emissary I guess?) he can see all things on the surface and he certainly knows enough about what's going on to have been watching all along. Well, he says it's more of a 'seeing schemes and feeling emotions' thing rather than sight, but whatever. Close enough for government work.
Back in the day, he was planning to hide from his cycle's Cleansing and be a glorious golden god-king for the next, to protect them from the High Ones.
Basically, this is last cycle's Yerai, or possibly their Pahtira? Well, not last cycle. Many, many, maaaany cycles ago, perhaps the very first cycle. So if it's been 50,000 years since the Pyreans, and he claims there's been 1,000 cycles... he's been down here for in the ballpark of 50 million years.
How he's not mad as a bag of clams by now, I have no idea.

- I can't remember, do normal centurions have the Guardian's bitchin' 3-4 inch long goat? It makes him look all old and distinguished and stuff.

- He's shocked I'm here. Apparently, the Prophet always dies after the Emperor leaves her.
He knows of the Veiled Woman, but as far as he's concerned she doesn't even have a mind, so he has no idea why she would be helping out this time.
I really wish I could probe him for more information on the Veiled Woman, but along with the Aged Man she's the other big hole in his block of exposition.
Anybody who can hold up a conversation like she did after Jespar bit the dust and during Calia's backstory certainly isn't mindless. But he talks about her, the brief amount he does, like a force of nature rather than a person.
I suppose it's more realistic that even the giant robot that's been watching everything all along can be wrong. It marks him as an unreliable narrator, and that you should at least take even his version of events with a grain of salt.

- The Prophetess seems weirdly shocked when the Black Guardian explains that she's dead. Like… people told you you were dead, and you saw your own corpse. What did you think happened?
The actual news here is that the Black Guardian claims that the Emissaries are all dead people – which he calls Fleshless – that the High Ones turned into projections indistinguishable from other people. The Prophetess died in the ocean, obviously. Tealor died in prison. Coarek probably died during the rebellion or something. I wonder how many other Emissaries – and therefore undead – are kicking around? I never got a list or anything…
This doesn't seem to be a 'High One puppet' situation, more of a 'jumpstart the corpse and watch it go' thing. They don't appear to control us from the inside out, it's more of a top-down kind of thing where they poke at us from above until we do what they want.
And this isn't a Veiled Woman versus High One setting like I half expected, but rather the High Ones orchestrating both sides from the beginning.

- There's an actual cutscene right around here, except that my computer can only barely chug its way through it; I get audio but no video, and if I touch the keyboard during the cutscene Enderal crashes.
So it goes.
Skipping ahead...

- See, the Black Guardian has noticed that the High Ones don't have any powers at all, besides kickstarting Emissaries and talking to people. Uh, and the Red Madness I guess. And raising the dead as Lost Ones, and there was that thing with Rynaeus where the High Ones portaled in an Oorbaya or something. And they're behind the dreams, of course. And then just outside the temple, when they summoned like 20 wraiths and a ghost-dragon to bully us.
So really, that's a lot of powers.
But they don't have much in the way of physical powers. You'll never see the High Ones throwing down, themselves. There will be no High One boss battle.
And they can't start the Cleansing. The Beacon will either deliver salvation or doom, and it has to be activated by human hands. Tealor Arantheal works just as well as Coarek for their purposes. The second someone turns on the Beacon with all the Black Stones but no Numinos, the Cleansing begins and the world dies again.
The Black Guardian sees this whole thing, the High Ones and the Beacon and the Cleansing and so on, as a sort of trial from some ineffable higher power. Which, I guess? The rules for this thing with the Beacon and the High Ones feels too artificial to just be a natural part of the world. If the world reset every 50,000 years and the High Ones were just some aethereal parasites sponging off the process somehow, that'd be one thing. But the Beacon itself coming pre-built and the whole 'save the world / destroy the world' dichotomy feels too structured.
And a little bit rigged. This is some Mortal Kombat-style Earth Realm/Outworld tournament stuff, here. Except Shao Khan won 1,000 times to our 0. And our Raiden is completely inscrutable and possibly non-sentient.

- Which, by the way: Tealor was under the impression that turning on the Beacon was effectively a nuke, but the Black Guardian explains that what actually happens is a light begins to shine from the Beacon, the sky will open up in response, and everyone on the planet will begin to burn from the inside out.
Which is way more metal.

- We can't ask about the Aged Man or the Veiled One, but we can ask about the Ancient Starlings, or the 'Yalam-Rashai' as they were known back in the day.
Although the Black Guardian cautions that their floating city is at the very outermost edge of what he can perceive, so he doesn't know everything.
He knows that they survived their cycle in the same way he did; by refusing to play. He turned into a robot; they tore their city out of the ground and flung it into the sky, and protected it from the Cleansing, somehow.
For a time, their city was the light of civilization; the greatest and most enlightened and the most advanced humankind has ever been.
But then the societal rot set in and they started getting overpopulated, so they started setting strict birth limits and mind wiping and exiling anyone who committed crimes back down to the world below. As you do.
That's where our Starlings come from, of course. Their drive to return to the stars is a kind of race memory of what they lost.
And the Black Guardian doesn't know why the Ancient Starlings died, either. Way to blueball me right at the end of the story, man. The ending is the best part!

- Also, the Black Guardian's plan is to put me back in the ball and send me up to the Starling City. The escape pods can do that, apparently; he has seen the Ancient Starlings use them that way.
So I think my headcanon of the Ancient Starlings hitting up Riverville on beer runs is true!

- So yeah, it looks like we're coming to a binary choice. Let's take it piece by piece, shall we?

- The Black Guardian's recommendation is that I flee to the Star City, to survive and live an ageless and endless life until human life returns in the next cycle, and then guide them into being a better people, who will not fall prey to the machinations of the High Ones by dint of being morally superior.
This is a load of bollocks, frankly. I have zero faith that I could take the selfishness and greed out of a human civilization, no matter how many centuries I had to plan it out. Trying to create a world of nothing but altruism is a foolish dream.
On the upside, this means I would survive the Cleansing. I'm in favor of that.
On the downside, this means I would survive the Cleansing to live for 30,000+ years alone in a crumbling sky-city, alone except for occasionally murderous robots.
He says he'd contact me once I got there, so maybe I wouldn't be totally forever-alone.
Except that he also finishes the conversation by requesting I throw this lever and kill him because he's tired of an endless vigil with no hope of change.
I'm not sure if that's a screw-up on SureAI's part, or if the Black Guardian has gone a little screwy all alone down here for 50 million years after all. Could go either way.

- The other option is to run on up there and break the Beacon.
Tealor has activated the bloody thing, but it'll still take a little while to start burning people from the inside out, and me one of the last of all.
I'd die. I think maybe Enderal would die too? Maybe just the city, since the Black Guardian is sure this plan would kill Coarek too. And he's of the opinion that what humanity needs is a knowledgeable immortal looking down from on high to guide them more than a few previous years before the High Ones start whispering in the ears of Kileans or Qyrans or whoever, to swerve back around and take another crack at this Cleansing thing.
Of course, this is also the guy who tried to become the Enlightened Golden God-Robo, so of course he would think that.
Uh, but just going by my own personal experience here, yeah, this would probably spell doom for humanity too. There's always going to be a Coarek out there willing to do horrible things for the promise of some vague ascension, or whatever other lever the High Ones need to use. That's just humanity for you.
The High Ones are 1,000 to 0 on this plan working.

- Oh, but maybe I'm not going to have to worry about any of this, because when I flip the switch I start to get sucked into the robot and the Black Guardian wants my body. And not in the fun way.
Yeah, that's a thing.
Today has just been one thing after another.


The Takeaway:
The simple fact that they needed some rando to show up and fill in the gaps in the plot all in one exposition dump is something of a hammer, writing-wise. Nothing's perfect, though, and this joker is leagues above some other examples I could name from AAA titles.
This isn't some villain expositing about his master plan; the Black Guardian is a victim of the cycle as much as I am. I don't hate him, even as he tricked me into the robot. I'd do the same to him in a heartbeat. That's just how humanity rolls. This 'ha haaaa, now I will be the immortal god-king of humanity!' nonsense at the 11th hour is just playing into the same themes this game has been working with for ages. This is Sigil Leader Jorek and Natara and Sha'Rim all over again.
Though he's been present for many events in 'history' he's still fallible. Because he's fallible, it's no big deal if he can't answer the innumerable questions a player might want to ask and the writer can't anticipate ('What was up with that Living Temple, seriously' or 'But what about Natara tho'). Although he still does a better job of answering pertinent questions than Mass Effect's Star Kid ever did.
And unlike Star Kid, we don't have infinite power at our fingertips only to boil it down into simple choices; we might be a lich and a giant robot, but we have limited choices because we still only have the limited power of humans.
He was properly foreshadowed as a part of the world, too, which is pretty nice. I even said last week that I was probably going to end up having to fight a Black Guardian, and boy if it isn't looking like that's going to be true. I even kind of like that he's a giant robot, because that's established as a thing people can do in this setting. Yerai was maybe smarter than the Guardian, even, since he made a much smaller robot but at least that one has working legs. This isn't really coming out of left field at all.

 

[Guile]

- The Black Guardian's plan is interrupted by Jespar showing up at the narratively appropriate time like a Big Damn Hero and doing… something. It sounds like he threw something that connected with a great crash, but damned if I know what it was.
Maybe his dagger, because when we get to the boss fight he's got a fuck-off big rune axe instead of his usual loadout.
Whatever it was, I stop being tied to a post by robot magicks and leg it over to my hero.

- What follows is the most video game-y boss of the entire game. The Black Guardian spawns 'flesh constructs' out of vats, which look a fair bit like Falmer from Skyrim, but darker. I think their loincloths are reinforced by ringmail, which is an interesting aesthetic for the Guardian to settle on.
Like, chainmail bikinis? Literally.

Spoiler: strange things going on under the loincloth, too

They aren't even a speed bump for me at level 60-some, dying in one hit, but I'm more wondering about the implications. How exactly did you make these things, man?
He couldn't have gathered them from fallen adventure-seekers, since he's tied up himself. Plus, I needed a Veiled Woman portal to even find this place. I'd guess they were some artificial homunculus-type creatures he created when he had working arms, servants to enact his will? The line he gives when they pop out is 'I have had enough time to practice!' which seems to support that he's been working on this for a while.
Except if he had these things, why didn't he send them up to the surface ever? Maybe he didn't want to clue the High Ones in to his semi-survival.

- So there are waves of flesh constructs – including an occasional glowing explode-y one that might kill you in one hit if you stab 'em, since that's what it did to me. Jespar warns you to shoot them or run away, but that was a liiiittle too late on my first run through the fight.
The waves of flesh constructs are interspersed with bashing on the Guardian's generators a bit, conveniently located nearby. Sometimes the Guardian launches fire or drops a bunch of exploding runes. Rinse and repeat two or three times.

- The Black Guardian has a few lines here and there about him being the worthy one, which are pretty standard, but he also seems really angry that I'm refusing to work together with him. He would have kept his word, he claims.
Which just reinforces the idea that the Guardian went loopy at some point, because I was on board with working with him until he betrayed me.
I think… I think he forgot. Or is misremembering what happened five minutes ago. He thinks that I was refusing to work together because I didn't want to get in the giant robot while he piloted my body around like a meat puppet.
That's not how teamwork works, I'm pretty sure.

- So eventually something explodes in the Guardian. It almost looks like a second, smaller dwarf centurion helmet popping out of the Black Guardian's giant one? And then it falls into the abyss. It's kind of weird, considering the Guardian already had one of those watery stasis chambers that contained the Aged Man's lover lodged in its chest, which I assumed held his old body.

- Whatever. We win, apparently!
Except our only choices are still 'blow up the Beacon, dying in the process' or 'take it to the skies, my boo.' Jespar can feel the burning of the Cleansing begin even underground, and briefly glows from within with a Lichtenstein-y tracery of white light. You can talk to him for a bit, and he notes that in his opinion, the winning play is to flee. Though he acknowledges that may just be his love for you talking, not wanting to see you sacrifice yourself. He knows he wouldn't live to see the new world anyway.
Aw. Also, you never know, man! You already got resurrected once.
I played through both endings, so I'll go through them one at a time, but both of them begin by the Prophetess making her way back to the Sun Temple.
If you choose to blow yourself up to save the world, then Jespar says he has a back way out and hopes to make it to Qyra to start telling people about what's happening. Telling the story. The prophet to the Prophetess, so to speak. Jespar and the Prophetess share a tender kiss backlit by mushroom-light before moving on.

Spoiler: well, as much as Skyrim models can, anyway

If you choose to escape, you still have to go find the pods and get them ready.

- The Sun Temple gates appear to have been broken and re-barricaded with debris that is now on fire, and the courtyard is scattered with corpses.
Some of the corpses aren't corpses but curl inwards, fetal position, shaking and shuddering in silence, Lichtenstein figures sketched across them.

Spoiler: late to the party

As you watch, white ghostly figures begin to separate from the bodies; their souls being drawn up towards the rift in the sky. It's cool, but it's disappointing nobody seems to be talking if you click on them. Most of them are too far gone, I suppose.
It's weirdly quiet. Only you, walking among the dying and the dead.
Scouring the battlefield, first you spot Commander Eren and the cultist-looking guy Sammael, who look like they managed a double-kill. Considering Sammael tore my soul out last time I ran into him, I have to congratulate our more recent, not-particularly-badass commander for managing that one.
Archmage Lexil is next, <delirious muttering> like someone in the grip of a nightmare or fever. But he doesn't have any real lines. Shame.

Spoiler: goodbye, fancy elf

Taranor Coarek is down at the center of the courtyard, not far from where Tealor Arantheal made his speech. Strangely, one of the corpses nearby appears to have been stripped of its clothes? Not sure what that's about. It's pretty disappointing that Coarek isn't still awake, I'd be really interested in hearing what he has to say. Is he feeling betrayed? Does he blame it all on Tealor? Does he think his reward is still coming?
No Natara, so I guess that plot thread was snipped earlier, after all. Weird.

- Calia is further along, and still lucid. Considering Coarek the Emissary is down but Calia is not, I'm thinking it's not being 'Fleshless' that's protecting me, but something the Veiled Woman did.
From her I learn that at the eleventh hour Tealor showed up, claimed Sha'Rim and the Prophetess were killed by the High Ones – not technically wrong – and that he found the Numinos, and turned on the machine. Of course, he was working on the wrong data; he was expecting a kaboom, and he got a wet fizzle as he did the High Ones' job for them.
Paladin to the last, she seems to be keeping the faith. Not in the Order, though. In me.
I tell her that there is still hope, and in a quiet, fading voice, she says something like, 'Oh, good. I knew I could count on you, Sa'Ira. It's what you do.'
Right in the heart. Ow.
Now, in the ending where I am blowing this popscicle stand and heading to the moon, I am pretty goddamn upset that I can't pick the girl up and put her in the pod. I mean, Jespar has to make it up here to get in his own pod, she's still responding, so what's stopping me? Except the game.
I know there's only so many branches the ending could realistically take, but this is an obvious one that people are going to want to do.

- As I travel up to the highest point of the Temple, where we stuck the Beacon, I can see the souls floating up from the city below towards the rift in the sky. It's a hell of an image, made even eerier by how the Prophetess is just fine.

Spoiler: we all float down here

A 'dull pain', she calls it, but there's no staggering or HP loss or fuzzy screens like when I'm having a vision. You seem fine. Like a city struck by plague, with one healthy survivor.
Nothing like a nice big helping of survivor's guilt to kick off the next Cycle.

- Tealor is laying within the metal arms of the Beacon, clearly having fallen almost immediately. He seems to be hallucinating me as his dead Lightborn god-wife. 'Indra,' he says. 'See? I led them to the light. I, alone.'
Just like the ominous loading screen. … Yeah, buddy. Yeah, you sure did.
It's probably the High Ones fucking with him again, but whatever, I guess they can have their fun. There's a conversation option to browbeat him for fucking up at the end, but what's the point? It'd be like kicking a dog.
… Who left me to die down in the City of a Thousand Floods, admittedly, but his heart was in the right place. He wasn't a saint, but who is?
Except maybe Calia. Shame about her. Damn shame.

- So if you're onboard with Team Martyr, you smash the Black Stones powering the Beacon, and everything goes white.
You just nuked Enderal, just like Tealor hoped to do. The Cleansing is averted (minus, possibly, some stray souls here and there), but the High Ones are still out there.
You get sent back to the same old dream, about your childhood house. Except instead of dread, I was super ready to go kick Dad's head clean off
Unfortunately the door to the house is locked, even if the light is on inside. Kind of a missed opportunity here, for a little High One gloating right at the end.
There are four tombstones out front; one of them is presumably yours. Clicking on them activates the ending, and you get Jespar doing a voice-over as the camera slowly pans up and the sky slowly fades to white-out.
Jespar made it out in time, somehow or other, and spread the word to all the other nations. He tells the story of Enderal, of your story.

- The Azeraleans (isn't that where the Witch Hunters from the painting sidequest hail from? I suddenly have mixed feelings) are building their own Beacon, he says (how, tho?), except they know how it works now. The ironic trick of getting the fleshbags to pull the apocalypse lever themselves isn't going to work, at least.
The High Ones can probably still build up a Coarek to come over and take it, but it feels like a positive direction.
For all Coarek's talk of rationalist enlightenment, he was in the end a cultist to a being he didn't understand. You don't need a giant machine god watching over you, either, although I wouldn't necessarily turn one down if he wasn't 50 million years past the service warranty.
People shining the light of truth and knowledge into the dark corners where the High Ones live? That's how you really move humanity forward.
The end credits seem to agree with me, set to a fairly peppy, adventure-y jam.

- For the 'escape to the moon' ending, I need only head into the Chroniclum, past a library I never realized was there and the corpse of a named librarian I've never spoken to, to arm the pods.
It's as simple as throwing Jespar in one pod, hitting a button, hopping in the second one and closing the door.
You can see a few souls drift by the green glass window before acceleration pastes you to the top of the escape pod. Which… I'm not sure that's how acceleration works, but what am I, a scientist?
The Cleansing will go ahead as planned, minus only two quiet souls. I doubt they'll miss us, Prophetess or no.

- In the dream, Jespar is sitting and waiting for you at the childhood home. He vanishes into white light, only for another Jespar to appear, and another, leading you back down the path from whence you came.

Spoiler: you can see the tombstones on the left, there

I guess you could see this as a kind of metaphor for Jespar's love leading you away from the tombstone ending that comes of sacrificing yourself? Feels a bit weak, but I can't imagine what else it would be.

- I wake up in the Star City, and wander out to find Jespar with his legs dangling over the clouded abyss. I join him, and together watch the sunset as the world below burns.

Spoiler: nice place to spend the next 50,000 years

The Star City is beautiful, lushly overgrown, and a duck that has never known fear of a human nests near to where we sit. The sunset sets the sky and the sea of clouds alight. But all the same, there's a much more melancholy feeling here, a sort of 'What do we do now?'
The end credits begins on a beautiful, serene, faintly sad note… and then soon turns back into the jaunty adventure tune of the other ending. … Odd.


Author's note:
So, apologies for the pause in the middle of the ending! Life, you know how it goes.
I'm going to digest the endings a bit and then take a crack at an extra-long Takeaway on the subject as its own post. Generally, the endings left me with a feeling of 'This is good, but', and I'd like to explore that a bit, give some of my own ideas for how this could have or should have gone.
After that, I'm thinking maybe a retrospective post for the game as a whole, and then I'll be done!