Category: Episode Enneagrams

Remember, Mercedes is the lady knight with the French accent who escorted the hydra head to the capital. She’s been hanging around court ever since. Now she needs our help.

Daughter to Hearthstone’s lord (a neighboring country, apparently) she will not be “an idle burden on the duke’s hospitality any longer.” Trouble is afoot and she’s off to investigate. We have no choice but to join her.

When we get to the Stone of the North all of the guards fight between themselves. Sedition! The leader of this rebellion is Lord Julien. He has also been hanging around court, looking all manly, and is the Night’s Champion and spy for Salvation. We saw him with Madeleine at her new shop.

He and Mercedes face off while he deeply insults her with misogynistic taunts. They battle.

Big dude with a mace pounds on little woman with a rapier. I could step in — I have in other playthroughs — and kill him during the duel. Instead I let him attack so I can hear his monologuing. 

He wants to forgo the fishing life to travel the land and study its wonders. This from the fellow who makes it ten feet past the village gate and faints.

We have to provide him with a bunch of difficult to find things: Sour Ambrosial Meat, which apparently is the byproduct of a dangerous ape monster, and a Pilgrim’s Charm for luck, which I buy off of Fournival! Good thing I saved him from a guilty verdict.

Valmiro has so many crates to go in his boat he needs us to help him load.

And then we have an evening drink on the beach by a bonfire. He seems to be comparing his wanderlust with my fate after a giant dragon ripped my heart from my chest and ate it.

At sunrise he’s off. We get some rare items, like a hydra’s gallstone, to remember him by. It’s possible we’ll see him again, but only if the game decides we love him best. We have a lot of contenders for that position.

Okay, we’ve got more info about the sorcerer Salomet. Is any of this relevant?

The duke held a council of magick scholars, tasked with ensorceling grimoires and trinkets. Salomet was the head. He fled with the findings of the research. Ooh, and killed everyone else! Now he’s stolen this ring, which must make it important.

We are to track him down and retrieve the ring. This is another must-do quest.

When we find him hiding out at the quarry we battle him and his men. He can’t be killed because he must run away so that we can beat him up again later. Such is gaming life.

One of the scheduled, must-do quests is to help the castle guard fight a griffin. It’s the only guaranteed griffin battle in the game.

We accidentally killed it right away. I mean, that’s awesome usually! OP fight. But I’m trying to pursue all of the story. By ending the griffin I cut the quest short. An entire corner of the map is avoided, a marvelous, cinematic griffin battle is missed, and another portcrystal is temporarily unavailable. And that dude we helped retrieve the grimoire, he comes in with his book and fights with you. It’s really useful to have another combatant at the top of the tower.

I thought about trying to reload and redo, but the save system is too auto-generated. Besides, I killed it on one go! Yay!

I’ve been warned by the guard at the gate that suspicious people are asking about the Arisen. As we travel the roads at night we’re attacked.

A person named Raven, and others named Rouge and Noir, ambush us. Why? It’s never quite been clear to me, but I think they’re associates of Salomet.

Cool names, though.

We continue to investigate the cult. Skeletons appear at night and attack people on the roads. With a key we access a different part of the catacombs to discover another meeting. No Elysion this time, but some other believer leads them. They use their own followers as fodder for their dark arts. “Bone warriors wrought from living men are stronger than those come from corpses.”

It’s all part of preparing for the dragon and the chaos.