marsden_online | Armexis Journal: The shortest path (Reply)

A captured ogre pointed the way to the lower levels before we allowed him to flee. In a quirk of fate these ogres are those who fled from the steading, so I expect him to spread word that now might be a good time to abandon this place as well.

We rapidly fell into a pattern of encounter giants, kill giants before they raise the alarm, continue. Offers to cease fighting in exchange for an escort to their king have were met with determined refusal. Frost giants definately hit harder, although fortunately not much more often. I have been fortunate to escape the worst but Oscar and Wengus have not been so lucky. Moriana is starting to look dented again.

Another denizen of the caverns was a 'storm' giant, responding to an alarm we failed to stop. Larger again, but fortunately paralysed by a spell from Azarel before he could attack. This may well indicate the alliance of giants continues here.

Our one attempt at stealth - sneaking through a room of giants while invisible and silenced, failed when Wengus failed to convince himself that he shouldn't be killing them. Once he had broken his invisibility the rest of us had no choice but to do the same and aid him.

Sheer good fortune led us to take what must be the shortest route to the throne room. Here and in another chamber we defeated several waves of giants after an alarm was raised. Perry had purchased several scrolls of powerful fire spells, and these were devastating to our opponents.

The last giants we faced were the King and Queen, and here we took a casualty as Wengus was pounded into the floor by the giant king just as quickly as he has dispatched many giants. The winning of this battle came not so much from direct force of arms but from an enormous bear summoned by Perry which mauled the king and a spell from Azarel which temporarily removed the giant queen from this plane, returning her when we were ready to fall upon her.

Unfortunately these two giants were the ones most likely to be able to give us useful information about the person we seek. Searching their chamber revealed no solid clues. There is map to yet another giant lair, this time in or near a volcano, but that is tentative at best. There is also a chamber whith a magical lever, which Azarel thinks may be some form of summoning or teleportation device.

Rather than experiment with this in our weakened state we have teleported back to King Roland's castle, where we hope to get Wengus raised (if we can find a suitable church that he hasn't offended). Other options include asking for divine advice on investigating the giant lair on the new map, and returning to the frost giant caverns in hope of finding and capturing a subordinate who might know something, or having Heldig use clerical magic to question the giant king's corpse.