If that's the end of your Drangleic adventures does that mean you never visited Alsanna?

"That's correct. We didn't really think to visit the Queen's sisters… not that we really thought much about them. Mytha hated Elana of course, but she also hated her brother and the rest of the city."

Were you ever harassed by the Pursuers?

"Well, there's an interesting topic. What exactly are they? Glowing red eyes usually mean a human lost to the Abyss, but they've got that strange blue power of cursing which doesn't seem Abyssal. And that shield, which can resist curses…

Well, long story short, no. But it's not clear whether that was because we just avoided their hunting spots or because we clearly weren't seeking the Great Souls and the Throne or because… we did their master's will…"

Is the Great Dead One related to the giants' princess, and both of them to the time travel which the brightbugs seem to facilitate?

"So, the Undead Crypt has those reliefs of of some death goddess, right? Well, the Great Dead One wasn't a god or a woman and didn't wield an invisible katana. I'm not sure how he's involved in the mix at all. That death goddess is more properly the Goddess of Mortals. But what is a god?"

Why was the Milfanito trapped in the castle, and why was the Embedded used for a lock? How did the Demon of Song get a hold of the key?

"This one's easy. One: the song suppresses the Dark, i.e. the Queen. Two: a human maniac who refuses to die makes for the most durable lock. Three: the key was originally kept in the Shrine, and the demon just kind of swallowed it with its keeper. It's not one of the King's guards; it just kind of showed up."

It took a little bit, but we did eventually reach the land of giants, what the Queen called the Ringed City. It's like a giant fossil rising out of the ocean and the infinite fog. The walls are made from the petrified remains of fallen kingdoms. No matter where they were during their own time, they end up there.

There are no harbors. You either have to lay anchor and scale the sheer cliffs or sail for the recent ruin of a harbor city. The King was a clever bastard. When we arrived for the invasion, we were able to land on the shore of a Mirrah city he'd put to the torch, just for that purpose.

While Mytha and I lacked the resources or desire to destroy a city of our own, Aldia kept tabs on the world outside the little bubble of Drangleic. As it happened, Volgen had recently lost a coastal town to the Curse. It wasn't that hard to find, and we slowly pulled toward shore.

There's no wind out there at the end of the world. That'd blow the fog away. We had to row in order to close the distance. We didn't have wyverns to pull the ships like the King did.

Problem was, our "camouflage," so to speak, stopped working. We still had our imitation-princess songstress belting out the map, but I think once we got within range of sight, it was pretty clear we weren't an official visit from the princess who should have already been within the City walls.

We had three former prison ships in the end, crewed by the Varangian pirates you know. They weren't quite as hollow then, and we took the most alive of the batch. Well, they started getting shot off the tops of the ships pretty quickly.

There were some ragged defenders crawling on rooftops who pelted our decks with lightning. The way the ruins piled up on the City's border, giants couldn't exactly defend the walls. Too big. Humans had to do that.

Some of our crew tried to shoot back… with arrows. Since that had a snowball's chance in Loren of working, it was time to go to work.

Mytha rose up over the deck of the central ship and gave the order: "Lion clan! Raise shields!"

Now, it turns out your favorite catfolk don't use wooden shields because their metalworking is terrible (which it is) but because wood is the best defense against their natural enemies… dragonslayers. Apparently.

Their people have worshiped the God of War since he first appeared. That's why you'll sometimes see an ancient dragonslayer with a lion helm. Thing is, once the God of War changed from a dragonslayer to a dragonrider, the clan needed to change their equipment.

Anyway, we had a bunch of burly barbarians rise onto the deck and use wooden tower shields to block the lightning streaming toward us.

Once we got closer, Mytha barked out the next command: "Witches! Commence bombardment!"

We didn't exactly need any of the buildings of that pleasant harbor town intact. We just needed enough of the wharfs left over to dock three ships. So an entire harem of those sexy desert sorceresses hid behind the tower shields and rained fire on the town – on a scale which would have been considered a war crime if it weren't against undead.

We ran into the docks pretty roughly with only half a crew left sailing, but we didn't totally destroy them.

Mytha called out the next command: "Manikins! Kill the red hoods!"

The hollows hurling bolts at us basically only wore bright red hoods, so they made easy targets. The manikins dropped their oars and poured out of the ships' holds. As golems, they didn't even need to cross the docks. They just dropped into the water and clambered up the sides of the scorched buildings like insects.

Only, now that we'd reached the shallows, the next problem reared up. I mentioned before that I can't use human effigies because they remind me too much of something else. Here's that problem.

A few of them rose out of the places where water settled and became murky. That is, the bloated corpses of a particular order of knights. Tree roots run all throughout the armor, and instead of heads, there's just an orb of Dark. Fortunately, those orbs are easy enough to disrupt, and the bodies just fall over when they burst.

But the knights are even more dangerous than giants if you can't hit the orbs. Tougher, faster, stronger. I tensed as soon as I saw them.

The first time, when I had been part of the King's forces, we lost several ships to them. They just… jumped out of the water, swinging old, rusty swords larger than a man's body. These bloated things, wobbling and heavy with water, moved so fast that they each wiped out a group of men before we could react. Fortunately, I was on one of the rear ships.

I didn't let that happen again. I yelled to Mytha, and she had the sorceresses focus on them. The monsters tried to evade or to hide under their blades. I didn't let them. At my command, the last survivors of the King's forces – whether conscript or Syan Knight – raised their gonnes.

Through flame or gonnefire, the monsters fell one by one.

It didn't take long to wrap up from that point. Mytha ordered the team of scholars Aldia had sent with us to unload the acid sprayers – the dragon-shaped ones like in Drangleic Castle – and to prepare our secret weapon. The central ship had been much larger in order to store it, but we'll come back to that.

Now, the problem was that we had to climb through all the ruined lands to reach the top of the wall and then climb back down to the City itself. We'd managed to round up a decent little collection of forces for our attack (sorry if Drangleic seemed a little empty), but that also meant that we weren't just two women sneaking in.

It's not like the defenses were wholly unmanned either. How much do you know about that place? About the Dreg Heap?

You see, all the works of mankind end up there one day. Just as soon as they're forgotten or misplaced. Much like your coinpurse after a night of hard drinking. Only, these are the big things. Cities. Magics. Heroes.

I mentioned that harbor town, recently destroyed. Something small like that doesn't last long. The less important things are quickly crushed under the weight of new human waste being added to the pile. That's the magic of the city. Everything was meant to end up there one day, but the magic was never intended to last for an age… much less however many it has been since the spell was cast. There is no more room, and still it draws in all our leavings.

Well, as we left that little town, we had to climb over all the ruin made by the outbreak of the Curse. All the destroyed towns and broken bodies, as they slowly decomposed to ash. All thoughout the place ran the roots of the great tree, sucking the life from the ruin. That much hadn't changed since the last time I was there.

As we climbed, we began to find ourselves in familiar places. I don't mean the sorceresses seeing the remains of Jugo or thinking the sea of ash resembled its vast deserts. I don't even mean that I saw some ruins I'd seen the last time I was there.

We'd hardly risen through the Heap before we came upon the black walls of Castle Drangleic. You and I have been through the halls of Aldia's reflection, but the original lies long forgotten beneath the old lake. And so the greatest castle of Man found itself in the Heap.

Only, the castle wasn't alone. It wasn't unchanged. It had collapsed into the side of a much older part of the Heap. The Heap and its magic seem almost alive at times. It was almost as if it had pulled something from its depths to join with the castle.

We first saw the castle itself through a great crack in the side of the Heap. Light shone down on it like light shines from the crack leading from the Things Betwixt. Eventually, we reached a great iron gate, marked with a certain three-lobed emblem of young greens. Do you recognize that seal?

The gate lay on the far side of a bridge. There was no other way to go, so we needed to cross in order to rise further. Now, the bridge was guarded by blue wyverns, not much larger than a horse. Runts, compared to Aldia's breed.

Again, we fought through lightning. The drakes could breathe lightning instead of fire, as nonsensical as that sounds. Aldia's sages were baffled, but the lion clan took it a sign of their god. At least it meant that the wyverns weren't particularly fire resistant. Our sorceresses made short work of them.

We nearly used some of our acid supply early in order to open the gates, but I discovered the mechanism to properly open them atop a turret on one side. It was long broken, but it could be repaired easily enough using debris from the area.

Now, I knew the Heap wasn't the most stable pile of cities, so I'd brought Vid the Gyrm with me. He warned me beforehand that opening any old, sealed environment like the chasm behind that gate risked an outpouring of debris. That's pretty much the state of Tseldora, right? A pair of guards stuck with me at the lever, while Mytha withdrew with our forces.

Sure enough, once we opened the door, a great flood of stagnant Abyssal water poured out. Many would have been washed into the valley below if they'd been waiting at the gate. Honestly, it was uncomfortably familiar.

Not the castle. The challenge. The trial. I don't know if it's the magic of the Heap or just the way of the world. When the King had tried to climb the Heap, we had found old King Ferran's keep, likewise overflowing with the Abyss. Honestly, the lava in the dream version was reassuring. Imagine that horrid place, oozing with Dark instead.

Only, I was dreading what came next. King Vendrick was enough to handle Ferran's guardian angels. What could we do against Vendrick's own? Ah, but what's an angel?

"Mytha," I said as I rejoined the group, "if you see something with wings that isn't dragonkin… run."

"Oh really?" she said. "And abandon you on your trudging metal legs? Perhaps you ought have crafted a tail."

Now, I'd had the time to replace my prosthetics. It was a rush job, but using the good materials and workshops left over in Drangleic still gave me a better result than the long-worn iron set I'd made in a hole in Catarina. I even had the time to do the joints in geisteel.

That said, they'd still probably classify as heavy armor. I was "fatrolling," as the kids say.

"I'm serious," I said. "They're not exactly as powerful as dragons, but… there's something wrong with them."

"With what, pray tell?"

"Angels."

"Ah," she said, ending it.

That's the thing. What is an angel? Why do we know that word without having ever heard it? It commands such presence that the seven heroes who returned from the invasion were proclaimed the Seven Angels. (Of course it turns out this was the King manipulating his public image.)

Well, we entered the cavern, climbing over the waterlogged bodies packed tightly against the cavern stone like pickled fish. It was definitely not the mountain peak where the castle had been before. Just past the gate was a shantytown, and a variety of outbuildings were attached to the castle by stone walkways or creaking gangplanks.

We'd hardly set foot in this strange version of the castle grounds before the next trial emerged. They arose from amongst the corpses like the dead, eyes shining with the red of Abyssal madness through the mask of a skull. The Darkwraiths, first of the red-eyed phantoms.

I'd seen them before, during the King's invasion. Though skilled duelists, they weren't suited for battling an army. Still, against forces as small as ours, they wouldn't have been as outmatched… agaisnt humans, that is.

Mytha was already prepared. "Men, lions: fall back! Manikins: to the fore!"

The manikins, despite being golems, were every bit as agile as the Darkwraiths. We would lose some of them for certain, but we would ensure the enemy have nothing to lifedrain. Thats's a unique skill I won't get into; it does what it says. Anyway, we killed them all.

The next challenge was something we required… the results of Aldia's "research" to solve. The King himself had been forced to avoid it. He sacrificed a company of men to distract them and let the rest of the army move on.

That is, untouchable specters like our good friend Chancellor Wellager. The ones in the Ringed City are long hollow and seem to have scythes for hands. Of course, Aldia doesn't like unsolved problems, so he discovered the means of killing them once he had returned from the invasion. It requires a concentrated curse.

Incidentally, no, "the Curse" is not actually a curse. However, the resentment that boils in the hearts of the lion clan for the exile and disgrace of their god certainly counts. Mere wood could block ghostly blades that passed through even the strongest of armor, and their crude iron axes cleft through formless bodies.

However, those ghosts too could cast lightning. That was not a power of the giants, nor was it one they could grant. I looked at Mytha, and she looked at me. I hadn't really recognized the truth in that mad battle when Vendrick sacked the Ringed City. The Seven Angels had stared it straight in the eye. Mytha and I might have been in over our heads, aspiring dragonslayers or not.