Could that crow mask and medallion have belonged to an old servant in the ancestry of the King's mother? Could there be a relation to the Nameless Moon?

"You mean to say, 'Isn't Vendrick an heir of Irithyll?' I wonder. Is this the reason why he despised the clergy?"

Did the King have any reason for the castle to emulate the layout of the Ringed City, or was it mere coincidence?

"It was definitely deliberate, though on whose part, it is hard to say. I don't believe Queen Nashandra had any input on the part of the castle which imprisoned her. But did Vendrick do this consciously or unconsciously? Was he spurred on by his memories of our attack or by the cycle of fate? Four kings of Men sought to rule souls themselves in the land of the gods; four kings sought it again in Drangleic. There may be some karmic curse."

Could the War God have been raising wyverns as guard dogs?

"Oh. Well, certainly. Yet one would imagine they possess the power of wyverns. Not lightning. I did speak with Aldia about it a bit. Such a change in the creatures' fundamental nature is no light thing. The War God was some sort of genius."

Next came what I like to call "the funhouse." The upper part of the windmill got merged into some sort of sadistic labyrinth. You remember how there were occasionally dart traps or spinning blades in the windmill in addition to the poison pools? Whatever this was added bladed pendulums, ballista traps, and sticky floors. Oh, and also several stairwells which had boulders roll down them and either crush you or knock you into a poison pit.

And in spite of Mytha's best efforts at being a snake, this place was actually full of snakemen. They were sort of backwards from Mytha. Instead of slithering around on a tail, they had long necks and giant snake heads the size of… well, giant snake heads. Maybe a human curled up into a ball?

The sorceresses had seemingly been at war with them from the beginning. The manikins faced off against the snake warriors, with their enormous cleaver-swords while the sorceresses themselves fought lightning-wielding four-armed cleric snakes. Try saying that four times fast.

Well, the lion clan freaked out again and wanted to make peace with what seemed to be another clan clearly related to their god, between the draconic heritage and the throwing lightning. We weren't there to broker a peace between cats and snakes, though; we were there to kill a dragon. We wouldn't be able to keep everyone else occupied while they resolved generations of fighting. And of course, any peace would only last until Aldia's scholar team got caught vivisecting one of the snakemen.

So yeah. We weren't about to deal with that mess.

While the lions were starting to cause a ruckus, Mytha rose up on her tail and boomed out in priestly voice, "Let the manserpents undergo a trial of Sinh, Dragon of Stibium! Let the Ancient Dragons determine their worth to our mission!"

This of course got the lions going, since they love both holy rituals and blood trials. That wasn't exactly what happened, though. What actually happened is that she had the sorceresses raise a barrier "so that we might not interfere with the trial" and then filled the entire building with poison gas.

At that point, we just had to walk all the way to the rooftop. And by "walk," I mean Mytha and I had to go first and methodically disable a few dozen traps because the pendulums kept knocking idiots into the poison moat.

Now, "what do you mean the rooftop of a windmill?" right? We ended up on this winding, open roof. I'd been here before, with the King. Just as I feared, there were giants all over the place. They weren't the kind you saw in the giant memories or the distant corners of Drangleic where you found surviving holdouts.

Those giants are near-hollow. That's part of why they were unbreakable and why they relied only on brute strength. They had only one desire – to rescue their holy princess. As far-gone undead, they could pursue that goal to the ends of the earth.

The giants on the rooftop were still healthy, though probably not alive. They wore crude armor and had mostly upright postures. They even had faces, hidden in part beneath slatted helmets.

Now, these giants were just workers rather than warriors or pyromancers as we'd seen in Drangleic. They didn't have weapons. That didn't stop them from defending the place, of course. We'd hardly begun to climb onto the rooftop before they began to throw giant-sized firebombs at us.

Of course, Mytha and fire don't get along. In fact, most of our army wasn't fond friends with fire. If I got hit, for example, my powder stores would explode and kill me in a spectacular explosion.

Do you want to know who pushed us through? The damned jester! I don't even know where he came from! I was about to order Aldia's team to do something about it, but then the fool pranced about in the open and set off the firebombs, killing the giants and nearly blasting the rooftop to smithereens!

Then he disappeared again! How many eyes were watching that clown? And he just vanished! It was baffling! And yet, there's actually a straightforward answer to it. I'll let you have the fun of figuring it out. How he'd followed us was simple. Why is another matter.

Well, it's not like we would have been trapped there. I did have a new trick in my pack that I hadn't wanted to reveal to whomever might be watching, but it would have gotten us out of that mess. In any case, we headed upward.

There was a great iron golem on the uppermost level, probably an inspiration for Ferran's mess. Much more sophisticated, though. For all its battle damage and wear, I could still tell it was finely-wrought. It was durable, for certain, but what could a single golem do against a small army?

Now, I hadn't been worried about the golem. Velstadt and Raime had thrown it from the rooftop easily enough. My concern was that the Heap might have destroyed the path upward. The magic of the Dreg Heap is that nothing really dies. Things just happen again and again, following a long-worn path like particularly boring clockwork. Only, sometimes a gear wears out, and the Heap replaces it with a wheel skeleton.

But it was still there – the great passage the King had carved from the sheer cliff. When the King had led his army through the fortress, he found that there was no passage on the rooftop. There was a staircase carved into the cliffside, but it had been buried in rubble and risked entrapping the army even moreso than the fortress below.

To make matters worse, some sort of bat-winged creatures had descended in great numbers and tried seizing hold of those nearest the front. We repelled them with sword and gonne only after several waves. Remembering a close call, I looked up to make sure they hadn't repopulated, but it looked like we may have successfully exterminated the vermin.

The King had ordered engineers such as myself and a conclave of Gyrm he had brought to quickly develop a solution. As the army had been human then, we had brought enough supplies for the journey and more. Only, we had expected a more traditional war, where we could raid settlements for supplies. The army wouldn't last if we weren't successful in a (frankly impractical) lightning raid.

Well, the group worked together, and between Man and Gyrm, blasted and chiseled a winding tunnel through the cliff and up onto the wall above. Looking back up at it, I had the impress that everyone might have been better off if we'd failed and mistakenly collapsed the cliff onto us.

I took Vid, a couple of guards, and a couple of heavy lifters into the tunnel to ensure it was stable and clear of rubble. After a while, we were the first to emerge from the top and stare down into the last obstacle before reaching the Ringed City's outer wall. Stretched out in the bleeding sunlight beneath me was lost Anor Londo, first capital of the so-called gods.

I scribbled an "all clear" message on a scrap of parchment and had one of my guards shoot it down to Mytha on an arrow. Just to clarify, there were a couple of bows. Even with me making them, gonnes still have issues with long range, and there are a couple of other places where bows outshine them. For now.

Now, things were a little out of order for this journey as opposed to the King's invasion. We'd gotten all the way to the top of the Heap without encountering an angel. Back then, they'd appeared throughout. I kept an eye out for them as I looked down at the ruined city.

The Heap had shifted under it since I'd last been here. The cliff wall was higher as more human cities had piled up at the base of the Heap. It had been mostly upright the last time, but now many of the buildings had halfway fallen over.

Now, if you've never seen illustrations of the place, it's a metropolis made entirely of multi-storey buildings which resemble churches. It looks like there had been open spaces between the buildings in the past, but now they were all filled with ash and the roots of the great tree. The whole city is centered around the "King's Keep," which looks like the mother of all cathedrals and is probably larger than Drangleic Castle.

Thing is, it's just a keep. At the height of their power, the "gods" grew to tremendous size. The central section is just a handful of modestly-sized rooms – scaled up for human-shaped things the size of dragons. By the time of their decline, they'd shrunk quite a bit, so the attached wings are more human-sized.

Well, the keep was our destination. During the King's invasion, we needed to reach the audience room in the upper rear. By now, the building had fallen over, and its crumbling mass was crushing part of the Ringed City's own wall. We just needed to descend Anor Londo's wall, run down the main road, then up the front of the keep itself.

It was simple enough, and there weren't any angels to be seen. once the rest of our forces joined us atop the wall (and spread down most of the stairs as well), I described the final descent. The only part which might have proven difficult was that a part of the road mechanically turned around and went different directions and different elevations because apparently the God of Civic Planning is an utter moron.

Everything was working out fine, which is how you can tell that something's about to go wrong. We got about halfway down. Mytha had reached the stupid turning bridge; I was observing from the bottom of the wall.

All throughout this time, the sun was in a perpetual state of twilight. Everything was sort of yellow-red like in the frozen Majula. Well, it got dark. The sun was eclipsed. By what, I still don't really know. But the eclipse cast the image of the Darksign on the sky.

Everything kind of fell into place when I saw it. The world itself is undead, right? Time is frozen but decay doesn't stop. Throwing humans into the First Flame is "restoring humanity," isn't it? Sacrificing a bit of Dark makes things take on the appearance of being normal again. But the rot is still there, and it will still slide inescapably into hollowing.

That's why you're so important. Everything has a cost, whether thousand-year pearls or stones made from the ashes of human sacrifice. But your immortality doesn't have anything like that. Just a magical hat. There's our question – how do we make a hat big enough for the whole world?

Well anyway, Darksign in the sky. Angels started coming out of it. They were different from the angels we'd seen during the King's invasion. The angels before were like something out of Ferran's mind. They were burning Men of iron with wings of blades. The ones that Mytha and I saw – I wonder if they were King Vendrick's?

Of course they looked wonderful at first glance. They were angels, after all. Humans can't help but feel awe in their presence. Only, I've got pretty good eyes.

They shouldn't have four arms, should they? The angels all had bulging veins and had a sort of corpselike blue tinge to their flesh. Their "robes" were part of their body. Their wings weren't feathered – those were tendrils. Of course the things had "hoods" over their "heads," but I think I understood it immediately.

Those things were mushrooms.

Bel pauses and looks around at the bar staff. The mushroom people don't seem to care.

"I haven't been able to squeeze anything out of these fun guys. Something something Oolacile."

Mytha shifts uncomfortably. At last, you can make out her tail winding beneath her long gown. After a moment to compose herself, she speaks.

"There was something draconic about them… but it wasn't right. Did you pay particular attention to the flesh of the false dragon in the Shrine? What should be inviolate scales of stone are (or is it were?) instead cracked and host to all manner of lichens and mosses.

You've seen what became of oh-so-pure Shulva's priestesses and temples. Even in the holy Sanctum City, there came aberrant plant life and infestation. Life bleeds into itself. If the false dragon was made from the so-called giants, and those creatures are themselves trees, does the mind of the false dragon dwell in the stone body or in the fungal and plantal parasites?

Were those false angels mushrooms which imitate dragons and angels, or were they parasites inhabiting the bodies of incomplete angels?"

Bel raps her wooden knuckles on her helmet to get your attention.

"Philosophy's great and all, but the short answer is that they're definitely parasites. The Dark is getting stronger each time the world goes through this. New, primitive forms of life are emerging, and parasitism is an easy way to gain strength quickly.

Mytha and I have been measuring the quality of water and the like during our travels. It's not my area of expertise, but we've been finding a lot of contamination. It'd almost be safer to drink the toxic alchemical runoff from Earthen Peak.

We've tried sharing our findings, but they usually run into the face of some tradition. You know how it goes. People don't like it when it turns out their thousand-year-old holy spring which grants visions was actually causing hallucinations due to parasitic worms which infest your eyes and brain.

But we're getting off topic."

So, the angels were coming out of the sun itself – or whatever was eclipsing it. We were too far out to run back to the tunnels, but we were completely exposed on the road. Ferran's angels had rained hell on the King's army. If we didn't hurry, there was no telling what these new angels would do to our much fewer numbers.

I yelled for Mytha to take cover and then ordered our siege teams to duck back into the elevator room. My team raised their gonnes and set the sky alight. The desert "sorceresses" weren't much use with their midrange pyromancies. The only support we got were from the few undead with bows and even fewer sorcerers specialized in long-range spells.

The fake angels tumbled in midair as we unloaded steady fire in ranked shots. It didn't look like we were hurting them a great deal, but they couldn't fly straight while they were eating lead. I ordered the slower groups to sprint to the covered section in the middle of the road while those shooting steadily advanced between volleys.

The forces out front with Mytha had continued to the keep, but they were stalled there. I ordered my group to keep firing while I ran ahead to help.

"What's the holdup?" I shouted.

Mytha turned and shook her head, which was always a funny thing to see since it didn't stop swinging around for a few seconds.

Well, anyway, she said, "There are no paths by which we can lower our equipment to the wall. Even descending by foot would be treacherous. I've sent a specialist to find a means of opening the main gate in the hopes that we can defend ourselves within."

Now, the keep had fallen over quite a bit. It wasn't easy, but it was possible to walk up the wall. I took some iron claws from my belt and latched them onto my feet. I'd intended on climbing up to the roof to get a good look at the wall below, but then I stopped.

The keep had this great big rose window – a main circle window of stained glass, that is. Mind, it actually did show a flower, but it was the green blossom of the Chloranthy Ring. Thing is, the roots of the giant tree which runs throughout the Heap spiraled just beneath the window. It was a short drop, but that was better than nothing. The roots were wide enough that we could roll the cannons down.

I yelled to Mytha, then started walking onto the window to inspect it. I intended to blow it out with some black powder. Now, I'd expected it would bear my weight, but something must have gone wrong. Maybe another effect of the Heap. Anyway, it shattered beneath me. I hit one of the roots below and blacked out.