Lands of Lore Part 49: Lord Michael

The map shows only two remaining paths that we haven’t gone down yet, both in the northwest area. I head in that direction, and one of them turns out to just be a small side area. I head over to explore the other one, and it leads to a long corridor with several doors. These appear to be prison cells, which makes sense since we are in a castle dungeon. The first cell we explore is empty, but the one next to it has a treasure chest inside. The chest contains a Salve along with a diamond. I drop the Salve-we already have plenty of those-but I make sure to take the diamond since we’ll need it later. From there, we have to head down a bit further and soon find several cell doors on both sides of the corridor. On the south wall is a switch that I flip down, and next to that is a cell door that I open to find a chest inside. This chest contains the Axe Butcher, which I drop-it’s a pretty weak weapon compared to what we already have-and an Oil Flask, which likewise gets dropped. However, that’s not the end of it. There’s a switch on the wall, which I make sure to push. Doing so closes the cell door, but removes a wall that reveals a new corridor. This corridor has two pressure plates that trigger a Fireball trap, but we find three additional cells. Two are empty, but the third has a Guardian Orb that I add to our inventory.
With the Orb collected, I head back to the main corridor and resume checking cells. We find an empty one, and then one with a chest in it. However, this particular chest has a trap. Making a lockpick attempt on it for the first time causes the party to be teleported to a completely different section of the map that isn’t connected to the rest of the dungeon-it’s only accessible by teleportation-and we’ll have to find our way out. Fortunately, the way out is fairly straightforward. All we have to do is advance through a few doors and we’ll eventually reach a portal that’ll take us back. Inconveniently, the path is blocked by several Knowles, but that’s alright-we do have to kill them anyway to appease the Xeobs. I go through the first door and face two Knowles, who give us a tough scrape but we still win. Paulson’s health is in the yellow after the fight, and I heal him with a Salve to open up inventory space before resting. We then go through another door, defeat a second team of two Knowles, and pick up the Iron Key that one of them drops. The Iron Key is needed to open the last door, and once we do we enter the teleportation portal that takes us back. We can now safely lockpick the chest that took us here, and it turns out to have the Crossbow Elayna and the Great Helm Nestor. I don’t want either item, so I drop them both and move on to the next two cells, neither of which have any loot. One of them is empty, while the other has a portal that’ll take us back to the side area we were sent to by the chest. I go ahead and revisit that area, but once I do there’s nothing left to explore on the dungeon map. All that’s left is the sealed door to Castle Cimmeria proper, and to unlock that we need the key from the Xeobs. I make my way back to the portal in the south and enter it to return to Cumalla, but we’ve got bad news. The Xeob informs us there are still Knowle stragglers, and we’ve got to eliminate them before we can get our prize.
Generally, the best place to start looking in this situation is the very top of the map, where the secret passage is. Lots of enemies tend to congregate there, and we might have missed one or two. I head to that area, and sure enough there are two Knowles there. We promptly dispatch them, and after thoroughly checking the area I make our way back to the Cumalla portal. This time, all the Knowles are really gone, so we get our reward. The Xeob declares that we’ll now be known as “Lord Michael” and everyone in the party gets a new fighting level. Moreover, after the cutscene ends, we have new gear. There’s the key and the Vaelan’s Cube-I end up dropping a Salve to make room for them both-and a new Great Sword Justice. I give the new sword to Baccata while letting him keep his Great Maul Thunder in his second hand, while Paulson gets Baccata’s Halberd Widow. The next step is to get our armor back on, so I return to our large pile. From there, I spend some time testing various breastplates to determine which ones provide the best protection. The best type is Dwarvish Plate Mail; we have two of those, so I give one to Michael and one to Baccata. Of the remaining four, the best one is the Chain Mail Protector, so that goes to Paulson. As for shields, Michael gets the Dwarvish Kite Shield, Baccata gets our two George’s Kite Shields and Paulson gets a standard Kite Shield. At this point, I head to the final locked door and use our Xeob key to open it. On the other side is a staircase leading to the first floor of Castle Cimmeria, which we can now invade. The endgame is about to begin.