Lands of Lore Part 50: Welcome to Castle Cimmeria

I head up the staircase to the first floor of Castle Cimmeria proper. As befitting the home base of the Dark Army, it has a fearsome appearance-the walls, doors, and even keyholes are designed with imagery of demonic faces. It’s also full of dangerous enemies, and we get a taste of what we’re in for fairly quickly. After taking only a few steps forward, an ethereal Cabal Warrior comes out of the wall and attacks us! The first floor of Cimmeria is patrolled by the spirits of fallen Cabal Warriors, and as with the spirits in the White Tower standard weapons do very little damage against them. Fortunately, with our Vaelan’s Cube they’re little more than a minor inconvenience. I make short work of the attacking Cabal Warrior as well as his buddy, then get to business. There’s a fork in the path near the staircase; we can go either north or west. The corridor as a whole is laid out like a square, so it’s essentially a choice of going clockwise or counterclockwise. I decide to go west and find a door with a hostile-looking face on it, which I press a button to open. We enter an open area with two other doors, but before we can check them out we get attacked by a floating pair of axes with the handles chained together. These sentient axes, technically called Hachucks, are the other enemy type on Floor 1. They’ve been enchanted to function as guards, and they attack intruders such as ourselves who get too close. They’re not very durable, though, and while they’re hard to hit using conventional weapons our magic can make short work of them. I pick up a Wand of Fireballs and obliterate the axes in one shot, then open the two doors in this area. They’re both dead ends, so I head back out to the main corridor and move forward.
Across the hall is another door that I open, and inside is the Small Key which I pick up. The next room that I open has a switch next to some faces that look like theater tragedy masks. All this switch does is summon Hachucks to attack the party, but I decide to press it anyway to increase our experience. I press it and, sure enough, we’re confronted by large numbers of Hachucks. I use our Fireball Wand at first, but it runs out after two shots. At that point, I switch to fighting with normal weapon attacks, and we successfully defeat a Hachuck that way. Unfortunately, we keep missing another one, so I decide to pound it with Mists of Doom. I have Michael cast Mist of Doom 2-it’s the highest level of the spell he can cast-and it easily dispatches our opponent. I then rest and move to a nearby door, which I open. It’s another dead end, so I head back to the main corridor. The next door that we encounter is jammed-there’s no way to open this one, so we have to leave it. We then find a door leading to a miniature wing of the castle. Inside is a jagged glass door that continually opens and closes on its own; making it stop requires us to hit a switch on the wall. Unfortunately, this entire wing is a dead end with nothing of value for us. There’s a door with a keyhole, but it actually can’t be opened with the Small Key or any other key in the game. It’s only really there to distract the player, but I still show it off before returning to the central corridor and moving on. Another nearby door that I open has a Hachuck on the other side that we make short work of with a Fireball wand, but it’s otherwise another dead end.
The next door, though, leads to something that we absolutely have to get. There’s no button next to it, but it can be opened by a snake-tongue switch on the wall facing it. I hit this switch and, after Fireballing our way through some Hachucks, we reach another tragedy-mask switch. Pressing this switch opens a niche containing the Cobra figurine, one of four such figurines that we’ll need when we find King Richard. Unfortunately, there’s also a pit that opened up behind us, blocking our way out. That’s actually fine, though. The pit simply leads to the dungeon downstairs, so I elect to simply jump through it and retrace our steps. I duly step into the pit, and we land in the northwestern area of the dungeons. I rest to restore the bit of health we lost from the fall, then make our way back to the stairs heading up. Soon we’re back on the first floor of the castle, and I return to the fork in the path from earlier. I decide to head north this time, and we come to a door that I open. The room has another door inside, but the button for this one doesn’t work-the inner door can only be opened when the outer door is closed. After a pause to defeat some Cabal Warrior ghosts, I shut that door and open the inner door. It leads to a big room, with a big surprise-Dawn is trapped in a crystal ball! We have to use the diamond we picked up downstairs to shatter that crystal ball, and once I do Dawn is released in a cutscene. She thanks us for rescuing her, then teleports away. That’s not exactly helpful, and it looks like we’re on our own.