It took a while for me to get to the Mounds, being a far way off from the Capital, but seeing it in person was definitely worth the trek.
Contrary to the leafier areas of the Forest, the Mounds were a series of tall, rocky hills. Well, tall, from my current perspective. If we were talking about normal sized human terms, then these hills were likely just about average for hills. But from where I was, those hills towered over me like mountains, patches of short, waving grass dotting the rocky landscape.
I raised my eyes to watch the gentle slopes of those hills stretching like ramps far past the canopy of the Forest and seemingly into the clouds. Here was where the Trolls and the Dwarves lived, with the Trolls camping on rocky outcrops on the surface, and the Dwarves tunnelling into the heart of the hills.
Legend had it that the Dwarves had been a part of the Mounds long before Briarwood had come into being, tunnelling amidst the dirt and the rock and forming networks of caverns and caves deep inside the hills. Unlike the villages in the Light Marshes that were all broken down, there were actual, thriving Dwarf cities hidden away inside each Mound. My destination was one of these cities — the city of Clochglas, in the Mound at the very centre of the Mounds.
While this story quest needed me to clear a dungeon just like the last one, there was something different about the Ruler’s Grave dungeon compared to all the others. Unlike other dungeons, there wasn’t a set spot I could go to to access the dungeon’s entrance. There wasn’t a special “key” I had to get to be able to open it either. The issue with the Ruler’s Grave, was that its location was random.
Somewhere upon one of the peaks of the many hills in the Mounds, the Ruler’s Grave would spawn. Sometimes it would spawn on the hill closest to the Forest, sometimes it would spawn on the one farthest away. Its spawn point changed every midnight, and would stay there for a day before changing locations again. There was no rhyme or rhythm to the switching, all I knew was that it was completely random.
Usually, after players had cleared the dungeon in story mode, they’d get a pin on their map that told them where the Ruler’s Grave was so they didn’t have to go find it every time. But for those that hadn’t, like me, the Ruler’s Grave location was very much a wild goose chase if you didn’t know how to find it.
There were two ways you could make your way into the Ruler’s Grave.
The first and most obvious one, you scaled every hill and tried to find the one with the right sized hawthorn tree hanging over the right sized pile of rocks. But that was time consuming, boring, and above all, you had nothing to do aside from climbing, since there were no mobs to fight on the surface of the Mounds. Only booby traps, and false paths.
The only signs of life there were the little Troll families camping out in the open, endlessly cooking hunks of meat on a spit. They didn’t even give quests, they were just there to block the right paths up the hill and steal your money when you got too close without an offering.
The other way was the official, main campaign way. Namely, through the Dwarf cities.
I skirted the foot of the Mounds, looking for the right way into Clochglas. On my way, I passed by two or three large, paved roads leading up the hillside, but I decided not to chance them. I didn’t frequent the Mounds often on my old account, having left it alone after completing the Ruler’s Grave. Yet I knew that the obvious ones were traps, paved paths that suddenly fell away into bottomless pits.
Instead, I took a hike along a tiny dirt path snaking amidst the stones. It wasn’t particularly noticeable at first glance, since the landscape there looked just as rocky as the others, but the stones littering the path were a distinct type that only lined the paths to Clochglas.
Smooth, slightly dull, green pebbles that blended in with the dirt and the grass.
I followed the path deep into hills, twisting and turning around boulders. Sometimes the path would curve up the side of the Mound, only to swerve back down amongst some grass.
All around me, the hillsides seemed to get steeper. Where they once stood at gentle 5 degree angles, now they towered at steep 70 degree ones. The path was now starkly outlined by the shape of the cliff-like hillsides, an abundance of green rocks scattering across its surface.
I tried my best to move faster by dashing with every step, but the Mounds were wide and Clochglas was right in the centre of it all, so it still took some time before I reached my destination.
The path ended at a slightly off-colour patch of grass at the base of the centermost Mound. When I stepped closer, I could distinctly hear a murmuring voice coming from the grass. It was reedy and whimsical, its voice more like the sigh of the wind through the rushes.
“All hail…the king from beyond…all hail…all hail…”
I knelt down next as close as I could to the ground, and knocked against the dirt.
It made a hollow echoing sound.
The murmuring promptly stopped. Then started up again.
“Psst,” it hissed into my ear. “What’s the password?”
“There is no password,” I whispered back.
The voice went silent.
Then, slowly and steadily, it started to giggle. The giggling turned into chuckles, then raucous laughter that echoed up from the ground and sent a shiver up my spine.
“HEHEHEHE! DING DING RIGHT ANSWER!” It shouted, its voice only slightly muffled by the ground separating us. “HEHEHEHEEHE! OPEN UP, OPEN UP!”
With a rumbling of underground machinery, the patch of grass began moving aside to reveal a vertical hole leading straight down into the ground. Nothing but dirt and roots, the owner of the voice was nowhere to be seen.
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“WELCOME TO CLOCHGLAS, CHAMPION, HEHEHEHE!”
I stared down into the bottomless pit. It looked deep, and was in fact very deep, if my knowledge of Briarwood Rebirth was anything to go off of.
Well, here goes nothing.
I jumped into the hole.
***
You know those drop machines at amusement parks? Where you sit strapped to a chair with a bunch of other people? Then a bell rings, and the chair begins lifting up into the air at an agonisingly slow pace as you watch the ground grow further and further away. At the very top, it stops for a few seconds, leaving you with your feet dangling in the air and wondering why on earth you decided to get on the ride. Then, you take a downward plunge from what feels like off the side of a building, having a screaming contest with the others next to you. The wind is slapping in your face, your heart has stopped beating and escaped through your mouth. A kid is crying, another kid is laughing, and you’re just sitting there regretting your life decisions. And when you’re finally unstrapped from the chair, your knees wobbly like jelly, it feels like you just lost your soul somewhere back at the top. Then after the agony is over, you look back up and think, hey, that wasn’t so bad, and think you can handle it until the next time you go on it and start to regret all over again.
It was similar with the hole. Except now 20 times higher and with 100% less screaming because of how tightly my teeth were clenched. It’s funny how pain doesn’t register, but when it comes to sudden and agonisingly long drops, your brain fills in all the details to an excruciating degree.
By the time I came shooting out the bottom of the long, long tunnel and into Clochglas, my mind had mostly dipped and I’d forgotten about half of the journey. The half that I did remember was mind numbing terror at the fact that I’d actually just jumped into a hole leading to the centre of the earth, and the calmer reminder that this was the fastest way into any Dwarf city without going the long way around.
I sat there for a while, getting my breath back, as I took in my surroundings. I was sitting on a green road paved with the same stones that had lined the path I’d been following before, except larger and used as tiles.
This road was pretty wide and well worn, clearly having been trodden on many times. Before me was a bridge made out of what looked like oxidised copper bars welded together to make a sort of imposing metal structure. Beyond that I could see the green glimmer of Clochglas.
In front of the bridge was a queue leading up to a tollbooth that blocked the way into the city. Inside the tollbooth sat a large rat with front teeth the size of dinner plates, and tangled fur that looked like the frayed ends of a large rope. It was boredly questioning people in the queue before carelessly waving them through with one hairless paw.
“State your business…” I could hear it say from all the way over here.
“Permit please…”
“How many entering…”
While in the game, you could technically just walk past the tollbooth without any consequence, I decided to wait in line behind a mosquito lady wearing a lace bonnet. For some reason, it felt bad to cut in line while the others were still waiting. Presumably an imprinted response from the words my mother had taught me when I was younger.
It’s funny, isn’t it? I laughed quietly to myself as I waited. I had no qualms genociding every last Redcap in the Crimson Hall, but cutting the queue was where I drew the line?
The queue moved pretty fast, and it wasn’t long till I was the one standing in front of the giant rat. It held its paw out, its nose twitching.
“Permit please.”
I pulled out the medallion Rosa had given me from my Inventory, and passed it to it. It took the medallion. It stared. Its eyes bulged.
“Ah! A Chosen One!” it hurriedly returned my permit and gestured towards the bridge. “Right this way, Mr Chosen One sir!”
“I thought I had to state my business?”
“O-Of course not!” the rat’s eyes swivelled in their sockets. “Who is this humble rat to keep a Chosen One on his business?”
“Sure?”
”Quite sure, sir.”
“Well, if you say so,” I walked past the tollbooth and onto the bridge, heading towards Clochglas.
The Dwarven city of Clochglas was situated within a massive underground chamber, with layers upon layers of buildings that were stacked up to the edges of the cave. A green glow filled the chamber, and what seemed to be lamps carrying fireflies inside them lined the green cobbled streets.
A clock tower covered in snaking pipes loomed above the rest of the city, the gears in the clock face visible as a loud ticking noise filled the air. Tall scaffolds made of some type of metal (that I knew wasn’t iron due to fairies’ deterrence to it) were fitted with green tinted panes of glass, the light shining out from within illuminating the displays of various weapons and armour made of metal.
Clockwork seemed to be what the city ran on. Giant gears were attached to the sides of all buildings, groaning and turning slowly in time to the ticks of the giant clock. Clockwork trams puffed along their rails embedded in the roads, the gears in their sides spinning all the delicate machinery around. If anything, Clochglas looked like what the Emerald City from the Wizard of Oz might have looked like, if the Emerald City had a Victorian steampunk aesthetic.
I walked through the cobbled streets, seeing a variety of Little Folk wandering around. There were some Briar Elves, some Fae, some Trolls… even some Champions. I watched two players with name tags go sprinting by, their hefty gear clanking loudly against their mismatched armour. Looked like not everyone was at the Fortress of Ruin.
Ahem. But above all, there were Dwarves.
Large nosed, large muscled Dwarves, who carried around big hammers and smithing aprons wherever they went. There were Dwarves crying wares in the shops, Dwarves cleaning the windows on the street, and Dwarves giving directions to whatever tourists had passed by.
Some of the Dwarves were blacksmiths, as their Class might suggest, pounding away on giant anvils in open air smithies or pumping air out of a large pair of bellows into a blazing oven. Others took up less back breaking trades, manning some armour and artifact shops.
I even saw one burly hawker using the back of a clockwork turtle as a workbench, carefully joining together the two ends of a delicate wire wrapped necklace with a pair of tweezers.
It was funny, because usually, the impressions of “blacksmith” and “steampunk” do not gel well together. One seemed sweaty, grimy, and perpetually stained in soot, while the other was all peppy and parasols. However, Clochglas made it work somehow. It was a wonderful mix of gears and glass, of armour and jewellery, of the heavy thuds of hammers and the gentle ticking of clocks.
I made my way to the Guild area of Clochglas, walking along the paved streets and generally admiring the view. You could choose to establish a branch of the Guild or even the Guild Hall itself in any of the Dwarf cities, letting you have a warp location closer to the Ironsalt Wastelands at the edge of the map. I didn’t know if the Chosen Ones Alliance had a Guild branch at Clochglas specifically, but either way, I wasn’t there for the Guild.
Though now that I thought about it, warping here might have spared me the horror of the bottomless drop.
…
Hey, what’s life without a bit of excitement? At least it wasn’t that bad…right?
I sauntered up to a large metal bulletin hanging on the side of one of the buildings. Posted on it were a huge mass of green windows, all showing different kinds of quests of different difficulties.
Hmm, let’s see… Deliver supplies to Godwin… Defeat 2 sluaghs that wandered in from the sewers… Collect 10 copper ores…
Picking out some of the quests that overlapped with each other, I hurried on my way. There was a lot of work to be done before the dungeon respawned elsewhere, and I fully intended to clear the Ruler’s Grave within the day.