Chapter 4: Xardas

The hero arrives at the Old Camp and finds the gates shut. Milten waits at the north gate with the story: Gomez has had the Fire Mages murdered in their own quarters. Diego waits at the south gate with the rest - Gomez is planning an assault on the Free Mine and the Old Mine has collapsed under the weight of its own tunnels. Both friends are already on the road to the meeting that will close the Colony's old politics for good.

The hero carries the news back to the New Camp. On the dam Lee hears him out first; any former Old-Camp guardsman who shows up here in the hour of the massacre is taken in as a mercenary on the spot ("Verbannung aus dem Alten Lager"). Saturas hears the rest and sets the next objective: find Xardas the Necromancer. The old Fire Mage left the camps years ago, retreated into the orc territory and has not answered a messenger since. If anyone knows what is really waking beneath the mountain, it is him.

Xardas' tower stands deep in the orc lands. The approach is guarded by three golems and a demon inside the doorway. The hero talks to the demon first - the creature names its price in golem hearts and hands over a teleport rune once all three are down. The hero fights the ice-golem with fire, the fire-golem with lightning or ice, the stone-golem with blunt weapons, carries the three hearts back to the demon, takes the rune and teleports up to the study chamber.

Xardas is brief. The Sleeper is no god; he is an arch-demon of the enemy side, sealed under the Orc City by five old shamans who gave up their own hearts to bind him. The hero has to learn the rest from someone who was there. Xardas sends him to the old ruined castle where the exiled shaman Ur-Shak has been hiding from his own brothers, and the rescue of Ur-Shak from the temple warriors at the walls earns the hero a friend. Ur-Shak tells the story - the five shamans, the binding, the under-temple, the ancient orc prophecy of a Holy Enemy who will banish the Sleeper - and explains the Ulu-Mulu: the orc sign of peace. Carry it in hand, and the orc brothers will not strike.

The Ulu-Mulu cannot be bought, it has to be built. The only orc in the Colony who still knows how to assemble one is Tarrok, a slave in the Free Mine. The mine is now Gomez' last stronghold, and getting to Tarrok means cutting the Old Camp's remaining grip on the mine. At the New Camp Wolf adds one more errand on the side: bring him enough minecrawler carapace plates from the deep mine and he will forge a plate armour like nothing in the Colony has seen before ("Minecrawlerplattenrüstung"). Lee at the New Camp dam gives the signal for the assault; Gorn waits at the northern barricade to walk the final stretch to the Free Mine at the hero's side.

Together they break through the mine guards and the shadows, take the winch-house key off Gorn's pick and throw the outer gate open. Inside, the hero finds Tarrok perched on a ledge in a dark tunnel, sick from a minecrawler bite. Climbing into the wall niche retrieves the orc medicine that keeps him alive; in exchange Tarrok agrees to craft the Ulu-Mulu, but the pattern calls for four ingredients no bandit hunter teaches: a swamp-shark tooth, a shadowbeast horn, a troll tusk, a fire-waran tongue. The hero leaves the mine and hunts them across the Colony - the swamp past the Sumpflager for swamp sharks, the forests between the camps by night for shadowbeasts, the Troll Canyon and the monastery ruin for trolls, the ridges around Xardas' tower for fire warans. With the four trophies in hand Tarrok threads the Ulu-Mulu together and hands it over. Gorn catches the hero on the way out of the mine with a final word of warning: whatever waits in the orc city and beyond, the free miners will hold the tunnels while the hero pushes on.