Chapter 5: The Guardians of the Portal

The hero returns to Wolf with the minecrawler plates, takes the first Crawler-Plate Armour ever forged inside the Barrier, and turns his face toward the Orc City. The Ulu-Mulu travels in his hand or across his back, and the orc brothers let him pass. He moves straight through the camp toward the sealed gate of the under-temple, takes a brief detour through the side corridors for the last usable scraps of loot, and lifts the Sleeper-statuette off its pillar with a Telekinesis spell. The orc shamans strike the moment the figure leaves the pillar. The fight is hard. With the statuette finally in his inventory and the switch beside the gate pressed, the door of the temple opens.

The Sleeper's Temple is a maze of switch-rooms, traps and walking dead. The first hall closes its door behind the hero and throws skeletons at him; the two wall niches reveal secondary switches, and the triple button sequence in the next chamber has to be pressed in the order the wall relief dictates: orange, yellow, violet. The great-hall doors slide open together.

The right corridor leads through a dark tunnel into the room of three switches; the first two summon demons, the third summons Varrag-Kasorg. His corpse holds the Lichtbringer, one of the five old shaman swords the hero will need at the end, and the sword has to be slotted into the floor depression before the door will reopen. The central corridor leads into the second hall with its switch-room; pressing the left switch in that room and then clearing the central chamber drops Varrag-Hashor and his Weltenspalter. The right room beyond holds Varrag-Unhilqt and his Zeitenklinge; the door out of the room only unlocks when the wall reliefs are hit with a ranged weapon. A further hall hides the fire-trap room that should not be entered on foot - shooting the wall panel twice from the doorway opens both the side niche (for loot) and the switch-room (for the red-yellow-green sequence), and the next door opens onto Gor Boba on watch.

Past Gor Boba the tunnels split again. The right-hand route runs across floor traps or through the crawler shaft into the lava chamber with its island; circling it and throwing each side-room switch rolls out the bridge to the island, and the house on the island can only be entered through the side window. Inside, Varrag-Ruuushk stands over the sarcophagus on which the sword Uriziel lies. The blade is powerful but dormant - the old magic is gone. Ruuushk falls, Uriziel goes into the inventory, and the hero presses on to the final hall. In its centre stands a podium that lowers the hero one floor when he presses the switch on it; a second switch down below opens the doors upstairs, and crossing the bridge past them leads him to Grash-Varrag-Arushat, the leader of the five shamans.

Arushat is unkillable with normal weapons. The hero retreats from the temple, takes the long road back to Xardas and lays the dormant sword on his table ("Das magische Schwert Uriziel"). Xardas works on a recharge formula and sends the hero on a parallel errand: dive the sunken tower in the lake east of here for a suit of armour worthy of the blade he is about to carry. The hero swims the submerged halls, fights through the zombies inside and recovers the ancient ore armour along with a teleport rune to the Old Camp. He takes the offered detour - one last duel with Gomez in the castle, the ore-baron's key off his body, the cellar unlocked where Stone the smith waits to upgrade the ore armour into the improved ore armour ("Verbesserte Erzrüstung").

Back at Xardas, the formula is ready. The hero teleports straight to the New Camp and finds Milten there, the only Fire Mage still breathing. Milten walks him to the ore-heap, speaks the formula while the hero drives Uriziel into the ore, and the blade drinks the Colony's stored power in a single surge. Uriziel sings. The hero teleports back to Xardas before the Water Mages can ask what just happened to their breakout energy, and the chapter closes on a blade that can finally cut Arushat down.