Chapter Nine: City of Flames

Quite the ominous loading screen in front of this chapter, we have to say. It looks like Arantir might get his wish after all...

Anyway, you have to get up and out of the sewers if you want to help save your city. You’ll meet up with Duncan again when you hit the top of the ladder leading up. Protect him as best you can, but you don’t need him to live to move on. In fact, if you want to simply avoid this first fight altogether, you can feel free to do so. Fire a rope bow into one of the beams overlooking the windowed archway, and you can climb up to one of the windows, then climb out the window on the far side and drop down near the bridge.

Ghouls have overrun the city. Are you a bad enough dude to defeat the ghouls?

Many more ghouls will come your way now, so be ready to either attack them or kick them off the bridge or into the spikes here. There’s a secret area underneath the bridge, where the body of a soldier lies next to a full health potion. You can simply Telekinesis the potion, if you wish, or you can extend a rope arrow down from the beam above it.

When you move up the path towards the burning buildings, you’ll encounter Percy, Duncan’s cousin. He tells you of a path that will lead you to the Necropolis, but warns you that an undead Cyclops will stand in your way. He won’t follow you unless you manage to either kill the beast or find an alternate route around it.

It Stinks Of Death

Always a lovely sight.

If you wish to avoid the cyclops, walk along the path until you reach a sewer grate that’s been opened. Head down, kick the gate that stands in your way, and jump across the gap to the far side. After climbing up the ladder there, open the door in one of the nearby buildings and climb the ladder up to the rafters. You can climb out the windows here and move over to the next building and look around for a key. The key will open the doorway nearby, which will let Percy into the building. (It will also open the upper locked doors in the same building, which lead to uninteresting secret areas.) After following Percy through the building, he’ll open up the gate leading onwards to the next level.

If you want, you can fight the cyclops and kill it to allow Percy to cross the square here. There’s nothing to drop on its head, so you’ll have to simply dodge its blow and hit its eye numerous times before finally finishing it off, or cast a huge number of Lightning Bolts at its eye. You get the same amount of skill points for killing or avoiding the Cyclops, so feel free to leave it be if you wish.

The Sanctuary Of Ylath

After you get split up from Percy, run down to the well area nearby and fight off the necromancer and ghouls. If you can keep the civilian alive through the entire fight, he’ll open up a door nearby when you’ve killed everything. Just some potions inside; nothing very interesting. To move on, walk down the alleyway with the crates in it and climb the chain there.

Your new weapons will let you mow down the undead.

If you want to bathe in the waters of the Sanctuary and get Xana out of your soul, then head up the slope here. Getting rid of her now will have no effect on whether or not you can achieve the good or evil ending to the game. If you do decide to purge yourself, you’ll lose the ability to switch to a demonic form (which you’ve probably rarely used), but you’ll gain a few highly-powerful weapons that will serve you well in the final chapter of the game, as well as three skill points. The only characters that aren’t directly rewarded for this (outside of the skill points) are pure warriors, but then again they’ve had the Sword of the Dragonclaw for a while now. Outside the Sanctuary, you’ll find another full health potion and some Shadowsteel Armor, if you missed it earlier. If you go inside and cleanse yourself in the fountain, you’ll gain the Staff of the Dragonbane, the Bow of the Dragonhorn, and the Daggers of the Dragonfang. Each of these, like the Sword of the Dragonclaw, does a good amount of damage to everything, and deals double damage to undead foes. Since the last chapter of the game will pit you against large numbers of undead, grab one of these weapons and use them wisely. You can try them out on the zombies that are raised in the graveyard outside.

Getting To Percy

Head back down the slope and engage the ghouls that attack the city guardsmen there. If you can keep these guards alive, they’ll travel with you for a bit, but it’s really not necessary to do so. When the doorway opens up to the next part of the city, walk through to reach another open area with more ghouls. A stone bridge crosses a chasm here to the house through which you have to pass now, but there’s another secret area that can be found by jumping off of the bridge onto the ground to the right of it, underneath the overhanging building. Nothing major there, just another magic mushroom and some regular mushrooms. The building will lead you to another loading screen afterwards.

Undead Villagers

The attic of this first building is one of the least secret secret areas you’ll find in the game. It has some scrolls in a chest, whoo hoo! Also downstairs is another Lightning Shield and Master Thief’s Outfit if you didn’t see the other two instances of each earlier on.

Kill the zombie villagers outside the building and move on until you run into Percy. He’ll tell you to open the flow valve in the backyard that he points you to. It is, of course, overrun with undead, including a powerful Necrolord. Kill everything that moves and rotate the wheel until it locks into place, then run back to the canal and jump in. When you reach the grid, Percy will open it up, giving you access to the tunnels that lead to the exterior of the Necropolis.

Necropolis Exterior

When you reach the exterior of the Necropolis, you’ll find a large obstacle in your path: a Paokai. Luckily for you, it’s easily defeated by running into the large open archway nearby, climbing the stairs, finding the ballista, and using it to blow the damn thing away. You can’t heal while in the ballista, though, and will be a sitting duck to boot, so don’t forget to run out of it and into hiding to heal yourself when need be.

And another one bites the dust.

When you’re done with the Paokai, explore the rest of the keep until you find a winch. If you look outside, you’ll note that the winch opens one of the far doors below you. Press the winch until the wheel stops moving, then destroy the planks in the floor nearby, drop down as quickly as possible, then sprint across the exterior surface until you reach the entrance to the Necropolis. If you don’t move as quickly as possible here, the door will shut before you can reach it.

Inside, reunite with Leanna (how the hell did she get in here?), then head down the steps to reach the game’s final chapter. If you happened to keep Xana in your soul instead of bathing in the sacred blah blah blah, you'll have to fight Leanna and kill her before you're able to move on, you bad boy, you. You'll get the three skill points you missed out on earlier for doing so.