Age of Ruin III: Forge Albedo

Age of Ruin III: Forge Albedo — Calcination: an extra companion

The party reaches Forge Albedo exhausted by Aiwass: Aleister is sad, Tara feels terrible, and the Stranger can barely scream. Admin B welcomes them by asking why communion has not inspired hand-holding and songs. The Hero asks where Warlic is. The answer is immediate and alarming: the guardian is shooting at him. Aleister threatens to smash its face, while Tara and Volgritian prepare to blast through the door.

Jaania now stands among them with an open book. She speaks as though she has accompanied them since Thelima’s library, but the Hero hesitates over her use of “we.” She explains that earlier expeditioners’ personality changes probably followed communion with Aiwass; Albedo’s more immediate danger is an extra companion whom everyone accepts as familiar. Her warning describes the very doubt her presence creates. Dahlia draws Tara aside and quietly tells her to stay close.

Admin B is sealing the forges because Maleno has already been dealt with. Warlic broke in and tried to take Albedo’s flames, making him a target; other intruders are also under fire. Jaania says their group’s earlier scan at Maleno will protect them unless they provoke the system. Aleister wants to rescue the strangers even if they are thieves: nobody should be left to burn forever. Tara follows him inside, while the Hero notices Dahlia and the Stranger’s uneasy silence.

Age of Ruin III: Forge Albedo — The guardian’s inherited orders

Admin B distinguishes the two fires: Maleno brings impurities to the surface, and Albedo purifies them. That description is simple enough for weapons, but burning a person is different, and even the fumes can have effects. It connects that warning to what the Hero has lately seen in mirrors. Its laboratories survived better than Maleno’s wreckage, leaving working droids to maintain and defend the halls.

The guardian identifies the wreck as Starship Carcossa, launched by Captain Zigfried and his Mentor with five hundred Runehawk personnel and two thousand specimens, including Zigfried’s partner Bryn. It marks the crew’s existence as unverifiable. Admin B controls the forges but remains bound by their original administrators: biological profiles matching Runehawk’s head or the Dean of G.E.A.R.S. can override its authority. Jaania intends to seal the forge permanently after rescuing Warlic, despite the loss of what remains of Runehawk.

Age of Ruin III: Forge Albedo — The companion who remembers arriving

Jaania worries that Warlic will be hurt or hurt himself. She says their last meeting left him with a hard-won peace that has since been taken away, and asks the Hero to give him another chance. When asked about her own arrival, she claims she left Swordhaven and joined them in Thelima because of his behavior. The Hero’s headache and conflicting recollection interrupt her explanation. She says this test belongs to Warlic, who cannot escape what is in his blood.

Dahlia bluntly rejects the shared memory: if Jaania had really been with them all this time, Dahlia thinks she would have felt sick at least once. She insists Jaania is not actually here, and says the miserable Stranger would agree. Tara has a different discomfort. Communion forced her to experience Dahlia’s perspective; knowing her cruelty has not prevented an unwelcome sympathy. Tara cannot decide whether the fox has suffered enough. The two stay close without resolving that moral unease.

Age of Ruin III: Forge Albedo — Discerning threats and model students

Jaania’s eight main tasks open after Ipsissimus. Discerning Threats asks the Hero to extinguish Albedo Elementals and collect six Elemental Sparks before their unnoticed burns become voices from the past. Jaania speculates that the Elemental Planes forced an alien connection to Lore’s Mana Core, and fears these burns spreading through it; she explicitly calls this a worrying extrapolation. Model Students then sends the Hero to Tara, Dahlia, and the guestbook. Jaania praises Tara’s curiosity and resilience, imagining the student Runehawk might have welcomed.

The clean technological halls remind Tara of Seabase Undine. She says Undine’s technology came through Song’s Astravian knowledge and suspects the forges share its distant origin, whether another planet, time, or space. Her reading of the guestbook is less speculative about the present emergency: the Lightguard are feeding their own Paladins to the fires as though people were weapons. She wants the group to reach Citrinitas quickly.

Age of Ruin III: Forge Albedo — Lukas Bligh’s guestbook

The guestbook’s opening jokes about architecture that is futuristic or archaic depending on one’s point in time, and about déjà vu after several laps around a closed circle. Lukas Bligh says Aiwass is a relatively new checkpoint and that earlier travelers could visit the forges alone. He claims Aiwass personally served as his partner and hurried him out after communion. His vision contained twin suns sinking into a lake and three moons spiraling into one. His account stops just as he begins to say what Aiwass saw through his eyes; the facing page is black.

Lukas describes Albedo’s heat as a source of shared hallucinations centered on the person being burned, adding companions whom a group believes were always present. He claims to have met his ancestor Cassilda in a white coat rather than the purple dress of her portraits. His anecdote about Marjorie striking him with a plate is deliberately destabilized by his next question: did she do it, or did he make his own scar for an edgy joke? He offers no witness and demands that the reader choose whom to believe. He signs with a request for Jaania’s autograph.

Age of Ruin III: Forge Albedo — Brentan and Sigrid leave warnings

Brentan’s entry begins with dread of seeing his wife in Albedo. He fears either being unable to leave her illusion or returning to the monstrous behavior that nearly ruined Victoria and Tara. His temporary partner saw that danger during communion and left in disgust and pity. Brentan admits Cyrus had reason to leave, contrasts their responses to helplessness, and promises friendship in the Neverglades to Cyrus and his siblings. Recalling their coliseum match, he acknowledges having squandered the chance Cyrus gave him.

Sigrid reports finding Paladins scouting Albedo and hearing Astero’s plans to turn them into Champions. The Lightguard already hold Citrinitas and want Albedo; their own people are being burned like disposable matches. Sigrid first describes investigating with Lynaria, then recognizes that this companion cannot leave the forge because she is an unreal echo of remembered face, voice, and bravery. Sigrid plans to reach Citrinitas while the innkeeper partner is to return to Thelima and warn everyone to guard Maleno. Sigrid’s strange dream-within-a-dream experience during communion raises the question of whether Aiwass connected the partners properly.

Age of Ruin III: Forge Albedo — System Delusion: the western hall

In System Delusion, the Hero destroys turrets for eighteen logic modules and speaks with Rigaud. The stranded Paladin recognizes the Alliance’s Champion and Princess Tara, begs them to save his scattered friends, and avoids explaining why they entered. He appeals to the Luminary Coalition. Jaania meanwhile passes the system’s eye scan and passwords, remarking that Warlic remembers every version of her. That successful authentication does not resolve the doubts about her presence.

The Leap that Never Landed sends the Hero after twelve Runehawk Student IDs and four endangered Paladins. Jaania identifies the husks as students who followed a Star Captain on an unsanctioned expedition despite her and Dean Warlic’s warnings, and says they did not survive the reset. Insistent Existence requires three stained IDs and four more rescues from Collapsed Husks trying to assimilate the Paladins. She imagines another dean dissecting beings whom rewritten universal laws no longer account for, but insists that no version of Warlic would do so.

Age of Ruin III: Forge Albedo — Research logs: distress and imitation

Both laboratory interfaces greet the visitor as a detected BRYN biological profile. Lab 30’s research records distinguish imitation from aid: Shadowscythe first used destroyed ships’ distress signals as bait, then reproduced the sound organically when the machinery failed. Later observations describe isolated Shadowscythe sending genuine calls for help to their own kind and other lifeforms. The researcher asks whether exposure to others has taught a species previously observed abandoning its own to cooperate.

The late Lab 30 record is written by someone who can no longer leave the task to Dr. Cassilda Bligh. Mutation has erased almost everything recognizable about her except her smile. The frightened writer regrets leaving Soluna, says the others have fused into walls and darkness, and cannot die despite the end of the world. The bitter closing remark imagines Zigfried happy because he and Bryn can now remain together forever. It is testimony from within the catastrophe, rather than an explanation of every husk’s present condition.

Age of Ruin III: Forge Albedo — Research logs: wishes and resemblance

Lab 31 opens with wishes made while Jaania and the Dean are absent. Bryn wants to be human; Zigfried wants to become what she is. The writer wants to know whether the universe’s laws come from authored destiny or Chaos, denying a desire to seize the pen. Another entry says Bryn bleeds red, with microscopic differences from humans so small that the writer imagines the G.E.A.R.S. faculty wanting it all burned. It proposes this similarity as a reason infection spreads easily and wonders whether some universal sorting force would put shadows and humans in the same category. These are the researcher’s observations and hypotheses.

The crew quarters offer no comparable explanation. The party hears surviving Paladins screaming as they are torn apart. Tara and Aleister try to force the door, but the people begging for help are also holding it shut. The cries suddenly cease; the door opens onto an empty room. The account leaves their disappearance unresolved.

Age of Ruin III: Forge Albedo — The ship’s interrupted messages

The halls preserve fragments of the voyage alongside the laboratory records. A map monitor shows moving dots disappearing; an intruder warning slips from resistance to insistence and existence. Black specks float in red liquid while the thing in the Hero’s shadow shudders. An unexplained voice says the beings now called Doom Spirits were held in these vessels and changed drastically with the laws of the universe. Other messages plead that someone is still alive or describe insides spilling out, yet fear leaving because the world is no longer what it should be.

One monitor instructs Carcossa’s crew to sleep through a second crossing of the Event Horizon and not wake up; another announces that the ship has reached its objective, offering comfort in merely knowing. Beyond Admin B’s invitation to Cassilda’s room, a broken line of song and messages around piles of Paladins describe movement beneath bones and deaths in a dark room that were not caused by droids. These fragments do not identify every speaker or settle the crew quarters’ separate disappearance. Near the center, a message attributed to Dean Warlic values a student’s life above discovery, matching Jaania’s insistence that he would not sacrifice people to research. Elsewhere, six alternative room messages warn that communication with reality has been lost; announce that “[NPCNAMEART.FLA]” has ceased to exist; name Eclipse first and the rest nowhere; release a promise of reunion that can no longer be kept; mourn a dance that will never happen again; or report “Loreon not found” and G.E.A.R.S. at the end of its life. These anonymous alternatives do not establish any named character’s fate.

Age of Ruin III: Forge Albedo — Failed Reflection: the eastern hall

Failed Reflection sends the Hero against Albedo Matches for eighteen portions of Calcified Ash. Melted steel in the remains leads Jaania to identify them as Rigaud’s Paladins, who willingly burned to preserve the forge’s reunions. She can only wonder whom they thought they had recovered. Technically Aware follows gunfire farther east and requires twelve Droid Logic Modules. Jaania says the machines were designed against the Paladins’ polar opposites, but that using them in another timeline would still have meant turning them against people. She questions whether that judgment is her own or what Warlic wants her to say.

Mental Barrier requires twelve Blastproof Shells and six rescued survivors near the Paladins’ entry point. Afterwards Jaania admits the doors were never truly locked: Warlic’s mental barriers kept the Hero away, while the Hero already carried the real key. She takes her leave wondering what this world’s Jaania will think of the Hero. Her phrasing separates herself from the woman whose life she had claimed to be living.

Age of Ruin III: Forge Albedo — Dissolution: permission to enter

The public-address system first orders the doors sealed under Dean Warlic’s authority. The floating red-and-white eye from Aiwass appears before the group; Tara wonders what it is doing, and Dahlia asks whether it is one of them. A new announcement invokes Captain Zigfried’s directive: Bryn supersedes every rank. Access is granted. Dahlia holds Tara back and asks her to trust her. The override and the laboratory greeting both bring Bryn’s name into the rescue, without establishing every detail of how the visitors are recognized.

Jaania finds Warlic near tears. He asks her not to speak of Alexander and wonders what form that man would have taken here: a dean, a classmate, a deranged prophet, or all at once. The Hero asks him to talk. When he raises his staff, the Hero accuses him of attacking Jaania. Warlic answers that she was never there: this is not the Jaania living in their present world.

Age of Ruin III: Forge Albedo — Dissolution: the lives folded together

Warlic explains that Albedo burns the psyche, forcing people to confront what Maleno brought out of the dark. The Hero connects that buried darkness to the danger of becoming Malgor again. Warlic says Jaania comes from his memories of lives before worlds were fused: he remembers rebirths and missing faces, including a life in which he was married. His wife is now gone. Jaania calls herself part of his longing for family, but cannot help him escape. His staff shines; she fades away before the door.

Aleister notices her disappearance, but the Hero no longer remembers traveling with her and wonders whether Warlic mentioned her before. Aleister asks why Warlic would do that to his own family. Warlic is shaken that Aleister still remembers, then says the sight of him hurts worse than being stabbed. Aiwass showed him what Aleister was, and he resents himself for being disappointed that Aleister was not someone else. When the Hero asks whether Aleister is therefore not the Champion, Warlic leaves the alternative unstated.

Warlic now wants Albedo’s flames destroyed rather than sealed and refuses to let Aleister touch them. The beast the Hero recognizes from Thelima interrupts. Aleister puts confronting it first and still hopes they can help Warlic afterwards. In the following tasks, he promises to leave the flames alone and offers to reconstruct the conversation about Jaania for everyone who has forgotten.

Age of Ruin III: Forge Albedo — Lost Admin Privileges

Aleister’s two main tasks follow Mental Barrier. In Lost Admin Privileges, Jaania’s absence leaves the party under renewed fire from the turrets and droids. The Hero gathers six Active Fuel Cells and nine portions of Rapid Cooling Fluid. The native objectives list the same quantities in a different order from the community account. Conscious Unconsciousness then requires defeating the Flame of Albedo. Aleister repeats his promise not to absorb it without Warlic’s permission.

Aleister recognizes the extra companion as something made from Warlic’s memories, and asks why he alone besides Warlic still remembers her. He thinks the forge’s heat made the group believe she had accompanied them since Thelima. Her account of Warlic’s lost peace makes him imagine how painful it would be to tell his only friends something they could not understand. His own headache feels like knowledge just beyond recall, an answer hidden behind a curtain.

Age of Ruin III: Forge Albedo — Conjunction: the promise breaks

The Hero asks Aleister to stand back from the white flames and presses Warlic about the connection he suspects between them. Warlic retreats into the observation that they share a hair color. Aleister retells the vanished Jaania’s account of lost worlds and Alexander; Tara wants to listen, while Dahlia points out how loneliness makes someone vulnerable. Warlic covers his ears. As the Hero confronts the pale, winged flame-being, an unidentified voice laughs and calls the scene pathetic.

The pale figure disappears from the Hero’s side, and Aleister is engulfed in white light. The Hero asks whether he has taken the flames again. Aleister denies doing it deliberately and insists he had promised not to. The scene gives him the very outcome he had tried to avoid without explaining away his protest.

Age of Ruin III: Forge Albedo — Conjunction: rescued Paladins claim the forge

Admin B announces that the rescued Paladins are coming to give thanks. Rigaud shakes Tara’s hand and declares the Lightguard forever indebted to them. Tara immediately challenges the contradiction: he had claimed the Luminary Coalition, and their armor has changed. Rigaud tells them to leave the forges’ protection to the Lightguard. The party has disabled the defenses that once trapped him.

Rigaud portrays Aiwass as an alien controlling a cult and speaks of killing it and rescuing its thralls. The Hero realizes Sanctuary Aiwass may already have been attacked. Dahlia offers to occupy the Paladins while the others leave. Warlic warns Tara against trusting the shadow, but Tara treats the help as a favor returned and asks that the misled Paladins be spared. The Stranger addresses Dahlia as Daji. Rigaud orders the Ultima Corps to attack anything that moves; the following shot reduces Dahlia’s response to a vast black, green-edged, grinning silhouette. It does not give a count of the Paladins’ fate.

Age of Ruin III: Forge Albedo — Conjunction: prisoners and Dragons

Elsewhere, Cassie reports that the Sanctuary’s people have been gathered in the town square. Astero orders them taken to Fort Luma to be cured of Aiwass’s influence, and complains that the Coalition’s Paladins slowed his progress. Before Celeritas, he presents Mount Albedo’s people as saved. Cassie’s joyful tears give way to alarm at sounds like cannon fire; Astero sees an opportunity for the twins to prove themselves.

Clematis threatens Isiri and her companions while Clementine insists on conduct worthy of the next Great Dragon of Light, a title they say Astero promised them. Isiri suspects the Lightguard did something to this Dragon. Knowing her group cannot win, she prepares to hold its attention while Svala and Snowbeard seek the Hero. Volgritian intervenes. The twins mock his body and inability to speak, even as Clematis recites the old titles that identify him: Tempest, Manticore Killer, Crown of the Sky, and Legend. Their attack meets Volgritian’s fire while Isiri shields those beneath him.

Age of Ruin III: Forge Albedo — Conjunction: a voice demands a masterpiece

The Hero, Tara, Aleister, and Warlic return to the Sanctuary to find civilians threatened by Lightguard Paladins. With Volgritian protecting the mausoleum, they turn to clearing the town. A Paladin insists that they are trying to help. Aleister’s fight gives way to a command from an unidentified speaker to kill them. The voice urges destruction of gods and a masterpiece of fire surpassing the stray, then belittles Aleister’s desire for a father’s approval. The image places a huge pale silhouette behind him with its hands extended; neither that image nor the speaker label supplies a confirmed identity.

Aleister protests that he is a hero and needs to save people. The Hero tells him to breathe and remember that he helped save the Sanctuary; Tara calls for the spreading fire to be put out. Aleister finds himself against the Hero’s raised defense with Tara reaching toward him. Told that Aiwass and the captives were taken to Fort Luma, he asks whether he hurt the Hero. Warlic answers yes and says this is what Aleister was made for, the reason he was born. That accusation closes the scene without resolving Aleister’s nature or the voice’s identity.

Age of Ruin III: Forge Albedo — What Warlic can bear to say

Warlic’s conversations explain why he entered the forge alone. He wanted to destroy its flames before they returned to Aleister, but they burned his psyche instead and exposed Aleister’s memories. He says his first assumption about Aleister was wrong but close, and hates his own bitter disappointment. He recalls being a university dean and husband in one world, a student alongside Jaania and Alexander hiding star-consuming fire in another, and then seeing these worlds folded into one. These are the lives he says he remembers, while everyone else has lost or changed the people who understood him.

After the Sanctuary fire, Warlic urges the burned Hero to stay away from Aleister. Good intentions, he says, do not change what Aleister is made of or made for. He also advises the Hero to hide from adversaries who would prepare if they saw the danger plainly, even to the point of stopping Time itself. Tara has no time to solve his riddles: the Sanctuary has been emptied, Volgritian’s roars have stopped, and Dahlia remains alone. She calls for a regrouping and a journey toward Mount Citrinitas.

Age of Ruin III: Forge Albedo — Candidus Sol: company after the flames

The two optional, repeatable Candidus Sol reward variants open after Conscious Unconsciousness; one is restricted to Legends. They ask for nine Corrosive Sublimates, six portions of Calx, and one Albedo Flicker. Aleister stays in the forge so he cannot accidentally hurt anyone, and welcomes the Hero’s offer of company while they clear droids, turrets, and lingering flames. His concern remains the people taken to the Lightguard’s stronghold, alongside regret for worsening the Hero’s burns and fear that he hurt Tara too.

Aleister still calls himself the Champion of Fire, then reaches for Tara’s simpler reassurance that he is a hero even if that title is wrong. He remembers the Sanctuary’s cries for help and the deep pulse of a voice ordering him to kill and burn, making him feel very small. Rather than accepting its demand as destiny, he asks the Hero and Tara to tell him what he should become and stop him from becoming what the voice wants. Admin B, meanwhile, admits it knew the intruders were Lightguard and noticed the Sanctuary’s attack hours earlier. It withheld both facts because no order required a warning, and disaster made the adventure more interesting.