Age of Ruin III: Sanctuary Aiwass

Age of Ruin III: Sanctuary Aiwass — Intrusive Thoughts: the diagnosis

Admin B’s examination of Volgritian finds assorted swallowed animals and metal, but no new burns or hotspots. The Hero asks whether the intruder escaped, since everyone saw the Dragon bite down on both it and Aleister. Admin B instead reports that the two fused inside Volgritian’s mouth. Aleister is in perfect health, perhaps better than before. Tara recalls him doing something similar in Thelima, while Dahlia jokes about an evil spirit producing a last-minute possession. Aleister’s attempt to turn his own head only hurts. The diagnosis gives the group an explanation to consider, without establishing all that the fusion means.

The Hero still wants Maleno’s flame sealed. The connection between the beast and the forges is enough reason, even if its origin and its ability to move through stopped time remain unknown. The Hero admits to fear for their own safety, and Tara reminds them that their companions will help. Aleister proposes taking Maleno’s flame into himself. Warlic stops the discussion, saying that gratitude is clouding the others’ judgment.

The Hero tells Tara directly that Warlic tried to kill Aleister. Aleister continues to excuse him: he was holding the intruder still, and moving would have spoiled the shot. Tara objects that the world’s best mage would not have hurt her in the same position. Warlic answers that Aleister has been helping incidentally while taking the flames and their power. The Hero presses him to explain why he is so certain of the danger; Tara has seen him dig his nails into his palms until they bleed. He gives them no answer.

Age of Ruin III: Sanctuary Aiwass — A workaround and a separation

Admin B interrupts their argument with the declaration that it has found a workaround to the protocols that prevented it from sealing them inside. Their conversation gave it enough time; its intrusive thoughts have won. Warlic orders everyone to stay together and prepares to teleport them to Mount Albedo. Aleister calls out about the flame, and the Hero calls to Warlic. The escape does not bring the group to the same place.

The Stranger is pleased to have the Hero alone at last. It claims Warlic deliberately separated the party so he could corner Aleister and finish what he started. Its proposed solution is assistance from itself. Later it adds a condition: it will not intervene until asked. This is an offer made by a companion eager to gain influence, rather than a confession from Warlic about his intent.

The Stranger’s ordinary conversations expose how closely it watches its host. It finds the Hero unusually difficult to isolate because friends actively engage with them, unlike Valen. It cannot identify the three voices heard during the black-flamed man’s attack, and distinguishes another, greasy voice asking to play with the Hero. It had expected to become dormant when its host slept, but the Hero can forgo sleep. When it asks what obscured its view during the day, the Hero answers with bitterness about a body that has betrayed them.

Age of Ruin III: Sanctuary Aiwass — The white fire

The Stranger directs the first five main quests while the Hero searches for the others. In Shared Taste, the connection becomes unpleasantly mutual: after the Hero bites a Dove, the Stranger tastes the bitter flesh and recoils. It says it has never possessed a living Doomknight before. Ablutio sends the Hero against Albedo Elementals, whom it calls Fiamme’s kin burned by the forge. Their white heat threatens the psyche as well as the body; the Stranger’s curiosity wanes when it feels that heat itself.

Physical Conflagration reveals another difference from Maleno. Albedo’s fire also burns its victims indefinitely, but strips away their outer physical form in the name of removing impurities. The Stranger cannot explain the form left behind. Quiet Aftermath reaches a settlement where the Hero speaks with Svala and Snowbeard and encounters dreamlike Leonals. The Stranger describes the lions as projections from someone else’s mind, and the Sanctuary as an open mind spilling into the physical world.

Svala identifies Aiwass Sanctuary as a stable teleportation point between Maleno and Albedo. She initially assumes the visitors sealed Maleno and came to help, then learns that the Hero does not know where the others are. Snowbeard had seen the rest pass through while he carried people away from the flames. Their own expedition cannot continue: Svala shielded him during the attack, and her Dwarven-made dress protected her from burning, but her ribs were injured.

Age of Ruin III: Sanctuary Aiwass — A sanctuary under attack

Svala and Snowbeard had been preparing to leave when white flames swept through the forest and meadow. A white-hooded attacker resembled the figure that struck Thelima, but carried Albedo’s white fire. Isiri held it off while the wounded were taken to safety. It soon abandoned the Sanctuary and headed toward Forge Albedo. Snowbeard regrets that he could not delay it until the Hero arrived, while Svala says Isiri’s magic saved everyone from being engulfed.

The Sanctuary had sheltered its followers quietly while the forges were cold. They reached out when the flames reignited, and Dwarves and Drow came after receiving visions from Aiwass, including settlers following Vath’s defeat. Svala describes gardens, a life supported by the forest and reflection on dreams. She does not yet understand what Aiwass is, but feels safe there. Her sense of safety makes the attack a wound to more than the mountain’s defenses.

Solva Et Coagula sends the Hero to speak with Geopetal and take a Salt Sigil from Crystal Prima, which blocks the way. The Stranger explains salt as one of alchemy’s three components of living beings. Its familiarity comes from earlier efforts to produce perfection, a subject it puts aside now that it has the Hero.

Age of Ruin III: Sanctuary Aiwass — News from the other peaks

Through her gold and ruby vessels, Geopetal can carry news of Maleno and warn the other expeditions about the guardian. She tells the Hero to concentrate on Albedo while the Luminary Coalition and Song’s party hold their own. Her link with Aiwass conveys feelings rather than clear speech. She briefly sensed panic, followed by calm that is helping the survivors relax.

At Citrinitas, the Lightguard’s seizure of the mountain has forced the Coalition into negotiations. Geopetal has warned both sides that Albedo’s attack could be followed by an intruder in gold flames. The Lightguard is growing more aggressive, and Sigrid is absent. At Rubedo, Song’s party has already encountered a red-flamed intruder in Warwick Forest. Victoria has responded to their request for aid, with Elius agreeing to accompany the reinforcements. These reports widen the emergency without identifying the different intruders as a single being.

Age of Ruin III: Sanctuary Aiwass — Only Two: Isiri’s care

Isiri helps the Hero breathe and offers a spell to soothe the pain left by Albedo’s fire. Snowbeard explains that she is a visitor from Somorah and wants to make her a gift for saving them. Svala confirms the white-hooded attack. Isiri says she was fortunate: the being shook her soul, but its true objective was the forge. The Hero wants to hurry after it, while Snowbeard urges a careful plan before another rush into danger.

There is news of the missing companions. Tara and Dahlia are with Volgritian and asked the Hero to meet them at Forge Albedo. Isiri also tried to speak with Warlic and Aleister, but they rushed past as though chasing one another. The report relieves one fear and sharpens another. A dark interlude shows a pair of pale eyes above the Hero, without naming the watcher. Back with the group, the Hero recognizes how tense they had been.

To reach the forge, travelers must first commune with Aiwass. Isiri describes a being from beyond the stars who died long ago, whose body lies in the mausoleum and continues to dream. Aiwass reached her through sleep, showing Somorah as a planet rather than a peninsula and a burning gaze fixed on their world. She was still interpreting the vision when the attack came. Communion will share emotions and memories rather than ask questions, and may change those who look inward. Svala has not dared it; Snowbeard worries that someone different would emerge.

Aiwass accepts visitors only in pairs who have undergone a ceremony. Isiri explains that no one can change, or make change, alone. As an Ascendant and an Unael, she would be willing to join the Hero, but points out that a partner is already present. The Hero turns to the Stranger. It agrees with grand claims about everything it has witnessed, while Svala recoils from its voice and Snowbeard lightens the moment with a joke.

Age of Ruin III: Sanctuary Aiwass — The Chymical Wedding

Isiri explains that the Chymical Wedding is a symbolic fusion, not a literal marriage. Its name conceals the ceremony’s purpose from ill-intentioned visitors: to convey how change can create perfection through the Magnum Opus Forges, up to the Philosopher’s Stone. She had not come seeking the forges. Aiwass reached her dreams with loneliness, surprise and kinship, and AlzEin agreed to accompany her in the ceremony before leaving to pursue an interest in the Thunderforge.

Somorah, Isiri says, is a distant peninsula of deep blue dunes, lakes and glass spires. The sand shines like stars, the nights are cool and the days fiercely hot; her people would welcome guests. When asked whether sunlight troubles her, she says no, then hesitates over why it should. The unfamiliar feeling sits beside the vision of her homeland as an entire planet, without settling what either means.

Rosenkreutz has the Hero consult Isiri and retrieve Albedo Materia. The Stranger compares the ceremony to its own bond with a living vessel, which it says is less common than binding to the undead or an object. In Synchophant Symbiote, the Hero clears the changed Matches inside the mausoleum and declines its offer to guide their blade. When the Hero holds a hand over the white flames, the Stranger feels the burn and wonders why any of its brethren would willingly share a living body. The Hero hears that thought too.

Tria Prima combines the Salt Sigil with Mercury and Sulfur Sigils from the divided chamber. The Stranger treats their union as a message about creating perfection, increasingly speaking of itself and the Hero as a perfected pair. Chymical Fusion makes flowers bloom from the fused sigils; eight offerings go to Aiwass’s sarcophagus, and the Hero reads a nearby scroll. The Stranger recognizes its author, Lucas Bligh, and remembers the Bligh family obstructing whispers around the Drakaths until Dethrix II’s birth.

Age of Ruin III: Sanctuary Aiwass — Lucas Bligh’s strange scroll

The Chymical Wedding, signed by Lucas Bligh, describes a white vessel of Prima Materia sheltering a benevolent soul at peace in death. Through shared dreams, Lucas learned an account of Aiwass as the last of its kind: it escaped a parallel dimension consumed by fire and tore through reality to reach Mount Albedo. Communication through dreams gave it solace among people who could not otherwise understand it. Visions of fruit decaying in salt water, hatching and being reborn became part of what it shared.

Lucas distinguishes this scroll from a larger book of his: an enlightened reader could use that recipe to create the Philosopher’s Stone, while a surface reading would produce a stick or club at a forge. He then asks why Aiwass especially sought dreamers such as Chromia. Somorah is supposedly a peninsula on Lore, with Atlea as its capital and people who walk in sunlight. Yet he questions whether that has always been so. Perhaps souls, places, ideas and dreams survived an earlier reality and were reimagined in a new creation, living as if it had always existed. He stops short, joking that such speculation could get him burned. The scroll records his hypothesis, not a demonstrated universal rule.

Age of Ruin III: Sanctuary Aiwass — Pity is the First Step: the dream

Ipsissimus brings the Hero and Stranger into communion once the perfected flowers open Aiwass’s mind. What begins as an apparent fight immediately unsettles their separate identities. The Hero complains that this feels like another test, while the Stranger finds itself saying that it is the Hero rather than something in their shadow. It realizes the alchemy is psychological, then recoils at what its Knight might see in return.

Age of Ruin III: Sanctuary Aiwass — Borrowed grief

Dahlia experiences Tara’s confinement from within her form. She feels years of isolation, the lingering pain of Infernals’ claws and the laughter of a fraud that will not let her sleep. She apologizes to her father, Brittany and Victoria for allowing nobles to use her and for trying to take Victoria’s crown. She wants her family again, then asks for her husband and catches herself: she is not Tara. The dream makes another person’s regret intimate before she can separate it from her own.

Melchior’s voice speaks of a fox claiming a throne only with his blessing, calls his Champion precious jade and demands that a parasite leave his silver garden. The perspective then follows Tara through Dahlia’s wounded form, arrows protruding from her back on a bridge. She insists that she stopped lying when she was promised protection, and that this should have been her empire and the moment she proved everyone wrong. Other voices accuse her of trying to kill the Emperor and demand that she be burned. Tara insists she is not small or afraid, then admits she does not want to be alone. She is not Dahlia, but now she understands.

Age of Ruin III: Sanctuary Aiwass — The wait behind Warlic’s anger

The Hero asks where Warlic and Aleister are. A figure drawn as Warlic speaks under Aleister’s name: he woke before anyone he knew had been born and waited through months, years, centuries and thousands of years. Vegetation covers the seated mage as the wait lengthens. The story he anticipates keeps ending the same way through repeated cycles. This is Aleister’s encounter with Warlic’s experience within the dream, rather than an independent confirmation of every remembered cycle.

The Hero calls to Warlic and tries to bring him away. The answer is an accusation: the Hero is neither the Chosen nor the Dragonlord, but took their place. Their silhouettes are engulfed in orange fire. Aleister then calls for the Hero to come back, saying that he did not mean it and that Warlic did not mean it. The Hero is left asking who and what they are. The exchange gives the earlier silence a shape—waiting, loss and anger—without resolving the Hero’s identity or excusing Warlic’s actions.

Age of Ruin III: Sanctuary Aiwass — A partner made small

In the dream, voices call the Stranger small, insignificant and a creature wearing the clothes of the dead. It begs them to stop and promises anything. The Hero answers that this is both of them. The thought grows into an assertion of Us, followed by questions about what they are and will become. The pair names a gift, a curse, a bond, an Iris, a ring and a promise. A red eye motif accompanies these words, but what the union would become remains unresolved.

Kathool intervenes before that possibility is completed. It says Aiwass did not know what it was doing and calls the interruption a favor to the Hero. The Stranger protests that it had been on the brink of grandeur. Kathool instead directs them toward more urgent matters and pulls back a curtain. Infamy appears, calls the Stranger one of its own and introduces itself as its Master. The Stranger violently denies the claim, calling it an impostor and a fraud. The exchange shatters its confidence without settling its demand for the Master it remembers.

Age of Ruin III: Sanctuary Aiwass — What the partners carry out

The companions emerge shaken. Aleister asks whether everyone saw what happened; Tara says it was terrible to be Dahlia, and Dahlia answers that it is terrible to be them both. The Stranger screams in anguish, its dark mantle crumpled at Aleister’s feet. Tara recognizes that the Hero remains in the dream even after the others are ready to proceed to Forge Albedo.

In a star-filled vision beside a red, eye-like form, the Hero asks Aiwass why they were not shown Warlic seeing through Aleister’s eyes. Aiwass does not answer in words, but the Hero senses its pity and calls it the first step toward hope. They compare the being present to the one beneath Termina Temple and the small snake in their own shadow. Aiwass’s sadness at parting with it recalls Bananach and Eire. The Hero promises to take “them” to Forge Albedo and speak with Warlic; the referent remains unnamed in this passage.

After communion, the Stranger’s description is stripped of its grand mantle: it is a small Doom Spirit, its Master gone and the current Shadowscythe impostors in its eyes. The Hero sees it with almost contemptuous clarity, yet considers abandoning it a waste. Isiri says the change in the partner is real. Whether its depression lasts depends on its character; Aiwass’s followers regard this state as an accomplishment and the beginning of the soul’s work. She hopes the journey to Albedo helps it find itself, adding that beings like it are almost extinct around Somorah.

Age of Ruin III: Sanctuary Aiwass — Al vel Legis: an optional return

Al vel Legis and its membership-only Legend version are repeatable reward quests unlocked after Ipsissimus. They share the same text and ask for one each of Sal Alembroth, Milk of Sulfur and Aeon Dream while the incapacitated Stranger struggles with its crisis. The Hero recalls Isiri’s explanation of salt, mercury and sulfur as the three primes of a living body and wonders whether Aiwass’s followers tried to provide it with a new one. The thought remains speculation, extended uneasily to the screaming shadow. The second reward variant adds no separate communion or confirmed rebirth.