The Fall of Atlas

Dage and Atlas

When Atlas returns from the sea, King Zedek invites Lore's champions to his court. You go to Dage instead. A sacrificial appeal had bound you to answer the kingdom's victims, and you ask for a slaughter, not a war, sparing one citizen marked by a safe-passage coin. A second, private request leaves your souls joined, and the being that approaches Atlas is neither simply you nor simply Dage.

The Legion feels the union through its bond with Dage. Virgil's three-faced mirror lets you see who else witnessed the union. Kathool promises to swallow Atlas after the judgment. Tranquility overrules the other Masks when they demand that you separate. The martyrs repeat the plea for which they had offered everything. As Maleagant prepares the invasion, Victoria's diplomat Elodie quietly evacuates Greenguard's visitors after your warning.

Yara, a Paladin investigating Atlas, refuses evacuation. She had accepted a marriage proposal from the scholar Coelho to enter the city's restricted circles and now wants to save his son as well as uncover its secrets. After subduing the Legion General Slaine, you are welcomed by Zedek. He offers a place in his family and a future devoted to destroying Evil, unaware that Dage already shares the body before him.

The city's children supply the first clear evidence: Coelho Jr. still wants games, but his friend Gertrude speaks as the longstanding head of Astronomy. In the catacombs, Coelho's records explain Atlas's youth: its elders replace their children's souls with their own, killing or silencing relatives who resist. When Coelho's old body falls, he takes his son's before you and dismisses the child as his property. Yara confines the new vessel, unable to save the boy whose body it occupies.

Misaru, the citizen bearing your coin, had been Queen of Atlas until she refused to surrender her newborn son as Zedek's next body and survived execution. An unnamed woman had taught her and the other bereaved parents beneath the city the ritual that reached you, but Misaru alone survived to witness its answer. She leads you toward the king, past Arethusa's willing service to the same system. You keep the executioner Ladon alive rather than risk letting his soul escape to another vessel.

Insisting that his crusade could not be entrusted to a successor, Zedek thinks victory assured when an armored Dage falls into the city's wards. The prisoner, however, is Maleagant in borrowed armor. Atlas's defenses had not prevented your earlier union outside its walls, and the real Dage remains with you. Zedek's trap has exposed his plans without separating the being he needs to defeat.

Yara, Misaru, and Slaine help overcome Zedek's defenses through the cost of Blood Price and Soul Cleaving. You and Dage reveal your shared draconic form, destroying Atlas's inhabitants while sparing your protected companions. As the union carries both of you toward a future in which your separate identities fail, Dage rejects it and breaks the shared course before it consumes you. Afterward, you refuse Misaru's offer to die, asking why she had prayed for vengeance instead of her children's return. She had never considered asking, and you insist that she live with the choice she had made. Before Kathool takes the city, a final spell releases the light of those who had never been allowed to live.