Darkon's Elegy

Darkon's Garden and Eridani

A missing warrior's family leads you to Darkon's Garden, a pocket dimension also known as the Genesis Garden and Darkon's Junkyard, where you meet Fa playing on her Shift console. The part-time caretaker claims not to have seen him, though she warns that many heroes have disappeared here. She points you toward the mountain, but before offering more help, enlists you in tending the Garden's unusual creatures.

The creatures Fa calls rabbits have teeth and need manual de-worming, giving you reason to doubt her as you go about the errands. Along the way, you find scattered notes that appear to belong to the missing warrior. As they describe his deterioration after eating the local creatures and drinking a copper-tasting red liquid, the writer longs to return to Thylla. The last scraps end in a barely legible plea.

Near the summit, you meet Fa's assistant Mi Calistege and investigate a crack in the mountain. A shadowy Fa pushes you into a pit, where you fight Creature 12 before meeting Darkon, who thanks you for solving his pet problem and apologizes that you have not found the warrior. After you leave, his conversation with Fa reveals how close you have come: the fallen experiment is Human 182, whose dying Swan Song had nearly reached their target output. Darkon transforms it into a sword, while Fa's report of your greater strength gives him a new subject of interest.

A letter draws you to Eridani to investigate a series of murders. Fa's friend Re points to a skull in a pit as the supposed sender of yesterday's letter, then advises you to leave while insisting that she hates lying. Time has stopped in the village, she explains. Years beneath the same red moon are driving the residents to desperation.

Bursha Night asks you to find her son Caden, believing he left that morning, though he says five years have passed. Other villagers' memories slip between hours and years as you investigate the murders. Loshe Allen blames Bursha for the village's curses and suspects the miller's daughter of killing her father.

The miller's daughter, Bydis, instead suspects Christopher Lugha, who sent her father to hunting grounds where the meat bore strange holes. The villagers had hanged Christopher's companions despite his testimony. He directs you to a house on the village's eastern side, though his part in the miller's death remains unclear.

Bydis follows you into the house and, finding a pair of severed legs, accuses you of murder. The gathering villagers refuse your warning that the victim appears infected, only for one of them to transform into Creature 34. Re intervenes, joining you against the creatures as the infection overtakes Eridani.

When you find the Mayor suffering the same transformation, Re admits killing the first victims and forging the letter that had brought you here. After you defeat the transformed Mayor, she loses an arm protecting you from its Swan Song. Her report to So explains the experiment: the murders had encouraged paranoia, the unmoving moon had weakened the villagers' minds, and your arrival had helped trigger their transformation. With the results confirmed, Darkon summons the Scale to the capital.

Astravia and King Drago

Brought before King Drago by the Astravian Royal Guard as the sole survivor of Eridani, you receive an order rather than an execution: he wants you to suppress the unrest and monsters spreading through his kingdom. His promised reward is the honor of serving as his furniture, but you accept the chance to investigate the spreading disease.

Kasper, a retired mercenary, warns that no one will trust a visitor emerging from Drago's court, and the citizens only begin to talk after you remove the King's spies and protect the rebels. Carlton Magnus explains Alprecha's Beloved, the blessing that redirects harm to the ruler onto his subjects. Dr. Rosa Anne Pechora links Drago's summoned beasts to soldiers disappearing from his armies, whereas Talis Mikaels remembers a generous prince who had helped his family, someone very different from Drago.

When infected mercenaries open the gates to the creatures, you help Kasper protect and evacuate the civilians. Drago resents their gratitude toward you, while his Advisor proposes the Coronation of the Celestial, a royal ritual requiring mass sacrifice. As the King prepares it, a messenger brings Kasper orders for you to confront the invading commander.

Kasper recognizes the commander, Ti, as his former teacher, but it is La who intervenes after your battle, accusing So of acting beyond the Scale's plan. Holding Ti back, she sends you to stop Drago's ritual. You return to the capital and defeat The Moon, the next beast his sacrifices have summoned.

As La exposes Drago's Advisor as the shapeshifter So, the King recognizes La as Aurola, the bodyguard he believed he had killed, and realizes that his brother Darkon is alive. La stays to confront So while sending you and Drago into the castle to prevent another summoning.

Drago admits sacrificing rebels and their families to summon The Moon. When you threaten him, he demonstrates Alprecha's protection: his own injury fells a nearby guard. With more subjects to make suffer whenever he chooses, he threatens another summoning and forces you to assemble the Nine Muses Key, claiming it will open his escape route.

In the Genesis Garden, So demands punishment for La's betrayal, but Darkon calls Aurola a dear friend, and Ti believes her actions are meant to help him. Believing Drago is coercing you, he leads the Scale back to the castle.

La reveals that the Nine Muses Key opens the ritual chamber rather than an escape tunnel, allowing Drago to continue summoning the Arcana in sequence. You help her sabotage the chamber without killing its remaining guards, but Darkon's arrival interrupts the effort.

Darkon offers to take you out of the castle, warning that you have not recovered your full power and that Drago will summon The Sun regardless. The King does so, sacrificing his guards. Despite the pain caused by the distorted flow of time, you defeat the beast to protect what remains of Astravia, making clear that Darkon will still have to answer for his actions.

Darkon seizes Drago, who insists that too few citizens remain to pay for Judgement or The World. Darkon answers by pointing to the creatures' Swan Songs: their human hosts had become sacrifices capable of opening a rift for a Primordial's true body. Time in their home plane had made their transformations unpredictable. Your arrival as the Eternal Dragon of Time had accelerated them and supplied the army that drove Drago through the ritual.

Judgement and The World

Drago demands that you erase Darkon from the past or destroy him as a dragon. Darkon refuses to let him treat you as a tool and explains Judgement's final price: the life of the summoner who began the cycle, as Drago had done with The Fool twenty-two years earlier. Darkon says that he still loves his brother and that their separation will not last. Judgement arrives, and Drago's death releases the surviving Astravians from Alprecha's Beloved.

Talis returns to help evacuate the survivors as Judgement's hands reach into the streets and the dead rise as jurors. Beneath the trumpeters' calls, you hear another melody putting people to sleep and follow it to Judgement's scroll, where Mi is playing her guitar.

Mi urges you to hide, unable to understand why you would defend people who had persecuted Outsiders like her. She believes that putting the Astravians to sleep before their deaths is merciful, but you challenge the distinction: helping the slaughter still denies them a chance to change, when they share neither one mind nor one measure of guilt. Mi recognizes the kinder world La had described in your argument and agrees to hear you out.

Hoping you can save Darkon as La intends, Mi guides you up Judgement's scroll, where you help her read the names: white marks record ritual deaths, red marks more natural ones. When she begins hearing the trumpeters herself, Mi realizes their call can reach those who feel guilty, whether or not they deserve judgment. Her music helps you pass the accusing shades on the climb.

At the summit, La raises her weapon against you, believing she had failed both Astravia and her friends and can no longer escape judgment. You fight without trying to kill her, and afterward she says you remind her of Suki and regrets that you had not met in another life. Darkon interrupts, seizes you by the throat, and drops you into the abyss when you refuse to stand aside. Refusing to kneel to what her friend had become, La wishes him happiness before disappearing and leaving her knight's emblem behind.

Do Dawn and Do Dusk guide you through the past Darkon wants to undo. He and Suki had hoped to reform Astravia and build a life with their adopted daughter, Song. On the eve of his coronation, Drago turned the prince's intended abdication into an accusation that he was abandoning his people for an Outsider. He threatened Suki to force Darkon to surrender the crown and Alprecha's protection, then betrayed his promise to spare them. Suki died asking Darkon to live for the people who had been deceived.

The Fool offered the dying prince a new body in exchange for experiencing his life through him. Darkon accepted and recovered his surviving friends, but his efforts to save Suki reached further: he and Song sent a clone to intercept her in the past. Its journey instead helped set her on the road to Astravia. Convinced that time and reality themselves kept them apart, he began the experiments that would make his revenge possible.

You understand what Darkon has lost, but refuse to let it justify killing later generations. The reunited Arcana have become The World, whose final sacrifice will be Lore itself, erasing the existing world before creating Darkon's replacement.

Their time with the Scale has given the Envoys reason to hope Darkon could change, and they offer one opening: as The Fool's power returns to the Arcana, he will briefly face you as an equal. You fight past Re, Fa, and Ti while resisting the spreading Nothingness. As the loss of The Fool's power restores parts of Re's memory as General Regulus, she recognizes how far they had strayed from their vows and chooses to help you stop Darkon.

Fa offers to take Re beyond The World's reach, but Regulus refuses to abandon the others. She asks you to be gentle with Song, who repeatedly stands in your way, terrified of losing the family Darkon had given her. After you defeat Song without killing her, Darkon steps forward to protect his daughter and face you himself.

Darkon promises that everyone, even Drago and the traitors, will return to a world without cruelty, but you reject a paradise that removes the freedom to choose kindness. Invoking Suki enrages him: the Eternal Dragon had also reset the universe without asking the people whose lives it changed. Acknowledging that failure, you still refuse to let another imposed world replace Lore and meet Darkon in the final battle he demands, defeating him.

As the Nothingness recedes, the Arcana offer their thanks and apologies, but no further help. Their reunion had fulfilled the ancient promise. Darkon admits that Suki would never have wanted a world without free will, and you, too, accept responsibility for the earlier reset and the lives it had overwritten. Asked whether you will seek balance as a person rather than a distant god, you promise to try.

Without The Fool's power, Ti and Re cannot survive, though Titania calls their extra years a blessing and Regulus hopes they might meet again as family rather than soldiers. She asks Fa to see the wider world with Mi and Song and not make grief her only future. After they fade, Song apologizes for her failures, only for Darkon to tell her she had never disappointed him and that he is proud of the person she will become.

Darkon wishes he had met you sooner, when Aurola believed you might have become family. Seeing Suki beside the Prince's statue, he asks whether she is real or a dream and whether they can be together again. Back in Astravia, Song cradles him and begins to say goodnight to Dar, then changes her farewell: good morning, Dad.