The Halls of Colossus

Corinth, Elsweyr

In the city of Corinth in Elsweyr, Talin travels to the local Mages Guild seeking information on the Halls of Colossus. There, Loremaster Turamane ap’ Kolthis tells him of a recent attack upon the guild by priests from the Temple of Agamanus. During the attack, a tablet bearing the location of the Halls of Colossus was stolen. In exchange for recovering the tablet, Turamane will shed light on the location of the lost halls which contain the fourth piece of the Staff of Chaos. Our next step is clear.

The Temple of Agamanus

The temple is standard dungeon fare, with little distinguishing features on the first few floors other than an uncommonly high number of hellhound enemies as well as a small maze on the second floor which gives you a hint to “bear left, stay right.”

The third floor of the dungeon where the tablet resides sports some flooding and involves a lot of swimming through passages beneath walls. It is here we encounter a common bug in this dungeon that can be very frustrating. To get to the area holding the tablet, you need to swim beneath a wall in the southwest corner. However, a floating ghost enemy typically occupies the space directly above where you need to swim, blocking the way through.

I try several solutions, going invisible, swimming in through different angles, exiting and re-entering the dungeon as well as saving/loading in different locations. Nothing works. With a stroke of luck, while scrolling through my inventory and experimenting with my unidentified items, I discover a longsword enchanted with Passwall, an incredibly useful spell that lets you delete walls. Making a note to purchase the spell after leaving the dungeon, I levitate over to the wall where I was blocked earlier and tunnel my way through, taking vengeance on the annoying ghost once I’m through.

Once through, we find the tablet in a matter of minutes, return it to Turamane, and make our way to our main target.

The Halls of Colossus

I mentioned in a previous post that the Fortress of Ice is where the combat difficulty of Arena begins to spike. The Halls of Colossus is where the navigational difficulty of the game begins to increase. Straight ahead of the entrance, we discover a body.

As the note suggests, to get through this dungeon, we’re going to need to find six keys to open six corresponding doors on the second floor. It is possible to trivialize this process by deleting certain walls with the Passwall spell, but I feel like that is against the spirit of the game so we’ll do this properly. Thorough exploration is required. From the corpse with the note, I begin to explore with the right wall technique, which involves following the right wall of the dungeon, opening and traversing any doors in the process (I skip canals and pits on my first pass). The idea is to follow this process until you either reach your destination or get back to where you started, in which case you’d repeat the process with the left wall. From there you can go back through, following rivers/tunnels and exploring areas you may have missed. I don’t follow this rule religiously, but it’s a helpful starting point for intensive exploration and will continue to come in handy as we make our way through Arena and especially the labyrinthine Daggerfall.

After exploring a little bit, we find some steps leading down to the lower level and take a gander.

At the bottom of a grand stair, Talin’s footsteps kick up dust as he strides into a massive hall, the titanic pillars on either side stretching into the blackness above. Even the radiance of his light spell fails to reveal the full scope of the monolithic architecture around him, the echoes of footfalls and the clink of mail reverberating into the blackness abound.

His eyes catch glimmers of movement in the flickering shadows at the border of his magical light. Raising his sword and shield, he takes a battle-ready stance. A soft squeaking chitter begins to tickle his eardrums, slowly rising in volume. From the oppressive gloom, five tiny pairs of red eyes take shape, ten, dozens, hundreds…

With the sudden force of a shattered dam, all around him spills a horde of hungry rats, clamoring over each other for the first bite of the meal that had wandered into their midst. He hacks through flesh and bone with desperate urgency, but there are too many, the nibbling of verminous teeth biting into the heels of his leather boots, the pattering of small, clawed feet climbing up his legs and back.

He wastes no more time. Dropping his weapons, he unleashes twin gouts of flames from his hands of such intensity that the front line of rats are instantly burned to ash, the ones clinging to his body releasing their hold in retreat from the sudden scalding heat. Twisting in a circle, the spellsword holds back the tide in a tornado of immolation. Only when the last of the creatures have retreated out of eyesight does he release the spell, summoning a tempest wind in its place to clear away the flames and the choking scent of scorched flesh and burnt ash.

The second floor of the dungeon is a large grand hall with rows of pillars on either side and sports many rats throughout the space. At the far end is a corridor containing a series of locked doors which we need keys for, and the north and south walls each have three doors leading to different areas of the dungeon, some of which are partitioned off from the main thoroughfare, needing to be accessed from this central hall.

Alternating between the two levels as necessary, Talin begins to gather the keys. This dungeon plays host to a great many secret doors, so judicious map checking is advisable, revealing the red square characteristic of doors on what appear to be walls in game. One area features a statue of a dragon surrounded by water, inscribed with the name “Theodorus,” which I note down for later.

Once all the keys are assembled, we unlock the way to the third and final floor of the dungeon where a pair of doors locked with riddles wait for us. The first is relatively simple.

Light work, it’s our boy Theodorus. The second riddle is a little more challenging.

This riddle appears impossible, as nothing in the game tells us what the ages of the two sphinxes in question are. Rest assured, it is possible, but involves a rather large leap in logic. But first, a disclosure. The only reason I know how to do this is remembering it from my last run of Arena years ago, where I solved the riddle by typing, 1, 2, 3… until I reached the correct answer, and then looking up the methodology after. What you are supposed to do is translate each letter to its numeric value (A is one, B is two, etc.) and then add the sums. As such, Agamanus would be ninety, and Igon forty-five (but left this world twenty-six years ago at the age of nineteen). With these numbers we can set up an equation leading us to the answer 108. Either people of today are much less adept at riddles than we used to be or people in the 90s were cheating this nonsense too.

With that out of the way, the final room of the dungeon lies open to us. This room features many floating platforms and lots of homunculi, impish dragon-like creatures which have magic attacks. After clearing away a few of these beasties, we secure the next piece of the staff.

The session closes with another visit from the ever-helpful Ria Silmane. The next piece of the staff lies in the Crystal Tower. She tells us “It was said that the southern tip of the Dragon’s Teeth, which stretches from the ice-covered mounts of High Rock to the wooded forests of Valenwood, could be seen on the horizon from the top parapet of the Tower. This would lead me to believe it is not far south of the majestic mountain range.” With that description, only one place seems likely, Summurset Isle, home of the High Elves. Join Talin next week as he sets sail for the next leg of his quest.