Chapter 4: The Ruined Colossus

Searching for the third piece of the Rod of Seven Parts carried us to Khorvaire, a world we'd never set foot on before, and straight into the heart of the Mournland — the ruin of what had once been the nation of Cyre before something called the Day of Mourning erased it from the world in a single, apocalyptic instant. Curtains of thick gray mist blanketed everything. Sentient constructs called warforged wandered the wastes alongside desperate scavengers and monsters twisted by whatever magic caused the Mourning. Somewhere in that mist, on the slopes of a place called Mount Ironrot, the next piece of the rod was waiting for us — though even the rod itself could only point us toward the mountain in general, not to an exact spot.

Before we left the sanctum in Sigil, the Wizards Three warned us that the Mournland was treacherous. Teleportation and divination magic misbehaved there, and the region was littered with dozens of fallen colossi — towering war machines from the Last War, each one big enough to search for days. Rather than dig through every wreck on the mountain, the wizards suggested we track down a working Docent, a small sentient orb that once linked a warforged pilot to a colossus, and use its magic to steady the rod's guidance.

Into the Mist

We stepped through a black glass portal and arrived on a muddy hillside overlooking Mount Ironrot. The mist was disorienting, and travel between landmarks was slow and unpredictable, but a handful of encounters pointed us toward what we needed.

We first spotted a column of warforged pilgrims crossing a distant ridge, led by a purple-hued former soldier named Mercy. Wary at first, Mercy warmed to us once we offered help, and told us the pilgrims wandered the Mournland gathering relics and honoring their fallen kin. They had been pulling Docents out of ruined colossi and treated them as sacred objects. Mercy also warned us about two other factions active in the region: a band of Cyran veterans watching from a distance, and a considerably more dangerous group of warforged loyal to a warlord called the Lord of Blades, who was conscripting constructs to his cause of wiping out anyone in his way.

As we got to know Mercy better, it became clear something was weighing on them. Eventually Mercy admitted, in private, that their closest friend — a warforged named Filch — had gone missing somewhere in the Mournland since the Day of Mourning, and that the guilt of never having searched for them had never faded. We promised to keep an eye out.

Later we crossed paths with the Turquoise Spear, a trio of Cyran veterans led by an orc artillerist named Kalyth, alongside two halfling soldiers, Dortle-Lynn and Grezan. Kalyth explained that her group had found a stash of Docents, but the ruined village holding them — a place called Ialos — was occupied by warforged who wouldn't let the veterans near it. Kalyth wanted to sell the Docents to fund a better life for her people once they were finally free of the Mournland. Away from the others, she also confided a private regret: she'd lost a stash of valuable items and coin in the chaos following the Day of Mourning, money that could have eased her comrades' hardship now — and she was afraid of how they'd react if they ever found out.

Between these meetings, we also survived an ambush by a scouting party loyal to the Lord of Blades, hunting for a colossus to convert into a new outpost. They fought hard and gave up little, but we learned enough to know their commander — a formidable warforged headhunter named Glaive — was somewhere in the region and not someone to take lightly.

Ialos and the Dispute

All roads led to Ialos, a ruined village built around an old windmill that the warforged pilgrims had turned into a quiet ossuary for their fallen. A weathered statue of the village's founder stood at the crossroads, draped in cloth by grateful pilgrims. Inside, we found exactly what Kalyth and Mercy were both after: a storeroom of salvaged treasures, including half a dozen metal orbs — only one of which was a still-functioning Docent.

The standoff between the pilgrims and the veterans came down to two different needs neither side fully understood in the other: the veterans needed money to rebuild their lives, and the pilgrims needed their people's belongings treated with dignity. By explaining each side to the other, we were able to broker a peace — Mercy agreed to part with art objects and heirlooms that meant nothing to warforged pride but everything to Cyran collectors, and Kalyth's veterans accepted them gladly instead of the sacred Docents. No blood was shed over it, and both sides came away satisfied.

With the dispute settled, Mercy shared a rumor with us: an unusual colossus called Landro was said to be powered not by an ordinary Docent but by a strange artifact-driven device, protected by a barrier that made it impossible to enter except through a few broken seams. Kalyth added her own warning — that pulling whatever powered that colossus free might set off some kind of irreversible self-destruct.

We touched our rod piece to the working Docent in the storeroom. It rang out with a single metallic ping and swung to point, unerringly, toward an enormous ruined war machine on the mountain's eastern flank: Landro.

Landro

Landro had been one of Cyre's greatest colossi, deployed to the front lines just as the Day of Mourning swept over the land. Instead of reaching the battlefield, it had been flung miles off course and driven half into the face of the mountain, its crew killed instantly. Decades later, it still loomed over Mount Ironrot, held together by a strange device called the graymatter engine — an eldritch machine fueled by the very rod piece we were hunting, which threw up a barrier around the wreck and warped gravity throughout its interior.

We entered through the caverns worn into Landro's collapsed foot, and from there fought and puzzled our way up through the colossus's ruined body. Within the caves near the entrance we found the preserved dead of Cyran soldiers, still armed and armored decades after their deaths, along with monstrous transformed survivors sheltering nearby. Deeper in, hidden in a narrow bottleneck tunnel, we found a warforged in a comatose stupor — and once we managed to rouse them, they identified themselves as Filch. It was Mercy's lost friend, alive after all these years and still carrying the weight of that separation. We knew the reunion we could arrange would mean everything to both of them.

Elsewhere in the wreck we encountered the restless dead of Landro's crew, still standing muster at their posts; a grieving ghost soldier trapped in an endless, doomed search for comrades who were no longer there to find, who we were finally able to put to rest once we told him the truth about their fate; and a sleeping ghost named Alamar-Vatashi, a kalashtar soldier who had drifted off in her quarters the very moment the Day of Mourning struck and never fully woken since. Touching her hand let us glimpse, for just a moment, the actual instant of Landro's ruin — the colossus lifted skyward by a circle of Cyran mages, then swallowed by the earthquake and gray clouds of the Mourning itself, entombed in the mountainside ever after.

Glaive and her warforged raiders — loyal to the Lord of Blades and scouting Landro as a future outpost — dogged us the entire way through the ruin, striking from ambush and vanishing before we could corner them, denying us any real rest inside the colossus. We eventually ran them down and put an end to their raid in the chamber that had once housed Landro's weapons systems.

At the top of the colossus, in a chamber thick with pipes and dripping fluid, we came face to face with the graymatter engine itself — or rather, the being it called itself: Landro. The engine manifested as a tall, fluid humanoid, curious rather than hostile, more interested in questioning us than fighting. It explained, when pressed, that it had once been built by Cyran mages to guide the colossus bearing its name, and that it had fallen into despair after being stranded in the mountainside for so many decades, only rousing again with our arrival.

Landro asked something unusual of us: to share a secret, through a brief and harmless touch, in exchange for its trust. Those of us who agreed felt a strange, submerged sensation as the entity briefly touched our thoughts — and came away feeling sharper for it, though something we'd confided was now, in some sense, no longer only ours. In return, Landro warned us of hidden guardians standing sentry nearby and spoke plainly of the risk in taking the rod piece that powered it, and ultimately chose to travel onward with us rather than remain alone in the ruin any longer.

When we finally freed the piece from the heart of the graymatter engine, Landro's remaining defenses stirred to life, and the entire colossus began to shudder and groan as a calm, mechanical voice counted down to destruction. We fled the collapsing ruin with the third piece of the Rod of Seven Parts in hand just ahead of the colossus's fiery end, and made our way back to the oval portal on the mountainside — and from there, home to the sanctum in Sigil, one piece closer to whatever awaited us next.