Another Maze

Waking of Friday, September 21, 2018

Another Maze

I had come back toward the Suma Sahma Shrine until I was close enough to trigger an autosave. Now from the shrine I wanted to go south to the Devil’s Own Highway, and thence to that big mysterious maze between the mountain and the desert....

But....

That King Of The Mountain Syndrome.... KOMS.... I just wanted to explore a bit of the northern parts of Mount Granajh first....

And we all know how that goes.

I wandered and wandered until I came all the way to Spectacle Rock, catching Koroks, Violets, and Guardians along the way.

But I did come back, and ended up on the north side of the Champion’s Gate canyon anyway, down low to the ground. And so I just decided.... to approach the maze via the Gate, as I had originally intended.

It was called the SOUTH LOMEI LABYRINTH.

Another Lomei Labyrinth. How interesting....

From ground-level it looked much like its Akkalan counterpart, just a large, very tall cubic thing of ancient stonework. The encompassing geology meanwhile was either exceedingly convenient.... or this gigantic depression had been carved out some time beforehand.

Then again the land was old. I thought of the Forgotten Temple far to the north, and the pressing collapse of the canyon all around it. Anything could have happened in the history of this South Lomei Labyrinth. At any rate the surrounding crags concealed it perfectly from any eyes below the tops of the foothills.

I circumnavigated it first. It was big, and all the while my shrine-locator was going off like crazy. I knew what had to lie within, somewhere near the center by the sound of it....

There were no sweeping Guardian Flyers here, but rather I saw, from some higher vantage points, a couple of Bokoblins patrolling the tops of the walls! Interesting....

When I’d made a round of its outside and encountered no other baddies, I came to the opening nearest the Champion’s Gate, and set foot over the threshold and inside.

A monk’s voice sounded: To you who sets foot in this place, my blessing awaits you at the labyrinth’s end.

Or some such words.

Well.

I knew how to play this game.

I started running the maze....

It wasn’t like the Akkalan island; on my map the maze looked downright symmetrical, which was why I had wondered if it would just be a big flat enclosure similar to the top of the Forgotten Temple. There was a straight shot right to the middle that I could see, but....

Well the Akkalan Lomei Labyrinth had also had a wide open central court.... with a Guardian running around in it.

The straight corridor stank of ambush, and so I plunged into the lesser tunnels to try my luck there. The avenues still twisted and turned, but I could still feel a bit of the symmetrical order in their arrangement, which was nice.

I continued running the maze, senses flared for any minor baddies or Decayed Guardians. But I never encountered anything that actively sought to hurt me.

However, around one corner, in the distance down the hallway—

“Malice,” I hissed.

I’d have to be careful in this place.

It made for some interesting climbs and a tight watch on my stamina-meter, but eventually I found the shrine—the Dila Maag Shrine—without too much of a struggle.

It was a blessing Shrine. And I remembered winning the Barbarian Helm at the Lomei Labyrinth north of the Akkalan Ancient Tech Lab.... and I wondered....

AND MY WONDERING WAS JUSTIFIED—Inside Dila Maag’s treasure chest was BARBARIAN ARMOR.

And when I put it on—OOOOHHHHHOHOHOHOHOHOHOHHH DID I LOOK AWESOME. 8-) All fur and bone and cord and a wicked right bracer and there was even vicious purple paint splashed up my midriff in thuggish, primordial shapes! XD I looked like I fell out of a Mad Max movie or something! Oh my gosh so cool....

There were at least three more areas on my map that I had yet to fill.... And I decided then and there to keep my eyes open for any more mazes that might show up once I hit those towers....!