The Defence of Pinewood

What makes Meliora special, Aurelius explains, are its Rifts: openings into strange dimensions through which raw magic pours into the world. Only a true wizard can summon that energy unaided, but many Meliorans have learned to work it into enchanted objects. Pinewood, a small town of blacksmiths and enchanters at the edge of ancient ruins, forges the finest of them, and so it is the first target of the goblins.

The goblins have coveted Melioran weapons for ages, and paying a fair price has never appealed to them. Now an army of orcs has been smuggled into the realm. The stranger arrives to find Pinewood strangely lifeless beneath crystal-powered airships, whose drills punch into the ground and release yet more brutes.

In the ruins above the town the stranger shatters a vast, warped crystal that threatened to corrupt the Pinewood Rift, and with it the strange silence over the village lifts. Holding the ruin gates against wave after wave, the stranger learns to tame lightning and to raise a shield. Once a dragon passes overhead, settles on a tower and flies away, a sight Aurelius sincerely hopes never to see again.

The brutes, it turns out, came from below. Under the ruins, which Aurelius likes to think were once a wizard king's palace abandoned when the Rift opened, lie catacombs said to hide an unmarked but ornate tomb. At the bottom a chanting sorcerer awaits, and a revenant rises to fight for him.

The sorcerer vanishes, leaving Aurelius badly shaken: the face he glimpsed looked like his own desiccated corpse. Beyond the ruins, in a castle cursed and abandoned for centuries and scarred by strange Realm Shifts, the stranger finds the villain's laboratory, the artifact causing the anomalies and a map with the Healand Mines marked upon it.

"Powerful people rarely rest in peace." — Aurelius