Shaw could feel her resolve weakening, the cheers of encouragement from her one-time supporters having long since receded into the ashes of the past. She had been trapped in the Lands Between for much too long, the memories of her former life reduced to occasional flashes. If she was going to see this through to the end, she would have to do it on her own.
To be honest, Shaw was a bit at loss at what to do next. Liurnia covered a much larger area than either Limgrave or the Weeping Peninsula. Seemingly endless, aimless exploration was not necessarily her forte. She needed some guidance, and there was none to be found.
Of course she could just follow the wisps of light emanating from the various sites of grace, but these could just as easily lead her to certain doom. Experience had taught her that nothing was to be fully trusted here.
So she chose the easy way for now; the uncovered map showing at least two evergaols, she aimed for those. By their design, these encounters were good practice; if she failed, she would never be more than a few steps away from recovering her lost runes and trying again. Low risk, high reward. With this in mind, she cleared the Malefactor’s Evergaol and the Cuckoo’s Evergaol. Neither proving much of a challenge.
Having exhausted the available evergaols, she consulted her map for something new and noticed an icon for the Finger Reader Crone; here was someone (or something) she had not encountered yet. Shaw had to fight her way past multiple soldiers and another flaming skull car, but she managed to clear the surrounding of the South Raya Gate and speak to the crone.
This charming, eyeless, multi-limbed lady was prone on a table at the edge of a crumbling bridge. How she got there is quite a mystery, but she was definitely obsessed with fingers, like creepily obsessed.
While humorous and somewhat creepy, the encounter did not yield any immediately actionable information, so Shaw said her farewells and headed for a shiny blue gate nearby. The entrance was locked by some powerful spell. Fortunately, a corpse lying at her feet conveniently held a map to the location of the key that would presumably unlock this gate.
While Shaw’s sense of direction was not known to be all that great, and her ability to read maps even less impressive, she quickly ascertained that the indicated location was not far, and against all odds she was actually correct! Unfortunately, the key was guarded by a sleeping dragon. Fortunately, in the Lands Between, horses are somehow faster than flying dragons, and also dragons seem to have short attention spans, giving up chase once their prey is only a few yards away.
Key in hand, Shaw went back and walked through the gate of Raya Lucaria Academy, probably.
