Not long after leaving that small patch of wetland, a group of monks with white candles atop their heads forced the party to take a long detour before continuing onward. Both Shade and Sister Belen could sense that the Flame they sought was drawing nearer. Their destination should have been just ahead.
Looking into the depths of the White Fog, Shade saw no grand buildings or vast open spaces beyond the densely packed gravestones. This left him, who had been expecting a "special graveyard," rather puzzled.
What the group ultimately found was an obsidian stone pillar standing in the wasteland.
The pillar was about as thick as Shade's waist and two meters tall. Calling it a stone pillar was not entirely accurate, however. On closer inspection, it was clearly assembled from obsidian triangular pyramids, with faint gray runes drifting across their outward-facing surfaces.
Shade took the Compass and circled the obsidian pillar twice before confirming that they had not come to the wrong place. Something like this was certainly strange amid all these gravestones, but it did not look like a "mausoleum" or a "cemetery."
"So what is this?"
Shade asked the three Witches. Sister Belen stood where she was with her lantern, gently shaking her head, while the blonde Miss Violet examined the runes on the obsidian pillar with great interest.
"These are runes in the style of the Ancient Giant Kingdom era. Pure-blooded Titan Giants vanished after the end of the First Epoch. The giants who inherited their bloodline enjoyed a period of glory in the middle of the following Second Epoch, but were soon destroyed by the Elven Empire of the pointy-eared folk.
"There are very few surviving records of the Giant Kingdom from the Second Epoch. If we could take this thing out, the professors of