Conquest 1983

A youth named Ilias leaves his paradise home for the wilderness, his father marking the rite of passage by gifting him a magical bow that will test his courage and resolve. In a land where small tribes are preyed upon by hostile creatures, Ilias’s journey soon places him in the path of danger and wonder. The masked leader Ocron watches from the shadows as a faceless youth with a powerful bow dares to strike, and she dispatches her troopers to hunt this newcomer down.

A band of Ocron’s marauders moves to seize the bow and capture Ilias, but they are thwarted when the outlaw Mace crashes into their camp, delivering a brutal beatdown that sends the attackers fleeing. With fierce survival instincts and a growing sense of camaraderie, Mace teams up with Ilias on a quest to purge the land of evil. During a rough training session, Mace kills a random hunter as they test the bow’s power, and together they desecrate the hunter’s camp by stealing his game, a grim reminder of the price of combat.

The danger escalates when Ocron dispatches Fado to capture Ilias and the bow. The two travelers press on, resting for the night among a tribe sheltered in cave walls, where they offer a fresh animal kill as a peace offering. There, Ilias recognizes a young girl from earlier in the journey—Ayana—and the two youths drift closer before fate intervenes. Masked attackers strike again, killing the girl and abducting Ilias, along with the bow. Mace tracks the kidnapper’s camp and wades into a bloody confrontation to rescue Ilias, restoring a flicker of hope amid the encroaching threat.

In the lair of Ocron, Fado is punished for failing to capture the bow, burned on a giant hot plate as a stark warning. Ocron calls forth the Great Zora, a spirit that inhabits the body of a white wolf. She offers herself, body and soul, to Zora if he can kill Ilias, raising the stakes of the struggle and hinting at darker forces at play.

Meanwhile, Mace grows wary, doubting their ability to challenge Ocron and choosing to escort Ilias as far as the sea. Their path runs along a landscape thick with danger, and a swarm of tiny poisoned arrows erupts from the shrubbery, injuring Ilias and beginning a rapid deterioration of his condition. The two press on to a coastal meadow where a rare plant can cure the poison; Mace sails the coastline with Ilias to reach safety, while he adventures ashore to confront undead beings and a spectral double of himself—the double is revealed to be Zora, and then it vanishes again, leaving questions in its wake.

The plant heals Ilias, but the experience leaves him disenchanted with the mission, and he begs to return home with Mace, who refuses to claim the bow as his own. No sooner do they part than a swarm of cobweb-covered monsters descends, binding Mace to a wooden cross and demanding Ilias’s whereabouts. Ilias returns in a blaze of archery to save his companion, yet Mace falls from the cross into the sea as rescue unfolds. In a remarkable turn, an army of super-intelligent dolphins gnaws at the ropes and frees him, washing him ashore while Ilias arrives with a renewed sense of purpose to stand beside him and continue the fight against Ocron.

That very night, Ilias is seized and dragged into a subterranean lair by monsters. Mace follows, engaging in a fierce chase through twisting caverns until he finds Ilias hanging upside down, his head severed. Zora returns with Ilias’s head and the bow, delivering both to Ocron as a grim payoff to the ordeal. Mace kindles a funeral pyre for Ilias, and the boy’s spirit speaks within him, guiding him to anoint himself with the ashes to inherit a power Cronos granted to Ilias—the bow becomes his to wield.

The next morning, Mace faces Ocron in her lair, and the bow shoots from her grasp into his hand. He confronts all of Ocron’s werewolves with a flurry of magical arrows, and one shot shatters her mask, revealing the ghoul beneath the human façade. Ocron dies, her corpse transforming into a wolf that gallops away into the wilderness alongside Zora. With the shadow of evil receding, Mace resolves to carry forward Ilias’s mission and continue the fight to rid the land of darkness.