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The road ends at the ruins of a castle in greater disrepair than even the shattered paving stones that once provided a smooth journey from Alfheim to this very keep.
You need no map to recognize this place. Though only the bones remain, you still remember the shape of the structure that once stood here from its depictions within the Gymnasium's history books. Once there stood a grand and impregnable fortress of stone as black as midnight, riveted with great pitons of adamantine each as long as a tree is tall. Nine great towers stabbed into the earth like swords forged for giants, their pommel stones shaped like the bulbs of stained-glass flowers gilded in brass. They each played home to one of the Nine Dragon Kings, whom together held dominion over the Humes who lived upon the lands facing the Sun Above.
Now all that remains of their once mighty works is detritus and ash. Fangs of midnight black stone still penetrate the mountain side, melding with the sediment after centuries of disuse. Of the nine towers, only three of them still rise beyond a few scant meters, and even then the bulk of their body has wilted and fallen into dust from time and erosion. Brass, glass, and adamantine alike has been taken from this once hallowed hall, to be reforged and reblown into new works of art and war.
The gardens of the grand courtyard has become overgrown, the flowers blooming with untamed beauty - dirty, chaotic, and yet no less proud in their flashes of bright color despite their lack of tender. The vines which bear them have come to cover the remains of each tower, lending them an air of melancholic beauty that they never could have had when they still stood.
Beauty, for even after so many centuries, the flowers still carry with them the beauty they were bred for.
Melancholy, for they accentuate what has been lost to the endless corrosion of time, and how far the Humes have fallen since the loss of the Dragon Kings during the Third Blight.
Walking through the ruins, you cannot help but feel that the Humes were hit hardest by that final Blight. As the Children withstood the loss of twenty elvenhomes and the Stouts withstood the loss of a hundred mountain holds, the Humes could have withstood the loss of the tribes in the north and the kingdoms of the south. When they lost the Dragon Kings in their mad attempt to strike at the heart of the Blight, they lost the mortar holding together their society. Without those men, no single group of Humes had the strength to bring the others to heel, and an empire that once spanned the surface of the world crumbled into pieces.
Your hands idly trace the vines that have grown over the fallen slabs of blackstone, toppled megaliths that are each still as tall as you despite having toppled to their side. You can feel the history of this place flowing through the vines, for even if the Humes who once lived here are long gone, the flowers remember. They remember, and those memories have power you do not wish to waste.
