Location:Mid Ring, Vel'thari Containment — fortress ruins
Date/Time:4–5 Frostforge, 9941 AZI — Days 4–5 of the Harrowing
Realm:Lower Realm, Doha
The walls came out of the gray like a jaw closing.
Stone. Dark, dense, cut in blocks taller than Jayde and fitted without mortar, the joints so tight she couldn't have slid a knife blade between them. The fortress rose from the broken ground of the Mid Ring in tiers, stepped back against a ridge of natural basalt, its lower courses buried in the corruption-fed soil and its upper works standing open to the dim-cycle light. Broken in places. Collapsed in others. But standing. After however many centuries the basin had been trying to eat it, standing.
Jayde stopped at the perimeter and let her eyes do the work before her feet followed.
