Chapter 2.2

On the afternoon of the third day, we were traveling at the base of the Dragon’s Mouth Mountains, a massif of sheer faces and summits which pierced the clouds, when Rockridge Castle, a black spider on a cliff of grey shale, came into view. It had not changed since that day, many years before, when I had visited it with Sharp – a fellow student, a good friend, and my traveling companion for several summers. Sharp had liked Rockridge, but I had been anxious to leave. The whole thing is built of rock and shadow, and even now it holds the taint of the twilight world. Treacheries are at home there, slithering down the halls like cold snakes in their pits, and untruths chirp like crickets beneath the stairs. No yule-fire could ever burn away the shadows of that place.

It’s outer curtain, a half-ring curving from the face of the mountain, has two stories. The upper half belongs to the soldiers, holding their barracks, armory, and storehouses. The lower hold stables and workshops. Eight observation towers rise from the wall, and from each arches a slender bridge to the main keep, the body of the spider. The kitchen sulks behind the keep, close to the moutain wall. Gardens – kitchen, herbal, ornamental, and trysting – cling to the slope above the castle, while deep in the stone beneath the keep lies the dungeons and torture rooms, so far below that the screams of the damned will not disturb the pleasure-seekers in the garden.

The keep itself has four towers. One holds the library and the chapel, a second holds Lord Guerney’s private rooms, the third is given over to the ladies and their servants, and the fourth is for the Steward, servants, and distinguished visitors.

Lord Guerney has many castles which perch on the spine of the mountains, but Rockridge is his seat and winter home. It guards a narrow pass to the Badlands, where gangs of bandits and wizard-kin live among thorns and prey on the weak. Below the pass huddled the town of Krast, where lived the families of those in Rockridge, both those who served Lord Guerney and those shut away in his dungeons.

And that was the monstrosity that my lord wanted to ally himself with.