The Cinder Fortress
A border furnace guarding Brynvale’s most profitable road and its most dangerous secret.
The fortress occupies the southeastern approaches to Brynvale, where highland roads meet the routes toward Pinewood and Fallowerness. Its black walls come from furnace slag, poured in the years when heat was believed inexhaustible. Water channels run under the gate to prevent the road from freezing.
Oren Halvek calls the buried workings a public utility. Tarin Halvek has found maintenance marks proving that one chamber is still drawing from a source absent from every ledger. The Cinder Breach exposed a child's shoe fused into the oldest layer of slag. No one has agreed who should be allowed to name the child.
A failed chamber exposed a child’s shoe fused into the oldest furnace slag.
A highland principality guarding the passes and the engines that keep them open.
A solitary eastern storehouse where the sea’s approach is measured on the walls.
The northernmost promise in the eastern rescue network.
A mountain fortress whose red stone conceals a hospice rather than an army.
A root-bound chamber at the heart of Alceria’s disputed history.