Ink and watercolour sketch of a ruined shrine at night: a faceless robed statue holding two stone orbs above candles, broken pillars, torn red banners and a violet crystal spire in the distance.

Location

The Ruins of Pinewood

Famous yet little-understood ruins beside Pinewood: a Rift-lit tower, deep catacombs and a castle cursed and abandoned for centuries.

  • Before the Invasion
  • The Goblin Invasion

Description

The ruins beside Pinewood are famous, yet astonishingly little is known about them. A Rift burns in one of the remaining towers. Beneath lie catacombs where an unmarked but ornate tomb was said to rest, and beyond them stands a great castle, cursed and abandoned for centuries, its architecture remarkably well preserved. No one had dared explore it in centuries.

Historical context

Aurelius's favourite theory held that the ruins were a wizard king's palace, abandoned after the Rift opened, and that the tomb might hold that legendary wizard. During the goblin invasion the brutes came up through the catacombs, a sorcerer raised a revenant in the burial chamber, and the castle became the villain's hideout. After the revenant fell, stable pockets of extradimensional displacement, the Realm Shifts, bloomed in the castle gardens until the stranger destroyed the artifact behind them.