Castrum, they called it – the Stone Keep. Not built, not truly. It… coalesced. From the heart of the Obsidian Mire, a place of perpetual twilight and unsettling silence. The locals, the Mirefolk, whispered of it being a wound in the earth, a place where the veil between realities thinned. They claimed it predated even the oldest of their clans, a silent witness to the rise and fall of forgotten empires. It wasn’t a fortress in the traditional sense; more a resonance, a point of heightened awareness. The stone itself seemed to absorb and refract the ambient energy, creating an unsettling distortion of time and space.
“The air grew thick with static. A metallic tang filled my mouth. Then, he was there – Silas Thorne, cartographer and foolhardy adventurer. He claimed to seek knowledge, to chart the unchartable. But I saw the hunger in his eyes, the desperate need to *understand*. He spent weeks within the Keep, scribbling in his journals, his demeanor growing progressively stranger. The Mirefolk warned him, of course. They spoke of ‘echoes’ and ‘lost directions’. He dismissed them as superstition. Then, he vanished. Not through the doors of the Keep, but simply… ceased to be. His journal, recovered months later, was filled with nonsensical diagrams and feverish accounts of ‘shifting constellations’.
“The silence… it pressed in on me. Not a quiet silence, but an active one. It felt like the Keep was *listening*. I was attempting to repair a tapestry – an ancient one, depicting the rise of the first Mirefolk clan. As I worked, the threads began to unravel, not through my touch, but… spontaneously. The images shifted, distorted. Faces emerged from the fabric, faces of those who had been lost within the Keep. A woman, weeping. A warrior, frozen in a silent scream. The Weaver’s Lament, they call it now – a reminder of the Keep’s insidious influence.”
Many have sought knowledge within Castrum. Few have returned. Some claim to have glimpsed the future, others the past. But the Keep doesn’t offer answers; it offers reflections. Reflections of your own desires, your own fears. It amplifies, it twists. Be wary of the echoes. They are not your own.