A sprawling, misty fantasy castle with numerous spires and towers, featuring faded pastel roofs, perched on a rocky promontory at sunrise.

**The Distant Citadel of Aethelgard:** A sprawling castle complex perched on a rocky promontory visible for leagues, its tall, slender towers capped with roofs of faded pastel—powder blue, soft rose, pale mint—that once earned it the name “The Jewel of the Valley.” Now those colors are muted by distance and memory, the walls below them grey and uninviting. Within its gates lie manicured gardens gone wild from neglect, a great hall hung with the banners of noble houses, and the royal apartments where a six-year-old prince once slept beneath embroidered linens. The citadel houses the throne room where a brother’s decree was signed, the guards’ barracks where Kaelen once quartered, and the narrow servant’s passage through which a knight carried a sleeping boy and never looked back. It shrinks on the horizon with every league, a pastel smudge against the hills, a place that is no longer home. Ver mais