Welcome to the Ruins

My Findings

How I Found This Place The Tower The Letter in the Box Living Quarters 1 Living Quarters 2

Hello, fellow traveller.

Welcome to the ruins. This is a place that I found on my travels a while back, and it is a place I have found myself pulled back to time and time again. The place is old. How old, I don't know. There are the remains of towers, walls, and large buildings. Most things are still standing, but the walls are crumbling and have collapsed on the eastern side, most of the towers are just piles of rubble surrounding the remains of the tower bases, sticking up like broken tusks. Weeds poke up through gaps between cobblestones and sprout in the dust of rubble. The outside on its own is interesting enough, but the inside is where the truly fascinating lies. This place may be dead, but I think something of it deserves to survive. I don't know if anybody else will be struck by all this, but I've decided to share my findings in case there someone out there is struck by them, too, or can help me figure out what it all means. As a disclaimer, progress will be slow. Although I explore as often as I can, it takes time to trek to the ruins and care when trying to explore. Not all of this place is structurally sound or trusted to be otherwise safe. I don't want to get hurt, nor do I want to cause any damage to the ruins or its artifacts. With all that out of the way, my main goals for this project are as follows:
  • Figure out what exactly this place is
  • Figure out what happened here
  • Find someone else who cares
    • Come, let's explore this together.

    Author's Journal

    {1/12/2024} Settling In Living Quarters 1 is up. Yeah, I know it’s been a little while. I’ve been slowly settling into this town and its rhythms. I’ve got an apartment and a job at the nearby hospital. I tell you, keeping up a certification in basic medical spells is incredibly helpful. Half of what I do is just simple mild pain relief and antiseptic charms, and the other half is cleaning up after patients and bringing them food and whatever talis or the like that the professionals ordered for them. It’s been keeping me busy along with trying to get settled in. I haven’t been able to go visit the ruins much lately, but I’ve been spending some of my spare time in the library trying to find some info on some of the words used in the letter. I don’t know what kid didn’t grow up playing swordcery with sticks, but I don’t have many guesses as to what “Impetoris” could be, other than maybe being associated with swordcery. No findings yet. Anyway, I’ve been trying to probe to see what the townspeople know about the ruins in the woods. I haven’t mentioned the ruins directly, and neither have they, but I’ve been able to find out a bit from the librarian and a little book about town history she guided me to. The book looks to have been written by hand no more than a few years ago, its pages still smooth and crisp. It says that there used to be a garrison stationed here a long time ago—hundreds of years, even—back when this place sat right on the eastern border of the Lormithian Empire. A little fortress was built not far from here for defense. The book rambled on a bit about a century of intermittent war and how the border kept shifting back and forth, but eventually described how the empire wound up expanding far past this valley. As war stopped ravaging the area time and time again, the town grew and began to mine from the nearby mountain. There was very little information about the garrison afterwards, just a single sentence reading, “Despite the garrison no longer being stationed here, the mining and smithing industries continued to thrive due to outside demand.” That’s it. What doesn’t make sense to me, though, is that the border moved over 150 years ago. How would there still be identifiable paper, or more modern clothing in the bedrooms? Why would a fortress hold individual rooms for its troops rather than open barracks? While sure, maybe I’ve found the ruins of the old fortress, evidence points to the place having continued to be used much more recently. I’m not sure what to make of it.

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