Caer Vallen

The shattered seat of the Vallen Imperium under the northern Rampart — the human empire's holy heart, and the place where the god was drawn down and cracked. Publicly, the great works here 'failed.' In truth this is where the Sundering was done to Vallen, not suffered by him, and the ground has not forgiven it.

A field of leaning columns under the Rampart, roofless now, where the wind moves through halls that were meant to hold a god at their center forever. This was the seat: the place the Imperium raised over the strongest presence of the Wright in all the Vale, so that his making and his law would sit at the empire's heart and hold the march. It held, until the Vyr came to it. What lies under the throne-floor is not architecture. It is the wreck of an engine — a great graduated bore sunk straight down through the god's own seat, its rings of imperial bronze warped outward as if something vast had been pulled up through them and had fought the whole way. This is the Drawing-Down. The Vyr, with Athra's art, built the works here to draw on Vallen's power — to lift their sky-cities, to fuel a golden age — and they drew too hard, and the god cracked, and the crack ran out through every oath sworn in his name and became the Sundering. They did not mean to kill him. They cannot say they did. So the story became that the great works 'failed,' which is true the way a felled man has 'fallen.' You can stand in the sundered court and see it plainly if you know how to look: the columns nearest the bore are not toppled outward by any quake — they lean IN, toward the hole, drawn down after him. House Vandahl claims the ruin by blood and will not sleep in it. The Temple claims it by right and holds no rite here. The tribes claim it by silence, which is the only claim the place answers. It was from this floor, in the broken hour, that the largest solid piece of the Wright was carried out wrapped in a dead man's coat — the shard that now lies walled in the eastern barrow. The ruin and the relic are halves of one wound. The wonder is not that no one will spend a night inside the walls. The wonder is that anyone, four centuries on, still comes back to dig.