concept
Obissian Castle
Also called The Black Castle, or Blightstone Castle
First appears in Chapter 2
You are ahead of your reading. This entry first appears in Chapter 2; nothing below is hidden from you, but it may say more than you have met.
OBISSIAN CASTLE Seat of the crown. The blackest thing in Kraeta.
Type: Fortress and royal residence Location: The hill above Blackswain Known for: Its walls
Obissian Castle stands on the hill over Blackswain, and on a clear day it can be seen from a long way off as a hole cut in the sky. It is built of black volcanic glass, and not the common kind. Stoneworkers grade the material by its darkness: the cloudy, smoke-colored stone is cheap, the true black is worth more, and the deepest black, the kind that swallows a lamp held up against it, is rare enough that most masons will handle a piece only once or twice in a lifetime.
The castle is made almost entirely of it.
No record survives of who quarried it, where a seam that size was found, or how it was raised. The royal line has lived inside it for as long as there has been a royal line. People in the town below say the castle folk wear better than the rest of Kraeta. They stay strong longer. They keep their color. The usual explanation is the obvious one: those on the hill eat first.
This goes past where you have read. Reveal anyway.
Beyond
BEHIND THE VEIL
The black stone is older than Kraeta. At the creation, fire rose from the core of the world, the place called God’s Heart, and as it cooled it drank in the raw magic that filled the young air. Every piece took in as much as it could hold and then stopped. The darkness of a stone is the measure of what is packed inside it, and the deepest black holds the most.
Magic behaves like water. A single drop on a dry surface pulls itself tight and holds its shape. Put it near something already wet and it reaches, stretches, and goes. Life force does the same. Left alone, it stays in the living thing that holds it. Shown a path to more of itself, it leaves.
Raw, the black stone admits no light. But it can be worked. Ground and polished the way a lens or a gem is cut, its faces can be made to open. The obelisk is black stone cut this way. Sunlight passes through it and comes out the other side as the rainbows that arc over Kraeta every day, and each rainbow is a damp line drawn across a dry world. The life in the land, the crops, the animals, and the people reaches toward it, a little every day, and does not come back.
Obissian Castle is a mountain of the highest grade in existence, and its walls were left uncut. The stone is full and can take in nothing more, but the magic inside it still calls to its own kind. Anyone living within those walls is a drop beside a lake. Their life force clings toward the stone and the stone cannot drink it, so it simply stays where it is, and the thin pull of the rainbows slides past them. This is why the king, Aris, and Eri have never withered the way the people below them have. None of them know it. They have lived their whole lives inside the one shelter in the kingdom and taken it for ordinary walls.