Hundreds of miles beyond the southern border, the fractured crags gave way to an unbroken sea of mist-veiled peaks.
Here, the mountains did not stand as solitary sentinels, but stretched across the horizon like ancient, sleeping dragons half-buried beneath pale autumn clouds. Deep valleys wound between the sheer granite cliffs, drowned in perpetual shadow where the freezing wind whistled through the needles of gnarled black pines. No mortal roads dared carve through these unforgiving heights; only the dry cries of mountain hawks pierced the cold silence, circling high above the jagged gorges where ice clung to the stone year-round.
Rising where three precipitous ridges converged, a colossal promontory of pale grey rock jutted out over the abyss like the prow of a leviathan ship.
Carved directly into that monolithic cliff face sat the stronghold of the Righteous Alliance Regional Division.
