The Kingdom of Zephyria sat in the shadow of Cardella geographically and in the shadow of its own geological inheritance in every other sense, built across the mouth of the oldest and largest dungeon in the known world.
A structure so vast that its lower floors stopped behaving like floors at all by the 70th floor and started behaving like separate dimensions, with open skies and weather systems and terrain that had no logical relationship to the rock several kilometers above it.
Both Zephyria and Cardella had entrances to that dungeon, and they alone shared that access to it, which had made them neighbors in a geographical sense and allies in the political sense for as long as either nation had maintained records of being either of those things.
