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The place had a peculiar layout to it, no doubt due to the work of many different architects over many different eras, but its most prominent feature had to be the labyrinthine walls that surrounded the inner keep. The outer walls were normal enough, but the inner ones were full of branching paths, dead ends, booby traps, and bored-looking guardsmen standing atop crenellated turrets.

Whatever medieval lord had commissioned this horrific maze must have been quite the paranoid bastard. Perhaps that was why this stronghold had come to be called the Rat’s Nest.

Not a very flattering name for a place that boasted such impressive structures. True, it wasn’t the most... aesthetically pleasing castle Loren had ever seen, what with its mismatched stones and bricks and woods and lamps. But that still struck him as a bit unfair to the builders. He doubted any of them would’ve chosen such a name.

Thankfully, the maze was much easier to navigate when you had keys to the multitude of doors and gates that went straight down the center of it. And at the moment, most of the gates were up, probably because the guardsmen or perhaps one of the head honchos around here hated having to constantly wait for them to be raised and lowered whenever coming or going from the keep.

If Loren shouted for the guards to lower those gates, he wondered if they would even listen to him. He hoped he wasn’t going to find out.

He made for the outer walls, taking the first staircase that he could find to the top.

From up here, the view was certainly something.

The Rat’s Nest was a fortress within the nation of Corrico. And Corrico was currently at war with Melmoore. Not more than three months ago, Corrico and Ostra had both declared war by invading Melmoore, but here and now, it was the Melmoorian forces that Loren could see all the way out there on the horizon, sprawled across a number of tented encampments.

Was that three separate battalions? No, four. A full brigade, most likely, commanded by a brigadier general. If they were marching, at this distance, it would likely be two full days before they made it here, but to Loren’s eyes, there was not enough movement for that to be the case.

Yet.

None of this was news, of course. They’d known the circumstances of this place when choosing to come here, and from the sound of what Kalikos had just been rambling about, perhaps those circumstances were precisely why Caster had picked this place.