It was through the crack to the East where the wall of the battlements
in disrepair had opened that the light of the cold pale sun unfurled
into the courtyard signing a new bleak dawn.  The fortress, an archaic
monolith to the hubris of stonecraft, laid alone, all but abandoned,
the town surrounding thinning to a scant ring of houses, farms, and the few
artisans who, through disease or fate, remained attached to the
decaying ruins. The castle was built of a black stone from which no
light, once fallen, ever lept out again, a material whose art of
shaping was lost in by-gone ages when such a vast structure was the
pinnacle of military power. Now, rotting, its falling stones colored
with a sickly green moss which is the only thing that would
touch it, held a ghost troupe of guards, skeletons of men, speaking
rarely even to each other.  The castle gate was flown solely as a great
event, to let another wagon of subsistence through, burdened with the
trappings of the living.

The inner keep was not opened at all and even in the noonday sun it
stood black, an unlit spire, casting its long narrow shadow as its
only speech. A single guard was stationed inside, and it was known he
was not dead for the eyeslit opened occassionally, with a thin rusty
creak that could only be heard for the oppressive silence that
deadened the yard and, for a moment, a grey hole therein could be seen. Once,
per happenstance, a passer-by coincided with the drawing of the slit
and saw, before they spied him back, empty white globes, their pupils
wide in a sea of irises all but washed of blue, shaking in
terror. Then the apeture was shut.  Inside he walked, through darkened
corridors lit with the barest candelight until he came by maze of
passage to the throne, its door hanging open on hinges that no longer
closed, and the king sitting there, becoming his suit of armor, never
moving, his hand never leaving his sword, unless by years his posture
fell further until it would drop him to the stones below bequeathing
no heir a domain never wanted