*drumroll please*
It's the Nightfort Canon Roundup!
Context:
- Largest and oldest castle on the Wall, twice the age of Castle Black, making it at least 1,200 years old (first mention of Castle Black in the timeline is 600 years ago).
- The castle was rebuilt many times with only deep stone vaults remaining from the first iteration.
- It was completely abandoned in 58AC in favour of a smaller castle, Deep Lake, which was built seven miles to the east.
Stories:
- The
Night's King and
Rat Cook
- The
seventy-nine sentinels
-
Danny Flint
- King
Sherrit
- The
thing that came in the night.
-
Symeon Star-Eyes seeing
hellhounds fight.
-
Mad Axe
-
Arson Iceaxe
Appearance:
- Broken towers.
- Buildings include a bell tower, a rookery, a brewhouse, a library, a dungeon capable of holding five hundred prisoners, a bathhouse, an armory, and a forge.
- The rat-filled great hall only has one remaining wall.
- The kitchen is a stone octagon with a domed roof and contains a stepped well, a twisted weirwood grows through a hole in the roof.
- A maze of tunnels connecting its vaults and cellars.
- Its yards have become small forests, and there are trees growing where the stables used to be.
- The gate through the Wall is sealed with frozen stone and rubble.
- The steps to the top of the Wall are cut out of the ice itself, but have thawed and re-frozen so many times that little of them remains.
The Black Gate:
- It is set deep in a wall of the well at the center of the kitchens and is made of white weirwood with a face on it. The face is old, pale, shrunken, and wrinkled with white eyes. The door glows.
Selected Quotations:
- A "desolation of rubble, ruins, and weeds" (SoS, Bran IV).
- "The wind made a nervous whistling sound as it shivered through the broken towers, the keeps groaned and settled ... The yards were small forests where spindly trees rubbed their bare branches together and dead leaves scuttled like roaches across patches of old snow. There were trees growing where the stables had been, and a twisted white weirwood pushing up through the gaping hole in the roof of the domed kitchen." (SoS, Bran IV).
- "the castle had been expanded upon many times over the centuries and that little remained of its original structure save for some of the deepest vaults chiseled out of the rock beneath the castle's feet." (TWoIaF, The Wall and Beyond).