The Citadel (The Citadel)

The Citadel

It is funny to think that one of the most fought-over areas of the war was little more than a dirt road just a month before its start. The citadel today is a monument to modern defensive engineering; built by the Architect to defend the fortified riverside bridge, it has been the site of some of the most bloody and costly battles of the war so far. It has guarded and defended entry into the Marches since its construction and has come to symbolize the defiance of the Caer Wen people in the face of overwhelming odds.

History

With the liberation of Riverside and the capture of the Fortified bridge only a few miles away, the Dragon's army had gained complete control over The Marches region of the continent. By this point, however, Kroll's numerical superiority was well known to Caer Wen and it was only a matter of time before he launched a massive attack to retake it. As the only crossing point into the Marches, the defenses of the Fortified bridge were woefully inadequate and it was decided that a major upgrade was needed. The first iteration of the fortress was a simple, albeit massive stone wall, bristling with towers and defensive artillery, and with a large military base on the friendly side of it. This base also contained dozens of catapults and trebuchets that had pre-sighted the entirety of the approach, meaning that the engineers operating them could quickly and efficiently change targets to pre-established settings to aim their artillery at any part of the field within range. The first attack, which became known as the battle of the wall, cost the army of Caer Wen almost 3,000 men. The death toll to Kroll has never been accurately established, but estimates range between 60,000 - 90,000 men and decimated the armies he was using to maintain control over the southern area of The Savannah. The damage to the wall, however, was considerable. At least half of the towers were damaged beyond repair and there was a very large breach in the main wall. Learning the lessons of this costly victory, the architect redesigned the defenses from a single large wall covering the entire valley of the approach, into a single, three-tiered walled fortress that only guarded the entrance onto the bridge itself. The second major attack on the Fortress came a few months later. With most of the Dragon forces being drawn away to defend Haven and the new allies of Caer Wen, the Citadel was the least defended that it had ever been. It was General Arthuros who spotted the ruse, requesting that the Dragon allow him to take two of the army's legions with him to reinforce the fortress in the event that the assault on Haven was a diversion. He had been right. The Second Battle of the Citadel, or as it is more commonly known, The Battle of Haven, is notable for its highlighting of the limitations of the fortress defenses. The force attacking the Citadel stayed just out of range of the defensive artillery, serving only to pin the garrison inside, while a second force - made up of Giants and Trolls - bypassed the castle to start construction of a second bridge upstream of the fortress and out of range. With the enemy out of range, and sallying from the Citadel to attack them being suicide, it was only the quick thinking of General Arthuros, calling for urgent assistance from the Dragon, that averted disaster. Unfortunately, and despite the timely arrival of the Caer Wen Dragon, his rider, and the Demon Meru, General Arturis - the heroic defender of Traveler's Rest and the second in command of all Caer Wen armies - was killed in the defense of the Citadel. A permanent monument to his honor and sacrifice now stands in the center of the Citadel keep. In May 2022, The Citadel defenses received a massive upgrade. Mac, the Caer Wen forge master replaced every tower-mounted artillery piece with his newly designed magnetically launched Ballista, increasing the range, power, rate of fire, and destructive capacity of each weapon exponentially. The next attack against The Citadel will be well within devastating range long before the enemy is able to pose any real threat to the Fortress or the recovering region of the Marches that it defends.

The Corruption

Main article: The Corruption It became clear, after the discovery of the Whiterock ruins, that the same magical 'darkness' that had corrupted the ancient city was also affecting the lands outside the Citadel. In the months since the Battle of the Wall, the land on which most of the fighting and death had taken place was still as blackened and barren as the morning after it had been fought. There had been absolutely zero regrowth of the natural flora in the pass, not even the grass had regrown. More than that, the creeping feeling of darkness that had affected the army so acutely at Whitebrook, was now measurably present in the garrison of Citadel. It wouldn't be until the discovery of Reverences journals, months later, that the corruption and its effects started to be properly understood. Only the "land cleansing" efforts of the newly ascended Patron Goddess of Caer Wen - Willow Aides - seemed to have any effect on it whatsoever, but even then, it took three major attempts before the corruption was pushed back enough for its effects to start to be undone. More disturbingly, her efforts - along with those of the Demon Meru after the Battle of the River Fork - have shown that any man, friendly or hostile, who dies on corrupted land has their soul trapped where they fell, unable to pass on to the afterlife until they are released. Tens of thousands of trapped souls were released during the three ceremonies to clear the land around the Citadel.

Reconstruction of the Citadel - November 21, 2021 The Architect had learned the lessons of the battle. Instead of having a single, thick wall stretching from one side of the pass to the other, he had almost completely abandoned and dismantled the extreme ends of the wall, including the section that had been breached. Instead, he had folded the walls back on themselves and angled them towards the river. Whereas it has once been a wall in the same vein as the Great Wall of China, it was now a true fortress, a vastly superior defensive structure to Caer Wen. The walls were triple layered, each ring separated by a few dozen feet, and each wall about half as high again as the one in front of it. An army facing this citadel, unlike the one we defeated a week ago, would not have a single wall to overcome. Once they had climbed the first wall, they would still have two more increasingly taller ones to get past. Even while assaulting the first wall, they would be underfire not only from the men defending it, but from the men defending the two higher walls behind it. If they managed to get ladders agaisnt the first wall and climb them, even if they somehow managed to get those same ladders over with them, they wouldn't be tall enough to scale the second, and the ladders for the second wall wouldn't be able to reach to the top of the third. Even in the obscenely unlikely case that they brought these three sets of ladders with them, AND got them over the walls, the gap between each ring was a valley of death. Designed with arrow slits, murder holes and traps to make sure that nothing could survive in within that ring for long. And enemy army would need to cross three of them before they even got inside the fortress to face the garrison. The walls themselves were of a slightly different design as well. Still the same stone and rubble construction, but the tops of the walls were suddenly cut off by a 10 ft overhang of the ramparts. The next group of those fucking Chimera who tried to climb the walls themselves would have a hell of a leap out from the wall to be able to catch the ledge and complete the ascent. The towers were reconstructed in the same way. More than that, more towers were added in the gaps between the existing towers. Whereas before, the towers were designed to defend the walls with very little overlap between their fields of fire, now there was no tower that wasn't within firing range of at least two others. The tales of the Rangers on the spared towers, watching that creature climb the walls and massacre their sisters, helpless to do anything more that watch, made for harrowing stories that the architect would not see repeated. There was a very simple logic: every single point on the walls, on the towers, or within the castle itself, was within archer range and coverable from at least two other, separate places in the castle. This was far from the end of the improvements. The aid station had been turned into a complete hospital that almost rivaled the infirmary in the capital. Moreover, it too was defedable in the unlikely chance that the walls were breached. Barracks, mess halls and training fields were all encompassed by the inner fortress. The walls wrapped around all four sides of the castle, including the side facing the river and the bridge had been raised to span above the first two walls, meaning that the bridge couldn't be attacked from the river and the walls themselves couldn't be flanked. But talk of walls being scaled and the use of ladders all seemed obsolete. An enormous moat had been dug around the castle and the slow moving water from the river had been channeled into it. Only a single retractable bridge allowed general access into the castle. Each gate through the walls was defended by a hardened dragon-forged steel portcullis that would be almost impenetrable to men on the ground when dropped. But when risen, would alow the armies of caer wen to pass through easily to campaign further into the mainland. As a final coup de gras, holes the size of grapefruits, peppered the outer facing side of the walls overlooking the moat. Behind each hole was a hardened reservoir of oil... oil that could be released into the moat, would float on the water, and could be ignited by a single flaming arrow... the moat could be tuned into a fiery wall of hellfire and the slow moving nature of the water would keep the fire exactly where we wanted it. Every tower had a ballista on it and every square inch of the field had been presightend. There wasn't quite enough room for the same number of catapults and trebuchet as behind the old walls, but with the added towers and the improved accuracy and firing drills, the small loss of number of artillery was able to be made up elsewhere. The citadel, as it had come to be known, was in a word... terrifying. And The Dragon couldn't have been more proud.