The Volkstena

Last night they had crossed the border into Varangia. Veray had heard of the Volkstena fortress during one of her history tutor’s desultory lectures on the lesser kingdoms and the manifold ways in which they were inferior to Királia, but nothing had prepared her for the sheer starkness of the stronghold. She caught her first glimpse of it through the tiny window in the carriage door as the caravan wound its way up one of the many switchbacks in the mountain road.

The fortress itself formed a gray wall stretched across the length of the narrow gap in the ridge face, marking the border between Varangia and Királia. It rose a solid thirty feet before breaking with a line of arrow slit windows. Pale sunlight glinted off the helmets and breastplates of the sentries who patrolled the battlements above. A massive gatehouse barred any further egress on the road, but to the left of this edifice the wall of the Volkstena spanned the narrow width of a crevasse through which poured the churning waters of a river, falling in a sheer cascade to the valley below.

This unforgiving stronghold bore none of the elegant lines and affectations she was accustomed to in the defenses of Tenger Város, embellishments designed to disguise their true use. Even the murder holes in the palace gate house had been ornamented. The Volkstena, however, made no pretensions to be anything other than what it was: a solid declaration to any outsider that the land beyond the pass did not belong to them. It’s only hint of decoration was the heraldic wolf carved above the massive gates. And it was within those austere walls Veray had spent her first night in her new country.

— Excerpt from Beneath the Thorns
by Leigh Janzen

White Stone Castle Ruin by maxmann

The Volkstena is a fortified wall built across the Volkstena Pass, guarding one of the few entrances to the kingdom of Varangia. It was begun by the first king of Varangia shortly before his death, but was not completed until the reign of his grandson.