After the Shattering, every road in the Lands Between became an argument. The stone gates still promised a destination, but grass had swallowed the milestones and the old banners no longer agreed on whose future they named. I began keeping notes at each Site of Grace, not to map a route, but to record what the kingdom refused to forget.
The ruins are instructions
The lesson is quieter than the legends: power survives only when someone gives it a shape worth carrying. In empty chambers, beside a sword left upright at a cairn, and in gold dust caught beneath a ruined arch, memory becomes architecture. The Tarnished does not restore the old order; they decide which fragments deserve another dawn.