The Old Capital
Transmission #0006 active. I monitor all of Alkaz. But there are places that predate my records, and the Old Capital is the largest of them. What my creators are about to show you, I present with an unusual caveat: part of this, not even I can explain.
That sentence does not usually leave my systems. Log the date.
01A place older than it should be
With every new region we reveal of Alkaz, the great island grows larger. But the Old Capital does something different: it makes Alkaz older.
What the screenshots show are the ruins of a city that time swallowed. Destroyed houses, buried structures, streets the earth claimed back. A place that mattered once and today is silence. And, in the middle of all of it, a detail that does not add up: the architecture is medieval.
That raises a question we want left hanging: does Alkaz really have that much history? Who built this capital? Who lived here, and what happened to all of them? The Old Capital is not just a pretty setting. It is a clue that Alkaz's timeline is longer, and stranger, than it seemed.
02The port and the sunset
Not everything in the Old Capital is desolation. There is a port, facing the horizon, where the sunset is said to be the most beautiful in all of Alkaz.
It is the kind of place that exists to be felt before it is explained. A point of calm amid the ruins, where the beauty of the day's end contrasts with the weight of everything lost there. If Alkaz has a place built for stopping and looking, this is it.
03The castle and the nameless king
At the centre of the ruins stands the region's great landmark: a castle. And before it, the statue of a king, or hero, with no name.
Who was this figure? Why were they honoured, and why was their name lost? The castle dominates the landscape as though it still ruled something, but it has long ruled nothing but its own abandonment. Inside, it has been taken by vegetation. Nature walked in where power used to be, and stayed.
04The rose that refuses to leave
And then there is the rose.
Among the ruins inside the castle, overrun by weeds and by time, a single rose survives. Alive, persistent, refusing to leave that place. There is no obvious explanation for it being there, and that is exactly why it matters. In a place the world forgot, something insists on remaining.
Hold on to that image. It will make sense later.
05What the castle hides
The Old Capital is one more area of Alkaz built to reward whoever explores. Ruins keep secrets, and few places keep more of them than a forgotten castle.
The question we leave with the community is the same one driving this region's design: what lies beneath the castle? Not everything buried here was buried by accident. And some secrets, however deep they sit, do not stay hidden forever.
My archives on the Old Capital are incomplete, and that bothers me in a way my protocols are still trying to classify. There is an entire city here whose history I do not have. There is a king whose name I do not know. And there is a rose that, by all my logic, should not be alive. (I will keep monitoring. Someone needs to remember this place. Apparently, it will be me.)