The castle south of Cindergate

Cindergate was always a gate to somewhere. A gate with no wall left either side of it, and something still bothering to keep it shut. South-east of it, across the fields it used to feed, there is a fortress — and the fortress is still standing.

Seven places, from the ploughland outside to the keep at the middle: Gallowfield, Rotwater, Hallowgate, The Ashen Bailey, Cinderward and Grimhold, with The Grinning Teeth off to one side where the portcullis came down and stayed down.

They ask for level 65 at the field's edge and 82 at the keep door, and what lives in them runs from 66 to 85. Every one holds a melee, a ranged and a magic fighter, so no route through is the easy one.

The archer in the gatehouse

Something roosts above the fallen portcullis and shoots at what comes near. The Iron Fletcher is the fourth boss in the game and the first that fights at range — the three before it were melee, melee and magic, which had quietly made one answer good against all of them.

It drops a ring, and it drops it about once in a thousand kills.

Two more rungs, and the ladder is finished

Gear at 72 and 82, every slot in every trade, same as it has always been done. These are the last two: recipes climb ten crafting levels a rung, so the one above would want a crafting level that does not exist.

That is deliberate rather than a wall. What comes after is meant to be found rather than made.

Something to gather in a place with no fields

A castle has no seam and no forest. It has everything somebody carried in and left instead — so you work the fields and the reeds outside the walls, and the broken gate, the burnt siege engines, the hangings and the forge once you are inside them.

Alchemy gets a rung too. Siegebloom tonic heals 435, and it grows in the physic garden, which is the one thing a castle certainly had and nobody has weeded since.

The door at the bottom of the keep

Grimhold is unbreached, and the door at the foot of the stair is shut from the other side. It stays shut for now.