The Warrens

The corridor was damp and dark, twisting around the base of the towers. It joined with steps up and down and various other irregularities made with the additions and subtractions of the centuries as bits were added, taken away or changed in the fabric of the great building itself.

At one point, it had been a castle with a small hamlet, spilling out from inside it that became a village and then a town. Then, for various reasons lost to memory, defences were extended around the village, then the town. As the castle grew into a large and ungainly building, houses, workshops, inns and other buildings merged into the fabric of the castle itself until it became this bewildering maze of tunnels, corridors, passageways and buildings within buildings.

It was said, by those who could be bothered to talk of such things, that there was no-one still alive who knew their way around anything but a small part of the sprawl. It was also said that whole families, whole dynasties could grow thrive and then dwindle away in parts of the great stone conurbation completely unknown to other such similar families but a few corridors, streets, passageways, away.

It was even said that in some of the more outlying satellite suburbs and warrens that the people there had no knowledge of the king and his court. Some claimed those outlying zones paid their taxes only to local lords and barons who ruled a segment of corridors patrolled at the borders by their own soldiers.

The old king had spent the final decades and years of his rule himself confined to a few narrow corridors and a few halls around his throne room and royal bedchambers. This meant some of the more outrageous stories about the disintegrating sprawl from castle to fiefdoms beyond the control of the king, could be true. But no-one knew, at least until the old king died.

His queen, once she had disposed of her rivals and their princely progeny after her husband’s death, decided she would like to have a cohesive and thriving kingdom to hand down to whichever of her sons – eventually – deposed her. So, she began preparing for the changes to come as soon as her husband departed his sprawling kingdom for the final time.