Let me tell you, boy, what's the scariest place I've ever been.

No, it's not one of those mana basins you know about. Heck, today, you have well-prepared teams of people going in those all the time. I even hear you have tourists. People who pay money to go there, just to see what the Ancient have left behind after the Fall.

Now get me some good stuff if you want to know what makes old Diego freak out.

Ah, that hits the spot. Gonna need it.

The scariest place in the world is called the Fortress. And do you know where it is?

Europe.

Yea. The Desolation of Europe. Don't listen to those old fuddy-duddies who tell you America almost died in the Fall. You can get books, they'll tell you, almost 1 million people survived the first twenty years, before the manastorms stopped coming every week and the monsters from the mana stopped coming. Everyone's got stories of that coming down from family. Oh, and don't get me started on the Reunification Wars. My great-grand-da, he was born twenty-five years after the fall. He lived to almost a hundred. He remembered those. Ah, the stories when I was a little kiddo.

Europe now? No one knows exactly how it went, because there are no survivors left to tell. Not a one. Smart people say the Switzerland are certain to have made it, but nobody's ever heard of or seen a Swiss since. Anything west of the Danube is a howling wilderness, and the only ones who'd know are the Fae, except the freaks prefer hunting people to talking. Only fools cross the Danube, and the Lord doesn't protect fools like that.

Heck, people aren't even sure if the Fae are real or stories.

The Fortress now? It's an old port. Older than the Fall. Saint Malo, it used to be named. In the Ancient times, sailors went from there to across the entire world. Changestorms erased entirely the everything, including the ancient city, but the old fortress and the houses within? They stayed up, even if people starved within.

And of course, the British decided to make it their foothold on the continent, as if rebuilding their own island after the Fall wasn't hard enough. No, once they spent a century making trade routes up to the north, they decided they'd own France, as it was once called. And sure, they picked a port to put their banner on the mainland.

Now imagine the heaviest walls you can picture. A small city, entirely enclosed in walls that were ancient before the Fall. The only way in or out is by ship. And all around is the forest, and you know nothing lives within thousand of miles. It's just you and the people around you. And every week or so, there are Deep Changed that come sniffing. You have giant crossbows, sending bolts the size of your arm, to deter them... and some dodge them and come scratch at the walls.

Only the baddest of the baddest ever go out of the Fortress. In twenty years, they've managed to clear, what, eight miles of woods around it.

Of course, if you asked me, I'd say, sod it, get back to the isles. But the British? No way. Too proud, one and all.

How do I know? Well, when I was younger, and sailed the Atlantic trade, I did go. And our ship did have passengers and cargo room after we landed at the Isle of Mann, so the captain said, why not. And so we ended up in the Fortress, and some people wanted to charter us back to the Union, so the captain said, why not. And so we spent four days there, waiting for stuff to be negotiated.

And that's how I ended up the walls, looking around. And we got not one, not two, but three buggers coming out of the woods. Saurids, they call them. Fire-breathing "dragons". Thankfully, those things don't fly. But yea, here I am, watching, and those thirteen-foot tall monsters come out, in a triangle, and they look at the wall in the distance, and you can literally see their brains going "yummy, juicy meat". And they start trotting toward you.

And you know what? The guards start laughing and making bets. On how long they're going to run before they realize that we're shooting small-tree-sized bolts at them and turn tail. And the beasts approach, and the guards are yelling "hold.... hold.... hooooold.... FIRE!!!" And one of them yells that they're cheating.

And then the beasts breathe fire. Like they're spitting flaming oils. And they're raising their heads, and I realize that if they get close, they can incinerate us on the wall. I was looking about to find stairs, anything to hide behind.

And then the first bolt really hit, and that Saurid becomes a ball of fire, and you have flaming bits of cooked meat coming all over the ground, and the guards are laughing like silly at the other two.

And that's how I was in...

What? No, I didn't stay. I think they were almost as much laughing at me as I was running down the stairs as they were at the Saurids. But I'm still there, so I guess the other two didn't make it either. Frankly, I didn't ask. I stayed in the ship until we left. The port authority said anyone who wanted to work there was welcome and the pay was good, but I didn't even go up on deck until we were out and at sea.

Yea, the scariest thing about the Fortress isn't that you're the only people in all of Europe. It's when you realize that the people around you are completely bonkers.

Bloody Brits.