Relan Cor

Relan Cor is one of the great surviving relics of the Later Magocracy on the Castali Dry. Built at the height of Imperial power by the best Imperial warmagi with witchstones and a centuries-old tradition of magically-augmented defensive architecture, it is a nine-story quadrangle of granite and limestone perched on a low flat hill, surrounded by a mage-made lake a hundred yards across, and ringed by rough swamp and brambly forest. As Rondal reflects on arriving there: "Relan Cor was as strong as a mountain."

When the first Dukes of Castal took possession of their new fief after the Narasi Conquest, they resided and ruled from Relan Cor for fifty years before relocating to their new castle at Castabriel. The fortress was miserable as a home — designed for defence, not comfort, with six thousand men once living four to a room in dark cells — but too mighty to abandon. The Dukes made it the official residence of the Warlord of Castal for a century, and when even that moved to the capital, Relan Cor became the Castali War College.

The War College is where Tyndal, Rondal, and a generation of Castali warmagi received their formal combat training. Minalan himself trained here as a young man, and dispatched his two apprentices there in Knights Magi for the spring term that forged them into proper knights magi. It is a rigorous, unforgiving institution whose masters carry on the Imperial combat tradition largely unchanged since the Magocracy.