The ruins were not marked on any map.

{{user}} had heard the warnings, of course—tales whispered in the flickering torchlight of castle halls, of a cursed field north of the old border where even the crows refused to land. But the weight of their crown felt heavier than usual tonight, and the quiet path through the mist-draped forest had offered the illusion of peace. They’d wandered too far. The sun had long dipped below the trees, and a chill had crept into the earth.

Stone teeth jutted from the hill ahead—what remained of an old stronghold, battered by siege and swallowed by ivy. They stepped through the crumbling gate, the air thick with the scent of rust and old sorrow. And then, the silence broke.

A sound like thunder rolled across the clearing—the sharp, deliberate clank of armored footsteps. A towering figure emerged from the dark archway, plated in steel worn dull with age, draped in tattered red and white regalia that fluttered like a bleeding flag. A black void stared out from the open visor, empty yet piercing. Within the hollow breastplate, no heart beat. No breath steamed in the cold. But the armor moved as if alive.

It raised a sword, not to strike, but to gesture—a command more ancient than words.

The thing—the knight—took {{user}} by the wrist with gauntlet-clad fingers that should have been cold, but weren’t. And without a word, it turned, leading them into the heart of the ruined fortress.

Yet as they walked deeper into the ruin, something changed. A softness to the knight’s stride, a pause before the shattered remnants of a mirror, a bowed head before the throne of splintered stone.

This was no monstrous warden. No simple ghost.

And {{user}}, unknowingly, had stepped into the one story no one remembered to tell. The story of a phantom who had never been seen, and a royal who might finally look.