Layer 1 - The Gilded Manor
The walls of this layer are well-treated stone, meticulously laid and in pristine condition, only a few hundred years old. The halls are tall enough for a gargant to stand comfortably. Soft blue light suffuses the corridors from glowing gemstones set in the wall every dozen or so feet, though any attempt to remove them extinguishes their light. Running along each wall, around shoulder height for a gargant, is a band of gold a foot tall and set with strange runes that none can understand. Though the passageways are well built, they are meandering, purposeless and confusing, often ending in dead ends or empty chambers. They date from a time when the mason gargants had already forgotten the purpose of their construction, and simply built out of habit and ancestral obligation. Flood waters can be seen streaming down the walls in places, draining out into the depths below. In places, buildings from above have crashed down into this layer.
Skyvault Gate
This immense reinforced gateway once opened into the Stormfort, allowing passage to skyvessels and flying beasts. Now buried and locked shut by runic seals, its mechanisms hum faintly with locked-away energy.
Thunderguard Parade Ground
Vast enough to accommodate an entire Stormhost, this training and mustering field is eerily silent. Statues of long-forgotten heroes line the vaulted ceilings, each one etched with victories now lost to history.
The Veiled Tribunal
A solemn, shadowed amphitheater where sacred oaths were once administered and failures judged. The seats are pristine, as if the robed jurors had simply vanished mid-session.
Stormfont Reliquary
A sealed sanctum for housing divine relics of Sigmar and other gods. The relics were locked behind adamant-barred vaults, guarded by silent, inert automata covered in verdigris.
Vault of Bound Tempests
This sealed chamber contains bottled lightning storms, once used as weapons or power sources. The air crackles unnaturally around it, and time seems to stutter near the adamantine vaults.
The Reclusium
A chapel richly adorned with celestial iconography and statues of ancient saints. Its light has dimmed, and the air tastes of metal and ozone.
Chamber of Unstruck Thunder
A staging chamber, for contemplation, preparation, and prophecy. Dust lays thick, none have entered in centuries.
* * *
Layer 2 - The Snarl
The next layer down the air becomes heavy and humid, the stonework is plainer and less pristine, and creeping plant life has taken root on every surface. Moulds and fungus line the wall, creepers and vines hang from the ceilings, and giant mushroom-like forests clog the open spaces and seem to shift and move to block previously open passages. The plant life is hostile, corrosive and dangerous. The passageways are smaller, though still just large enough for a gargant to pass if they duck, yet there are many more larger open chambers.
The Green Hell
A chasm, a vast crack in the walls of the Citadel that leads out into the depths of the mountains. The chasm is also home to an ancient wyvern.
The Veridgrave
An overgrown ossuary where fungal vines have wound themselves around stone sarcophagi and iron memorials. The cracked mosaic tiles of the floor are threaded through with vines that seem to have stitched the cracks together.
The Dreamer’s Gate
An ancient door, a hundred yards tall. Made of sigmarite sculpted with bass-relief depictions of Sigmar at war with the terrible monsters of nightmare that inhabited Azyr before his arrival.
The Vitrian Well
It’s hard to say what its original purpose was, for while its upper galleries are choked with creeping vines and fungus like the rest of this layer, the rest of the chamber has filled with crystal clear waters, like an artificial cenote. In the depths, murals can be seen lining the sides.
Gallowsroot
A high chamber of blocky stone with evenly-spaced but imperfectly aligned columns. Eerily quiet, save for the sounds of running water. Many stone dais remain above the floodwaters, like artificial islands in a river, and a thin mist lingers around them.
* * *
Layer 3 - The Howling Abyss
The walls of the corridors beyond the Dreamer’s Gate are irregular, roughly cut or natural. There is no light. Black ash lines the floors, and is constantly being whipped into the air by the howling wind storms that tear through these passages at irregular intervals. The Ash Storms can strip skin and polish stone. The winds are deafening most of the time, but they occasionally diminish, then there is the sound of an unnatural heartbeat; some hell-wrought and arcane machinations in the deep.
The Black Obelisk
A ziggurat, rising out of the ash, with a megalithic obelisk on its peak. It’s covered in the same runes seen throughout the Citadel.
The Aetheric Bastion
Once the command centre of the Stormfort, the Aetheric Bastion is the inside of a towering spire of sigmarite and starmetal, lined at the zenith with broken lightning-conductors. Its vaulted halls hum with residual celestial power, but now lie cloaked in gloom, the echo of long-passed command decisions hanging in the air.
The Shimmering Divide
A hairline crack in this crude stone arch reveals a view of endless skies, scattered with clouds, and lit by a perpetual sunset. Pink orange, and gold - flowing in an unfelt wind through a deep blue firmament.
* * *
Layer 4 - The Chamber
At the deepest, darkest heart of the Citadel lies the Chamber. Black stone walls, clean and squarely cut, rise unadorned from floor to ceiling. It is built like a cross, with four large rooms radiating off from the central chamber. These rooms contain the Citadel Wards, the arcane and mechanical relics made to contain what lies at its heart. Still water lies across much of this layer, rising to the knees of most mortal beings. At the very centre of the Chamber, however, it sinks deeper. There, a hundred feet below the surface, a gray stone sarcophagus is barely visible, unadorned, never meant to be seen.