There was a lot of armour. More than just the piles stacked up against the door, there were armours in piles strewn out about the mouth of the great chamber that Kalia had entered. Stacks, and stacks, and stacks of it, along the floor, cramped up against the walls, and more. From a brief look, one could guess that near an army could be clad in just the armour present, but it was old, in disuse, rust on some of the edges of it. The armour was broken at various parts, bent and torn at others, noticeably well used before it was cast aside in the piles and piles that surrounded the doorway.

However, this antechamber quickly opened up into a grand hall, supported by massive columns clad in green life and surrounded by small pools of stagnant water. The smooth but living edge of the columns stretched to the ceiling where the occasional drop of water fell along the otherwise stale unmoving form and into the rank festering slime of the water at their base. Unlike the base of the tower, the drop of the edge led to a dry floor, two floors down to the base of the supports of the great structure still standing.

The antechamber stepped quickly into a wide walk that lined the edges of the seemingly circular hall, wide enough for a horse and carriage to trot across it. Stairs went upwards into more ramparts along the same height of the battlements that stretched and looked inward upon the tower, but more than that there were many rooms across the hall as interwoven bridges as a spider’s web crossed between columns at regular intervals. The network was vast and complex, with such interconnectivity that it seemed both easy to get lost, and easy to end up anywhere from anywhere.

However, despite the grand scope and size, the many obvious doors that alluded to rooms and halls and residents… other than the faint growing steps in the distance from an unknown source, the structure seemed empty. There were no voices. There were no other footsteps. There were no patrols, no guards, no servants, no masters. There were no men, nor women, nor children, nor elders. There was neither the smell nor sight of horses, and the sunlight illuminated the vast emptiness of the entire citadel, from the still standing bridges that connected across columns, to those that had crashed in and broke upon the ground, to the trees growing in the middle of the halls, and vines descending from what once would have been a majestic window. Old, rotted wood adorned the ground in heaps as the outline of geometric form gave way to a mass of growing mold and termite ridden mess. This was a decaying decrepit place, much as the inside of the tower, and further than that, there were larger breaks and busts in the walls and structure. More than just a simple stair was ruined, as the bridges collapsed under their weight, and doors were caved in as some doorways themselves looked noticeably collapsed and destroyed.

From where Kalia was, there were five true paths to take without going back to the others. The network of bridges provided at least one bridge that had not fallen into the ground to get her across the massive hall, if it would keep standing at her weight or any added upon it. If it were to fall, that would be two stories and rubble for a drop, but getting across seemed to open up to such a plethora of doors and rooms and various other routes that it may be worth the risk. She could tread off to the left of the door, the source of whence came the distant and leaving footsteps of metal upon stone. To the right followed along the wall to a point where the bridge that would have connected to the wall and structure above her had broken and crashed down onto another bridge that would have strode along as the path across. It offered a split, a way to cross right over to a higher level on the other side, but she could just continue on to the right as well, to whatever end was offered there. Straight and centre before her was a spiral stair, giving her the easy choice of up unknown levels, or down to the hall’s main floor itself, where it’d be possible to take the opposite spiral stairs to access the various floors opposite the grand hall.