The images in history books and old newspapers didn’t do it justice. Nurmengard had been built atop of one of the many peaks littered across the Alps. It had a stark and sombre appearance. The dark walls rose from the edges of the cliffs and the sharp falls beneath them, gothic and grim, reaching for the open sky high above. Around it were only bare stones and patches of melting snow. The thick pine forest at the very foot of the peak, far beneath the Austrian magical hamlet she stood in at the moment, the only touch of green.