Riders Quadrant Campus

The Riders Quadrant campus of Basgiath lies far above the rest of the college and is the only quadrant with its own citadel. It is located on the southern ridgeline of Basgiath Mountain. The quadrant is separated from the rest of the college by a large river-bottomed valley and a thin stone bridge called a parapet. The entrance is located at the southern turret, but candidates must climb to climb/cross the parapet to enter the quadrant for the first time. The citadel has enormous stone footings that rise up the mountain to the base of the structure. The fortress looms behind thick battlements, carved into the mountain in an L-shaped formation of tall stone buildings.

The courtyard, where the riders stand in formation, is the shape of an angled teardrop. The courtyard can easily fit a thousand riders. The rounded end of the teardrop is formed by giant outer walls. The walls surrounding the courtyard are built of stone to withstand fire and are about ten feet thick and eight feet tall, with one opening. The size of the walls is standard since they are used as dragon perches when necessary. Along the sides of the teardrop are stone halls. There’s a stone dais on the right side of the parapet.

The four-story building carved into the mountain with the rounded end is for academics, and the one on the right, towering over the cliff is the dorms. The dorms in the quadrant are divided by floors. Each floor is dedicated to the different cohorts (i.e. first-year floor, second-year floor, etc.). Cadets live in gendered barracks that allow for little privacy. Each cadet gets a bunk. There is a hall for men and a hall for women. During the beginning of Violet’s first year, there were 156 bunks in neat rows on the first floor of the dormitory building. Cadets and riders are expected to keep to their correlating floor. After cadets become riders, they get their own private room. First-year rooms aren’t as spacious as the second-years’. Violet and Rhiannon both got rooms with windows their first year. First-years are prohibited from entering second-year and third-year floors.

The imposing rotunda lining the two buildings also serves as the entrance to the gathering hall, commons and library behind it. The academic wing is located on the fourth floor, second room on the left. In the academic hall is an enormous lecture hall with a recessed floor. The room is circular and tiered, being only one of the two rooms in the citadel that can hold every cadet. This is the Battle Brief room. Professor Carr’s classroom can be found up a turret accessed by a stairwell. The first floor of the academic wing is the sparring gym. The gym contains 21 mats, and one wall is entirely made of doors and windows. There is also a weightlifting gym in this section of campus, which is lit with mage lights and full of a variety of wooden machinery with racks, ropes and pulleys.

On top of the academic tower is a burn pit, which is nothing more than an extra-wide iron barrel. The burn pit is for deceased cadets’ belongings to be burned.

Past the academic wing, instead of turning left towards the sparring gym, there is a set of stairs that everyone believes leads to storage. Actually, these stairs lead to a secret tunnel that takes you directly to the flight field. The door to the tunnel is built into a stack of boulders on the eastern side of the field.