Tartod Castle

The rivalry between Firtos and the wicked Tartod, ending with a castle swallowed by the earth.

Legend says that after the great flood, two fairy sisters, Firtos and Tartod, chose the peak rising above the plateau as their home. Firtos was beautiful and kind-hearted, and her fellow fairies soon chose her as their queen; seeing this, her sister Tartod, wicked and cunning by nature, was consumed by envy. When Firtos decided to build a castle, her fairies raised its walls in a single night, and in their joy lit fires and danced beneath the finished stones. Seeing this, Tartod swore she would raise an even finer castle before the cock crowed - and that she would steal the cornerstone of Firtos’s castle for her own. At midnight, with her wicked fairies, she tore into Firtos’s unfinished wall, ripped out the cornerstone, and drove an iron rod through it to carry it away. But as the load passed over Korond, a rooster crowed, signalling the end of the night and the end of the fairies’ power. The iron rod snapped in two, the stone fell, and Tartod’s oath collapsed with it: her half-built castle sank into the earth in that same instant. Only its ruins remain today, hidden deep in the forest - silent witness that ill intent, even backed by fairy power, cannot reach its goal.