Location from The First Law by Joe Abercrombie
The ruins of a civilization destroyed by the war between the Maker and his brother — a wasteland of impossible architecture and ancient danger where Bayaz led his expedition to find the Seed.
The Old Empire is what happens when gods fight. Kanedias (the Maker) and Juvens (his brother, Bayaz's master) waged a war that destroyed a civilization, and the ruins are the scar. Nothing lives here comfortably. The land remembers what it lost. Bayaz's expedition crosses the Old Empire to reach Aulcus and the Seed, and the journey is one of the first trilogy's most unsettling sequences — ancient dangers, spiritual corruption, and the growing realization that Bayaz knows more about this place than he's telling.
Vast ruins stretching across a dead landscape — buildings of inhuman scale, roads that go nowhere, and an atmosphere of wrongness that makes the air taste metallic. The architecture is too large, too precise, and too broken to be anything but the remnants of something greater than the current world can imagine.
Also known as: The Old Empire, Old Empire