The city was split away by the fog and everything within it was lost. The thick gray vapor wrapped about the walls concealing everything within. Any attempts to enter the fog was met with failure. The explorers would spill out at the other side within impossible time, encountering nothing but the flat gray void within.
Years passed, the city spires piercing through the fog veil but nothing remaining within. The land beneath the mountain began to decline without the trade normally that passed through the main town. Explorations into the fog ended. It was left to its own anonymity and faded into legend.
Many explorers told of the city, its sudden envelopment into the fog like a nightmare. The spires piercing the sky but no one able to find the buildings within. Stories of palaces trimmed in gold and the blood spilt within. Dragons with sapphires set into their horns and teeth. Royalty draped in silk and gemstones mined from the mountain the city was built into, eating anything they could get their ringed claws into. For how were they to survive without the fields at the mountains base outside their new walls; eat themselves alive? No one remembered the truth. As the fog wiped away the city so to did it papers and knowledge so only stories remained, passed through story and ever changing verbal history. No one went in. No one came out.
Enough time passed the city fell from the maps and what mountain actually cradled the city in its slopes became debate. Children's stories to lull them to sleep with dreams of elves and men in their homes of gold, dragons walking the street in scale and skin, fairies nesting in the eaves.
A singular map remained locked away inconspicuous in its plain wooden case, a dried flower within; given in expression of love. For as the city had been taken, so had those within for all time.