1) Everyone is assuming that arches are broken because they just fell down for no reason. I'm doubting this is the case. IE a dragon attacks a building made of arches and the tops are going to be gone from it hitting them.
2) Even with adra, the only possible thing that could break on an arch is the top. Otherwise the thing likely fall over from having its weight oddly distributed.
Fucking raptors everywhere, man.
No, I’m not assuming they fell down for no reason. They are being called “ruins”. I’m therefore assuming the stuff fell down because time and neglect, or for some traumatic even that caused them to become ruins.
In the first case, it doesn’t make any sense. In the second case, it might make sense, but not really.
Let’s say it’s a dragon attack. The “weight” of the attack would still discharge on the pillars, that’s how arches work. If they didn’t work that way, the arch wouldn’t stay up in the first place.
So let’s say that a dragon attacks from above and hits the roof. The force is too big, and the structure breaks (doesn’t collapse, clearly, it only breaks). Basically, what you are saying is that the part that got hit strong enough broke, but the rest stood up, because “adra” kept it together.
Except that’s not how arches work. For an arch to collapse like that, the abutments should have been “pushed” outwards, or the force should have been so great that it makes no sense that the rest of the structure stays up.
So, if it was a great force, strong enough to “break” the structure at the top of the arch, the pillars should have been affected enough to fall down too. Or, if “adra” is strong enough to keep it together, it doesn’t make sense that it stood up that way either.
If “adra” is strong enough to survive the kind of attack that broke those arches, then the explanation is that the laws of physics are different on that world, because those strengths should have weighted evenly on all the structure, not just the top. And therefore, “adra” (what a shit name btw) would have received roughly the same amount of strength through all the structure.
Flying buttresses exist precisely because one of the few ways for an arch to collapse is by “pushing away” the pillars, making the structure imbalanced.
Tl;dr: weight in an arch structure is distributed evenly, so the kind of weight that destroyed the top of the structure would have also destroyed the rest, the “it’s magic” explanation still doesn’t work.
