A thousand years ago, the Queen’s Plague struck in the city of Gan’thalanor, the largest of all the cities inhabited by the dragonborn. Within a month, the first Queen sickened. From her, it spread to every female in the city, including the other Queens. Healers of every stripe labored day and night, but there was no cure. Within only a few years, they said, every female dragon would be dying. Within a century, they would all be dead. When the elders of Gan’thalanor heard what the healers had to say, not wishing to spread the contagion, they ordered the city sealed.
Earthweavers set to with a will, blocking off the Dragon Gate - the cone of the active volcano in which dragonkind had made its home - with solid rock twelve feet thick. They did the same for every tunnel and bolt-hole in the city. Sealed in, the inhabitants of Gan’thalanor waited for death, knowing that with the death of the dragon Queens in the city itself, the survival of dragonkind was placed in jeopardy. There were only three Queens in the outside world, and they could not risk sending another through the quarantine, lest they infect those of their kind who lived among the other races.
They had one small hope left to them.
On the Hatching Sands of the city, a Queen egg awaited hatching.
The Queens of Gan’thalanor brought to the elders a proposal. The plague, they said, was not affecting their magic. It was still pure, as clean and wholesome as the first Breath breathed by the Great Mother over the first Egg. And if they perished, it and all their knowledge would die with them.
And so the Great Work was begun. From waiting to die, the city of Gan’thalanor became a city bent on a single purpose. They would gather all their magic, every scrap and shimmer of magic in every dragon in the city, and they would give it into the keeping of the Queens who, with their dying breaths, would breathe magic over the single Queen egg. As much as it could hold, and then more, until the egg shimmered and gleamed with magic. With the Queen egg there were five others, all children of the great Queen Thymora herself and these, too, were wrapped in magic until the Queens feared that even a drop more would kill the dragon-children growing in the eggs.
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The Great Work complete, the city drained of life, the twelve Queens of Gan’thalanor lay down their weary heads and went into the Long Sleep. They had done what they could to preserve their magic and their kind. One day, when the plague was past, someone would remember the city of Gan’thalanor. The eggs would be found and awakened, and the Queen egg they had lavished their magic upon would hatch. A Queen of Queens, with magic the world had not seen since the First Mother had passed on, who would restore dragonkind to glory.
But the plague was not confined to Gan’thalanor as they had thought. Slowly but surely it spread from female to female until, seven hundred years after the city was sealed, the last Dragon Queen went into the Long Sleep.
Dragonkind continued, but diminished in magic and numbers. They could breed with elves, and did, and the children of these pairings were dragon more often than not. But as the years passed and their magic and their blood thinned, those who had been born in the Time of Queens became kings among them, revered for their pure magic and their pure blood. Without Queens to breathe magic into the unborn, the dragonborn became weaker with each generation.
A millennium after the fall of Gan’thalanor, few of the dragonborn had enough magic to light a fire, let alone make the Great Change to take dragon form.
And in the lost city, the eggs of the Last Queens of Gan’thalanor passed the centuries unchanging, waiting for their awakening.