The Last Dragon
Dragons are long since gone from the continent that Kesh now hefts her shadow upon. In days far gone by, when the world was fractured and many great kingdoms with many great cities spread across the lands, the stretches of land and sea between the olden cities were the wilds where dragons dwelt. Great armies were raised and even greater armies felled, heroes would rise but even the strongest of them were slain. The dragons persisted and all den were kept in their place. While yes some were vanquished, others even tamed, the most fundamental dragons would persist. With this so nature ruled over all den. The wilds came first, the hearth second. A rule of the world broken only under the might of the Highking and his great empire.
In old Kiden tales there are stories of dragons of the wind and the woods being hounded and slaughtered, the Piskie folk are said to have once hailed from an island ruled by a grand old pale drake, and some Cotha of yore may have even had the capacity to turn their bodies from that of chalk into one of immaculate drekkon scale. But even these astonishing feats were on balance unremarkable. The sea was still whipped by storms, the mountains raked with rockfalls, and the untrodden path knotted with danger. To unite the lands and make den like gods, these dragons had to fall.
The great kingdom of Torenia, Pencitta the capital, was proved in an oven of such heat. The Highking and his knights, as they marched the lands, left each new place they touched marked with the corpse of a primordial beast. For this they were not only praised but hailed. However it was not until the final dragon was slain that the great city could rightfully call itself a capital to all that lies beneath the skies. One persisted: Den-nul, the humbler of all. Madoc the witch, though she may be dark and scheming, was the only knight the Highking could trust to take on such a drake, for her power was unmatched by any other than the great Torenian himself. For years her armies marched but the great beast was never found. Disaster swept the lands but the witch was always too late. Den-nul, the greatest of them all, the aspect of the wind, the keeper of the seasons, the great weight that thrummed out the waves of the darkest storms, was so high above that it was likely that they didn’t even notice the mass culling of their kind or even the hunting pack that followed behind them.
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A hubris that would be matched only by Madoc herself, but not until after the great disaster of Den-nul would set their sights on the future capital itself. Clouds of sodden peat smeared the skies for miles around, the harshest of winters in all of memory, a near decade of misery had arrived and all at the behest of Den-nul for they had arrived at last in the godly city. Madoc herself with five other wizened magi would face the devil as its great wings hung above the city and draped its great storming body over the kingdom. Seven great swords of magic said to have been forged of starlight collected by Brysowa themself would pierce the great beast’s thundering scales; the first and last being thrust by Madoc herself with the intermediary five by her great disciples. With this the chaos would finally be tamed, the corpse of Den-nul would hang above the city in perpetuity, only to be seen by those with ensorceled eyes, and the great Highking and those garbed in his livery would take these primal forces and have dominion over them themselves.
Talk between the wisest suggests that the role of dragon has been renewed in light of Kesh’s blessing. Shaman and scholar alike believe that the great ring with two gems reawakened the wilds and gave them form again, though in the shape of apparitions. Though I am also convinced of a second story concerning a final dragon that I had learned from a droll telling woman in the west; a story of a new dragon. While Den-nul’s corpse still hangs in the air, the way the sky was shifted by lady Kesh herself caused a great rupture in the natural law and thus demanded a new drake to embody the aspect of the terror of the eclipse. She had told me that she knew of this new dragon because she had met him herself. While travelling she had met a young Sulite boy with silver eyes who told her tales of the hardships of the blessing when it first arrived. Tales that the great bardic saint would never have told. She did not believe him at first but would eventually see that this boy had the blood of Cotha, and so was in fact older than he seemed. The boy, who went by the name Orleth, was a priest of Kesh at the first temple of the eclipse. Of course the first temple of the eclipse is open for pilgrimage but hasn’t had a priest since the first generation of those born after the fall of the capital over a century ago. The night she left the temple she spotted in the sky a shining wyrm. A four winged blessing in the shape of a reptile with silvery scales that flashed like cat’s eyes and a dark pattern of grey that twisted around the body like a patterned damascus blade. She learned that the same night she left the temple was the same night the last priest of the eclipse was seen. The new drake and the last drake: Orleth the damascus dragon.
From “Emergent Tales from New Kesh” by Lady Zelah Tremaine and Sir Edwin Hopper of San-Arsinian