Nineteen days before the Black Mausoleum
Dragon battled dragon in the skies, a thing that Blackscar remembered from its first lifetime and then never since. The old ghosts in the half-made sky-home were silent. Hidden once more. Even the little one, the sorcerer who carried a touch of the broken god.
Strangeness upon strangeness. As it dived upon the eyrie and set its innards alight, a part of Blackscar tried not to give itself up to the battle, to the fury and the joy of it. Too many things to consider.
It failed. Thunder and lightning rose up to greet it, battering its skin. Fire swept in a wave before it. Little ones screamed and burned. It felt their fear, delicious like honey. It felt the little one it was looking for. Running. Fleeing. It turned and came at the sky-home again. There. Standing by the edge, rising out of the haze of smoke and mist and steam.
You are mine.
The little one saw it coming. Knew its end. Nowhere to hide. Fire swept towards it, yet at that moment another dragon fell from the sky, teeth and claws and tail, ripping and tearing. Small. Barely more than a hatchling. A year old, half grown at best, but it came nonetheless and the dragon knew it must turn to meet it or be taken crashing to the ground, and either way, the little one was granted a miracle and would not burn, not now.
But soon.
It met the other dragon, tooth and claw. Victory was certain, yet the other came with a furious zeal. A certainty of purpose. A righteousness, even, the sort that belonged in the head of little ones and their foolishness, not within a dragon. Not within a creature that had seen such zeal almost shatter creation.
But there nevertheless.
They skimmed the edge of the sky-home, cracking its shell with their wind and their tails. It saw the little one fall, but the creature’s thoughts did not fade and flicker and so the dragon knew that it lived on. They crashed into the castle together and hurled themselves back into the sky. Blackscar threw the other dragon aside. Gently. Or gentle as a dragon could be. Wings intact and no bones crushed beyond repair. It turned for its little one once more, but now there were more dragons. Lightning struck it, sent it plunging spiralling through the sky. When its wings were its own again, the dragon turned its thoughts to the sorceries of glass and gold that spat thunder. The little one could wait.
Lightning met him, a storm of it. The little ones; and then their half-grown dragon servants fell from the sky and tore their own kind to the ground with teeth that struck to kill.
Dragon servants. Its rage could melt mountains. Fill seas and burn skies. Yet it withdrew. Some did not. Could not. One by one they fell.
Defeated.
The thought was enough to pierce any fury. It had never, in any lifetime, been left to savour the word.
A surge of something ancient burst from the sky-home. It echoed across the plains and faded and died. The dragon felt it. Saw it. Saw something cut loose. Saw one of its own kind it had known for fifty lifetimes lying crippled and broken in the folds of the sky-home’s womb and then die at the touch of an old goddess who always took something away.
The other dragons murmured among themselves. One by one they left, but the dragon called Blackscar lingered. One last thing. The little one was still there and so the dragon watched and waited, carefully and from a distance, touching the edges of the little one’s thoughts as it climbed back down from the sky-home to the ground. Watched as a magic made of dragon blood blinked its mind away and the little one it had hunted for so long vanished, finally, from its sight.
Such a thing might drive another to rage, it mused, but for once the dragon was unmoved.
After all, it knew by now exactly there this little one meant to go.
An expanse of largely unbroken forest that occupies the south-west corner of the realms, the Raksheh stretches over several hundred miles from Drotan’s Top and the Gliding Dragon Gorge in the north to the Sea of Storms in the south. Its east-west borders are less sharply defined: in the west the forest merges with the valleys of the Worldspine, while in the east the wooded areas peter out more gradually into the plains of the Silver City. Several large rivers flow through the forest, ultimately draining into the Yamuna and emerging close to the town of Farakkan. Numerous large round lakes dot the more mountainous western fringe of the forest; from the air these are similar to the Mirror Lakes of the Purple Spur. Various deep gorges and several spectacular waterfalls have been reported by dragon-riders who have ventured to cross the forest. The best known of these are those around the Aardish Caves.
The forest is largely uninhabited, although rumoured to give shelter to numerous settlements of outsiders and other feral tribes. Bandits and outlaws also frequent the fringes of the forest, particularly in the north.
The forest may be the home of many unique creatures. Earthworms as large as horses have been reported, together with six-legged lizards of various sizes ranging from the minuscule to the giant. Several breeds of venomous snakes and poisonous frogs are known to inhabit the forest. Snappers are also a constant danger, although their numbers are less than in the more northern fringes of the Worldspine. For those of our order, the forest offers a concentration of valuable and unique ingredients the like and diversity of which can only otherwise be found on the distant Oordish Moors. Frogsback, for example, is harvested from the southern fringes of the Raksheh Forest.
With the exception of the rather arid northern section close to Drotan’s Top, the forest has the distinction of being one of the wettest places in the realms, surpassed only by the southern reaches of the Worldspine itself.
Bellepheros’ Journal of the Realms, 2nd year of Speaker Hyram