Her tongue snaked out repeatedly, and the saliva that dripped from her mouth sizzled as it struck the grassy carpet.
The Black was only a little larger than the silver, and in a fair fight she could not have bested him. But she had gained the advantage, and she worked to keep it. This time she directed her acid breath at his front claws.
The silver rose on his back legs and opened his mouth to retaliate. He inhaled sharply, then exhaled, expelling a stream of quicksilver. But the Black was too quick. She dashed forward, under him.
The Black lashed upward at the silver’s belly. Her talons and teeth cut through his mirror scales, and she released another stream of acid. It splashed into his wound and he began to crumple and twitch. She moved in to finish him.
“I am Onysablet,” she hissed as she brought her jaws toward his face. Her horns pricked the scaly flesh beneath his eyes. “This is my realm.”
Six years later, the inhabitants of Southern Ergoth, an island continent six hundred miles north to south and nearly as wide, found themselves experiencing a change in climate thanks to one new resident.
Throughout the land’s history, Southern Ergoth boasted diverse climates. Now it was perpetually cold. Snow covered the desolate plains in the north. Snow blanketed the old forests and the mountains. A thick sheet of ice lay sparkling over the grasslands and lakes. The deep waters of the Bay of Darkness were so choked with ice and snow that they, and the surrounding coast, had become a glacier. In the Straits of Algoni and in the Sirrion Sea beyond, icebergs floated and menaced the shipping lanes.
It was winter—and would stay winter—because Southern Ergoth’s dragon overlord, Gellidus, was partial to the cold. Gellidus had spent the better part of a year sculpting the land to suit his needs. He was particularly fond of deep, hard-packed snow that he could glide across at amazing speeds. He also fancied thick drifts in which he’d hide and wait for unsuspecting prey. To him, the frigid wind was as cherished as a lover’s caress, and its howl blew down the mountainsides and across the frozen lakes as welcomed as a whispered kiss.
The dragon was known as “Frost.” An immense white dragon with glistening scales, his wings were smooth like oiled leather and tinged with pale blue edges. His head was covered with an angular, ridged carapace.
Gellidus had spent the past several months sculpting the climate to suit him, and dining on those dragons who protested. He’d also acquired a taste for the Kagonesti, Qualinesti, and Silvanesti, though it took a lot of them to fill his cavernous stomach.
The ogres and goblins claimed the mountains—or rather the mountain caves and niches that were too small to accommodate the White’s massive body. The elves who were able, abandoned the land. Those who remained did their best to hide from Gellidus and to adapt to the unnatural environment.
Southern Ergoth no longer held the promise of being a sovereign state for elvenkind where the Kagonesti, Qualinesti, and Silvanesti could exist side by side in peace. Shivering and weeping, most of the elves were driven from their homes and forced to flee west.
As the years passed, Krynn’s dragon population dwindled. Only a few dozen remained, and these were great, fearsome beasts of incredible size and power who firmly established their territories.
Some smaller dragons survived, those who knew how to hide from their huge brethren and who had no desire to challenge any of them for territory.
One such dragon was Brynseldimer. He had previously lived in the troubled waters of the Blood Cup, but laid claim to Dimernesti—the easterly sunken land of the sea elves.
He was a sea dragon, an ancient one who’d seen more than four hundred years. His blue and green scales had long ago lost their iridescent shine, and were flat and dull and covered with barnacles, dark like the bottom of the sea. His horns rose twisting from the top of his head, and when he nestled himself on the ocean floor, he looked like a craggy coral ridge. His tail was thin and smooth like a sea snake, and it was tipped with a barbed point that he often used to skewer large fish—or to spear the occasional overly-curious sea elf.
Brynseldimer had abandoned his northern home in self-preservation. The sea dragon wanted to avoid fights with larger dragons who had moved in and begun to battle in the area. He feared those who were his size and larger. He was not especially crafty or clever, and he did not want to fall victim to well-planned attacks.
The blue-skinned Dimernesti elves were more of an annoyance than a threat, and he did not think they tasted especially good. But from time to time armed bands of them would swim out of their coral-towered homes and challenge him. He swallowed them because he did not know what else to do with them.
Those few who tried to swim toward the land of the Silvanesti, to seek help from their air-breathing kin in the forests, were crushed beneath the dragon’s claws. Eventually the Dimernesti elves learned to keep to themselves and to stay in their homes, which had become their prison cells. The dragon, whom they dubbed Brine, usually left them alone if they did not wander.
Isolated, they didn’t know that elsewhere on Krynn dragons were establishing realms and tormenting people—that as the months and years passed the dragons claimed more and more of Krynn and changed the land to suit their temperaments.
The sea elves didn’t know that despite their seemingly-quarantined state, humans and elves in many other places were faring much worse. They didn’t know that Brynseldimer kept busy capsizing ships that got too close to his domain, concentrating on keeping the elves in their underwater communities, preventing visitors from reaching them. He swallowed other intelligent sea life, especially otters because the Dimernesti elves could shapechange into them.
And they didn’t know that his actions centered on squelching news of his presence. Though Brynseldimer was not the brightest of Krynn’s massive dragons, he knew that if he didn’t want his large, scaly brethren to hunt him, he would have to keep them from finding him. He would have to keep his presence a secret.
Almost twenty years after Malys shared her secret plan with the green male, another larger green dragon digested the powerful information (as well as the unfortunate green male) and set about claiming her own domain. Her name was Beryllinthranox and by the time she had slain more than two dozen draconians with her devastating poisonous breath, she was also known as The Green Peril.
The windswept plain of Kharolis, the land surrounded by Ice Mountain Bay and the Sirrion Sea, was hers. She directed her efforts to ferreting out draconians in hiding and hatchling blue and copper dragons who relished the dry land of Kharolis’s sloughs. She spent her captured energy transforming the land, creating an environment for trees and streams, where before only sporadic patches of scrub weeds grew.
She eventually edged her way north, to the grasslands south of the Qualinesti forest, where she added three young brass dragons to her list of victories and feasted on a patrol of elves.
Beryl grew larger, more powerful, more belligerent, and within the span of three years, she claimed the home of the Qualinesti elves and became dragon overlord of Qualinesti and its surroundings.
Malys’s realm included Kendermore, Balifor, Khur, and the Dairly Plains. The latter was no longer flat. She had expended her energies on crafting a rugged mountain range that stretched from the far south to the north and curved toward the Kender homeland. The rich forests were thinned, both from her extensive hunting and from the toll her sculpting of the land took on the earth.
Her lair, the Peak of Malys, was now just south of a place called Flotsam. It was a massive, high plateau ringed on all sides by spiky rocks. She met with other dragon overlords there, and they shared news of conquests. Malys was always interested in learning about the humans the other dragons encountered. She wanted to know all about them, their drives and passions, their weaknesses and faults.