PROLOGUE
Act 1 - The Sundering Rite
The world was not always as it is now, fractured and forgetting. Three hundred years ago, true dragons ruled this continent, not as tyrants, but as Aspects. They were ancient beings shaped by the same raw elements that formed the world itself, stewards of balance.
Through their presence the land remained whole. Rivers kept their course because Aurix willed them to. Storms softened before they became ruinous because Chuth Maw breathed against them. Life flourished beneath a harmony few mortals fully understood. Though powerful beyond mortal measure, the dragons did not watch from a distance. Many took mortal form and walked among people in humble guise, offering counsel, settling disputes, and guiding settlements so mortals might grow without living in fear of them. They believed wisdom was best given by walking beside others, not standing above them.
In time, this bond allowed dragon and mortal to share an age of prosperity. The world was not perfect, but it was held.
Yet stewards can see a storm coming that mortals cannot.
Act 2 - The Rot
The Aspects felt it first in the leylines. A fiendish incursion was coming, but not as an army with banners. It would not march. It would seep. A slow rot that feeds on greed, apathy, and hate. The kind of rot that makes neighbors turn from suffering, that makes a king gild his city while his people hollow out inside. Fiends do not need to conquer a world that will gild itself for them. They only need to wait until it is too hungry to resist.
The dragons knew they were the anchor for this hunger. So long as draconic power flowed openly through the world, fiends would be drawn to it like wolves to blood. If they fought the fiends directly, the continent would burn. If they did nothing, the rot would take root and never leave.
So they made a terrible choice.
They called it the Sundering Rite.
The Dragon Aspects would seal themselves away into leyline vaults, turning their bodies into land to starve the fiends of draconic power. They would give up flight, and form, and memory, and become the world itself. The world would forget they were ever real, and in forgetting, it would be safe.
One by one, they went to their vaults.
Act 3 - The Three Who Became Land
Chuth Maw, the Green Aspect, flew into the largest volcano on the continent and inverted her soul. She did not erupt. She imploded, and then exploded, her fire turning inside out. That eruption became Obsidia. Her body is still there - the green, ghostly obsidian glass that covers everything for miles, sharp as grief. The sickly green glow inside that glass is not natural light. It is her warding magic, still working three hundred years later, still trying to keep fiends out long after her heart stopped beating.
Aurix, the Gilded Aspect, the Gold Aspect, sealed himself under what would become the Verdant Expanse. He curled his vast body around the deepest leyline and turned his flesh to seal. His scales became veins of gold deep in the bedrock. His bones became white marble. His blood became rivers that still run warm. His breath became the warm wind that makes the Expanse fertile, the wind that smells like summer even in winter. His final hope as his eyes closed was simple and terrible in its kindness: that his sacrifice would leave the world a better place than he found it.
Aurelyth, the Goldenrod Matriarch, was not an Aspect. She was Aurix's daughter, younger, bright as straw in late sun. She wanted to help with the Rite. She begged to be sealed with the others. But she was pregnant, and in draconic magic, mother and unborn are one soul. The death of a dragon mother during pregnancy awakens an old and dangerous curse, one that twists everything it touches. Aurix could not let her perform the Rite. He could not let her die.
So he hid her in the grasslands where the leyline ran shallow and warm, where the grass grew seven feet tall and golden. He told her, "Sleep, my daughter, I will wake you when it is safe." He curled the grass over her like a blanket and sealed himself beneath the world.
He never woke up. No one woke her.
She slept there for centuries, gravid and dreaming, while the Magisters found her, while chains were laid, while the world forgot.
The Rite worked. For three hundred years, fiends turned their eyes from the realm. The draconic power they craved was gone, buried in stone and river and wind. Mortals built cities on the bones of their guardians.
Now the Rite is failing. The vaults are cracking. Stone sweats gold where it should not. Glass hums where it should be silent. Grass grows too tall and does not rot.
Fiends are beginning to turn their eyes back to the realm, sensing draconic magic returning through the cracks.
The dragons must waking up, whether the world is ready or not.