A Bit of History

It had started not long before he had taken residence in the Shreken Caves. As a human, he went by the name Lucieno, and hailed from the small country of Gana. He was part of an expedition to Voires, the long-wrecked capital of the Great Kingdom. Well, it wasn't completely ruined. One building had been standing intact. Voire's Grand Library. It seemed pretty incongruous amongst the other ruins. The main doors had opened with a loud creak, and the expedition members had stared in amazement at the sight before them.

Shelves upon shelves of books all in perfect condition, looking as new as the day they had been bound. The magic used to keep everything in shape must have been really powerful to last for as long as it had. They had tried taking some of the books, they always seemed to get a shock. That was until they hit on the idea to grab books that were relevant to their profession. Lucieno had a friend called Hendric who was a historian. He was flipping through a book when he found something that he thought would interest Lucieno. He called him over.

"What is it, Hendric?" he had asked.

He indicated a page that was half taken up with grotesque diagrams. "According to this book, seers have claimed to see that in the far future men were destined to evolve into dragons."

Now the people at the time had obviously treated this with derision, as why would mankind ultimately evolve into something that had been put on the planet in order to control the human population?

Some of the mages of the time, perhaps not the sanest of individuals, developed spells to test whether the seer's claims were true. As the gruesome images on the page Hendric had indicated showed, the mages had died during transformation. Hendric saw the gleam in his friend's eye, and automatically knew what he was going to do. Lucieno had disappeared before he could attempt to stop him.

He went looking for him around the ruins and eventually found him reciting some incantations from the book he was holding. He couldn't help but watch as his friend slowly transformed into one of the most infamous creatures in the land. He obviously didn't hide well enough, because the dragon who had formally been his friend spotted him and lumbered over to his position.

"Luci...Lucieno?" Hendric finally ventured.

Lucieno realised that he couldn't talk in his new form, so tried telepathy. Yes, it's me.

"How...how was it?"

Hurt like Hades, Lucieno admitted.

Hades was the name given to a young dragon that lived in some hills in Gana. He wasn't capable of killing a man yet, but still capable of inflicting terrible burns, as Lucieno had found out to his cost. Fortunately the healer of the town he been born in was well versed in treating these injuries, and there was no scarring.

Now if Lucieno was honest with himself, he hadn't really expected it work, and he knew that the citizens of Gana were not going to take it well. So he desired to take his leave and find residence elsewhere. It was with a heavy heart that he had to bid his friend goodbye for the last time before flying off.

He discovered the Shreken Caves, devoid of any presence, dragon or otherwise. He soon found out that there had been three dragons in the Caves previous to him. The first two had made significant changes to the landscape around them. Dragons were indeed magic creatures, but they had no control over their magical abilities, the results being rather random events.

To the north of Allaria there is the strange condition where arctic wastes and desert wastes laid a relative short distance away from each other, seperated only by the waterway known as the Chul Suz. The first dragon to occupy the Shreken Caves had been the cause of that, due to one of the battles with the first Allarian knights.

The second dragon had, in its death throes, altered the Shreken Caves beyond all recognition. The knight who had slain it got lost trying to find his way out. Lucieno had found his bones not long after his arrival there, and had given him a decent burial.

The third had made itself and the knight attacking it simply disappear from existence. Lucieno had no idea where exactly they had disappeared to, even though he spent a number of years trying to find out. He still tried to now, as mysteries were not something he was fond of.

His time as a human mage meant that unlike normal dragons he could control and hone the magical power his new dragon form had given him, though there was one thing he had great difficulty with. To begin with, his human nature was still in full control, but eventually the dragon one made itself felt, growing more powerful over time. He had planned to live in the caves and not cause anyone any harm, but the gradual take over of his dragon nature meant he was soon kidnapping children and burning cornfields.

Though there were a number of differences.

The first is that he didn't kill the children he kidnapped. He turned them into animals instead. He also kidnapped a few teenagers as well, Velus being one of them. The majority of them he turned back to humans once he had regained control. Velus didn't seem bothered about his doggy form and was content to stay that way.

Another was that he didn't store up treasures for himself. The belief that dragons derived their power from their hoard of treasure was incorrect; they were basically like jackdaws and couldn't help being attracted to shiny objects.

He gradually managed to take control over his dragon nature during most of the year, except from the spring season. Then the instinct was too strong to try and resist, and he knew if he tried he could be irreversibly damaged mentally. Also during this time he had decided to change his name from Lucieno to Minestus, which in the language of the Great Kingdom meant 'fire-lizard'.

Those knights that had tried to kill him during spring usually died in most horrible ways, and he could remember every one of them. To try and assuage his feelings of guilt, he wouldn't kill the knights sent against him the rest of the year. Instead, he would place them somewhere safe and look after them. Failure was not an option and any knight that returned from a failed quest was likely to be beheaded or imprisoned for life, depending on the mood of the current monarch. In more recent times the punishment they would receive was less harsh, but still a painful stigma for the knight to bear. In fact many knights had been known to commit suicide as they couldn't bear the shame.

There were those knights that refused the food that was offered them, but most after a few days would soon change their mind. The actual number of knights that would actually stick to their guns and were willing to die from malnutrition or dehydration were actually few and far between. Whichever was the case, when they died he would cremate them and try and make sure they were scattered over the ground of the duchy where they had been born. He saw it as a sort of tribute to them.

To begin with, Minestus hadn't thought that much of the afterlife, or what would happen when he died. But there was something that happened when the knights in his care died that soon changed his mind; he could sense something leaving their bodies at the time of death. One of the knights told him it was the person's soul leaving their body, going to whatever reward they were due. That same knight also said he didn't believe that animals (such as dragons) didn't have such a soul. This got Minestus to thinking. If he had a soul as a human, did he lose it when he transformed? These and other questions prompted to try and get hold of a philospher. Tao Tse Mung wasn't affiliated with any religion, so his opinions would be unbiased.

As for the emerald, all a transformed being had to do was touch it, and they would revert back to their original form, something Minestus obviously didn't want. However, a powerful mage as himself could remotely manipulate its powers. He wanted to see if its primal power could allow him to totally repress his dragon nature competely.

The emerald had been formed by primal magics when the world had been created. It was found in the temple of some ancient god the former inhabitants of the Great Kingdom had worshipped. A couple of powerful mages from the Kingdom fought over control for it. One mage used all his powers, killing himself in the process, to banish the emerald to the moon. It was another of the stories that his friend Hendric had told him about, and he had spent all of the seven hundred years he had lived to trying to locate it.

There had been literally thousands of Allarian knights sent against him over the years. The number of Aqualarian warriors sent against him was much less. He didn't know much about their politics, but he had realised that the warriors sent against him had done something criminal, their punishment being to fight him and presumably die in the process. So when Princess Astra arrived, it got him wondering what exactly she had done.

Talking about Astra, Fred's encounter with Velus who would lead him to her had been preplanned. His issued threats to get them to do what he wanted was somewhat painful for him. He knew, however, that it was sometimes the only way to get people to do what he wanted. His reputation, undeserved as some of it might had been, meant that he usually got what he wanted.

1. Back to Fred, Astra and Velus.

Add New Option

Go Back

View Forward Story Tree
View Back Story Tree