Immortal History: The Draracle and Jakel

Coming soon!

Mortal History: The Dracoids

Many branches of the river of History run along the surface, disappear underground for awhile, and then come back up to the surface again later.

In a deathbed change of heart, the last Emperor of the Dracoid nation repudiated his own involvement with the evil god Belial, and took extreme measures to erase all record of the Dracoid nation's guilt. The written records were destroyed, the pictographs were obliterated, and scores of governmental employees (and even a few Grand Ministers) were executed. Finally the great capital city was undermined, causing it to sink under the Bane River.

When the Dracoid nation collapsed, the few who remained behind in the submerged remnants began to mutate, eventually becoming the race known as the Ssar, the multi-tailed lizard beasts.

Most of the Dracoid citizens fled to other continents however, and became wanderers, hermits and menial laborers. As a scattered group, they behaved as if they were embarrassed to be Dracoid. The disintegration of Dracoid society was so complete that it was many mortal centuries before anything resembling a Dracoid political unit appeared again.

When a new Dracoid nation did at last form, it was along strict egalitarian lines, and democratic notions dominated all thought. Although none in polite circles would have had the bad taste to mention debacle of the last Dracoid emperor, none could forget it, and the new community occupied lands far away from the dreaded Southern Continent.

Throughout this period, those families, which had comprised the Dracoid aristocracy, kept their blue-blood ancestry a careful secret, fearful of reprisals. (The extremes to which these families went to disguise their once elevated status might have seemed obvious if anyone had been paying attention.) The lowest members of the new Dracoid society; the dung haulers, the rag pickers, the tavern dancing girls; these were the hidden Dracoid aristocracy of the modern era.

At first, after the collapse, the gentle Dracoid managed to keep many of their habits and routines, in spite of their wide dispersion and other seemingly insurmountable difficulties. Two hundred years after the collapse, there were still occasional balls for young Dracoid socialites, even though they were held in secret places and their gowns were fashioned from the tattered remnants of their great-great-grandmother's trousseaus.

But gradually, the flame began to die out. Secret gatherings became a thing of the past, remaining valuables were sold to foreign collectors, and only a very few individuals survived who had memories of having ancestors who had once belonged to the ruling class of a mighty nation.

These once haughty families, from among whom the emperors of the Dracoid people had been selected for all known time, dwindled to a handful despite intermarriage with humans. Stuck in their habits, and numbed by centuries of self-flagellation, they did not notice when no purebred Dracoid children at all were born to their remaining group for twenty years. Among them all, only one young half-breed female was still fertile.

Her name was Vernilla, and she was a dancer in the tavern frequented by Eric LeGre during the first siege of Cimmeria.

Gladstone History: The Throne and the Artifacts

Coming soon!