Dromoreth

Black-lipped Wolfsbane

Plant

While dangerous for wolves - and most mammals - to consume, Wolfsbane has no effect on dragons.

38

4

[ x ]

we went to sleĒ̶̡͓͎͛͜͝p beneath the ground together
the worms came and ate up our EY̵̗͒E̷̞̕S


In a time that escapes living memory, a wounded pilgrim flew on her last wings above the lands that would one day become Val-ar-Aion. Unable to carry her any further, her weary frame settled by chance in a flowered field.

The Wyldren poison had taken its toll; it seethed in her veins still, turning her ruined body against itself. Her final effort spent, the Imperial collapsed on a bed of thistle. Her hissing blood burst forth fresh blooms wherever it fell, leaving a crooked trail of renewal in her wake. She could have raged, cursed with her last breath, but her fury had fled; replaced by a strange equanimity. She had dragged this ragged carcass as far as it would go; there was some peace in the knowledge that, carrion that she would be, her remains would not go to waste. Already, it seemed that nature was sinking in its claws.

Through darkening vision, she watched as tiny green shoots sprung up through her feet, coiling about her limbs like fragile chains. Her eyes fell upon her heavy midriff. A pang of regret reached her, but it was very distant now. The little ones would not suffer. They would be together forever, their bones entwined amidst the briars and the dead blossoms.
Her eyelids grew heavy. The great black wyrm lowered her head, lulled to rest, for the last time, by the sound of birdsong.

---

It is said that the summers of the Sunbeam Ruins are incomparably lovely. It was during this season, on an afternoon beneath an achingly blue sky, that the scout Coriandir found himself drowsing in the midst of his duties. So little had happened that day, and for the past fortnight for that matter, that he wondered why the east wood was guarded at all. The spot was a few leagues out from the city, but not so far that the harpies would dare venture near, and the terrain was too open for Serthis.

And so it was that with the warm tickle of the breeze on his scales, and the sweet chorus of birdsong to lull him, that Coriandir found himself reclining on a great mound of soft, black peat to rest.

He was roughly awoken by the ground shifting beneath him. With a start, Coriandir tumbled onto the grass in a shower of loam. What seemed like a thousand birds scattered shrieking into the air, shattering the stillness of the summer sky like glass. In the fresh quiet of their fading cries, he felt a sudden chill run down his spine- the black dread felt by a rabbit when it senses the shadow of a hawk too late. Slowly, he turned.

Two immense black pits met his gaze, pinning him to the spot: the grinning, terrible death's-head of a beast far larger than any living dragon. The mound, which he had taken for a hillock, revealed itself as the form of an enormous, rotting wyrm. Soil rained from the great gaping ribcage as it coiled, a voiceless hiss escaping from some worm-eaten chamber in its chest- a foetid breath warmed by the decay of last autumn's loam. Vines both living and dead coiled about its frame, which snapped effortlessly as the creature rose and shook off centuries of growth. Coriandir quailed.

The dead weren't meant to walk in Val-ar-Aion! Didn't the Matriarch destroy them all long ago--?!

After leering at him for what felt like an eternity, something in the hellish countenance passed, and the creature seemed to take no more notice of the scout than a lion would an ant: the frightful intelligence he had glimpsed in the sightless pits dimming and returning to dumb oblivion. Its hoary length passed mere feet before his eyes as the abomination drifted past with the indifference of a river around a stone. Freed from the basilisk stare, Coriandir watched in awe as it circled him. Something else was moving in the tangle of ribs and thorns- the feather-light rustling of some tiny creature- a mass of smaller skeletons nestled within the first, faintly cooing.

Hatchlings...?

Coridandir counted: two- three- four eggshell skulls, perfectly preserved in their nest of thistle and briar, limbs all askew and delicately entwined as they had decomposed together. A distant memory returned to him, of discovering the desiccated remains of a crow in the walls of the old chapel as a child: how sad those tiny, fragile bones had seemed. The great wyrm snaked around to fix him with its gaze once more, and Coriandir now saw in its empty sight no ancient malice or hollow ignorance, but an enigmatic awareness, warm and knowing. Words sprang to his mind, though no sound shaped them.

We all return to the soil someday, though we know not the hour. You'll join us soon.

With a lethargy born of centuries of stony sleep, the serpentine form turned and ambled into the undergrowth, never to be seen again by Coriandir or any other in this century or the next- dreaming somewhere beneath root and hedge, passing era by era into forgetfulness and decay. Returning to the city in a daze, the young scout might have dismissed the encounter as some strange reverie, had it not been for a single token: a ragged black feather, earth-scented and unnatural, which he kept as a charm until the end of his days: and there were a great many of them, for since that fateful meeting, Coriandir was never ill again.