Miasma
(#64808544)
Rivers in the desert | it/its
Familiar
Stormclaw Showman
Click or tap to view this dragon in Predict Morphology.
Energy: 50/50
This dragon’s natural inborn element is Light.
Female Imperial
This dragon is hibernating.
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Personal Style
Apparel
Skin
Scene
Measurements
Length
25.42 m
Wingspan
20.94 m
Weight
7369.22 kg
Genetics
Flint
Savannah
Savannah
Taupe
Constellation
Constellation
Slate
Capsule
Capsule
Hatchday
Breed
Eye Type
Level 1 Imperial
EXP: 0 / 245
STR
6
AGI
6
DEF
6
QCK
5
INT
8
VIT
8
MND
6
Biography
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 M I A S M A 
"What makes the desert beautiful
Is that somewhere it hides a well. . ." L ore summary. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, vix dicant consulatu patrioque at. Ea ius vidit paulo, usu iusto mandamus eu, mea cetero inermis urbanitas ex. Laudem mucius intellegat mel an, ut usu populo propriae probatus. Autem accusam legendos ex quo, duo id efficiantur neglegentur. Delectus platonem ut vis, vidisse impedit voluptua an sed. At eos quis laoreet omittam, sumo elit aliquando *** te. Per mundi alterum at. |
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Dragonhome is an old, old land. There are places here where the ground flows like water, sand rising and falling in great waves while the bedrock shifts restlessly beneath. The surveyors, however, were wise to the ways of the earth. They stood on steady pillars or hovered overhead, waiting until the shifting sands were still. Finally, the ground went quiet. A huge fissure had opened up; sand cascaded over the side like waterfalls. The surveyors crept to the edges. “That’s odd,” one Ridgeback grumbled. She scraped at the sand, looking at the rock beneath. “It’s already worn down.” “Could be just an old wound, opened up again,” one of her subordinates surmised. She grunted noncommittally. And then from below— “Chief, there’s someone down here.” “Alive, or dead?” the Ridgeback asked. There was no audible response, but the silence was in itself an answer. Five minutes later, she was standing at the bottom of the fissure, while all around her, her crew worked to divert the tide of sand and light some lanterns. The glow washed over that unfortunate “someone”. The surveyor who’d discovered them crouched somberly nearby. “Was like this already, they were,” she said. And when said “like this”, she meant the way the bones were arranged. They had belonged to a Mirror; the crew could tell by the four holes in the skull—which was at the center of a neat spiral formed from the rest of his bones. All of them still seemed to be present, firmly embedded in the stone, starting with the lumpy vertebrae and ending with the little bits from the tail. Murmurs rose from the crew. “Never seen anything like that before.”—“Yeah, but they were a Mirror. Some sorta funerary rite from the Plaguelands, maybe?”—“Naw, see, the bones’re all stuck in the stone. That’s gotta be Earth magic—” “More working, less gabbing,” the Ridgeback chief said. The bustle resumed, and as she turned to look at the bones again, something caught her eye, gleaming through the skull’s eye sockets. She motioned to a small squad of excavators. “You can transmute this to mud, can’t you? Just the bit immediately around the bones. Let’s get the poor fellow out...” As the stone darkened, the Ridgeback carefully pried the skull free. There was a bundle beneath it: a leather satchel wrapped up in what looked to have been a traveling cloak. The cloak had gone gray and crumbly with age, and it puffed into dust at the Ridgeback’s touch. The satchel seemed a bit sturdier, though. Its brass buckles gleamed in the light. And there was something inside. “Traveler’s journal, a water flask—empty, of course,” the chief thought morosely. She’d been in this business for years, stabilizing land and clearing away sand and dirt for new lairs to be built. It wasn’t unusual to find dead bodies forgotten far beneath the ground. They had rules about this sort of thing: The remains were carefully gathered up and examined to determine their Flight of origin. Their possessions, if any remained, were studied for the same reason. Once a home Flight—or better yet, a clan—had been ascertained, the remains were sent there for a proper burial. Which was why a couple of days later, during a quiet afternoon, the chief took out the journal and began reading it. She did so carefully, for the parchment was yellowing and threatened to crumble in a stiff breeze. The writing was smudged, but readable, and it told a most curious tale. The writings (so the chief surveyor determined) had been made by an enterprising merchant named Jairus. In his day, there had not been so many surveyors, and many parts of Dragonhome were not fixed, so that travelers and caravans could be swallowed up by a sudden heave of the earth. The dragons usually managed to fly or magic their way to safety, but more often than not, they still lost their wares—and their money—to the sands. Jairus wrote thus, in an entry headed Rockbreaker’s Moon, Day 13— I will take only the barest minimum of attendants and supplies with me. Should the ground buckle around us again, escape will be much easier, and the loss of funds only minimal. Our failure will be inconsequential, but should we succeed in finding a safe route through those perilous sands, we will be able to fix it in stone and bring greater caravans through. I shall stake my claim on that route; my fellows will chafe at the toll I set, but it will still be a much smaller price to pay than losing their wares to the capricious motion of the earth. Rockbreaker’s Moon, Day 16— We are three days into our journey. To avoid the desert heat, we have elected to travel largely at night. Camps are set up at dawn, and the heat of the day is waited out as we sleep; we then break camp and continue our journey through the night, until daylight touches the sky again. Some of the attendants have whined about not being able to fly. This is foolishness; how shall we find an underground route if we are gallivanting about in the sky? I shall tell Horus to question prospective teammates more carefully. Evidently this lot is much less experienced than they professed themselves to be. There is nothing else noteworthy to report. The weather is as predicted, a breeze blowing steadily from the sea in the mornings and outwards from the desert in the evenings. We shall soon be in a valley of rock pillars, and I will have the teamsters drive the roundhorns a little harder. Once the scent of the sea fades, we shall be well and truly on our way. Rockbreaker’s Moon, Day 18— Nearly out of the Passage of Pillars; we shall be at its exit by tonight. The roundhorns are anxious to be off. It is nearly dawn as I write this, and by all rights the rigors of the previous night’s travel should have exhausted them, yet they remain restive, skittering around their posts. The wind blows along the tops of the valley and sends stones skittering down the slopes, and this faint and constant rattling is what keeps them dancing on the ends of their tethers. I understand their impatience. The hunters brought me some wild meat; it is tough and gamey, which I did not much like. Fare caught in the open desert promises to be even less appetizing, but then, that is what our supplies are for. I shall be glad once we are at the end of this trek (though even gladder, I’ll admit, if we achieve our objective and find a navigable route underground). Rockbreaker’s Moon, Day 21— Confusion and consternation! I am beside myself with rage. (And indeed, at this point, the writing was shaky and ink-splattered, as if the quill had been clutched in quivering claws.) That little fool, Gwynhfar, neglected to secure the roundhorns’ harnesses. Towards dusk, as we were breaking camp, some unseen beast howled among the dunes, and the idiot ungulates broke and fled. They have been rounded up, save for the three that fled back to the Passage of Pillars. I sent Bolivar and Therese to retrieve them, but the stony earth made tracking the wretched animals impossible, and they had to abandon that quest. Likewise, we shall have to abandon one of the carts, for we no longer have enough animals to pull it. My foresight, however, will certainly avail us now. We do not have to carry so much. Therese recalls that there are oases within a few days’ trek from here, so we shall be able to replenish supplies as necessary. She is at least proving her worth as a guide. That Gwynhfar, though, will be hearing much from me once we return to civilization. Rockbreaker’s Moon, Day 22— We reached the first of those oases Therese told us about. Far from the paradise we were expecting, it was disappointingly small. Much of the water had evaporated in the heat; what was left was largely choked with foul algae and exuded a fetor of decay. The hydromancers I hired were able to magic that water into potability, and we boiled it further for good measure, but it has been difficult to strain out the sediments. Some may have gotten stuck in my teeth, for all that the attendants tell me that my jaws are clean; I swear I can still taste that faint hint of decay. Alas, we cannot do without the water here, for the nearest oases are still some days’ travel away. Perhaps the stink will dissipate over time, or we shall get used to it. Rockbreaker’s Moon, Day 22— We have made excellent time, all things considered, but I foresee our pace slowing significantly. Therese has come down with a strange ailment. She has been bundled into various rugs and blankets, but she still shivers and moans of the cold, a chill seemingly deeper than even the desert brings at night. I would chalk it up to sun-sickness, but Therese is an Earth dragoness and should be immune to it. The stink of illness is upon her, perhaps some wretched infection borne on the wind from the Plaguelands. The border is several weeks’ travel away, though I would not be surprised if those accursed illnesses survived the harshness of the sun, only to latch onto this skinny, shivering Wildclaw. There is a great stone pillar visible to the north, and beyond that, Horus said, lives a friendly herd of centaurs. They will be constantly roaming within their territory, so he has left to find them now. The rest of us are to continue towards the rock pillar. We will set out once the sun has set and should reach it well before the next sunrise. Rockbreaker’s Moon, Day ? — The chief surveyor sighed. She had seen similar entries before. Question marks spotting the pages, silent cries of confusion. Sadly common in those weakened by the desert heat, as she suspected this merchant had been before he’d died. Attempts had been made to start other entries, but they all broke off in mid-sentence or had been crossed out. “Was it the sickness? Did he catch it from his guide?” The page crackled as she smoothed it out. Sand trickled from beneath it, the grains glittering in the lantern light. And Jairus wrote, making sense at last...or some sense, anyway— Is it the 25th day? Still Rockbreaker’s Moon, even? I cannot be sure. I must set the truth to paper lest I forget— The pillar. It was our destination, Horus called it a waypoint. We marched on through the night. We would have reached it in hours, but Therese was as cold and heavy as a block of lead, and we had to drag her along. She shivered the rugs off herself. Her breath stank, I remember the clouds it made, steaming in the chilly air. The moon sank. It must have been nearly dawn when we came to the pillar. No sun yet, and a chill fog had risen. Low and pale, but so thick, we couldn’t see our feet. Something awaited us in the pillars shadow.Thought it was Horus at first, with the centaur herd behind him. The Eleven preserve us! It rose above the fog, and the ruondhorns screamed and tried to run. Crushed them all in those great jaws, bones and cravans crunching together. The stink of blood, I can’t get it off of my scales. Nothing around us but fog like so many awful walls, that dark shape moving moving. It hissed like a fissure opening in the ground The Ridgeback felt an uncharacteristic chill. She shrugged it off and turned the page, expecting the sentence to continue, but the next parchment was covered with chicken scratches again. A few words were visible beneath: “sand” or “sunrise” or “nobody”, but nothing she could make sense of. Some pages later, Jairus briefly became lucid again. The sentences—fragments of them, anyway—leaped out at her. Thought the river would be full, but it was empty. I wanted to swim in it, but I just fell and when I cam up, my mouth was filled with sand. Tried to eat some grass, but it tasted like nothing. So dry, so. could barley move my jaws. I want to fly. But my wings, they’re so heavy. And it will see me if I do. It’ll snatch me out of the sky. Like Gwynfhar pieces of Gwynfar So much rain, red, the stink of it on my scales More scratchy writing, and more. The letters were barely legible now. The surveyor wondered at the flickering will that had pushed this doomed merchant to keep on writing. Her suspicions were confirmed when she saw the sentence— Cold, there world so bright an cold —and remembered what he’d said about Therese. “He got sick,” she muttered. “Or rather, the sick got him.” Sick in the body, as well as the head. Whatever was going on in his mind couldn’t be good. She wondered if, in some way, he’d been aware of his mind eroding. Jotting his thoughts down must have been his attempt to hold on to them. Sometimes mangled ideas are better than no ideas at all. A hole underground. I looking for yes It won’t find me. under ground. “Looks like he found that underground passage he was hoping for. Well, he won’t do much writing where it’s too dark to see,” the Ridgeback growled. Indeed, there were only a few scribbles left; the rest of the book was blank. And then the Ridgeback felt another chill. This time, it didn’t go away. Sleepiness briefly fled her mind, replaced by the clear-cut memory of the bones, Jairus’ bones, arranged in a neat spiral. He’d been alone, his attendants lost or killed. He had gone down into the darkness, he’d said, to escape the thing that had slain them. “And I don’t doubt that it found him....” I hear it. again. Things skittring in the dark. Like pebbles skipping over, the ground. No, it can’t it couldn’t have followed me. the way too small so It can’t be. rocks WATER, it must must Have water Some days later, the chief surveyor brought the artifacts to Terraclae. These were turned over to a calm, quiet scholar who took several moments to examine the journal while interviewing the Ridgeback about them. “One of our own, I see. Yes,” the scholar sighed, “a lot of travelers did go missing in that particular stretch of Dragonhome. Many still do. There are so many reasons....” “He mentioned how the oasis they’d visited was depleted, and the water had a strange smell.” The Ridgeback’s voice was once again flat and stoic. “And the other attendants lied about how experienced they were. Could’ve been they were all sicker than they thought, and nobody realized it. Not enough water...In the pre-dawn fog, they probably got spooked by a mirage.” “Yes, yes...Thank you for bringing these here. They will be looked after.” The ease with which the old scholar had accepted her explanation was a great relief. She’d been turning it over and over in her head and was quite proud of it. “After all, didn’t Jairus say that Therese had gotten sick? And that smell...He and the others could’ve caught it, too. It just took longer for their symptoms to manifest...” She went about the rest of her day and returned to her den at night. Sleep came easily enough—but the door at the back of her mind opened, and a single sibilant question crept out, asking her...no, taunting her— What if...? And now, in the darkness of her dreams, in the darkness under the earth, it loomed huge and frightening. Even hunched over, it was tremendous, each wing alone wider than she was. It turned towards her, and even in the gloom, she made out its skinless skull-face, the black caverns of its eyes. “You wish to know how he died?” —the whisper rattled out of the unmoving, blood-scented air, like the skitter of pebbles across stones, or perhaps the distant promise of running water.... A crack! split the breathless silence, and the Ridgeback, struggling to scream, saw the thing the creature had been gnawing on. A skull, not bleached white by the sun, but stripped with teeth and claws. Four empty eye sockets stared beseechingly at her. The Ridgeback remained frozen, unable to move, unable to tear her eyes away from the sordid feast. Though the creature kept its gaze on her, it ate as though she wasn’t there, unhurriedly stripping the flesh away, lazily chewing with its jagged teeth. After what seemed an eternity, it was done. It delicately picked up each bone, arranging them in that spiral she’d seen, with the skull at its center. One by one, they sank into the stone as though it were mud. And there they stayed, as a warning— “Or bait,” some deeper instinct realized. And then the creature turned and melted into the deeper dark beneath the world, a faint whiff of decay trailing behind it. In the way of dreams, it left only a lingering unease—and the strangely persistent feeling that she had to go back out into the desert, that there was something there that she absolutely had to find.
Lore by Disillusionist
Layout and artwork by awaicu
Banners by PoisonedPaper
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