Myseria

A lone Guardian wanders the wastes, far from her birth clan. The twisted, infected landscape seethes around her, as though trying to warn her off. Unfazed, she boldly strides forward. As the sun begins to set on the horizon, she searches for a place to rest overnight. Suddenly some unknown liquid strikes her flank. It's sticky, vaguely hot, and burns violently with magic wherever it touches her. Shaking herself violently she tries to fling the pus from her body, but it seems to spread over her almost willfully despite her thrashing. As she feels her consciousness start to slip away, she vaguely feels the pus thickening, slipping over her, swallowing her.

Myseria was born to a small clan on the edge of the Ashfall Waste. Almost as soon as she was hatched, she found herself clashing with the other dragons of her clan, from her nest-mates all the way up to the head of the clan. Though she was smaller than most of the others of her clan, what she lacked in physical strength she more than made up for in skill in combat and ambition; traits she often used to torment or exact revenge upon those who angered her. As soon as she came of age, she left on The Search, and few regretted seeing her go.

Determined to get as far away as possible from the clan she had come to loathe, she set out to the north, skirting the eastern edge of the Sea of a Thousand Currents, she wandered the Sunbeam Ruins, then The Tangled Wood, yet still she felt driven to continue. Finally, she came upon The Scarred Wasteland, its tendrils stretching through the darkness toward her. "Here," she thought, "here there is strength."

For days she walked this virulent graveyard, carefully skirting the pulsing boils dotting the terrain, cauldrons of diseases yet unknown. On the sixth day of her journey, she made a near fatal error. As she walked under a ledge she had planned to use for cover for the night, a boil, hidden by the shadows of the ledge, burst above her, covering her in its disease-ridden contents. When she awoke, she felt indescribably different; stronger, somewhat stiff, even physically larger, as though she had grown overnight. Opening her eyes, she caught a glimpse of her foreleg. Her skin was no longer the dull and leathery black it had once been, but lustrous, almost crystalline. Craning her neck, she gazed at her wings, now similarly lustrous, though both they and her skin seemed to absorb all light that touched them. In that moment, she knew her search was over.

Myseria took this place as her home, her charge, and over time found that she had some power over this place, and the infection which ruled it. She crafted the living landscape as she wished, and in every action worked to preserve the strain which had given her her power. Even as the plague claimed her first mate, she toiled on, ever seeking more; more control, more power over the creations of the Plaguebringer. Soon, another of the Plague Flight, Goreclaw, came to her corner of the wastes, and became her second mate, surviving Myseria's plague.

In time, Myseria perfected her strain, gaining complete control of it, refining it, able to enhance its mutagenic nature, make it entirely lethal, or even gain some control over those infected with the disease. As time passed, Myseria and Goreclaw's clan grew; warriors, scholars, engineers, dragons of all sorts recruited, rescued, or even travelling from all corners of the world in search of the rumors of another gifted with the power of the Plaguebringer.