Siomon

“These bones, they must be ancient!”, Siomon says, as he gently caresses one of the carcasses sticking partially out of the ground. They are mossy, overgrown, and enormous. His fellow adventurers, a traveling party, are as amazed as Siomon is. A small Fae adventurer already climbed on top of one of the mossy bones, studying the foliage. “I’ve never seen this kind of moss before.”, she calls out. Immediately, a couple of other adventurers fly up to assist her. Siomon stays on the ground, and grabs a notebook and pencil. “Let me know everything, I’ll write it all down!”, he yells to them.

But before he knows it, Siomon is the only one still on the ground. “It’s really green, almost unnaturally so!”, one adventurer tells him. “It’s incredibly dusty to the touch, as if there’s a layer of fine sand covering it.”, another one adds. “It really clings to my claws when I pull it off the bones.”, a third one says. Siomon notes all of it down, and checks the field guide he’s been carrying. It doesn’t match the description of other kinds of moss that the group has encountered so far. “Anything else?”, he asks. “It makes my nose feel stuffed up!”, replies the Fae who first flew up.

As Siomon is writing that down, the first adventurer begins to sneeze. And another, and another. Siomon looks up and sees his entire party sneezing and wheezing. “Come back down, that stuff isn’t good to be close to!”, he yells. None of them reply. They keep coughing through, and Siomon is smart enough to not fly up towards the danger. So he waits, noting down in his book that prolonged exposure to the moss causes some reaction, like an allergy of some sorts.

And then, suddenly, silence falls. Siomon looks at his adventuring companions. They are still. He calls out to them, nobody replies. So he carefully puts away his notebook and flies up, keeping his distance from the moss.

The moss covered all of the dragons that came too close to it.