Andara: A History

Andara: A History is a scholarly account of the eras of Andara's history, prepared by an unknown author.

Transcript
The Days of Pride

Well before any of our recorded histories come the rumors and tales of what our world was before the dragons destroyed it; a world where our forefathers once built great and glorious civilizations. Once men built castles which stood tall and vigilant over golden fields of grain so thick a man could hardly walk through. In those days the mountains reverberated with the sounds of picks, hammers, and songs, as ore, gems, and gold flowed constantly through the veins of the Dwarven Holds. The Great Elven lords found rest in the branches of their emerald forests, so skilled were their sages and so sweet were their songs that the trees themselves grew into homes and halls to shelter them. In the grand cities of the past, one could hear every language spoken, every cuisine tasted, and countless wonders of art and craft produced around the clock by skilled hands.

These utopian tales of a better time were whispered in the darkest hours of the night and only at tremendous risk to both teller and listener. For there was no greater crime in the days of the dragons than to spread rumors of the times before the dragons, and before we were andar. I have wondered how even the tenuous fragments we have today survived the fear that a rival, or even a fellow slave seeking extra rations, would turn the speaker in. One has to imagine that a people under such a heavy yoke, needed these tales as much as they needed food or water. For if there was a time before the dragons, there could be a time after the dragons.

I wish to impress upon you, reader, that however volatile and dangerous the modern world has been shaping up, you live in such a time. Perhaps, the world we live in now lacks the grandeur of the days of pride, but note that your mothers and fathers toiled that you may enjoy walking our continent without shackles.

 

The Days of Blood

The Days of Pride, as they were known, in which the people of this continent lived in their ancestral homelands, speaking their tongues, and ruling themselves, were brought to an end as the first dragonborn ship touched our shores, and the Days of Tears began. A thorough and bookish people, the dragonborn scribes aboard the ship integrated themselves into every court and nation, armed with quill and parchment and took detailed notes on the roads, the defenses, and most importantly the animosities that existed between the peoples of the world. Soon crates of gold and enchanted weapons came flowing across the sea, into the pockets of pretenders, rebels, and malcontentists all across the continent. The world of our forebears was soon engulfed as civil wars, rebellions, and lawlessness sparked everywhere on the continent.

Thus, when the first transports of the dragonborn unloaded the first legionnaires on this land’s southern beaches, to our shame, they did not find a proud coalition of free peoples armed and ready to throw them back into the sea, they instead found a hundred peoples all too consumed with petty local hatreds to ever realize the degree of their peril. Within a decade the exploratory forces, commanded by a single Dragonlord and his six Archons had half the continent under their thumbs.

Against this invasion, in what we now call the Burntlands, a coalition of kingdoms of states, the “League” would unify at a palace known to us as ”Citadel” (The actual names have been excised out of any dragonborn histories I have come across, and the oral accounts have not served any better). In a world fallen to darkness, the League of Eight burned bright with defiance and independence. The dragonborn would have us believe the region had escaped from the worst of the political consequences as the Citadel’s spy network successfully discovered and destroyed the dragonborn’s pawns. Andar historians, as few as they are, would have us believe that their unending tenacity alone protected them from ruin. Driving the expeditionary force back at the passes, the Burntlands would be enriched with various warriors, royals, and sages in exile bringing their steel, fortunes, and mastery of magic to bear in defense of the League.

Eventually the great Dragonking himself: Ostimandax The World-Tamer-That-Was lead a force of dragonborn through the passes. The remaining two score of dragons, and their tens of thousands of legionnaires pressed hard against the southern and eastern passes of the League of Eight, and failed to take them. For his failure during the push, Ostimandax would rip the wings off of the Dragonlord responsible: Scanthror, leaving him to crawl the ground forever dishonoured as a wyrm. The passes would be taken, but not without Ostimandax spending the lives of five of his most loyal dragon retainers, countless legionnaires, and a full decade.

This decade was well utilized by the League of Eight, and they spent every second in preparation for when the passes were breached. Property was seized, fortifications built, stores were dug and filled. Every hand that could hold a spear was pressed into service. Amongst the religious, “The Way” formed as a syncretic doomsday cult, that said that the gods had abandoned the people on account of the infighting and greed, and that the dragons were a punishment, only to be lifted by the unity of all people. They were willing to forever scar their lands that Ostimandax might be frustrated. Each nation scoured their grimoires, histories, and shadows of their cultures for any secret, however dark, that might grant them power against the Dragonborn.

When the legions surged through the passes, they found a land bleak and inhospitable, and a host of people willing to die for every inch of it. Ostimandax feared that his Dragon retainers might attempt to betray him, their conquest having been frustrated so. Several had been punished for suggesting that the conquest thus far was sufficient or that a peace might be reached with the League.

Ostimandax knew he had to strike a decisive blow and flew himself to war for the first time in a century. His wings cast a shadow over the Citadel, and he struck for the tower. Inside was, were the torture reports believed, a weapon to destroy him. After killing the many sages he took their great work: Corellon’s Gift, an emerald the size of a skull, flawless, and pulsing with arcane magics.

Sensing its great and terrible power, he took it in his maw and swallowed it, coupling his energies with the greatest well of magic the League could create. Filled with more power than he had ever felt, he scorched viridescent forests and golden fields. With all his cruelty and malice, he set ablaze the land with such ferocity the mountains erupted, their roars joining with Ostimandax’s to create a great cacophony of woe. With the first of the Eight fallen, the seven remaining nations each turned insular, and fought desperately and unsuccessfully to preserve what little they had remaining. Ostimandax would make the destroyed Citadel his roost, and the capital of his new empire. So ends the Days of Blood.

 

The Wyrmrot and the First Days of Chains

Ostimandax placed his most loyal dragons (the word has little meaning for dragons, these were those whose fear, pride, and ambition to become Dragonlords) command of the five great provinces of the empire. Ostimandax had only his dragonborn guards, and a complement of slaves for his amusement, but left it clear to his five dragonlords, it was their lot to serve his needs. Beholden to them, and in charge of particularly productive regions were the Archons, the surviving dragons. The Archons despised their relatively lowly position, and spent their time in patience and envy. Each Dragon had a body of dragonborn retainers, tasked with serving as guards, taskmasters, administrators, diplomats and scholars. At the bottom were the remaining andar, who worked in bondage in fields, and mines, meeting their dragon’s needs.

Ostimandax ordered the construction of great universities, libraries, and observatories in which the dragonborn were to acquire knowledge that dwarfed the greatest sages of the citadel. The Worldtamer’s Host was to spend several centuries growing in population and might as the Dragonborn Expeditionary Fleet sought more of the world for him to conquer. As he lounged on the mountain of treasure, roosted in the ruins of the citadel, the only thing that perturbed his was a growing hacking cough.

Dragonborn healers and scholars were called in throughout the empire to attend to him, yet despite their best efforts he grew sicker and sicker. His scales began to loose their ruby lustre, his wing muscles began to atrophy, and his cough grew worse and worse. The only thing that didn’t fade was his magic, which was stronger than ever, and his breath grew more and more powerful. Finally the great dragonborn healer Asclepiur, informed Ostimandax that he was dying and had perhaps a decade to live. Correlon’s Gift was growing inside his chest like a tumor, growing in size and power as it absorbed the magic innate to his nature. Ostimandax had little time left, as the vengeance of the Citadels’ sages took their revenge.

Faced with the inevitability of his death, the previously immortal creature was driven mad with fear, hate, and insatiable vengeance. His destiny, to unite and rule the world under one banner as the World-Tamer, had been taken from him. He ordered all dragonborn within his domain to secrecy, and banned the dragonlords from his domains on pain of death. He was filled with existential terror and began to exact his vengeance on the nations that once made up the league. Some of his slaves he forced to fight to the death. The less lucky ones he experimented with magic to warp their forms and natures, creating grotesque mockeries of people. He used his ever more powerful magic to permanently darken the landscape. The Burntlands, rendered borderline uninhabitable by the costs of the war, were filled with monsters and horrors. Out onto this unforgiving landscape he forced the survivors to live their nasty, brutish and short days in terror and fear, giving the children of the Citadel a fraction of the agony that ran through his mind.

 

The Wyrmdances and the Early Days of Chains

So loyal were his dragonborn retainers that the news of Ostimandax’s death would not be discovered until after he died. The Dragonlords and Archons, who had planned acts of treachery, politics, and betrayal against their rivals and superiors were committed in the following centuries. Now with Ostimandax’s death, the two strongest Dragonlords, Trategonn and Antronex, flew with haste to seize both the incredible wealth of magic, as well as the legitimacy and power for any dragon that dwelt within. They dueled in the skies over the ruins of the citadel, in the streets, between buildings, under the earth, and finally claw to claw atop Ostimadax’s horde. Finally Antronex locked his maw around Trategonn’s throat, and squeezed until the light left the Dragonlord’s eyes.

Antronex collapsed. Drained, scarred, and diminished of blood, he sought to recover until he heard the sounds of the wings on the wind. A bolt of lightning struck his flank, briefly stunning him. Antronex saw Khazrel the Blue, the smallest and weakest of the Dragonlords coming after him. Despite being twice his size, Antronex was in no condition to resist, and was quickly dispatched by Khazrel who assumed Ostimanda’s Roost, and proclaimed himself the new World-tamer.

The two surviving Dragonlords Berelyx and Charn, each more powerful than Khazrel, but consumed with hatred for another, considered a bid for Ostimandax’s Roost. However, Khazrel’s diplomats at their court convinced them that any move against Khazrel would succeed, but leave them fatally vulnerable to their rivals counterattack. Surely living under the rule of Khazrel was better than dying in the claws of their hated rival, and Berelyx and Charn bitterly accepted his hegemony.

Rather than rushing to avenge Antronex or Trategonn, their archons took advantage of the power vacuum to engage in their own wyrm-dances, as they fought amongst themselves to settle grudges. Eventually, two new Dragonlords would rise to rule Antronex and Trategonn’s provinces. These swore allegiance to Khazrel to stabilize their tenuous grasp over their archons. Khazrel would rule, often in name only, for the next 120 years, carefully playing the Dragonlords against one another and their Archons, and the pattern were decades of schemes, alliances and treaties followed by weeks of incredible violence, as Dragons called one another into the Wyrmdance, leaving one dead or worse, forever humiliated and stripped of his wings.

During these times, the dragonborn continued the great works ordered by Ostimandax and continued by Khazrel. Aqueducts were raised, paved roads spread like arteries across the whole of Andara, and through these veins works of wealth and knowledge flowed. All dragonborn not tasked with the “management’, or so they called the brutal suppression and rule over the andar people, were assigned to scholarly works, not only on the nature of magic, reality, and destiny, but also the practical questions of architecture, agriculture, leadership, and strategy.

The amdar people would each in their own ways attempt to resist the Dragonborn. An underground network of slaves would pass news, contraband, and resources across the continent, until sufficient force existed to attempt a push for freedom. These revolts, fueled by exiles from the League of Eight being enslaved and sold across the world, spread their tales of defiance to those now in bondage

In the Alvera, under the rule of Dragonlord Charn, the former independent Dwarven Hold of Delvain, a sin metal mine located deep underground would make a bid for independence. Armed with a stockpile of supplies, weapons, and mastery of their terrain, they fought deep in the mines to be free of the dragons. After killing all of their dragonborn guards and slipping away into deeper and deeper caverns, they began to strike slave camps, and leaving traps for guards that would follow them further into the mines.

To resolve this, Charn demanded that the youngest of his Archons, a young dragon wyrmed by Ostimandax following a failed assault on a pass to the Burntlands, to lead forces of legionnaires to slay the traitors, punish the defectors, and return the mines to a normal level of production. This dragon, Orroreg, would bait the main body of the Delvian rebels into a large cavern, there he would take advantage of the relatively small size of his frame, to massacre most of Delvain’s forces, scattering the handful of survivors deep into the mine.

The Delvain mine would rebel three times in the next two decades, with the sizable casualties they took making them more embittered, and during the third, a miner would take Orroreg’s eye. Orroreg was humiliated and vulnerable in the sight of Charn and his peers as his failures to suppress this insurrection, and turned to his dragonborn scholars, rather than his ever dwindling soldiers, for recommendations. He would march every single dwarf out of the mines, and would send them north on the galleys to be sold piecemeal across the rest of the continent. If their cultural connection to their home under the mountains and the graves of their forebears were tempting them to rebel, then he would not let them remain as a people. From other dragons he bought slaves from around the world, deliberately not a single dwarf, and he put these people divided by language, race, and culture back to work his mines. He had his administrators divide rations based on production, and as such these andar slaves fiercely competed in small clans for survival, jealously guarding mine secrets from one another, and more than happy to sell their rivals out to the dragonborn officials.

Orroreg’s success at quelling the Delvian people would be published and spread widely across the continent, almost making up for the shame of losing his eye to an andar miner. Soon the Dragonlords would shatter almost all of the former andar clans, relocating them in different parts of the continent, leaving populations only large enough for breeding stock. This traumatic event, the Shattering, saw families, cultures, and religions torn asunder. During these days we suffered the greatest disjunction in the histories, as little oral knowledge of the Days of Pride would survive this period intact, becoming folklore, or doubted entirely by future generations.

 

The Dragonborn Wars and the Middle Days of Chains

The patterns of dragons either slaying or subjugating one another in grand wyrmdances in the sky continued, whilst the andar toiled in the fields and mines for the entirety of Khazrel’s reign. Felixus was a smaller archon that had suffered grievous wounds during a previous dance and who found himself on the outside of any alliance after an unsuccessful coup against the Dragonlord Berylxus. With his days numbered he ordered his entire cohort of dragonborn engineers (he had been placed in charged of a university and a foundry) to begin work in secret on a project. Within several weeks a shadow of death would hang over his lair. Khazrel, the successor to the World-Tamer-That-Was, keen for any to cruelty remind his tenuously loyal subjects why he ruled, set out to punish the wounded interloper, and to seize his sizeable collection of magical arms.

Khazrel let loose bolt after bolt of lighting into the university, to challenge his foe to meet him in the sky, but Felixus did not appear. He fired bolts into the streets, electrocuting six score of rather valuable craftsman andar, yet Felixus did not appear. He hovered above the foundry and began to zap the great kilns and machines, and yet Felixus did not appear. Instead, as the canvas atop them were ripped off by dragonborn artillerymen, eight great ballistas did appear.

Grappling hooks attached to heavy iron chains shot up towards Khazrel, and before he could evade them all, several ensnared him, and a particularly well-placed shot punctured through his wing’s membrane. He began to direct his breath to the ballista teams below him, when rising to meet him came canvas balloons, each with a wicker basket carrying a half-dozen dragonborn warriors. These warriors, when in range would throw out a harpoon, and upon it sinking in Khazrel’s flank, would shimmy close enough to sink the steel hooks on their hands and feet into Khazrel’s flesh, where they would desperately take hold. Despite dozens of these boarders falling to their deaths hundreds of feet below, the survivors were able to with poisoned knives, administer foul concoctions to blood vessels beneath the scales. All the while the ballista teams cranked the chains tighter and tighter, drawing him closer and closer to the ground.

Finally, flapping his ragged wings triumphantly in the sky came Felixus who flashed a toothy grin to Khazrel before climbing several thousand feet. Simultaneously attempting to shake boarders, destroy balloons, and break the ballistas that had him ensnared him, Khazrel was incapable of dodging Felixus dropping upon him like a stone from above, crashing them into the foundry beneath. Enmeshed in chains and covered in dragonborn hacking at his wings, Felixus offered Khazrel his mercy and a chance to serve him as a wyrm, crawling on the ground and telling younger dragons the tale of the Once-Great Khazrel. Khazrel’s answer took the form of a bolt of lightning that would permanently disfigure Felixus’s face.

After the news was dispersed that Khazrel was dead, a series of violent wyrmdances began in the draconic correspondence over what must be done about the inclusion of dragonborn into conflicts normally solved only by dragons. Many agreed that such innovation destroyed tradition, and upset the natural order of the largest ruling, whilst the small submit or die. Most agreed that Felixus was long due for a gruesome, extended death, and that one of the Dragonlords should begin the wyrmdances. Finally, all dragons ordered in secret their dragonborn to begin military training, and for specialized teams to build and maintain these new airships and engines, and for their fiercest guards to learn how to fight dragons within the sky.

The resulting succession wars would shatter dragonborn society as they knew it. Prior to the succession wars, the dragonborn laid clutches, raised hatchlings, founded universities, oppressed slaves, wrote treatises, crafted masterpieces, and directed slaves in the construction of aqueducts, buildings, and palaces, that have never seen their equal before or since. But now the great dragonborn sages were tasked with dropping their quills and returning to the sword.

They obeyed, as they obey in all things, but from this moment their Pax Draconis (Their perversion of the Dragon-Peace, where all are fully cowed by a single dragon) was always in contention. From what I understand, their sages would never forgive Felixus the Deformed for this act, displaying a level of emotion not found anywhere else in their recounting of history. With the exceptions of administrators, slave-handlers, and selected scribes, the entire society was given over to war.

The dragonborn would fight one another nobly, fiercely, and to the bitter end. Tightly packed dragonborn phalanxes, so used to shattering andar levies and mobs like waves against a mountain without a single casualty, would meet their opposites in fields, on walls, and in the skies, grinding one another one down. Only the death of their dragon would lead to a surrender, as they would immediately kneel, and take their place under their new lord, serving them as loyally as they had served their previous master. The dragonborn population plummeted as a result.

Orerreg, now ruling much of present-day Alvera, and the foremost Archon of Dragonlord Charn, had upon killing his rival, Vestrix, taken the great forests of the Arbor Woad under his authority. Attracted by the incredible riches that ostensibly could be made from harvesting the grandfather groves that lurked within, he discovered that his dead rival’s final act was to saddle him with a fief that bled money. Vestrix had placed slaves in charge of the logging operations, keeping his dragonborn to protect the mill. This had not only allowed the woadling populations that defied the empire from their sacred grandfather groves to survive, but to interbreed and spread the word of escape and freedom into adjacent regions.

Orerreg immediately consolidated forces to the location of the grandfather groves sacred to the tribes closest to the shallow edge of the woad. His legions enacted two years of violent burning and slaughter, but the damage seemed irreparable, the taint of woadling magic and culture spreading through andar clusters throughout his holdings. However, Orerreg was a firm believer, unlike many dragonborns and archons, in the importance of education and learning, and turned it over the the sages residing in Aurcturan, a place of study outside modern-day Crossroads. An apprentice working under the lead of Sophryx, would emerge a year later with a solution, a new language, an artificial lexicon bearing no resemblance or intelligibility with any of the native languages of the continent, including draconic.

All Andar would be required to speak, and allowed in some extreme circumstance, to write in, Andarin, the new language of slaves. The punishments for speaking any of the old tongues were severe, the rewards for turning in a fellow slave who attempted to teach their children it were considerable. Within a generation, a new barrier was erected between his domain, and the yet unconquered wilderness and this language barrier proved more permanent and impassable than any curfew, river, or mountain range. Even as I write this today, a full fifty years after the Wars of Liberation, some of my short sighted peers divide the world into the Andarran “civilized” regions, and the “unintelligible” or “uncivilized” people of the outskirts. But it is our bastardized and orphaned culture that has strayed furthest from our forebears and Days of Pride.

 

The Andar Wars and the Latter Days of Chains

The Dragonborn wars would serve as a boon for our people for a time. Dragonborn turned their gaze to one another and off of their slaves. Facing a critical shortage of dragonborn   to serve in any civilian capacity, many dragons would appoint particularly skilled and ostensibly “loyal” andar servants to take over administrative duties. Quotas, andar councils, and occasional extreme violence would replace the supervision, courts, and ever present threat of punishment that had been employed across the region to maintain order. Within this growing corruption and inefficiency, various slave undergrounds and robber bands would emerge (at times the difference subtle or even indistinguishable, to the slaves whose supplies they raided).

In Hannabar, the newly-established Dragonlord Bharash faced a dire situation. With the death of his finest general, slain with her three-thousand legionaries in the Khal’az Desert, he was vulnerable in a way he had not been since before the Dragonborn Wars. Within a day of the news returning, he learned that his foremost Archon, Jarkul, intended to take his capital in Rabbath and his life at the start of the next year.

Into his compound he took his hundred remaining dragonborn to discuss the unthinkable. While the hundred were more than ready to die for their lord, their sacrifice would mean little. They were staff officers, pulled off the frontlines for being too injured, or old, or too valuable at strategy and logistics. They were to make an offer at the plantations and mines, that he would grant the first thousand slaves who appeared at his palace, a chance at freedom for their children if they were willing to undertake a secret project. These thousand appeared within a week, with many more arriving in the weeks that followed.

Bharash sealed his palace, allowing only for food and supplies being brought in at night. These first thousand were drilled for hours, and subjected to the rigor of legionnaire training: eighteen hour days, twenty mile long marches in full gear, beatings, and constant unrelenting yelling. Of these, some nine-hundred would be found incapable of training, and discharged back to their villages sans their tongues. The remaining hundred took to the spear, sword, and shield like a fish to water. They enjoyed the rich portions, provided generously after every day to build muscle. They enjoyed having their fellow slaves wait upon them with food and water. They relished the chance to kill dragonborn, and the chance to die on a battlefield, rather than of starvation, under the lash, or after outliving their usefulness. While their suffering in the drill yard was greater than their suffering in the fields, forests, and mines, it was a suffering they had chosen.

The second thousand would be brought in, and placed under the command of the first hundred janissaries. The first hundred, taking on the roles of drillmasters and sargeants, were no less exacting and thorough than the dragonborn who had trained them, yet the recruits rather than succumbing to despair as they did under the yoke of the dragonborn, merely grew more determined. Some 4,000 Janissaries would be raised before Jarkul and his legionnaires descended on the city. Jarkul and his dragonborn would find the city walls undefended, as he expected his rival would be making a pitiful stand in his palace. He ordered his five hundred dragonborn, a sizeable host in those days, to surround the palace, and to slowly tighten the traps. Small patrols of dragonborn worked their way through the labyrinthine mess of workshops and hovels, the squalor and disorganization of the Rabbathi “streets” preventing packed ranks or formations.

Emerging like locusts, drunk on blood, from every rubbish pile, doorway, and alley came squads of janissaries. All of the hatred and vengeance they bore in their hearts for the dragonborn they poured out onto Jarkul’s legionnaires. When one would be quickly cut down, another would fill their place, sometimes from the janissary reserves, but sometimes from one of the slaves watching the events. Their mind broken under decades of the lash, they would take up discarded arms and join the fray. His forces thinly divided and attacked by a new, unknown enemy that did not seem to exhaust numbers, Jarkul watched as his foe, Bharash, rose into the skies, gleeful and uninjured. Jarkul ordered a retreat, and demonstrated it as quickly as he could.

All but a few of the janissaries would be killed or scattered by the end of the battle, barely slaying a dragonborn or two for every score that fell that day. But the war was won, and Bharash had changed conflict forever. By autumn, his slave legions would number some ten thousand strong. When news of such an upset spread to the dragons, they did not bother with the pretense of offended honor as they had with Felixus. The world and changed and they would change with it. With the exception of token administrators and honor guards, the age of the dragonborn legionnaire were no more, and the age of the dragonborn officer began.

Following a series of communication disasters during early campaigns of the andar wars, It was fashionable for dragons to institute a uniform language for their officers, janissaries, and slaves. Much to Orroreg’s great chagrin, the language was Andarin. His pet project to isolate his slaves from their cultures and the rest of the continent would wind up becoming the Lingua Franca of the region. Despite his many protests, that each Dragonlord and Archon ought develop an entirely new language to maintain and exacerbate the divides, Andarin spread like wildfire.

The widespread implementation of Andarin  across the continent would see the development and spread of a new and unique Andarrin culture. Previously what little culture the enslaved peoples of the world had consisted of passing around little pockets of family history that had survived the Shattering, or was tied to the local community that had sprung up in the wake of the Shattering. With Andarin slaves from the deepest reaches of the Arbor Woad logging camp able to fluently speak with a Rabashi caravaneer, their shared expression gave way to a shared identity.

Orroreg was furious at the shortsightedness of his peers, who did not understand the stakes of the game they didn’t know they were playing. A song composed on one end of the continent might migrate, along the mighty roads the andar built in service to their masters, in mere months. From this time we see the first recorded evidence of the Shaperate (then called the Shaper’s cult), and the foundations of our modern religion and its magic. Whether the Shaperate was developed purely by united Andarin, or simply the only religeon to survive the Shattering, rebuilt in the latter Days of Chains, is unknown.

What is known is that with belief in the Shaper and her Saints came revolutionary sentiment about freedom and equality that were worth dying for. Stories about the return to the old times, about the deliverance the Shaper would prepare, about her Saints and the wars they’d raged against the dragons, and about the mighty warriors who defied the dragons in the passes of the Burntlands, spread like wildfire throughout the Dragon Empires.

The Wars of Liberation and the End of Chains

Armed not only with dragonborn weapons and tactics, but also the first unique culture in living memory, the andar uprising was inevitable. With the dragons and their legions severely diminished and the andar bolstered more than ever, Dragonlords and Archons relied more and more on janissary forces to keep the peace. As janissary forces clashes against one another in the fields of battle, they quickly saw the value in turning their spears against their collective masters, choosing to fight against the dragons instead of for their petty squabbles.

It is a shame more is not known about this time in our history, for surely there are stories even greater than those we tell now. Sadly, few Andarin were practiced in the written word, and nearly all dragonborn sages were pressed into service attempting, and failing, to quell the rebellions that ravaged the power of their dragon masters. With nearly an entire continent’s population at war, it is a wonder we have any records of the Wars of Liberation at all.

Further clouding our insights into this time (and the times preceding it) is the revolutionary’s tendency to burn dragonborn writings. Our people have a long history of associating magic with subjugation, and in turn, writing with magic. Ironic, considering the dragonborn held their secrets so closely that they would often burn their written knowledge for the andar for fear of it falling into their hands. With both sides of the conflict content to burn the records, one must wonder what secrets have been lost to time. Still, if conflicts with occasional holdout dragonborn veterans are any indication of the power their magics once possessed, we should consider ourselves lucky that their secrets died with them.

As the andar continued to unite, drive the dragonborn hosts back, seize their powerful weapons of war, and further the strength of the Shaper’s Saints, the Dragon Empires fell, slowly driven back into the sea. As it became apparent the dragons were losing their grip on Andara, many lesser dragons attempted to take to the seas. They were stopped by Bharash, too prideful to allow his janissary legions to take his province from him. It is ironic that the first great providence to conscript janissaries would be the last to fall to them. Several fleeing dragons were wyrmed by Bharesh so they might be unable to seek flight across the sea. But when the andar slew Bharash, what few living dragons remaining in the world were cut down or took to the waves, some forced to clamber aboard massive ships, cursed never to fly again.

What we know of the dragonborn suggests they came from another continent far to the south, though no expeditions to find this mythical land have ever found anything beyond endless waves. Perhaps their airships or the dragons aboard them allowed them to sail farther than we could hope, perhaps they lost their way, or perhaps there was no land across the sea to await them. Perhaps we will never know. As the Wars of Liberation came to an end, so too did the last living dragons. Dragonborn still live among us fifty years After Dragons, but we’ve achieved the End of Chains, the End of Dragons, and the Time of the Shaper. Already peace has proven difficult to maintain amongst each other, but we must not forget the companionship and kinship we forged while under chains, and we must remain vigilant for the potential return of the dragons.