The story of Karadiyar is preserved in the libraries of Tien and Sinraen. The miracles, wars, heroics, and follies of past ages are written on these pages alone.
Mirob's Black Ledger
The records below are compiled from documents that lay sealed for centuries on the lowest shelf of the Sinraen archives, known among the archivists as Mirob's Black Ledger. Most of the ledger consists of secret reports presented to King Mirob by Aldren, the commander he trusted above all others. It is no accident that the History of Karadiyar devotes only a single sentence to the eight hundred and twenty-sixth year of the First Age; the story of that year was buried in the earth together with the oaths of those who witnessed it.
I. The Shadow of Wings
Nearly a century had passed since the great winged creatures were first seen on the misty hills of Dalron Forest. The names given to them in those years had been forgotten, and only a single word remained on the people's lips: dragon. Few of the bold hunters who went after them ever returned, and the tales of those who did became stories that kept children away from the crack of the door at night.
But stories always fall short of the truth.
By the early eight hundreds, dragons no longer lived only in the mists of Dalron. They had spread to the sea cliffs of Gruk'thar. Fishermen on the coast spoke of thin threads of smoke rising above the rocks at dusk. On some nights the sea was lit by a glow that came not from the sky but from within the cliffs. Shepherds would not drive their flocks that way, and caravan masters preferred a longer road to a quicker death.
Gruk'thar was then much as it is today: a fearsome land where strife never ceased and mighty warriors were raised. To the orc tribes who lived there, a dragon was not a creature to be feared but a title to be won. A chieftain who carried a dragon's head on the point of his spear was hailed before his tribe as Dragonbreaker and took the foremost seat in the war councils. How many young orcs tumbled from the cliffs for that title, how many burned to ash in the flames, no one counted. No one wished to.
In time the orcs learned that dragons were overcome not by strength but by cunning. Young dragons felt a strange hunger for anything that glittered. The tribes would heap plundered gold and broken pieces of treasure at the bottom of narrow gorges, stretch nets above them, plant spears around them, and wait. The hatchling that came down out of curiosity was either smothered beneath the net or speared before it could spread its wings.
The goblins wanted something else. They did not seek to kill a dragon, but to break it. They chained wounded or young dragons, starved them, and tried to cow them with smoke and fire. Their aim was not a title but plunder: a dragon that bowed to them could open even the strongest gate. And in those years, the gates the goblins most wished to open were those of the dwarves' mining line.
The mines of Dunglor were raided several times in this period. The records do not give the number of the dead. They speak only of a broken gate, of smoke pouring from the galleries for days, and of the words of the few miners who managed to flee to the far side of the mountain:
"They did not come from the sky. They came from below, out of the dark. They were driving something in chains before them. The ground shook with every step it took, my lord. But not once did it lift its head."
II. King Mirob
Many kings of the line of Esthe had come and gone. Most ruled well, some ruled badly, and very few were truly remembered. Mirob was one of those few. Yet what made him memorable was not a victory, but a decision no one saw.
The records describe him as a man not short, yet not imposing either. He rarely raised his voice; in council he would keep silent for a long while as others spoke, then turn the course of the debate with a single question. The palace archivists write that every evening he climbed the northern tower of Sinraen and looked south. No one had ever asked him what he was looking for.
When the news from Dunglor reached the palace gates, the council split in two. Some of the commanders wanted an army sent south and every nest on the cliffs put to the torch before the goblins could truly tame a dragon. Others said that humans should capture the creatures themselves: "If the goblins can manage it, why not us?"
Mirob heard both sides out to the end. Then he laid upon the table a blackened, half-melted chain link that the miners fleeing Dunglor had brought with them.
"Look at this chain. The hand that forged it will forge a second one tomorrow. Then a third. One day the creature at the end of those chains will stand before our walls. If we burn the dragons, we kill an ancient part of this land with our own hands. If we chain them, our brothers will do the same tomorrow. And whoever holds more dragons will burn the other. I want neither."
Someone in the council asked what, then, the king did want. Mirob looked at the chain for a while.
"That they belong to no one."
The council broke up that night without reaching any decision. According to the records, that same night the king sent one of the palace guards to summon Commander Aldren.
III. The Secret Order
Aldren was past forty in those years, a commander who had spent twenty years riding against orc raiders on the southern borders. His men said he never marched at the very front, but never lagged at the very back either. The king received him alone, in a quiet chamber of the palace.
The first of Aldren's reports relates that conversation thus:
"The king told me to go to Gruk'thar, but not to take an army. 'An army makes noise,' he said. 'And noise either drives the dragons away or enrages them. I want neither.' He knew that most of the nests on the cliffs had long since been emptied, and that the eggs which had escaped the hands of orcs and goblins could now be counted on one's fingers. He asked me to find them. If I found them, to bring them back. If I could not, to make certain that no one else ever would."
Aldren took only three companions with him.
Nerya was a tracker raised in the southern forests. She owed no allegiance to Sinraen; she owed allegiance to no one. She had once saved Aldren's life, and ever since she had come out of the wild only when he called. She let no one carry her bow, and she did not care for talk around the fire.
Durgan was one of the few dwarves who had escaped alive from the raided mines of Dunglor. His brother had stayed behind in one of the galleries. He knew the tunnels running from Mitron to Dunglor, which face of the mountain was cracked and which rock was sound, how the underground breathed. He asked the king for no reward. He said only that he wished to see the hands that had forged those chains.
Ilvan was the youngest of the three. He was a scribe raised in the Sinraen archives, who for years had set down on paper the accounts of the hunters returning from Dalron. He was more at home with a pen than a sword. Yet no one in this land knew more about dragons than he did. The king added him to the company himself.
"Someone who knows them must go," said Mirob. "Someone who can look upon them with something other than fear."
IV. The Road South
In the last week of the month, the four travellers left Sinraen disguised as merchants. They crossed the plains beyond Stonehold and descended south-west, towards the mists of Dalron.
Halfway along the road, where the plain met the crags, they saw from afar the caves the shepherds called the Bottomless Maw. They were dark, silent mouths opening into the breast of the slope. The shepherds said a warm wind blew from within them, and that even in winter no snow settled around them. None of them ever went inside.
Durgan dismounted, pressed his palm against the stone of the slope, and stood that way for a long time.
"This mountain is deep," he said. "Something below is warming it. Not fire, but close to fire. There are passages running through the stone. Old passages."
Ilvan remembered that the hunters returning from Dalron had told of dragons first roaming these parts, above the warm rifts beneath the earth. Aldren recorded this exchange in his report with a brief note: "The Bottomless Maw. To be kept in mind."
That day, no one knew what that note would come to mean.
The following week they turned east and entered the lands of Gruk'thar.
V. The Golden Bait
The first thing they came upon at the border of Gruk'thar was a corpse.
It lay at the bottom of a narrow gorge, in the middle of a heap of gold glittering in the sun. One of its wings had been nailed to the ground with spears; the other had been broken beneath a net. It was twice the size of a horse; that is, it was young, perhaps not yet a year old. Its scales had been torn away in places. Ilvan knew that the orcs sewed such scales onto their war armour. Its head was gone.
Nerya circled the heap of gold, reading the tracks.
"Three days ago," she said. "No more than twenty of them. They took the head and left the rest to the crows."
Ilvan knelt in silence and touched the creature's cold scales with his fingertips. Aldren writes of that moment in his report:
"This young man, who for years had written in the archives that dragons were terrible creatures, wept that day over a corpse. I did not know what to say. Nor did Durgan. Nerya said only, 'We should not stay here long.' She was right."
Two days later they watched the fire of an orc hunting camp from a distance. Nerya crept to the edge of the camp by night and returned before dawn. The news she brought changed the whole course of the expedition.
The orcs had been talking among themselves about a goblin camp. It lay south of the cliffs, in a dried-up riverbed. It was said that the goblins kept chained dragons there, but, more importantly, that they hid there the eggs they had stolen from the nests. One of the orc chieftains, a warrior who called himself Ghrazak Dragonbreaker, wanted to seize those eggs and become, in the eyes of his tribe, master of the dragons that would hatch from them. The orcs were waiting for the right moment to strike the camp.
"So the eggs will go either to the goblins' chains," said Durgan, "or to the orcs' spears."
"They will go to neither," said Aldren.
VI. The Camp of Chains
They reached the goblin camp at the end of the third night.
From afar, the dried-up riverbed looked like a wound. Fires burned among the ramshackle tents pitched along its banks, and a heavy, greasy smoke rose into the air. Through the smoke came the sound of chains. And another sound: something breathing, from very deep, as if moaning.
In the middle of the camp were three dragons, bound to thick iron rings driven into the rocks. Two of them did not stir. The third was young; one of its eyes had been branded, and the membrane of its wings was pierced in places. The goblins had lit fires around it, and each time they tightened the ring they watched the creature shrink back in terror and laughed among themselves. Its jaws had been shut in an iron cage, so that it could not breathe fire.
At the back of the camp, in a tent kept away from the smoke, stood chests wrapped in straw.
The plan was simple. Nerya would scatter the fires at the eastern end of the camp one by one with her arrows, drawing the goblins' attention there. Durgan and Ilvan would slip round to the tent with the chests, while Aldren kept the line of retreat open. They would take the eggs and vanish into the dark.
Most of the plan worked.
Nerya's first arrows brought down the goblin sentries without a sound. Then one of the eastern tents caught fire, then another. In an instant the camp was in uproar. The goblins ran shrieking to the east. When Durgan and Ilvan entered the tent, they found that only one of the chests was full. Inside were five eggs. One was cracked, long since gone cold. The other four were, as Durgan put it, "heavy as stone, but warm inside."
As they came out of the tent with the chest on their backs, Ilvan stopped. His eye had fallen on the young dragon at the end of the chains.
"We cannot leave it here," he said.
Durgan pulled him by the arm. Aldren shouted from the darkness. But Ilvan had already begun to run.
Aldren's report tells what followed in short, heavy sentences:
"Ilvan took the axe of a goblin lying on the ground and struck the chain of the cage on the creature's jaws. Once. Twice. On the third blow the chain snapped. The cage fell to the ground. I do not know what I saw in the creature's one eye at that moment. Fear, or rage, or neither. Ilvan opened his hands and said something to it. I could not hear what he said. Then came the flame.
The creature did not attack us. Neither us nor the goblins. It was only afraid. A hatchling that had known nothing but fire, smoke and chains poured out all its fear upon the first person who stood before it. Then it tore free of its remaining chains, rose into the sky, and was not seen again.
We found Ilvan among the burning tents. He was still holding that axe. He was not breathing. Durgan wanted to carry him, but the shouts behind us were drawing closer."
They could not take Ilvan's body with them. As they withdrew, the goblin camp behind them was wholly engulfed in flames. They had neither the time nor the strength to free the other two dragons at the end of the chains. They left them to their fate, still in their chains, in the heart of the burning camp. In his report, Aldren writes of this as the moment of the expedition he could least forgive himself.
VII. The Stone Tower
Ghrazak Dragonbreaker's orcs saw the smoke of the burning camp and within hours had taken up the trail.
The four were now three, and they carried a chest on their backs. They tried to hide their path; they walked along riverbeds and leapt across the rocks. But the orc trackers knew no weariness. On the evening of the second day they began to hear horns behind them.
On a ridge where the westward road narrowed stood a ruined watchtower whose builders had long been forgotten. Before the tower ran a path wide enough for only two riders abreast. Nerya stopped at the foot of the tower and set her quiver on the ground.
"Here," she said.
Aldren objected. The records do not say how long the argument lasted. They give only Nerya's last words:
"You will take this chest to the king, Aldren. And I will hold this path. We each know our own work. Do me a kindness and do not look back."
Aldren and Durgan took up the chest and went on. All through the night they heard behind them war cries, the sound of bodies falling, and the ceaseless thin hum of arrows. For a long time the humming did not stop. Close to dawn, one more horn was heard. Then everything fell silent.
Aldren did not look back. The archivists have not failed to notice that as he wrote this in his report his hand trembled, and the ink spread across the lines:
"I do not know how many orcs failed to pass that path. But the next day we did not see a single orc tracker following us. The pack Ghrazak had sent to seize the eggs remained before that tower. And so did Nerya."
VIII. The Red Crags
The road turning west ran along a sheer precipice on the northern ridges of Gruk'thar, called the Red Crags. In places the path narrowed to the width of a man's shoulders, and beside it opened a void whose bottom could not be seen.
Durgan did not like these crags. He looked at the colour of the stone, the direction of the cracks, the moss on the rocks, and said that rain was coming. He was right. In the afternoon the sky darkened. When the first drops fell, they were at the narrowest point of the path.
"This stone does not love the rain," said Durgan. "Water gets into the cracks. And the cracks open. Walk faster, commander. We can talk later."
But the rain was faster than they were. At the last bend of the path a deep rumble broke out above them. When Aldren raised his head, he saw a piece of the slope break away and slide down towards them.
What Durgan did in that moment, Aldren set down in his report in a single long sentence:
"The dwarf thrust the chest into my arms, hurled me towards the solid side of the path, and threw himself into the only place that someone who had spent his whole life inside stone would know, the one spot where a hollow would remain beneath the sliding rock; but that hollow had room for one alone, it could shelter only one, and he chose that the one should be me."
When the dust cleared, the path was gone. So was Durgan. Aldren was left alone at the edge of the precipice in the rain, with the chest holding the four eggs on his back. According to the records, he waited there through a whole night. Then he rose and walked on.
IX. A Night in Sinraen
On the thirty-ninth day after he had passed through the gates of Sinraen, Aldren returned, alone and in disguise. He let no one carry the chest on his back. The palace guards took him straight to the king.
When the lid of the chest was opened, Mirob said nothing for a long while. The four eggs lay side by side in the straw. Their dark, rough shells gleamed faintly in the firelight. The king laid his hand upon one and felt the warmth of the egg in his palm.
"How many went?" he asked.
"Four," said Aldren.
"How many came back?"
Aldren did not answer. Nor did the king ask again.
That night Aldren told of Ilvan's run to the chains in the camp, of Nerya at the tower, of Durgan at the precipice. He spoke of Ghrazak Dragonbreaker, of the golden bait, of the chains, and of the fear poured out from a caged mouth. The king listened to everything. Then he repeated to his commander what he had said at the very start of the expedition. This time he asked that it be set down on paper:
"These creatures will belong to no one. They will be neither the orcs' title, nor the goblins' chain, nor our banner. Every king who makes a dragon his soldier must expect that dragon to return tomorrow as another king's soldier. I will not prepare this land for such a war.
To protect them is to hide them. And to hide them is to let them be forgotten. No one must know where they are. And the few who know must never speak of it again."
Aldren asked where the king meant to hide the eggs. Mirob reminded his commander of that brief note in his report:
"The Bottomless Maw. To be kept in mind, you said."
X. The Seal
Twelve days after Aldren's return, at night, the eggs were carried down into the depths of the Bottomless Maw.
For this task the king asked Mitron for only three stonemasons. The dwarves worked without asking what they were sealing away. Perhaps they did not ask because they knew Durgan had been of their own kin. In one of the deepest chambers of the cave, where the strange warmth rising from within the mountain was felt most strongly, they carved a nest of stone. The eggs were placed there, upon the warm rock.
The entrance to the chamber was then closed with a great stone. Upon the stone was carved the ancient seal of the line of Esthe. So that no one would ever see it, the seal was cut into the inner face of the stone, the side that looks into the dark.
Seven witnessed the rite without blinking: the king, Aldren, the three dwarven masters and two palace guards. At the mouth of the cave, in the cold of the night, Mirob took an oath from each of them in turn. The records do not give the words of the oath. They give only the king's last sentence:
"Let them sleep there. And if they must wake, let them wake bound by no one's chain."
None of these seven ever told another living soul what happened that night. The only known record is this ledger, presented by Aldren to the king and sealed by the king's own hand.
XI. The Day the Smoke Rose
Thirty days after the sealing, Mirob sent Aldren south once more. This time two scouts went with him. Neither owed allegiance to Sinraen; they were close-mouthed folk who lived in the wild, people Nerya had once hunted alongside. Their task was only to watch. Not to approach, not to touch, only to watch.
They reached the hill overlooking the Bottomless Maw on the morning of the third day.
Aldren describes what he saw in his report:
"Smoke was rising from the mouths of the caves. Not like smoke from a chimney, but like breath. It would rise, then stop, then rise again. One of the scouts thought it was a fire. I did not.
Towards noon a light flashed through the smoke. A flame reached out from the mouth of the cave and drew back. Then something came out.
It was small. Smaller even than the dead hatchling we had seen in the gorge of Gruk'thar. At first it opened its wings clumsily, then stumbled to the edge of the rocks. For a moment I thought it would fall. It did not. It found the wind and rose. Once it circled above the caves. The second time it circled, it looked towards the hill where we stood. I would swear to it.
One of the scouts reached for his bow. I held his hand. The creature did not come to us. It rose a little higher, then flew south, towards the mists of Dalron, and vanished from sight.
The others did not come out. Perhaps their time had not yet come. Perhaps it never would. I do not know. The one thing I know is this: the creature that came out of the cave that day bore no chain upon its feet."
XII. The Outpost
When Aldren's last report reached Sinraen, the king summoned his commander before convening the council the next morning.
Mirob knew that the dragons would emerge from the caves again. He also knew who would see them first: the chieftains of Gruk'thar who longed to be called Dragonbreaker, and the goblin camps that forged chains. Hiding the place of the caves was possible only up to a point. Smoke could not be hidden.
"We will not touch them," said the king. "But we will know who draws near them."
And so a small outpost was raised on the hill overlooking the Bottomless Maw. It flew no royal banner; those within were not palace soldiers, but a handful of scouts gathered from the wild. Their task was not to fight but to watch: the orc tracks coming from the south, the goblin camps creeping in from the east, every stranger's step leading towards the caves. The king gave them a single order, one that years later was also carved into one of the outpost's stone walls:
"Report what you see. Do not touch what you see."
Aldren spent the rest of his life travelling back and forth between this outpost and Sinraen. The records do not say whether in later years he ever again saw a dragon rise into the sky. They say only that once every year, telling no one, he went to a ruined watchtower on the border of Gruk'thar and to a lost path on the Red Crags.
Here ends Mirob's Black Ledger.
Later generations gave the Bottomless Maw another name. Today everyone knows it as the Dragon Caves. And the History of Karadiyar remembers that year in only a single sentence: In later years, the last eggs of these ancient creatures were hidden deep within what are now the Dragon Caves by the king of the time, Mirob, thus preventing their complete extinction.
The sentence is true. It simply does not record the price.