Khalazgorix - The Black

Description

Khalazgorix the Black, his name meaning “the Mountain that Burns”, styled Wrathion by the Elves after the firing of Arûvhalen in the War of Wrath, was a dragon of impossible immensity. Legend makes him mountain-sized, with scales ashen-black, eyes like twin embers beneath a jagged crown of black horns. His breath was a furnace, his maw a rack of needle-black teeth, his claws like obsidian sickles, one wingbeat turned the air to thunder. His roar shattered glass and shook stone. To behold him was to look upon doom itself. Immense and ancient, he seldom took wing without good cause, and that cause was wrath.

Biography

In the primordial world, when elementals ruled, the Titans, custodians of the earth, shouldered up the lands while the fire-borne Dragons roamed the skies and settled the high peaks. Rumor holds that Khalazgorix hatched in those first furnaces before the Titan Wars, and that he fought through that cataclysm as a foremost force. When dragonkind at last broke the Titans, they claimed dominion over land and sky, a victory Khalazgorix counted as a warrant for Dragons to rule the world.

Then the Light Ones descended. Small in form yet terrible in power, they reshaped coasts and seasons, planted a world-seed on Eiraval, and raised the Arü as keepers of their design. To Dragons, who measure worth by age, size, and wisdom earned through hardship, this was theft by interlopers. As the long years passed and the power of the Light Ones waned, rage fermented among the Dragons, resentment hardening into hatred, and Khalazgorix, who was the oldest, who knew better than any what it means to earn dominion, would soon put the Light Ones and the Arü to the test of hardship...

He summoned broods and elders, yoked stormfronts to his wings, and forged a single purpose: break the Tree and unseat the intruders’ order. Thus began the War of Wrath. The sky went black with wings, Arûvhalen’s crown burned like a fallen sun, and from that day many named him Wrathion. For days he battled Zyrellion, horn-crowned and heaven-heir, until a radiant spear found his dark heart. Khalazgorix fell, and with him fell dragonkind’s claim to open dominion. At least for a time.

Remnant

Today, the ancient and terrible dragon still lies there, beside the great stump of the former world-tree. He is too vast to move, his black scales seemingly invulnerable to mortal tools, to curses, even to decay. He is dead, yet birds will not light there, lichens fail to take, even the Tenebrites avoid his resting place. Some sailors report an eerie weight in the air as they pass, as though his ancient wrath and malice are still palpable even now, the lantern-flame thinning for a breath.

Yet another curse upon the face of Tenebrion...