The Legion of Scales and the Battle for the Atoll

Overview

The Legion of Scales is an organization of Elementals, many of them former members of the Church of the Spirits’ own Legion of Defense, who opposed the Church’s and the Greater Lyardian League’s decision to initiate the Conquest and wipe out the dragons.

 

Origins and History

The first members of the Legion of Scales were those of a renegade paladin unit, known as the Spirit’s Wrath, who, after their captain was saved by an Earth-born dragon, had a crisis of faith and renounced the Church of the Spirits, pledging their allegiance to the Dragons and the Celestial. They renamed themselves the Dragon’s Wrath, and set out to sabotage the Conquest.

Their numbers would grow over the forty-year conquest, to the point that the Dragon’s Wrath could be compared to a ctiy-state, holding on to several sympathetic villages in the outer regions of Raicuth, where both dragon-reverence and monotheism still persist. Through bloody battle and prisoner exchange, the Dragon’s Wrath carved a small corridor from the Boreal Shadowcast Forest in the north, and to the Vita Cloud Forest in the south, over Aquia Lake and down the Serpent-tail River. They controlled a fifteen-ship navy, a fifty-thousand strong land army, and a delegation to the sympathetic United Island Nation. Both the Authority at Aether Citadel and Dominic Unican, King of Raicuth, wanted the Dragon’s Wrath gone, so they began to plot a massive military offensive, on the scale of the legendary Operation Waning Moon. They called it Operation Butterfly’s Dance, a standard designation made to mislead any spying efforts.

Operation Butterfly’s Dance managed to cut the Dragon’s Wrath into three, the northern land fighters in the Boreal Shadowcast Forest, the southern guerrilla fighters in the Vita Cloud Forest, and the central navy that held the then-unnamed islands in the center of Aquia Lake. The northern land fighters and southern guerrillas both fled to the United Island Nation, but the navy came to blows with the Church’s Fleet and the Royal Navy of Raicuth at the Battle for the Atoll.

  The Battle for the Atoll was a vicious naval battle. Nearly fifty ships sank on both sides, but the Dragon’s Wrath managed to fend off the joint Navy of the Conquest by calling in a favor with some very strong allies; the House of Newmoon Ocean-born dragons, led by Currentsong, the direct descendant of Strength of All the Waters Combined. The Newmoon dragons sunk nearly twenty ships on their own, before performing perhaps the most incredible use of Lunar magic in history. They stirred up a great storm, the Blue-Moon Tempest, which swirls about the newly named Dragonleap Atoll, preventing anyone from entering who the Lord of the Atoll has not directly invited.

The overwhelming victory at the Battle of the Atoll gave the Dragon’s Wrath new pride and new power, negotiating the proper ownership of their settlements in the Forests, as well as a proper friendship with the United Island Nation. With this, the only surviving member of the original Spirit’s Wrath, Sir Damian Terrance, gave them a new name on his deathbed: the Legion of Scales, for they had grown beyond just being the Dragon’s Wrath.