Where were you, when the meteors fell?
In Gaudiguch, it is certainly a question that many will be able to answer with ease: the months of Tzarin and Klangiary burned into their heads as harshly as their fair city was burned. Yet it was not a cosmic act of misfortune set upon them by the stars, but the wrath of a spurned dragon emissary.
Having arrived well, the meeting appeared to be well underway as the citizens of Gaudiguch welcomed the volume-challenged dragon, who donned the star shape of a dracnari for their comfort. Yet, things did not appear to go well as a strange hunger ripped through the emissary’s body, and despite the attempts of Gaudiguch to stifle her hunger with the threads of dreaming, there was no speed with which to gather them to sate her hunger.
Instead, she was brought before the Guardian Drachou, where she presented a gift of foreign herbs from their ancestral home in offering, before speaking and being answered in esoteric prose to each other. Ultimately, the dragon dismissed the emissary as little more than a whelpling who had delusions of grandeur. Enraged, she took to the skies, revealing her true, primal form and calling forth glyphs from which she summoned a cataclysmic meteor to rain down upon the city.
Drachou’s prismatic flames would spare them total disaster, but the damage still poured through, and all the while the sachet of herbs burned before the Guardian Drachou. As citizens rushed to aid their citymates, the Guardian Drachou enjoyed the intoxicating vapours of the herbs and fell into a stupour. All seemed well, with casualties at a minimum…until Juliary, when Drachou would begin to grow ill.
Mesadari Rhiero joined Gaudiguchians at the apex of the Great Pyramid and quickly roused Drachou with a special supply of her most potent stash of drugs, long enough that he could explain his feelings of illness. Determing the drugs to be a maturing variety, Mesadari set out adventurers to recover supplies and ingredients for an ancient potion.
While there were struggles with stingy old merchants and thought-to-be extinct plants in the Skarch, eventually the Eternal Flame would rise as a pillar of flame in the sky, with the cries of Gaudiguch ringing throughout Lusternia: “DRACHOU! DRACHOU! DRACHOU!”
For now, the Guardian appears to be wholly revitalised, and yet what could possibly have been the goal of this drug? For what reason does he find his memories hard to cling to? What exactly what Scuchidira smoking when she came up with this miracle ‘hang-over cure’? Only time may tell…
