The Follies of Dragons (4)

In time, even the unthinkable can become reality.

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When Dragons ruled, they exalted in flight, circling the world as they chose, from Eye to Eye. Only when the Younger Ones began to spread across the lands did it become necessary to build the gleaming, pristine circles of stone, to guide these almost-blind species through the Eyes.

Whether clean and plain or intricately carved, these Circles became the centers around which all peoples congregated. Whether high in frigid mountains, or surrounded by sweltering swamps, the Circles were to be found the world over. That is, before the great fool-hero sealed them all, to our eternal doom and temporary salvation.

In time, even the unthinkable can become reality. So it was that so many Circles were lost, buried, ruined, or forgotten.

Their very existence became mere legend to almost all.

And if people forgot the Circles, how could they possibly remember the Follies?

The Follies were easily the greatest error of the Dragons in a long litany of such errors, or at least the most obvious of them. My ancestors had worked, over millennia, to obscure their existence.

The Dragons had not expected the Follies, hadn't been prepared for them. And for long years, the Dragons remained at a loss of how to remedy this failure of imagination. From what I've been able to learn, the different factions remain at odds on the subject, and so we fly towards our collective destruction faster than Dragons ever flew in our ancient skies.

Through the Follies, the life-blood of our world is being drained, constantly, inexorably. Humans dither, inevitably, as do the other Younger Ones. And the Follies only grow.

But each Folly became an accidental gateway between the Three Worlds. These gateways reached from our world to the Second World, and from there to the Third World. Dragons only learned of this complication when Giants began to appear in our First World. Some intrepid Dragons journeyed home with them, proving the veracity of the Giants' story.

The presence of Giants, of course, triggered the Dragons' creation of the Elder Ones, later called Wardens (among other things), and, through them, the creation of the Younger Ones.

I owe my own existence to the ancient folly that Dragons wrought upon three worlds, like all humans, Alfar, Orcra, Vereth, and Uroghen. We are the fruits of the greatest mistake in history.

When the Follies have finally drained enough of our world's ambient magic, the tenuous link between the Three Worlds will magnify, and something like a bolt of lightning will rip through the worlds, tearing them all to shreds.

How could anyone who knows this much about the Follies ever be able to forget them, or to pretend they don't exist? They are too entwined in all our destinies to ever ignore.

Continue reading with Part 5 - The Lay of Old Follies.