Leviathans of Minaria

Hamahara the Air Dragon

Since Air Dragons are orderly and courteous creatures, Nibagisis allowed his servant the freedom of his kingdom??only charging Hamahara to come to the empire's aid as the need warranted. Such an occasion soon came??the revolt of the Scarlet Witch King. The wyrm acquitted itself well against the armies and conjured monsters that the Witch King formed.

After the Cataclysm destroyed the Lloroi Empire, none were left to speak the Air Dragon calling spell. A period of total freedom lay ahead for the dragon. According to the Hothioran scholar Iudeu, who interviewed Hamahara and collected its lore, the Air Dragon lost its home in the catastrophe and had to search over the crumbled and smoking landscapes for another. As it sought a new resting place, the wyrm's passage was watched from the ground??by the astonished survivors of the holocaust.

To give these early Minarians their due, Hamahara is an astonishing sight. The dragon is as long as some small cities are wide. Its scaly armor is so reflective that the dragon seems to turn color as a different light shines upon it. Its neck is spined behind the head, and a sturdy horn grows out of the top of its reptilian skull. A shorter horn is located between its nostrils, while a beard of tentacles decorates its chin. The Air Dragon's feet are four?toed and have such a reach that one foot can seize an entire tower as easily as a man might grasp a bottle. Hamahara has two great, ribbed wings, but naturalists do not understand how the dragon can fly by these. Moreover, the creature is intelligent and able to communicate by means of thought transference. Certainly there must be something of magic in the Air Dragon from Reiken.

The men of the post?Cataclysm mistook Hamahara for a supernatural creature. In some areas the wyrm became a god in the pantheons of awed barbarians.

After years of searching, Hamahara located a home upon an ancient mountain that had defied the shattering power of the Cataclysm. The Goblins, who were to drift down into the newly risen Nithmere Mountains when the area stabilized,always treated their titanic neighbor with studied respect. they called Hamahara's snowy mountain Nayugen Moeshter (Winter Rest) and gave it a wide berth.

For the first few centuries after the Cataclysm, Hamahara ranged widely, devouring whole forests in its preparation for hibernation. The hundreds of Air Dragon legends that fill the folklore of Minaria probably derive from sightings of Hamahara during this period. But finally the wyrm retired to its rest and was seen no more. Iudeu reckons that Hamahara's hibernation began in the middle of the sixth century.

Centuries passed, and though the Air Dragon calling spell had been forgotten in Minaria since the destruction of Niiawee, the chief sorcerer of Reiken??the lord of the Luwamnas??still preserved it on a scroll. In the looting and confusion that followed the fall of the last of the Luwamnas, this scroll fell into the hands of Mivioran scholars. It was brought to Minaria where??since it was considered to have historical value only??the archon of Mivior donated it to the library of the Invisible School of Thaumaturgy. There, when it was performed on rare occasion as an intellectual exercise, the sleeping Hamahara did not hear it. As it happened, not many months after Hamahara had awakened from long hibernation, a magic student at the school was practicing his incantations with the use of the supposedly harmless scroll. To his shock, an Air Dragon did appear, darkening the skies like some great nimbus cloud. Hastily the student bade the monster go away in peace.

The ruling committee of the school was delighted to learn such powerful charm was at their beck and call. They moved the scroll to the vault where their strongest magic was stored, intending that Hamahara should be a weapon for no one but their magical brotherhood.

Alas, before enough time had passed to make the Air Dragon subject to the spell again, the Elven general Droncain sacked the school. He took that scroll and many others besides back to Ider Bolis. The Elves failed to benefit either for all too soon an alliance of their enemies sacked the city and distributed its loot between its members. The calling spell was recognized for what it was and, lest fighting break out for possession of it, a copy was given to each of the kings present.

Thus, since that day, the great wyrm Hamahara has become the common weapon of Minarian nations at war. What the Air Dragon thinks of this state of affairs, it has never said. We think, however, that it must look forward to its next hibernation and a few centuries of peace and quiet.
Urmoff and the Sea Serpents

In the fall of 1319, Musruma's ship sighted a derelict with straining topmasts hanging tangled in the shrouds and sails loosened and blowing like a phantom's sheets. The only man left aboard was the lookout, tied to a high mast, dead, with gulls tearing at his flesh. When Musruma and his companions boarded the vessel and read the captain's log, they found a strange tale written. An excerpt reads: "I don't know how many are left; Elbour on the mast stopped screaming two days ago. I have not been out of my cabin since the Sea Serpent came at us in the fog. Seven men are dead that I know of. Tukultae deliver us!"

The narrator goes on to describe the Sea Serpent's watch over the deck, days of patient waiting for further victims. Maddened by hunger and thirst, the besieged captain concludes: "I haven't heard or seen the creature since last night. I pray to Tukultae that it is gone. I must get to the water barrels or I perish anyway. Better a quick and merciful death than a slow one of thirst..."

Testimony such as this places Sea Serpents in a very bad light, but most known cases of Sea Serpent attacks have been provoked by their victims. The venom of the creature is much sought after by sorcerers and alchemists. Large boats sometimes hunt Sea Serpents on the high seas, slaying small ones with harpoons.

According natural history scholars, the Sea Serpent is an intelligent creature who lives in deep water but must come to sheltered coves to spawn. In Minaria the spawning area is Serpent Bay.

Holopaus of Boran, who studied the bay at first hand, found that one male guards the spawning grounds for decades at a time. Usually the great male and the smaller females do not menace ships which call on the bay. However, in the winter??spawning time??Sea Serpent tempers are short and no wise captain will take his ship into Serpent Bay. For this reason no port town has developed on its shore.

Sea Serpents can grow as large as a warship. They have fan?like sails on their backs and fleshy fins on their necks. A Sea Serpent's muzzle is long and wields a double row of teeth. Feeding tentacles, each several feet long, writhe on both its upper and lower jaws. The serpentine body ends in a supple forked tail.

Sea Serpents are able to communicate with other races by means of sign language, through the movement of their feeding tentacles. The Trolls learned the art of communicating with the creatures first, and established good relations with them. This friendship served them in good stead when Mivior tried to seize the Trolls' territory; their allies bedeviled the humans' supply ships and warships until a peace was concluded.

More often, Sea Serpents have gone to war in their own behalf. When the Minarian seafarers began hunting them for venom, the creatures warred grimly upon the offending nations' shipping. Formal agreements to respect one another's lives were drawn up between the serpents and the humans, the guardian male of Serpent Bay acting as an ambassador to Minaria for these negotiations. In return for the guarantee of a safe haven within Serpent Bay, the Sea Serpents agreed to restrain and punish members of their own kind which made unprovoked attacks upon humans. By this time Sea Serpent sign language was an art known to many of the most experienced diplomats of Minaria.

Since war is so much on the minds of Minarians, it is to be expected that its governments regularly attempt to ally the Sea Serpents when naval conflict breaks out. How successfully these embassies fare depends largely on the personality of the guardian of Serpent Bay. In the eleventh century, the Serpent Vasimir had a consuming lust for native copper??of value to his kind??and pledged himself to the largest briber. Analzak, in the twelfth century, was a saturnine creature who would not involve himself or his kind in the causes of other races. Muslusard in the thirteenth century would lend his aid only to his personal favorites, the people of Zefnar.

For the last thirty years, the bay has been protected by the magnificent Urmoff. He cares little for bribes, but is something of an intellectual with an inordinate interest in continental politics. It is said that Urmoff enjoys the opportunity to listen to ambassadors and ask informed questions about current events. It is a rare war, however, when Urmoff does not finally make up his mind and glide out to the open sea, where he gathers warlike volunteers for his enterprise. The sight of the undulating humps of a school of Sea Serpents can throw an entire enemy war fleet into panic or inspire their allies with new hope.
Llomar the Wyrm

The consensus of reports by responsible travelers and scholars since that day tend to confirm that wyrms are intelligent beasts, like the golden dragon Hamahara (if beasts such creatures are). The wyrm seemingly prefer hot climates, but dry or wet seems to be the same to them. They are omnivorous and will devastate even a cactus forest as readily as they will engorge a herd of wild oxen, or, unfortunately, horses and cattle. Nothing that dwells in the Blasted Heath is able to stand before an equal number of wyrms, not excluding even the mighty lion or chimera.

But like some species of snakes the wyrm, if it has dined well, need not feast again for many weeks afterwards. The Gazzohlans, or so it is said, gorge their wyrm battle-beasts, believed to be of the same species, before a campaign and need not worry greatly about provisioning them for the remainder of the campaign. This is ever a great advantage when traversing barren country where the beasts would otherwise have little recourse than to turn upon their own troops and pack trains.

For the first years of Minaria's acquaintance with wyrms but little was known, but that little was fodder for amazement. While they did not have fire breath, as the golden dragon does, the wyrm by reliable accounts, has a gaseous breath that asphyxiates and slays. Such stories should have deterred the most intrepid investigator, but there are men in all walks of life that the prospect of danger acts not as a bane, but as an intoxicant. That this powerful creature had come to Minaria apparently in numbers and with intention to stay brought several adventurers and scholars into their abode, some of who came to grief.

Wyrms are intelligent, as has been said. An intrepid scholar, one of the ilk just referenced, Telemur the Haian by name, embarked upon a daring venture. He hired drovers and brought a herd of cattle into the Blasted Heath during the brief rainy season, when the desert comes alive to the extent that for a few weeks grazing beasts might find enough to sustain them.

In due course Telemur's party was approached by a small string of wyrms. The bold Naturalist quailed not, but took a calf in two behind his palfrey and approached the oncoming creatures in full boldness. The wyrms seemed amazed, but the man made hand-signs to indicate that the offering was a gift to them. He who seemed chiefest of the wyrms accepted the offer taciturnly and gobbled down the calf in a rapid series of bites, which either betrayed his greed, or left as an unstated fact that the sacrifice was too small to reasonably share with the others of the string.

Thus far, thus well, Telemur thought as he made signs to the great reptiles that more of the same waited with his drovers, which no doubt the canny predators already knew. What a fabulous sight, a small rotund scholar riding in the van of several hugh-jawed slayers, as if they were guests coming to banquet, as in fact they were.

The wyrms sated themselves upon the herd, and Telemur continued his excited efforts to communicate, while his drovers quailed. At length, the leader of the string made gestures which Telemur interpreted as an invitation to come along. The drovers who saw him go doubtless believed they had seen the last of their foolhardy master and fled back north to Pon.

But return Telemur did, and doing so, he had much to tell. While the young wyrms were of an impatient disposition, their elders more hospitable, many of them having had peaceable commerce with humans in the East.

Telemur confirmed to his own satisfaction that wyrms were intelligent, and though strange in thought processes, at least as they outwardly expressed it, they seemed neither more nor less astute than any primitive tribe of men might be.

Telemur had worked out sign language with the old wyrms who had been tolerating him with and learned much. The nature of the beast, so to speak, was to live in great herds of cows and young, protected by several mature males, but which kept to their own cows and deferred to one great bull as their herd-leader. This was, roughly speaking, the wyrm "tribe." But herds were not constant things; family-groups, the strings -- the "clans" of the creatures ?- regularly split off and rejoined.

When a string bull grew old, he was either ousted by one of his own sons, by some rogue wyrm from the wilderness. Oddly, an aging bull will oftentimes resign his place voluntarily, to wander alone, like an old soldier who gives up the life of action and authority for a pilgrim's austerity. As for the younger wyrms, the day inevitably came when they were not calves anymore and those who could not stand up to their mighty sire were subjected to continual nipping and taloning until he abandoned the herd, thereafter to wander, much like those former herd masters which assumed that way of life in their late years.

So, while females enjoyed a protected place in the string, most male wyrms spent the greater part of their lives unmated. Rogue wyrms, especially the young males, might consider themselves ill-used and so were apt to behave in a very angry and unpredictable manner. A wise traveler did not approach one such without extreme circumspection. The unfortunate guards in the attacked caravan had doubtlessly encountered a string of brooding vagabonds.

The string of cast-off males is more properly called a "pride," but the wyrms take no pride in the name, which reminds them of their discomfiture and shame, and will generally use the term "string." But, it seemed that those strings which contained many old beasts, as did the one with whom Telemur dwelled, tended to be almost like a military order who transformed their frustrated needs into group-pride.

Wyrms came into their mature strength in banishment might leave to become a string leader, taking a cow-herd from some failing harem-master.

The wyrms had long dwelled in the East, Telemur learned, be had migrated west because a new nation of men, one very powerful and warlike, had extended their war-making to the wyrms, probably because bands of them had been so often and so lethally employed by human kings to resist the invader. The oppressed herds moved west, taking the foraging ground from those already there, who, if they could not resist, moved west in turn. So the noble Llomar had led his string west, lest they deny substance to cows and young from the migrating herds.

Of the nature of this new race of men who not only swept all before it, human and wyrm alike, the wyrms knew little for their string had never ranged where humans more than infrequently ventured. This was, though Telemur did not know it, the first word of the terrible Storm-Riders, the barbarian conquerors of the Far East, which Minaria would hear more from in one scant decade.

Oddly enough, the wyrms both understood and desired treasure. This string had little enough of it, but they knew of wyrms who sat upon great hordes of it. Possibly, Llomar speculated, the gods had made the wyrms to guard their treasure troves, but he could say no more than that. But pretty metals and stones were a status symbol for his kind, as well as a means of peaceful purchase of livestock, and so Llomar was desirous of entering into friendly relations with the cities. They had little to trade, of course, except their prowess in battle. Besides, if they conquered cities, there were be treasure for the taking, without bringing all the people of all the cities down upon them in anger. Telemur but nodded, knowing that the marauder who marches under the pennant of a monarch is not a marauder but a solder. And, besides, Telemur had had ample demonstration of their fearsome poison breath to doubt that any who employed the wyrms as auxiliaries would do well in battle.

The monarch of Minaria who read Telemur's book, and others as far away as Girionese Gazzohla agreed, and in no time recruiters came calling at the Wyrms' Lair, paying good treasure and offering of cattle for the privilege of recruiting Llomar's war-band. Wyrms are mercenary creature, so it seems -- and that is sometimes what one must be to get along in the world, at least until it becomes a far better place.

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