The Ruins of Embers

There weren’t always dragons in the valley. Long ago, there was a thriving city here. Buildings reached so high that the tops of them seemed to rival the surrounding mountains. There was constant noise coming from the busy streets. Children laughed and played as loudly as their hearts desired, without fear. Now, all that’s left of those buildings are charred ruins, like stumps of once tall and proud trees. The streets that used to be chaotic with life, are now so quiet that you can hear the breeze blowing through the weeds that grow in the cracks of the long-abandoned pavement.

The Fae that built the city many centuries before its fall had migrated here from over the mountains, fleeing from an evil in the west that they could not defeat. Where they had come from, a child among them named Baston had devised a dark form of magic. He developed a strange obsession with using it to create life. He molded figures out of clay and instilled his dark magic into them to create living magical beasts. As he grew older, these various creatures became larger and more savage. Eventually, he lost control of his various monsters. They killed him and started hunting the other Fae. The Fae tried for years to extinguish that plague of horrors and defend themselves. But eventually, they had to retreat and escape the western forest altogether.

They became nomads for months, looking for a place where they could build a safer life. Just when they were about to give up their search, a pixie appeared to the Fae matriarch and sent her a vision of a concealed valley that was behind the mountains she and her kin inhabited. It was the perfect place to create a new life away from the dangers they were trying to leave behind. A safe haven completely surrounded by sky-high mountains, abundant with rich soil for farming, and supplied with fresh water by mountain streams.

With the pixie for a guide, they crossed the mountains into this once hidden and isolated valley, and the building of the city began. Over many centuries the population, architecture, and technology in their safe haven grew and developed. All the while remaining hidden by the mountains. Every few decades, small groups of Fae scouts ventured back out beyond the mountains to gauge the state of the rest of the continent. The vast majority of those souls never returned, and the few that did always brought back stories of the horrors that still held dominion over the land.

Although Baston was long dead, his creatures were still in the west, and they had evolved themselves into the continent’s most hostile and cold-blooded beasts yet. Dragons. He had only meant for them to grow to be the size of large dogs. But dark magic often betrays its user. The dragons kept growing and growing over the centuries until they could uproot a tree with a mere swing of their powerful tails.

Only the oldest among the Fae now remember the day in their childhood when the dragons finally crossed the mountains into the valley. Nobody knows how they found it, but the destruction they caused that day was catastrophic. The city was burned to the bones, and the overwhelming majority of its people were killed.

This once heavily populated valley is now only home to a few small knots of Fae, who reside in various hidden encampments. Some in the mountains, some near the river in an unburned part of the forest, and some even inhabited tunnels under the now moss-covered ruins of the city. To this day, the dragons remain here, and they continue to hunt anyone they see out in the open.