Into the Badlands

More about Into the Badlands

Recovered from: The Ashen Codex — Folio IX, “The Emberborn Cycle”

And lo, when the ashwinds rose and the mountains bled fire, there came one who did not flee.

She was the last of the Skybound, rider of the wyrm Kaeroth, whose wings once darkened kingdoms and whose breath carved rivers of glass through the heart of war.

They say she crossed the molten valleys where even gods would not cast their shadows — a lone rider descending into the broken throat of the world. Her armor was not forged for conquest, but remembrance; her sword, not for glory, but for debt.

The sages of the north named it madness. The monks of Tervain called it atonement.

Yet the old songs tell another tale — that beyond the firefields lay the ruins of the First Gate, and that the blood of dragons was the only key left that could wake the world once more.

So she went — not to conquer, not to return — but to keep her oath, made beneath the dying stars.

And when the dawn broke upon the mountains, no one saw her again.

Only the wind remembers the sound of her wings.