Ultimately, with the aid of mortal sacrifice and cosmic sorcery, Paladine and Takhisis both discerned the secret of spawning-the creation of eggs. Each of the gods bred with the offspring dragons; their efforts brought forth a clutch from the Dark Queen herself, and a smaller nest from each of Paladine’s daughters.
At last the Dark Queen had hope for her ultimate domination-the answer to her schemes would be war! A trumpet call of fury rang through the skies of Krynn, summoning the chromatic dragons to their task. Her foe’s descendants would be slain, and evil would rule the world.
In those days the ogres were mighty, and with their help the dragons of Takhisis struck with swift lethality. In short order, the wyrms of silver, bronze, brass and copper were surprised, ambushed, and slain. Knowing that but one of her enemies remained, Takhisis planned for her ultimate mastery….
*****
Everywhere black smoke spewed into the air, dozens of billowing plumes rising from a shattered landscape to form a forest of vaporous, impossibly lofty trees. Tortured, churning trunks merged into glowering overcast, an oppressive blanket shrouding the breadth of Krynn.
At least, across that portion of the world within Furyion’s vision. The red dragon flew high, skimming the underside of the heavy stratus, banking easily around the pillars of ash and smoke, riding the expulsive updrafts of heat. The volcanic mountains of central Ansalon were the source of the massive black columns. From his soaring vantage Furyion could see a hundred peaks spewing their fiery guts into the sky.
Deep chasms and canyons scarred the ground. In some of these raged the white ribbons marking turbulent streams, while others glowed dangerously with the crimson fire of flowing, liquid rock. Steep cones rose from lifeless bedrock to form a jagged skyline of dark-stone peaks, often clustering in a massif of six or eight well-defined summits, spewing smoke, lava, and steam from an assortment of craters. Other mountains rose far above their neighbors, pyramids of hardened magma surrounding calderas many miles across.
Furyion flew past one such massive summit, skirting the rim of the high crater. With detached interest he admired a gridwork of fiery cracks amid darkened slabs of cooler lava, the pattern that crisscrossed the floor of the vast caldera. In moments the dragon’s flight carried him beyond the sight, great strokes of his scarlet wings pressing downward in a slow, measured cadence. Updrafts of scalding heat that would have seared the scales off of Akis, the white dragon, merely lifted the mighty red higher, saving him the straining of his mighty wings.
Now the greatest of mountains came into view, the massive peak dwarfing even the mightiest among the lesser summits. Rising as a cone of massive, primordial rock, this was a volcanic matriarch that could obliterate the entire range if she should unleash her might against the world. Black along the lower slopes, where cliffs plunged into shadowed gorges on all sides, the mighty peak’s color merged toward a rusty red on the higher elevations. A series of jagged ledges jutted like shoulders from the massif, barren outcrops on an otherwise sweeping expanse of steep mountainside.
Despite the mountain’s great size, the crater at the summit was uncharacteristically small, giving the peak the appearance of a sharp point that nearly grazed the underside of the black stratus. Unlike many of the volcanoes, the crater spewed neither ash, smoke, steam, nor fire from the deep shaft. Yet heat glowed there, the crimson glow of fundamental fire forming a circle of light against the clouds.
Once before, Furyion had actually flown above the great crater to confirm this fact. So intense had been the blistering emanations of raging heat that the ancient red dragon had been forced to veer away at the very edge of the caldera, knowing he would certainly have perished if he flew any farther into the searing updrafts. Yet even in that quick glance he had seen enough to know that this mountain plunged an unimaginable depth toward the heart of Krynn.
Furyion’s eyes gleamed as he lighted on a lofty ledge, one of the highest on the cracked and barren mountainside. He spread his jaws, extending a scarlet-scaled neck to its full length before bellowing a great cloud of flame into the sky. Wisps of oily fire scorched the mountainside, hissing and burning with a sound like thunder as the mighty red made bold announcement of his arrival.