The Dragon of Westbridge
You flew a full day south from Waterdeep and arrived at Westbridge just as the light was going.
It wasn't a town anymore. It was a memory of one. The center had caved in eighty years ago — blasted down into a bowl, the bowl filling slowly with water over the decades until it was a pond now, black and still. Deer grazed where the market square used to be. The outskirts still showed the bones of buildings: collapsed doorways, rootbound foundations, walls that had given up halfway. The locals didn't come here. There were stories.
You made camp near the crater's edge.
Crowley was working on Aurelion — coaxing him, fresh meat on an open hand — when KeYs felt it.
Dragon sense.
The signal was strange. Close, but not fixed. Present, then absent. As if whatever he was feeling was right here, right underneath.
Falkor knew. Before KeYs could say anything, Falkor raised his head and roared.
The pond erupted.
Umsheryoth came up out of the water like something the deep had been holding back. He was huge, blighted — necrotic vines threaded through his scales, eyes lit wrong — and he was in full attack mode before his wings had even cleared the surface.
You had about three seconds to form a plan.
The plan was: don't kill him. You needed him alive. You needed to apply the torch.
The fight lasted most of the night.
The dragon's slowing breath caught Moist first thing, and Moist spent most of the combat moving through mud. Falkor tried to paralyze him and the dragon burned through it. Emmith went invisible and climbed onto his back, hitting the gray flame torch against the blighted scales like a medic working in the middle of a firefight. Crowley's trident seared fire into the bronze hide while Emmith's snake, Monty — Monterey, properly — tried to hold on.
The dragon bit Monty in half.
The staff shattered on the ground. The constrictor snake was gone.
"RIP, Monty."
There wasn't time to stop.
Moist shrank him. One word of power, a small dragon instead of a vast one, and then KeYs was wrestling him and Falkor was throwing his full weight into a body slam and Crowley was throwing the iron bands and all of a sudden the bands caught.
The dragon stopped moving. Not because he couldn't — because he chose not to. The frenzy broke.
Whatever the blight had been doing to him, whatever rage had been running through him, it went quiet. He lay there on his side, in the ruins of Westbridge, and he let Emmith finish the treatment.
The torch moved over every scale. Slow and thorough. The gray light burned the blight out of him the same way it had burned it out of Aurelion — like pulling thorns, Greg had said — and the dragon's breathing went from panic to something slower. Something like relief.
He passed out before the treatment was done.
You kept watch in rotation through the night. The fight had been spectacular — thunder and radiant light visible for miles in every direction across the dark valley. You half-expected something to come investigate.
What came was six knights on horseback, at dawn.
They had seen the battle from a distance and ridden through the night toward it. Knights of Samular, out of Summit Hall. Ancient order, good people, three of their own lost here in Westbridge when whatever destroyed it happened eighty years ago. There's a shrine outside town, for those three.
Their leader, Captain Hezar Chun, came to KeYs first. He looked at Falkor. He looked at the recovering bronze dragon in the crater. He looked at the rest of you.
He offered to patrol the area.
You said yes. He shook KeYs's hand and the conversation had to end early because Aurelion was eyeing his horses.
"Don't eat them yet," said Crowley.
The knights left before anything happened.
The sun came up and the bronze dragon stirred.
He looked around — confused, in pain, but aware. He found KeYs first. He said, in Common so everyone could understand:
"I am sorry for whatever pain I dealt amongst any of you."
He called the blight the presence of the forest — a draconic idea of it, something that had been growing from the Kryptgarden for longer than anyone knew — and he said it had gone dark. That something in it had changed.
He gave his name: Umsheryoth. He knew the Silmerhelves — they were his. He had watched over Helvenblade House since before Olref was born.
Then he looked at KeYs for a long moment and said what he recognized:
"A lost art of the dragon riders."
He said it like something coming back after a long absence. He and Falkor looked at each other. He said that maybe it was time for dragonkind to reclaim what was theirs. That maybe the rebirth was coming.
"We shall talk again when I am healed."
He slipped back beneath the water. The pond closed over him. The sun kept rising.
You stayed long enough to start talking about what comes next. The pond, the crater, the bones of the town, the forest at the edge of the valley — Umsheryoth's lair beneath the new town would make him its guardian rather than its threat. There's a house on the cliff waiting. There are refugees waiting. There are knights willing to ride patrol.
There's a lot of work ahead.
Next session: Helvenblade House, and what it takes to make a home in a place that was taken apart once before.