The Doom of D’sira

The Undying Inferno, The Scorching Gale of the Rusted Dunes

When archaeologists from Zankor’s Institute of Conjury discovered the ruins of a vast city at the base of the Arid Heights, throughout the sandblasted structures they noted iconography of a massive flaming bird. Some faded murals and hieroglyphs depicted it flying over forests and leaving naught but ash. Surviving records recovered on the expeditions call the monster by various names, but all described it consistently as a tremendous avian creature of living flames, which turned life in its wake to ash, stone and sand to glass, and rapidly melted or corroded metal to rust. There was no doubt that it was a phoenix.
The records expound how it suddenly appeared during a civil war, devastated both sides of the battle, and subsequently set the forests of ironwood alight. When there was no more fuel for the raging fires to consume, all that remained were dunes of rust and ash, the waterways completely evaporated. The city was doomed, its lifelines scorched. Most survivors attempted to flee north, but some set out on a mission of vengeance: to slay the beast, no matter the cost. Few came back, and in their exhausted final moments wrote what transpired.

We rode for a couple days through the now desert, witnessing the destruction as we tracked the monster that caused it. Finally we came to a lone peak in the wasteland, the sweltering heat surrounding the summit making it appear as a mirage. In the climb across the scorching stone up to the beast’s roost and during the subsequent battle, some fifty brave souls lost their lives, flesh charred down to the bones. At great cost did we manage to down the living inferno, most of our weapons left melted or corroded. And in its death it exploded, shattering the peak, disintegrating some of us and sending the rest tumbling. Returning to the summit -now crater- we found a massive egg, still wreathed in flames and even beginning to melt the ground beneath it. The survivors organized and set to work, carefully entombing the spawn in several layers of scattered stone and the remains of our weapons, the materials slowly melting to its surface. There we left the still smoldering integument, in hopes it would be enough to contain the monster indefinitely…