There is a queen who was cursed into the form of a dragon with scales the color of charred blood. The moment of her transformation was a screaming whirlwind of fme, crashing wingbeats, shattered gss, and fallen masonry. Those witnesses that survived fled the castle in terror, never to return.

  Save for one.

  Now the queen’s closest advisor and confidant ventures into the web of ancient overgrown aqueducts beneath the clifftop castle where her liege has made her ir. The view of the valley where the kingdom lies below is breathtaking.

  It is the queen who finds the advisor, shaking the aqueduct with the force of her nearby nding. She turns her gaze from her confidant to the vista below and muses on how she thought that dragons were meant to covet and hoard wealth, but she already had all the wealth a person could want before the transformation and now all she wishes is to fly freely. To fly free and to let everyone else do the same.

  The advisor says that it is only the youngest of dragons who came from nothing that hoard. The ones that upon gaining power seize the opportunity to take all they were previously denied. But they all grow out of it eventually.

  The transformed queen bids her advisor to let the people know that the castle is safe to return to and that her treasury is to be distributed. Her st decree is that those dwelling within her kingdom are free to do as they will, knowing that a dragon is watching over them and treasures each and every one of their freedoms.