Lexicon/TheEffort
Effort, The:
From the writings of Foundation Apex, archivist to Ledaal Visaren of Tuchara:
We know little of the mysterious Dragon Kings of the First Age. Only a scattered few of their relics remain, and vicious reptiles haunt the ruins of their cities. Most of our knowledge of this noble race, who led the opposition to the Anathema’s excesses in the Kingswar of Sun and Scale, comes from a few surviving First Age texts and from the investigations of modern archaeologists such as Cathak Rakara and Ledaal Nori. But all agree that the artifact known as ‘the Effort’ is key to our understanding of these enigmatic beings.
The author of the White Words Codex describes the Effort as “a glassy orb the size of a pregnant woman’s belly, filled with divine fire.” Manosque Carar’s Blood of the Dragon: Diverging Paths, a compilation of First Age sources, states that the Effort “contains the collective Will of the dragon-folk, granted to them by divine Hesiesh at Time’s dawn.” He adds that the Dragon Kings locked the artifact away in a vault known as the Avardan at the height of the Contagion to preserve it for future generations.
In his Journey to the East, Cathak Rakara observes that the reptiles haunting the city of Rathess strongly resemble extant sketches of the lost Dragon Kings, and hypothesizes that they are, in fact, the Dragon Kings’ feral descendants. If the tales of the Effort are true, we may hypothesize that it is actually the cause of their current feral state. With the near-extermination of their people in the Kingswar and, later, the Contagion, the collective Will contained in the Effort must be channeled through too few hearts and minds, overwhelming their capacity for rational thought and leaving them with nothing but pure drive and instinct. A sad end for a righteous people.
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