Lore · Continents & Moons
Skyshrine and Lord Yelinak
In Skyshrine, dragons live as a nation. It is the city of the Claws of Veeshan, built on the edge of the wound their goddess left in Velious.
Ilak Tas Gral
The dragons call Skyshrine Ilak Tas Gral. It was built at the western edge of the great scar by the first dragons Veeshan placed on Norrath. Its dragons are the Claws of Veeshan; the Ring of Scale on Kunark broke away from them over free will and over mating between dragons of different colours.
The towers
The city is shaped like a pipe organ, its hollow towers placed seemingly at random and sometimes braced against one another by buttresses, wide enough for a dragon to turn in, with balconies for resting and sleeping. Four remain. The Tower of the Lords, of mithril and gold, once housed the dragon lords of old and now stands empty, “a maze of pitfalls.” There is the Tower of Humility, and the Mages Tower, where dragons studied magic, and Veeshan’s Spire. The rest were destroyed in wars among dragons. Gargoyles, golems, frozen cubes and drakes stand guard.
Lord Yelinak
Near the bottom of the city, joined to Veeshan’s Spire, lies the inner shrine, home of Yelinak, a snow dragon and its last guardian. He greets visitors “quite reluctantly,” apologises for seeming haughty, and explains that his trust is hard to win: someone else once arrived with the trust of the dragon kin, Yelinak trusted them too, and it ended in destruction. He is the chief dragon authority opposing King Tormax of the storm giants.
Hsagra and Porlos
His grudge with the giants is personal. Hsagra was his mate. In Skyshrine, Lawyla tells the dragon side: Porlos, one of the Kromzek, killed Hsagra because she had found a new magic that was very powerful against giants. The giants tell it in KaelQuick, where Porlos kills the white dragon as the dragons cry that she would save them all, and then sits on her skull as a throne. That same book says Yelinak chose Porlos as his prey, and that Porlos’s descendants are still hunted generations later.
Porlos’ Fury
The Dragon Sage explains in Porlos’ Fury how the giants learned to kill dragons at all: they watched which plants and watering holes dragons avoided, and found that one plant, mixed with other reagents, was deadly to them.
Hated on all sides
Few outsiders had ever seen the place; only a handful of explorers reached it after gnome icebreakers made the crossing to Velious possible. But the giants of Kael Drakkel and the Coldain of Thurgadin, who differ in almost everything else, agree in hating Skyshrine’s dragons. That three-way war of dragons, giants and dwarves shaped the politics of Velious in Scars of Velious in 2000, where players chose sides and built their faction accordingly.
Where the sources disagree
Calling Yelinak a “dragonking” who rules the city comes from the RPG; in the game he is the guardian of the inner shrine.
Sources
[1] Library of Erudin: Skyshrine · [2] Library of Erudin: Veeshan · [3] Library of Erudin: Lord Yelinak · [4] Library of Erudin: Claws of Veeshan · [5] Library of Erudin: Ring of Scale
Keep reading
Retold in our own words from the sources listed on this page; short quotes are marked and sourced. The illustration is an original AI-generated painting made for this page alone, not from the game.