Trakanon & the Dragon War

A dragon who saw the future

Trakanon was one of Veeshan’s brood from the first age of the world, a great blue dragon of the sky, favoured by Veeshan and blessed, or cursed, with foresight. He has seen much of Norrath’s future and shared almost none of it. In those days he was noble and wise: an old Faydark legend remembers the high elf Queen Elizerain visiting “the great blue wyrm Trakanon, who was a noble and wise creature in those days before his fall.”

He joined Jaled Dar and the dragons who left the Claws of Veeshan for Kunark, a founding member of the Ring of Scale, and settled in Veeshan’s Peak.

The vote he lost

The iksar fascinated him; they appeared in his visions. As the Sebilisian Empire rose he “hotly clashed” with the Ring’s leader, Jaled Dar, and “advocated swift intervention on behalf of all races,” but the Ring chose to intervene only indirectly. Most believe he was trying to prevent a greater wrong. When Jaled Dar ruled against him, Trakanon and other dragons “refused to obey.”

The squall

With the dragons he could win to his side, he summoned a terrible squall at sea and sank the entire iksar armada, killing Emperor Rile Sathir and his navy. The young dragon Nagafen did not join the attack, but the information and strategy behind it were his.

Half a century of war

The sinking began a war between dragons and iksar that lasted more than half a century. Rile’s son Atrebe took the throne and later died in one of his own necromantic experiments. On the Field of Bone the dragons fell on the empire, and there the last emperor, Ganak, killed Jaled Dar, who had never wanted the war but joined his kin anyway. Trakanon and his allies left the empire in rubble, its survivors scattered across the outlands, and “the once grand city of Sebilis was claimed by the one who decimated it,” in the words of The Crusade of 1312 A.G.

The poisoned exile

The victory poisoned him. Vile magic unleashed in the war fouled the air, the land, and Trakanon himself, and he turned to dark magic to stay alive; some legends say he made a pact with Bertoxxulous. The other dragons exiled him for starting the war, and he ended in the ruins of Sebilis, the old iksar capital, where he rules over the froglok kingdom beneath it. Whether he was imprisoned there, as Nagafen and Vox were, is still debated.

Lord of Sebilis

Adventurers found the wreckage of that story. In Old Sebilis an undead bard, cursed by “that blasted pile of bones who calls itself, Trakanon,” warns visitors away. In Trakanon’s Teeth the ghost of Emperor Ganak names the five iksar tribes, Kunzar, Kylong, Nathsar, Obulus and Jarsath, and trades the Idol of Trakanon for two of their medallions: the key to Sebilis. And in the Plane of Justice an imprisoned iksar, told that frogloks now live in Sebilis under a dragon, says only: “My how the mighty has fallen.”

Pawn or player

Not everyone saw a fallen king; some saw a weapon. A quest journal shows someone plotting to use him: “Trakanon can be controlled; he has worldly desires and so can be manipulated,” and “his fury at the Ring of Scale itself will ensure his loyalty to our cause.”