Falafelsnout Crowns the Dragon

The lair did not open onto treasure. It opened onto empty chests. That absence would have been insulting if the room had not offered something worse. The dragon waiting there was not the black shape the fog and breath had suggested on the stairs. In the clearer horror of the lair, it was a young green dragon, alive beneath Aleklot's Rest and wearing General Falafelsnout's polar-bear head as a helm or crown. The symbol landed hard. Falafelsnout had belonged to earlier Svalbard continuity, to a different wound in the campaign's history. Now his remains had been turned into regalia for a dragon beneath a dragon pilgrimage town. The lair was not only hiding a monster. It was wearing old victories and old losses as costume. Then the Voiling forces appeared. A Voiling General and soldiers emerged with the dragon, tying the crisis to Castro and void-aligned forces instead of a simple surviving creature. The dragon was not alone, and it did not seem free of larger design. Aleklot's Rest had promised buried heritage. It had delivered a living dragon wearing a dead general's face.