Azure Horde

## The Great Blue Dragon or The Parable of the Antlion or How the Trees Lost Their Shadows

“Sit and let me tell you a story, before your mind goes the way of the rest.

Before the elves came to the continent, there were five great civilizations that existed in a sort of semi-harmony. Or as harmonious as mortals are capable of being.

The Fire Giants, of course, were the most powerful. Their refuse is the Kingdom Under of the dwarves, but in that time they were the Forge Everburning, the Unbreakable Empire. They controlled the entirety of the under-continent, and perhaps just under a third of the surface as well. They were mighty in a way that even the angels, for all their glory, were jealous of.

Then came the little folk. Not the gnomes, as I suspect you would assume, but the halflings. In those days, all the territory of Solaris, the Gnomes’ Wild Magic Country, and what you petty things refer to as the Crusader Kingdoms were Porphyros, and the Halflings led a mighty alliance of dark mages and ritualists. In those times, their naval power was unmatched, and their purses nearly as deep as the blackness behind their eyes.

After them was Baghatur, in that time ruled by what had not yet become the Azure Horde. The drakes and men of Baghatur were untouched by the corruption of Netzah then, and their civilization was barely that. It was, even after their warlord found his fangs, little more than a conquering army and a collection of cities paying tribute. Baghatur is perhaps the most and least changed, steeped in tradition but humbled by the Crusade as it was. It was then as it is now, with a bit of territory lost to western Leng the only notable difference.

Casting their furious glare over what would become the Horde was the Gleaming Legion of Leng. Unlike Baghatur, which masqueraded as a state, the Legion had no such grand designs. It was a militant force devoted solely to, and maintained only by, conquest. In this time, only the nobles of the country had truly been touched by the Hells, and the Brotherhood of Shadows were the closest thing to a criminal element in the orderly, quiet war camps of the Southern Demon, then known as Azazel the Kindly. It was a decadent thing in decline, as that which is only plunder rarely lasts longer than a candle flame. The client state of Hangul was Leng’s breadbasket then, and maintained a lopsided partnership to protect itself from its warmongering neighbors.

Finally, there were the Ancients. The southwestern corner of the continent was once not the domain of any mortal, but instead the timeless beings that were the trees themselves. This was before the Children, of course, when the trees could talk for themselves and would negotiate with their mortal neighbors, offering up their dead in exchange for the stories the mortals could tell them. The trees were powerful, in that they lacked the touch of death that had been imbued among the dreams of the First God. Oh - oh - I am afraid that is not a story you would need to hear this time, child.

The trees, however, had a weakness that the mortals lacked. They had no spark to them, they were as dead as they were alive. While they could think and fight and even dream, they could not build. They still dwelled in clusters of themselves, never changing the world. The closest they could come to creation were the Fey, pettier even then you, little one. Even the archfey, for all their power, lacked… imagination. They were copies of what the trees had fled in the Wilds of their youth.

Because you see, the Fey were paltry imitations of Demons. To a mortal, a demon has little sense, acts according to whim and little else. But to something eternal, a Demon is death. It is Change to something unchangeable. It is the unstoppable force that all immovable objects fear. And one of the trees, not even a large one, a sapling, came to know this, and grew jealous of the power the demons possessed, to cause fear in something that could not die. Instead of venting it’s frustrations by creation or adoption, as was the custom, the tree left the woods.

The little tree returned to the Wilds, which it found had become a savage, untenable place, accompanied by a curious dragon, and the kindest angel. It traveled to the deepest, darkest place within the Wilds, a pit so horrid that none had dared the drop since the days before the Highest Thing had slumbered.

And it asked one of the least of the demons a question. ‘Would you like to make a deal?’

What they asked for, as you would imagine, was unimportant.

What is important is what the story means.

—

No, no, you sweet little fool.

The best laid traps are those which are not traps at all.

*From the Lemegeton, the Book of the Abyss*

## The Azure Horde

Defeated many centuries ago, due to corruption by the Dark Pharoah, the Azure horde was split into 3 pieces. These Pieces have recently been brought toether once more, allowing the Azure Horde to return to the Prime Material Plane. The Horde killed his captor, Masamune the Blacksmith for keeping its piece prisoner for multiple centuries, before achieving full dragonhood and flying off to Bagahtur, The resurrected Horde announces to all that it intends to reconquer its old empire, and that it will eventually seek vengeance on the angels for sealing it away.

## Purifying The Azure Horde

The only currently held theory on removing the Corruption from the Azure was created by Geits, a Death Cleric of the Horde. In his words, "It boils down to a conscious decision on the part of the Horde in addition to a cutting of key spiritual aspects of the corrupted host that are closely tied to the corruption, basically magical surgery. you would need someone capable of entering the astral plane to find the core of the Horde, as well as a group/item capable of keeping it subdued long enough to root out the corruption and excise it."