The last age of our world began with rain.
It fell on the face of the land as years passed, and neither broke nor diminished.  Clouds covered the sky and did not part.  When it first began, we welcomed the rain, for the sound of water has ever been the song of birth.  It heralds change.  It cleanses and purifies.  But it fell so long, so long; until its constant thrum echoed in our very blood.
The rain fell: silver by day and black by night, its sound was always the same.  It fell with the patience of stars.  It spoke with the voice of the sky.  We bore its immortality with the enduring stillness we bear our own.
The rain fell.  Streams widened into rivers, and lakes into seas.  The oceans spread over the continents and swelled together.  It swelled in our minds.  The beasts of the land sought higher and higher ground, their numbers dwindling as the floodwaters rose.  Water-loving plants that once knew only the warmer places across the girdle of the world began to spread north and south from their equatorial homes, flourishing in what seemed the blink of an eye.  Then, they too were swept beneath the hungry waves.
And still the rain fell, until the endless sound was a rolling white roar: the wings of a thousand birds lifting in unison to flight.
We felt as if, like the land, we would erode and disappear forever beneath the flat voice of the rain.  We thought its song would become our death.
When the rain stopped, the silence rang like a dissonant wail, unfamiliar and strange.
Nor did we recognize our sun, veiled behind the bearded clouds for the turning of an age.  The sun we saw when the rains had gone was a dull and tired sun.  Its golden face had bloated and tinged scarlet.  It was weary, like the face of one who feels the shadow of death close by.  We looked upon it and despaired.
Our star was dying.
Little by little, the great waters began to freeze.  The icy claws of the poles reached inexorably outward, and where they touched, seas turned to glaciers.  They grew and spread, burying the land, and freezing winds went before them turning all to frost.  White, furious blizzards spiraled into cataclysmic storms, killing everything beneath the blanket of their wrath.  The vast ice-mountains slowly began to swallow the world.
Our fading star could do nothing to turn them back.
We were not afraid of the ice, for we made our homes in the swirling snows of arctic wasteland, the churning, burning caverns deep under bedrock, in the crushing dark depths of black seas.  We have become so much a part of the elements that even in their changing state, in powerful eruptions of shift and metamorphosis, we were little affected.  Our spirit has always been in the air.  We slept for millennia, we sang to each other across continents; we are the eldest of Sentients.
But we are alive.  We must feed, as all living things must.  Our world was dying.  The ice-mountains and the frozen seas would soon be all that was left on the face of our once rich and beautiful world.  Our cooling sun had lessened and darkened behind centuries of rainclouds that hid its face; never again would our lands feel the changing of seasons.  Mighty as we were, we had not the power to alter the fate of stars – nor the course of fate.  We looked to the red sun and saw in its dim and weakened light the certainty of our own end.
And for the first time since our kind emerged into the world, we felt the bitter embrace of fear.
We had a choice: to leave our ancient home, face the unknown and nameless expanse of space in search of a new world – or to remain, and perish.
Imperceptibly, patiently, our Spirit began to call.  We felt it as a lodestone feels the call of true north, bent toward it like a sprout leaning for the sun.  We began to follow it to the apex of our being, slipping to the center of ourselves as droplets of water slip to the cusp of a leaf.  One by one, then by hundreds, by thousands, we came.
From the east came Apalala and Zhong-syu, whose tongues were forked and whose breath was sweet poison.  Their bodies slithered across the distance like emperor eels, majestic serpents, and their beards trailed behind them.  They were the youngest, and their eyes shone still with the vigor of youth instead of the starlight acceptance of eternity.  Elegant, quicksilver, they slid across land and ice and sea like a smooth wind.  We felt their hunger as they came.
From the west appeared Kalseru, the Light Bearer.  She shimmered and gleamed with every color in the spectrum.  Her eyes shone like fire opals; her teeth like cobalt blades.  She flew to us upon the clouds like the mightiest of birds, and rainbows scattered beneath the span of her shining wings.  Against the sky her brightness pierced the failing sun.
From the south came Amphiptere, the Moth.  Over her scales she bore feathers like a thick veil, the deep purple of pre-dawn sky whorled with blue and emerald green sylphs of tropic seas.  Her tail feathers dipped and spiraled like branches of some monstrous fern tree.  Her talons raked the air like a bird of prey; her cry was the cry of an eagle.
And with her flew her sister Phoenix, the Fire Bird, whose crimson plumes sizzled through the sky and who felt more than any other the weakening of the sun.  Spark and flame hissed in the icy air as she beat her brilliant wings.  Fire dripped from her beaked jaws and flashed in eyes the color of molten copper.
From the north came Nithhogher and Fafnir.  Their heads bore great curved horns and shaggy manes fell from the ridge on their spines, the crystallic white of arctic ice. They crashed across the oceans like breaking waves, their scales shining, blinding, roaring rime and frost. 
And they brought with them their children, the White Wyrms, who lived in the caverns of high mountains and sang upon their peaks the songs of winter in voices so sweet and cold it would still the wind.
Lladon, the Sentinel, came as well; the guardian of the golden fruit tree.  His beloved branches had been crushed by ice and the blessed apples were no more.  We felt his sadness and it became our own; sadness and the bitterness of decay.  We mourned for the memory of his great, golden form poised for millennia at the leafy gate of his sacred Garden, which waited beneath fathoms of water until the final death throes of a dying star would burn it into nothingness; mourned for a world lost, a vanished purpose.  His roar thundered across the sky and in it was the quintessence of despair.
From beneath the waves and fathomless deeps came Naggoth, Fish Eater.  Her serpentine body had no wings, but her magic lifted her and she swam to us through the air.  Her glimmering form slipped through our numbers like a silver vein.  And all the sea-serpents, stone green and onyx and ocean blue, followed her from the deep; they splashed out of the water and flew with the swaying, tide-drawn grace of kelp forests.
Eingana Matera rose from the loamy depths of deep earth to meet us as we gathered in the sky.  We welcomed her, for she is the first, the Eldest, in whom our Spirit first found form and from whose body the legion of us sprang.  Her black eyes shone like oil, and the turquoise mosaic of her stone-scaled hide glistened in the tired light of a sun it had not felt for a millennia.  She flew upward from the recesses of the last tall, dry peak, and dust fell from her like rain.  From her stony throat rose a great cry; it poured out like the rumbling of mountains, and the multitude answered her in greeting.  The sound of our cries echoed across the expanse of ocean.
Following her from the dark ground came the ones called Wyvern, our red cousins, who drank the living magma like milk from the womb of the world; whose eyes were the faceted crimson of garnet and ruby; whose hearts were as deadly as the fire they worshipped.  They rose up to the sky to join us in volcanic bellows of steam.
From every boundary of our world, we gathered.
We met and welcomed our kin, for a dragon may go a thousand years without meeting another.  We soared and spun through the sky in a vast reptilian shoal of fire and flashing scales.  The air trembled in our wake.  Our minds joined.  Our scales melted together, our muscles entwined, and a great light began to shine.  As we condensed into one, individuality was retained only in the deepest recesses of memory and soul, for our atoms bonded and we ran together like drops of water.  We became like a great stone, impenetrable and unbreakable. As we came together our hearts remembered our spirit and we became the Dragonkind.
Leviathan was last to answer the call.
Immortality allows little room for surprise, yet as he appeared we felt his presence spread through us like a black chill.  For Leviathan is the One to Whom All Return, the Dark Guardian of our immortality.  He has always been the voice of the Source, the messenger of God, and we who have not known death fear him as a creature of light fears the darkness.  He is a substance-less presence, a void that takes the shape of our kind.  He slid through the world like shadow, and in the absence of his eyes we saw our world and all we had ever known slip away, here and gone, like parting mist.
We felt him encircle us all, felt the circle complete as Leviathan put his tail in his mouth.
And we left our beloved world, dying with its sun as a bee will die without a flower. Our mass rose higher into the sky.  As we entered the dark emptiness of space, we looked to the stars for deliverance.  We looked into eternity for hope.
For a new home.
Then, we slept.  Our minds receded into the deep stone formation of our body; we ceased to breathe.  Our blood froze and crystallized.  Only a tiny spark at the heart of our being continued to burn.
How impossibly long we slept, we do not know, but worlds older than the one we left were born and ended again as we soared, a wayward comet, through the ancient expanse of the universe.  As we drifted through that primordial void, our dreams were of nebulae and of silent stars that passed, indifferent and strange.  We dreamt of things forever vanished to the stoic tranquility of time.
And then the Blue World appeared in the darkness, a tiny point of light amidst the chaos of stars; it called to our very soul.  Its presence was a pinnacle of illumination that drew us through the infinite span of night.  We drifted toward it like a migrant moon.
And when we pierced the atmosphere of the Blue World and felt the richness of life, the heat of a blazing and youthful sun, we knew we were home.  How wonderful, at long last, to remember the warmth of the sun!  To feel the coolness of vast green seas!  To soar with our wings stretched across a clear sky!  To rest, content and secure, on the mountain peaks and in soft dusty valleys of the earth!  Our bodies began to form, to shape, to breathe wind and fire.  We, Dragonkind, awakened. 
Some of us lost our sentience as we touched the earth.  And those who fell away felt the reversal of thousands of generations and became beasts, ravaging the lesser beasts.  They roared their anguish as they lost their great wings.  They groaned as they felt the confusion of static and loss.  They forgot our name.  Their bodies fell into dust and their bones became stones, and ceased to be our kin.  The Blue World exacted its price.
Some sought the heights of mountains, some the red roiling of the planet’s molten blood.  Some of us went into the sea.
Leviathan unwound and floated free, his form stretched out across the sky.
Ravenous, we fed on the beasts of the land.  The Blue World was plentiful.  The oceans teamed with fish, the plains thundered under the hooves of great herds.  We gorged ourselves on its bounty.  As we fed, the frail, lambent thoughts of the beasts we consumed flickered and expired in wisps of fear and acceptance. 
Then, we discovered an unexpected thing.
One beast did not fear.  One beast did not accept.  We felt the final thoughts of the beast go, not to the pain of our gnashing teeth nor to the resistance and terror of its own death, but to its child – which lay, we discovered, like a small worm under the thin top of a wooden shelter at our feet.  What we felt as the beast expired was anger, and regret, and love for its young.
Sentience.
And we learned that the Source had led us to a world in which we would need to share with the creature that calls itself Mankind.
They hunted us, though we were the mightier race; in some parts of the world they hunted us to near extinction.  By sheer numbers and force of will, they overwhelmed us.  They waged war on us in the names of their kings, and in the names of their gods.
We saw that Mankind is like a rock-bound grub, which worships the gods of damp-under-the-stone and dark-cool-of-earth as supreme, but who never see the gods that bring wind to the wings of birds and golden sunlight to the leaves of trees.  We knew them for a blind and fledgling kind.
But still, the Source has made itself known to them.  Their hearts, though brutal and mortal, feel love.  And they are Sentient.  We hid ourselves from them deep in the caverns of the earth, the oceans, the high mountain peaks, and to them we became a legendary image of savagery and might, etched into records of fable and myth.
Over time, we were all but forgotten.  Mankind forgot us as they forget their own gods, they forget their ancestors, forget their very purpose.
 
We, though lessened, and no longer what we were, cannot claim to have lost that knowledge which we know to be divine.  We wrap around the Blue World like a cord.  We spin with it, encompassing the turning seasons, the rolling years, watching life rise and fall like the tide.  Our name is Orobouros.  Our name is Dragonkind.  Our Spirit is in the sky, and to the sky we shall return, when again the stars call.

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