Chapter 149 - Preamble to Volume III

Words : 1308 Updated : Oct 11th, 2025

Chapter 149: Chapter 149 - Preamble to Volume III The dragons were the original inhabitants of this planet. Did they evolve here like humans evolved back on Earth? Or did they colonize this planet as an alien species? Or did they appear magically from the pure elements? I have no idea. But what I learned from my research is that humans, elves, and dwarves came much later. The dragons are strictly hierarchical, with very big body changes depending on where in the hierarchy one is. The so-called Superior Dragons are the ones that have the appearance that comes to mind to an Earthling when we hear the word ’dragon.’ They are huge, with big wings and a reptilian body that kinda looks like a dinosaur. At the top of the Superior Dragons are the Dragon Sovereigns. And below them are the dragonkin. It’s still possible to find the ruins of old dragonkin cities out in the wild. And I bet that if I could organize an archaeology team, we would be able to learn a lot from them. But one day came the humans and the fae folk. It seems that they came fleeing from a world on the brink of destruction, and the dragons reluctantly accepted them as refugees. There are no official records about it, obviously. After all, the official narrative is that humans were made by the goddess and are the rightful owners of this land. But there are some very old texts, which seem to date from before the goddess, in long-forgotten archives of the library of the palace, that mention it. And even with those texts, to unravel the tapestry of events from that age is like putting together a jigsaw puzzle of ten thousand pieces, but you only have like twenty and no reference as to where to put them. What is certain is that dragonkin have longer lifespans and a very slow reproduction cycle, just like elves normally do in the fantasy settings back on Earth. So at one point the humans started outnumbering all the other races combined. And what for the humans had been several generations, for the dragons it was a mere bat of an eye. The actual reasons for the start of the conflicts are shrouded in mystery. But I imagine something like this. (Cue, social media reels beginning.) Aurea (dressed as a dragon sovereign): "Well, neighbor. You’ve been here in my living room for some centuries now. Isn’t it time for you to find a new planet for yourselves already?" Aurea (dressed as a human king): "Find a new planet? What do you mean? This is my home." Aurea (dressed as a dragon sovereign): "We agreed that you would be staying here only for some time, until you got a new job and found a new home or something. That’s what the contract here states." Aurea (dressed as a human king): "Contract? What contract? Ohhhh, you mean that old piece of paper? It was so old and dusty, I used it to light the fire on the stove the other day. In any case, I’ve never signed any contract." Aurea (dressed as a dragon sovereign): "You signed, yeah. It’s here, the king of the confederation of men, and the signature." Aurea (dressed as a human king): "I’ve never heard of that guy before. And the confederation of men shattered last century. I can’t uphold a treaty that wasn’t even signed by my own country." Aurea (dressed as a dragon sovereign): "You human scum... so disrespectful and ungrateful! shattering old treaties like that! Unforgivable! This means war!!!" Yeah. It was merely illustrative, but I really imagine that it happened like that. Obviously, the texts I read only showed the side of the later humans of the story, after that first war, so a lot is obscured. But one of them had a piece of a supposed letter received by one of the human kings, and it was that letter that made me create that social media skit in my head. The first war ended with a fragile victory for the dragons, and the lands where humans were allowed to live were reduced. It was at this moment that most elves and dwarves departed from the planet. That’s because the elves and dwarves have more cohesive societies and are also long-lived, so the people who signed the contracts were able to enforce the terms of the contract over their own people. There was no animosity between the fae folk and the dragonkind, and both shared certain revulsion for the humans’ rapid breeding and spreading over the land, so some of the fae decided to stay back. And their descendants are the dwarves and elves who live today, far from human lands. The humans only managed to avoid being completely crushed in that first war because they used a power from beyond. Namely, they summoned a hero who was isekai’d from Earth. It wasn’t the goddess yet, but someone worthy of the title of hero. At least that’s what you would think when you read what the historians wrote about him. After some centuries, the population inside the confines where the humans were restricted to grew above the threshold of what the place could sustain. So there was a second war, this time a conquest war started by the humans. This time, three heroes were summoned. The goddess was one of them. And we already know what happened at the end of that war. The fact that the remnants of the fae folk sided with the dragonkind and the beastkin declared themselves neutral sealed their fate under the human rule. The goddess seemed to have fueled the grievances about having lost the first war and about being confined to a limited strip of land, and turned them into a full-fledged hatred towards what she called ’demihumans.’ There isn’t a single usage of that word in all the texts from before the goddess took hold of the human realms. So the word seems to really have been her creation. I think that she has some sort of charming power under her toolkit. I say that after talking to people, while under disguise, because they started showing some symptoms similar to the ones one has when they break from a charm spell. There aren’t, of course, charm spells within the human knowledge of magic, but some monsters that appear in dungeons are known to be able to manipulate people’s minds. That’s how the symptoms are known. It’s been slow, of course, as they have been their whole life under that charm effect. One thing that reinforces that hypothesis is the fact that younger people seem to break off from it far easier than older people. It seems that the charm was put on during baptism and then reinforced through the years by the compulsory rituals that marked some milestones of the life of a person. But, without the presence of the goddess who was the object of adoration that guided the spell, it weakened over time. There was a philosopher on Earth that was said to have said a shocking phrase. ’God is dead.’ People usually take the phrase, without context, at face value and think that the person said that the literal god is literally dead. But that’s not at all what he meant by it. He said that modern society ’killed’ ’god,’ as in, it destroyed the role that a god played in people’s lives. I don’t remember exactly the real phrase, but it goes like, ’god is dead. You killed god and didn’t put anything on its place, so there’s just an empty throne to guide people’s lives.’ But we aren’t doing that in here. No, this is where my mother, Saint Lillian, also known as simply The Saint, enters the play.

Chapter 149 - Preamble to Volume III

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