The Pogrom of Mages: The Healers of Glastamear: Volume One Read Online Free PDF Page A

filled the first continent and almost a million before they made the whole world their home.
    Obert sang the creation of mankind solo; his voice an octave higher conveying alarm.
    The human children bred like rabbits; in only three hundred years there were thousands of them. They did not know how to live gently upon the land. In each generation their healing magic grew weaker and less common. To help reduce the suffering of their human children some elves returned to little brother moon and brought the humans sheep, chickens, corn, grapes, and many other living things so that the thousands could grow food and not strip the land like a plague of grasshoppers.
    Fifty other naiads joined the song. Soaring yet gracefully, they described the great dragon of the Mountains of Min. The Red Dragon was old beyond counting because dragons never really age; they just get bigger each century. Since nothing can kill a dragon, they had no fear, but they were concerned about the humans. The Red Dragon saw Gripton’s error and discussed it with her.
    “Release me from my promise to never kill your children. I will take care of your mistake in only a few hundred years. When they’re gone, you can create some other better children in their place. Their sheep turn the high hills to dust by eating every stalk. They hunt the antelope to extinction on the great prairie from horseback, they pollute the mountain streams with their waste, and they burn the ancient forest through their stupidity and carelessness. The human men fight battles over the rocky useless hillsides and kill one another with their arrows and knives. Let me remove them from our land and restore the natural order.”
    But Gripton could not agree, for they were her children even though flawed.
    Then the great Red Dragon flew to the highest ice-covered peak of the Min Mountains and thought about her problem. She could travel to some other home because dragons were scarce in the world and there were many places where she could hunt in peace far from the plague of mankind, but eventually they would spread and defile her new home. She wondered why she should be the one to move after living in Min for twenty-seven thousand years.
    Her promise to the elves had not included the sheep and other creatures the elves had introduced to feed the men who bred too fast for the land to support. She decided to eat their sheep so the mountain meadows would not be bare. She would eat their horses so they could not hunt the antelope to extinction. They would then at least leave her alone in the Mountains of Min.
    She started her project that very day by eating every sheep belonging to the tribe who polluted her high meadows with their revolting odor. Other men called this tribe the Stinking Coal Baggers because they had no skill at properly curing leather and the concept of a bath had never occurred to them. The Baggers were truly the foulest of humans and the Red Dragon wanted them gone from the land of Min.
    To supplement their winter rations every autumn, the Baggers gathered leather sacks of coal from the foothills and carried the bags to nearby towns to trade for grain. Without sheep the Baggers were even more impoverished. Although they lived among large ore deposits, they knew nothing of smelting. They had no skill at construction and built no houses, living all together in one large cave where bats shit on them every day and fleas spread to everyone, increasing their misery to a level shared by no other human tribe. They knew only flint knapping to make arrows and knifes. Their bows were weak. They did not know of the atlatls to throw their spears a greater distance, therefore their hunting trips often failed.
    After the dragon devoured their sheep, the tribe of Baggers lost people every winter and were down to about a hundred suffering souls when they decided to become bandits and raid the caravans that passed by the edge of the mountains. Their ironwood bows were so weak that they could