Scorching

The Scorching, as shown in The Lost Heir (graphic novel), by Mike Holmes

The Scorching was an early period in Pyrrhian history when the dragons took over from the humans, who controlled the continent before the Scorching.

Description

At least five thousand years ago, humans swarmed the continent. They were organized and advanced, being the dominant life form at the time. They had several warring empires, and large, sprawling cities.

Webs mentions that stories before the Scorching would be best described as legends and fairy tales, due to how unlikely it was for scavengers to be as advanced as once thought.

With territorial disputes with neighboring empires coming to a head, the humans started seeking out new weapons to gain an advantage over each other; a certain human came up with the idea to steal and hatch dragon eggs and tame the dragonets for use as new weapons - a plan that soon spread to the neighboring empires, leading to the mass theft of many, many eggs from various different dragon tribes. However, when conventional taming failed, they started bringing the eggs to laboratories, where the freshly-hatched dragonets were experimented on in attempts to artificially control them - experiments that often ended with the labs themselves burned to the ground and the soldiers in charge of restraining them mauled. This eventually led to humans moving their experiments underground and into stone rooms that couldn't be burned, as well as the lab personnel adopting spiked armor similar to what the guards of the Indestructible City would be seen wearing 5,000 years later. After many years and countless thousands of eggs stolen from their nests, the few formerly disorganized dragons unite, scorching their cities in retribution. Eventually, the humans were overwhelmed; their civilization in shambles, they were forced to retreat underground into far more primitive homes and villages, though it is known that at least one small group migrated overseas to Pantala, where Cottonmouth continued his experiments into controlling dragons for some time afterwards, genetically modifying a species of plant that would eventually become the Breath of Evil.

With the humans no longer a threat, the dragons then formed tribes, and each one appointed a queen, allowing them to form complex societies; soon, dragons, who were once relatively rare, came to outnumber humans. This made it hard for scavengers to kill individual dragons. After the Scorching, transformation and resettlement of the terrain occurred( notably, the desert that makes up the Kingdom of Sand only formed at some point after the Scorching had occurred and the human civilization destroyed) as well as constant warfare between dragon tribes that continued for some 500 years afterwards.

Trivia

• Dragons keep track of the date by counting the years since the Scorching, as shown when Moonwatcher mentioned that five thousand and twelve years had passed from the Scorching.
• Tui would eventually like to make a Legends book about the Scorching.^{[citation needed]}
• The events of the Scorching will be addressed in A Guide to the Dragon World.
• Tui stated that the first known tribe and the origin of animus magic were "Scorching-based questions,” although it is likely that all dragons were a combination of the modern tribes, as seen with Freedom.