The War of the Lance
The War of the Lance began not as a single battle or proclamation, but as a shadow spreading over Ansalon. First whispered of in frightened taverns, then shouted by fleeing refugees, and finally known to all as an unstoppable tide. From the volcanic wastes of Neraka, the Dragon Armies unfurled across the scarred continent like a great serpent, its five heads striking in coordinated terror. In these years, as dread mounted and borders collapsed, the world understood that the Dragon Queen had returned to claim what she believed was rightfully hers.
The first tremors of the war erupted in Nordmaar, a proud but unprepared realm resting uneasily on the frontier of the Taman Busuk region. Here the Red and Green Dragon Armies descended like an unexpected storm. Few Nordmaarian warriors had seen a dragon in their lives, yet suddenly the sky churned with wings of scarlet and emerald fire. Their fields ignited and their strongholds crumbled beneath fangs and claw. The fall of Nordmaar sent shockwaves across Ansalon not merely because a nation had fallen, but because it had fallen so quickly that many doubted it had ever existed at all. In the aftermath of this conquest, neutral tribes of hobgoblins and ogres, long dwelling in the lawless places of the eastern mountains, pledged allegiance to the Dragon Queen, hoping to claim scraps of power from her rising dominion.
Appetite sharpened by victory, the Dragon Armies turned their gaze to the wide steppes of Khur, a land of wind-swept grasses, proud riders, and ancient tribal rivalries. The Green Dragon Army was dispatched to subdue the plains through force, but the tribes were not so easily crushed. Instead, Ariakas, champion of Takhisis, recognized a different kind of conquest. In the aftermath of a decisive duel between Salah-Khan—a charismatic and ruthless Khur chieftain—and the previous Green highlord, Ariakas offered the Khur leader a bargain. He would become highlord of the Green Dragon Army and rule Khur in the Dragon Queen’s name. Whether Salah-Khan accepted to protect his people or to elevate himself above all other Khur is still debated, and his name is both cursed and honored among the tribes. But what matters in the chronicles is this: Khur joined the Dragon Armies, and their riders added swift, deadly mobility to the war machine taking shape in the east.
Farther south, lands long quiet and unprepared felt the weight of the Dragon Queen’s advance. Balifor and the Goodlund Peninsula, isolated and lacking the armies of the great nations, yielded almost without war. The Black and White Dragon Armies slipped into the region like frost and shadow, claiming its towns, forests, and coasts with little more than the promise of retribution. But the invaders soon discovered that Goodlund harbored a resilient and unpredictable defiance. The kender of Kendermore, fearless to the point of madness, rose in spirited rebellion, harassing patrols, sabotaging supply lines, and turning occupation into a constant, maddening struggle. The Black Dragon Army held the region, but not without sleepless nights and whispered curses on every wind.
Yet no campaign was as brutal, enduring, or devastating as the assault on Silvanesti. For centuries, the elves of Silvanesti had embraced isolation, closing their borders and shunning the turmoil of the outside world. The Dragon Armies broke upon those borders like waves on stone; yet the elves—fierce, elegant, and unwilling to yield even a petal of their enchanted forests—met them with magic and blade. The siege dragged on for more than a year, its battles fought in shifting glades, crystalline rivers, and beneath the watchful boughs of ancient trees. As the toll grew unbearable, Speaker Lorac, ruler of Silvanesti and guardian of its ancestral wisdom, turned in desperation to a relic of forgotten ages: a dragon orb, a weapon designed to command dragons themselves.
The orb, however, was a treacherous ally. Its will clashed with Lorac’s own, and the land responded with catastrophic nightmares. Forests twisted into impossible geometries. Rivers ran backward. Time itself seemed to tangle in knots of terror. Silvanesti became a realm of living dreamscape horror, unusable to both elf and invader. With great sorrow, the elves abandoned their homeland and fled across the sea to Southern Ergoth, leaving behind a kingdom trapped in the eternal echo of a mind undone.
By 351 AC, nearly all of eastern Ansalon lay under the banners of Takhisis. Her armies consolidated their gains, their highlords returning to Neraka to divide the spoils and sharpen their next assault. The White Dragon Army swept south into the frozen wastes of Icereach, where their dragons thrived in the endless cold and the scattered tribes fell quickly before them. The Black and Green armies entrenched themselves across their seized territories, enforcing the Dragon Queen’s rule with iron discipline. In Taman Busuk, the Red and Blue Dragon Armies, commanded by Verminaard and the ambitious Kitiara Uth Matar, prepared their immense forces for a sweeping invasion of Solamnia, the ancient heart of honor, already weakened by centuries of internal strife and external scorn.
Yet even as the Dragon Armies tightened their grip on the continent, ambition festered within their ranks. The Dragon Queen’s highlords, elevated by her dark blessing, schemed against one another as much as they warred against their enemies. Takhisis encouraged such rivalries, believing that conflict within her own court would sharpen the blades of her champions. Thus, while Verminaard pursued visions whispered directly to him by his goddess—visions of a weapon forged from the shattered might of Istar—others maneuvered to seize their own glory. Among these was Kansaldi Fire-Eyes, Verminaard’s ruthless lieutenant, whom he dispatched to claim the power hidden in the ruins of an ancient Istarian city. Should she succeed, the Dragon Armies would gain a weapon capable of reshaping the war itself.
And so the stage was set for the fiercest struggle Krynn had seen since the Third Dragon War—a conflict in which dragons once again soared, nations trembled, and mortals would rise or fall according to the choices of a few brave souls.
The War of the Lance had truly begun.