Traitor Gold. False King. Golden Tyrant. These are the titles they gave my great-uncle after what he did to our kingdom. The one who I shall not name, for his name isn't worth remembering in any sort of written word. All you should know is this: he was arrogance personified, golden-scaled like his brother, the Great Gold. Called himself the 'King of Kings', yet was never even a royal. He was my grandmother's uncle. And this is his tale.

Little is known about his early life, but that's not why I'm writing this. I'm writing this to spite my mother, and not let his lesson be forgotten. She wants him erased from history, and that's fine. But someone, somewhere, will try this again. And this is my warning to them.

When I met him, he was thousands of years old. Bled arrogance. He loved himself for being gigantic and powerful, an ancient Ward of Fenrir who wielded the divine Sword and Chains with the promise to kill gods should they step out of line. However, the gods were too stupid to see that the soul underneath all that pomp and piss was rotten as a week-old carcass left in the desert sun.

So as you know, the Faction of Hope - an anti-dragon group of mostly humanoids - rose in Albronel, starting a riot that got pretty big pretty fast. Someone shot my mother in the eye with a crossbow bolt; she was dragged through a portal just as everything started to go to hell. The soldiers, returning from a battle with the serpents up north, were attacked by the ones they'd sworn to protect. Several began to try and storm the keep, having already overrun the bazaar and courtyard.

And yet, Albronel could have been saved but for one traitor Gold.

He came in like a furious tidal wave of fire and scales and so many conjured weapons you couldn't see through them. A curtain of steel. One entire side of the city was obliterated, vaporized, hundreds killed in an instant. Men, women, children, dragons, elves, humans - it didn't matter what or who. He slaughtered them all. Killed them in a rage that could not be stopped or helped. The fires that asshole wrought were the very fires that brought the rest of the city low.

He is the one who destroyed Albronel. He is the one that led to our throne's fall. Not the Faction, not the snakekind; just him. What happened to him after? Oh, I don't know or care what he was doing between the time he fled Albronel and when my mother caught up to him. Some said he was hiding in Evylon when the gods stripped him of his Wardship, and his weapons. Others say he was in Felnova, in Ibenia, when all that was going down. Another even said he kidnapped some demoness or another. Who knows or cares? He was psychotic. Maybe he did all of those things, or maybe he did none of them.

The part about his Wardship is true enough. Wherever it might have happened. Ayyndkhae and Mirthtira, the Sword and the Chains, were taken from him. My mother caught up to him some time after that, confronted him in the hole he'd hidden away in. I have no idea what exactly happened in that cave; mother won't talk about it. She only says that she got what she had come for, and that the traitor Gold was dead.

I think anybody can imagine what she did to that dragon, however. What anyone would have done. Hell, if it were me, I'd have torn his horns off and fed them to him, then - well, you don't really need to know that. But I figure there's a headless, rotting corpse with fading golden scales laying underground somewhere in a long-unmarked cave, and it probably has my mother's name carved into it. I wouldn't go looking, however. She'd most likely have buried it deep, so he has no chance of ever being resurrected.

One more thing I should probably put here before I let me aching claws rest - why does writing have to be so irritating, anyways? After he died, the traitor Gold's vault of treasures was dumped into a cavern in Vystriana. Strigine, probably working for my mother, found it and told her where it was. She put a spell on it - or had her mages do it, I guess - and crafted an altar and a gate constructed around it, so that nobody could get in. Made to commemorate those he killed.

But it's not sealed forever. If you find the Golden Altar, and leave an offering to the dead, you may enter the beautiful gates and take one of the many treasures that lay within. You might even find something worthwhile.

Always remember the lesson of the Golden Tyrant, the Traitor Gold, the False King. Never claim what isn't yours, and never let your power rule your soul.