Enderal:Myths and Legends: The Gargantuan Lizard
- Ark, Library
Volume 4: The Mountain in the Desert
Even till recent times, mothers from Duneville have told their children of the "Mountain in the Desert". This, they hoped, would discourage their children's youthful boldness, so they do not stray from the Path in their early years, when it is all the more alluring.
The legend revolves around a wild mage who retreated to the Powder Desert to be able to fully devote himself to the School of Entropy - and pull otherworldly beings from different realities into our own. It began with hair and scales, then whole limbs, and, in the end, entire beasts. He bore no interest in humans, and cared nothing for spectral beings or the Lost Ones. His fascination was with animals, dwelling in sandy planes not quite like ours.
He designed special cages for the creatures he summoned, and took to observing them. The mage watched his specimens closely, sketching what he saw; and, once satisfied with his drawings, returned the beasts to their own time and place. Research, you see, was his singular passion.
Following a few rainy seasons - which the reader unfamiliar with the desert's climate may consider akin to winters in Heartland - the mage had grown so skillful in the use of forbidden magic that summoning animals from the desert lost its appeal. Those alternate realities, he found, were too similar to our own mundane plane. Though he witnessed great cats unlike anything found in our reality, gazed upon richly-colored, gangly birds, and observed jet-black Bone Rippers, in time he came to regard the exotic beasts with a bored, experienced eye. So he reached farther, searched longer, and taxed his abilities to find something more alien.
This wild mage, whose name has been forgotten long ago, found himself adrift in the sea of endless eventualities, unable to orient himself, seeking a reality where time itself ran separate from our own. Quite to his surprise, he succeeded one day in anchoring his mind to a far-off world. Thrilled by what he saw of that exotic plane through the hazy, distorted veil, he quickly set his mind to pulling the first being he discovered into his reality.
The beast proved a towering green lizard vast as a battering ram, with menacing horns and a gigantic armored plate on the back of its skull. In his haste, the wild mage had failed to register the sheer size of the reptile, and soon paid the price for his hubris. When the portal from the distant world appeared and spat the gargantuan beast into its meager cage, the bars burst wide with a mighty, deafening crack like thunder. Perhaps angered by having been torn from its natural place and time, or perhaps terrified by the rending sound of the cage, the great monster charged at the wild mage - and drove one of its murderous horns through his eye.
Thus ends the story, and the life, of the wild mage. It is said that even to this day vagabonds might paw through the twisted remnants of a rusty cage and encounter the remains of a skeleton weathered by time and desert winds. Of the monstrous lizard from out of time, however, nothing remains, save the whispers which still breathe life into the ancient legend. They call it the Mountain in the Desert.
