The Boneyard

Arrival

A grey plain of ash where nothing grows, and out of the ash the ribs of dragons rise like cathedrals, nine of them, each the size of a hill. A lodge built inside the largest skull, with lights in the eye sockets. The dragon on your shoulder goes very still.

The feel

Graveyard and ruin biome on an ash plain: bone, ash, wind, the Legion's hunting lodge, undead that were the dragons' riders. The saddest place in the game and the one the dragon has to face.

The story here

The nine dragons Malachar ate fell here, because he brought them here to die: it is his trophy hall. Their riders died with them and did not stay dead. The dragon learns its true name from its mother's bones, learns what it is the last of, and takes back the roar. The Legion's lodge is where Malachar comes to hunt, and he is there, once, in this realm: the first time the player sees him, from a distance, and he sees the dragon, and knows.

The cast

• Ghost-Rider Corvane. The dead rider of the dragon's mother, a Bone Knight who kept his mind, courteous, exhausted, still guarding a corpse the size of a hill. Signature: he calls the dragon by its true name before it knows it. Secret: he let Malachar take the mother, to save the egg, and has never forgiven himself; the egg is the one on your arm. He is the dragon's godfather and the game's most tender undead. He rests when the roar is taken, and the player can ask him not to.
• Huntmaster Gallow. Master of the Legion's lodge, Malachar's oldest friend, sixties, a great hunter and a genuinely warm host who has personally killed four dragons. Signature: he offers you a drink from a dragon's skull. Secret: he is the one who taught Malachar the heart-eating, out of a book he found in the Temple of Faces, and he has never eaten one himself because he is afraid. The realm's boss, in his own lodge, and he asks to be.
• Malachar, the Wyrmking, seen for the first time from across the ash, on a hunt, and he stops, and looks at your shoulder, and the whole plain goes quiet. No fight. He leaves. The Legion's pursuit becomes something else after this day.
• The Counting Wraith, which walks the nine ribs every night counting to nine, and if you say "ten" aloud it turns and comes.

Underground and the boss

The Skull Lodge: Gallow's hall inside the largest skull, down into the throat where the trophies are. Bone knights, wraiths, vampire knights of Malachar's court, and Huntmaster Gallow himself, a Vampire Knight promoted with a name, four dragon-fang daggers and the manners to explain each one before he uses it. He can be spared, and if spared he tells you how the Wyrmking dies.

Out in the open

The Counting Wraith. The Bone Wind, an event: once a day the ash rises in a storm and the nine dead dragons' shapes stand up in it for a minute, and the dragon sings, and Bond fills to full. Gallow's Hounds, a Werewolf pack the lodge keeps, with a leader who was a rider.

The dragon here

Eats nothing for the whole realm, and the player has to notice. Takes back the roar and its true name. After Frostreach it is grown.