The Stormpeaks

Arrival

Highland moor climbing into mountains, heather and granite, weather coming across it in walls. Lightning striking the same peak three times. On the peak, a ruin with wide steps built for something that landed, and a figure in a tattered cloak on the top step, waiting, translucent.

The feel

Highlands: wind, rain, scree, black lochs, storm on the tops. The mountain biome under storm sky. The Eyrie of the dragonriders on the highest peak, and the ghosts of every rider who died at the fall still keeping watch.

The story here

This is where the game says what you are. The Eyrie's ghosts are the last Dragonsworn, and they cannot rest until a living one stands on their steps. They train you, they tell you what Malachar was, and they give the dragon its wings. The Legion holds the passes below with its finest, and Captain Vane is in command, and the favour from the Greenwold comes due. The Stormpeaks are also where the player first flies, in Wyrmsoul, over a fight, and never sees the game the same way again.

The cast

• Marshal Eowen Skyward. The last Marshal of the Eyrie, a ghost, a woman of sixty who died at forty, unbending, kind underneath in a way she has forgotten. Signature: she salutes the dragon and not you. Secret: she trained Malachar, loved him, and did not see it. She teaches the Bond's true use and gives the wings. At the Throne her ghost is on the wall, and Malachar sees her, and stops.
• Kestrel. A living highland girl, seventeen, who has been climbing to the Eyrie every week since she was ten to leave flowers for ghosts she cannot see. Signature: she whistles the riders' recall, which the ghosts taught her in dreams. Secret: she is Skyward's great-great-granddaughter and the only one the ghosts can touch. She is the realm's living heart and the one who sees you fly first. Returns at the Throne on the back of the dragon behind you, because somebody has to.
• Captain Serle Vane, again, in the passes, with orders to take the dragon and a memory of the boar. The player's choice with him here decides whether the Throne's door opens from inside.
• The Storm Wyvern Skreel, an old wyvern who nests on the Eyrie's lightning peak and has learned to ride the strikes. The ghosts call it the last of their mounts' bastards. It can be fought or, after the wings, out-flown, and if out-flown it follows you and is the dragon's first friend of its own kind.

Underground and the boss

The Eyrie's Roost: the dragonriders' hall cut into the peak, three levels down to the mounting stair. Ogres of the Legion's mountain corps, iron golems, wyverns, and Warden Hask, the Legion's mountain commander, an Ogre promoted with a name and a Legion breastplate, who has been trying to break into the Roost for twenty years and cannot pass the ghosts. You can. That is the point.

Out in the open

Skreel on the peak. The Wall of Weather, an event: a storm crosses the highlands every real hour and anything on the tops in it takes lightning; anything under Wyrmsoul does not. The Cairn Road, where every cairn is a rider's grave and speaks a line if the dragon is near.

The dragon here

Eats goats and lightning, apparently. Becomes a young dragon here: the player rides it down from the Eyrie. Takes back wings.