Magical Creatures: Researching the 'natural' sources of a myriad of magical beasts

• An excerpt from the tome __Magical Creatures: Researching the 'natural' sources of a myriad of magical beasts (with the main focus on dragon origins, but ends up being related to many others)__*

"Dragons in recent societal memories are a mere shadow of their progenitors. Research into the 'Age of Titans' has revealed that, while the titans may have been a brutal force acting upon the lives of the humans at their mercy, they served an interesting purpose in the beginning before humanity came together and destroyed them one by one. That purpose: Dragons.

Many people nowadays assume that dragons are some magically contaminated lizard that grew to unreasonable sizes. This proves the ignorance of the person holding those beliefs, because modern day dragons are born from the primordial dragons that found their way to the material plane during something that has been referred to in some ancient texts as 'The Great Linkage.'

Primordial dragons are unlike their modern counterparts in many ways. First and foremost: Intelligence. Primal dragons do not plan. They act. The majority of the time that act is consumption. Whether it be the great umbral wyrm from the shadow plane who, along with the great magma wyrm from the plane of fire, who birthed the chromatic dragons, or the great crystals and cloud wyrms (from Elysium and the plane of air, respectively) who are responsible for the birth of the metallic dragons, their paths were of pure destruction.

Unknown to the titans, they protected humanity during this cataclysmic time. Forcing the slow evolution of the great lizards into the more cunning, egotistical creatures we know today to learn to control their magicks, and learned that wanton destruction, while fun, and their right *(editor's note: the dragons believe it is their right)*, only leads to being hunted down by the mortals who killed the beasts that protected them from the wyrms for centuries."