The legend begins with the earliest days of dragons on our continent, back when the LeafWing tribe and the BeetleWing tribe were new, and they came to escape trouble in the Distant Kingdoms.

The first dragons who landed on Pantala encountered something … very strange. The night they arrived, as they all slept, the earth below them began to seethe with motion. Tiny legs crawled across their scales — and then more — and then more of them. The dragons woke suddenly, from their dreams into a true nightmare. They were covered in fire ants.

Their shrieks rose up to the three moons and they ran to the ocean, but even as they ran, more colonies of ants boiled up out of the ground and attacked. They marched up the dragons' legs and burrowed between their scales and dug their mandibles into their skin. The ants did not let go as the dragons plunged into the sea; they did not try to save themselves. They held on like grim death, until at last the ants drowned.

But the ants were only the beginning. The next morning, as the dragons were limping back to their campsite, they heard buzzing in the air, getting closer and closer. When they looked up, the sky was dark with bees. So many bees they blotted out the sun. The bees descended and attacked, all at once, just as the ants had done. And again, the dragons were forced to flee into the bay and hide below the water. They were saved by their flamesilks, who burned the bees out of the sky.

It got worse … and stranger. The swarms of insects kept coming. And the next attacks came from insects that don't normally work in groups — armies of venomous centipedes, battalions of tsetse flies, swarms of bombardier beetles.

They killed dragon after dragon with mindless, unwavering ferocity. Some of the dragons vanished in the night, never to be seen again. Others went down right in front of their friends, suddenly covered in assassin bugs.

Of course, the dragons fought back. They'd come too far to run away, and they were refugees who could never return to the Distant Kingdoms.

So they fought to stay, but it seemed that whenever they struck down one group of attackers, another would instantly appear in its place. The insects were followed by coils of rattlesnakes, a vast pride of lions, murders of crows.

But these were not ordinary attacks. The animals moved like a single organism. If a crow was struck down on one end of the battlefield, the crows at the far end somehow knew instantly. The snakes attacked simultaneously, targeting their victims with coordinated precision.

The tribes never found anyone behind the attacks. They searched far and wide for years, but there were no other dragons on the continent, as far as they could tell.

What they found, they called the breath of evil. The vine covered everything. It was wound around every tree, through every meadow, in every marsh. No matter the landscape, it thrived across all of Pantala.

But the dragons from the Distant Kingdoms soon discovered that when they destroyed this plant, the attacks waned. When they cleared all the vine from the area, that area gradually became safe to live in. No more attacks. The animals began to behave like normal animals, so long as they lived within the perimeter the dragons made where there was no breath of evil.