A/N: So I was re-reading the original first chapter and I thought to myself: "Gee...this looks a lot like a sloppily paraphrased version of simple Everquest canon lore. And that's precisely what it was. So now, before I go on about writing up the next few chapters to advance the story further, I'd like to re-write the first two chapters that were written so pathetically & poorly, even more poorly than chapters 3-5. I hope you enjoy these re-writes.

Chapter 1: Tome Thief

"Stop, thief!" A belligerent voice rang out among dimly lit halls of rock and stone. A guard groggily adjusted his eyesight and yawned as the commotion woke him from his post-lucky for him his superiors didn't catch him sleeping on the job.

"Hey, Odion," the sleepy guard nudged his naptime accomplice awake with his scaled elbow. "That was our 'Ryuu Clock' telling us to haul ass and wake up before Utenka finds us sleeping."

The second guard, who was resting his face atop the cool stone of a vendor's empty counter blinked twice as he registered the shouts from the 'thief'. He calmly yawned and stretched out his sore and careworn limbs, the extra blood circulation working to wake him up. "That sounds like Hemfar throwing a fit again."

"Yep."

"Ryuu steal his tomes again?"

"Yep."

The second guard, Odion, chuckled as he rubbed his hand over his bald head, his fingers running over the black tattoos on his face and dome of a head before gingerly touching the horns that he adorned on his forehead.

"That Ryuu..." he murmured under his breath. "He can be a handful most of the time, but he does have his uses." One of those uses being a daily alarm clock for the lazy guards, who counted on Ryuu to complete his morning antics with the city librarian, Hemfar, and therefore wake up the guards with their comical ruckus before they were discovered and possibly reprimanded by their comrades for sleeping on the job.

No rest for the weary, after all.

Odion glanced over at his partner, Tsekani, and shrugged. "Do we do the usual and pretend we didn't hear anything?"

Tsekani flipped his green hair that was obstructing his view away. "Agreed."

The flames on the walls flickered as the sound of running slowly approached them; the dimly lit lamps briefly illuminated a shadow against the wall before it dashed off into the darkness. Soon after, another shadow zoomed by to chase its quarry.

Ryuu huffed as he navigated his way deeper into the cavern city, circumventing empty vendors and leaping down stairs and over the heads of still-slumbering guards that had yet to be awoken by his tumultuous escapades before the crack of dawn. They would wake up soon enough.

Covered from head to toe in a flimsy cotton one-piece suit, the young man maintained his running speed while also keeping a rather large and degraded and aged book under his arm. It was taking everything in his power to be able to run away from Hemfar's wrath while also trying not to accidentally allow the ancient writings of the tome slip from their loose bindings.

Ryuu hid behind a banner hanging from the ceiling to catch his breath as he quite audibly heard Hemfar's footsteps approach his location. Fearing that he had already been made, the young man closed his eyes and focused his innate mana through his body and into his feet.

Alright, let's try this out, he thought. Shadow Step!

Darkness briefly consumed Ryuu before he suddenly re-appeared in a random hallway. Where he was precisely he couldn't tell-the drawback of using the Shadow Step teleportation spell, sometimes you can't always control where you port to. At least the footsteps of Hemfar could no longer be heard, and the thief breathed a lofty sigh of relief, his body slumping against the wall behind him as he tenderly held his prize in his hands. Ryuu slowly slid his body down to the floor as his hands gently flipped the cover of the book open, cringing slightly as he half-accepted the dilapidated piece of scrap to instantly fall apart.

You're lucky I like reading you, or I wouldn't even bother... he mentally scolded the book as if it were its fault for all of his morning troubles. He flipped through the first few pages: the book was an extended volume of the history of his people, his Drakkin, and that of their homeland, Crescent Reach.

Ryuu flashed a grin as his eyes perused over the tome's contents; the history seemed to flow out of the book and flow right over him as he mentally repeated the stories to himself as he read-he had read the tome so many times, he had all but memorized the majority of its contents.

The first few pages detailed extensive speculation as to the origins of the Universe: perhaps a 'Big Bang' or something else entirely (in truth, the Universe began when an omniscient being known as 'The Nameless' randomly began the expansion of space and the flow of time when he stumbled across the two elements in the Void; he soon forged the Elemental Gods to create Order out of the Chaos, who then eventually created the Gods of Nature and Influence, but that is a story for another time altogether).

Ryuu skimmed through the next several chapters and sections until he came across his favorite history segment: that of the Circle of the Crystalwing, and their creation of the race known as Drakkins. Ryuu flipped the page and read onwards.

The story began with what Ryuu understood was the Brood Dawn: a time when the eggs of the next generation of Dragon-kind were hatched within the 'Nest', an enormous breeding ground for dragons that was hidden away from the greedy and opportunistic eyes of Norrathians (non-dragon inhabitants of the world they lived on). However, as the Brood Dawn was about to begin, Norrathian adventurers seeking wealth and fame and romance broke through the barriers that separated their lands and the dragon-ruled lands, and, like water to a broken dam, poured into the Broodlands, seeking to explore this new frontier.

The dragons didn't take such an interference from foolish mortals too kindly, especially not with their eggs ready to hatch soon. The dragons flew out to drive the invaders out from their lands.

Raging tempests and tumultuous firestorms rained down from the sky, the dragons circling overhead as their foes continued to swarm the region, undeterred from the challenge of dragons-after all, isn't slaying a dragon an excellent source of 'fame' and 'romance'?

The two factions warred with each other with such malevolence that even Rallos Zek, the God of War, would have been pleased with the passion and the bloodshed. The dragons fought and fell, one by one, and the Norrathians perished in the hundreds by the claws and teeth of gnashing dragons and their potent spells, breath, and magic that could fell even the hardiest of giants.

As the two sides fought incessantly, a dark force had managed to slip through the lands unnoticed by the dragons, who were too focused on driving out the invaders, and into the fabled Nest, where the vulnerable and unprotected eggs lay.

What occurred afterwards laid waste to the dragons of the Nest, and proved potentially disastrous to the future of dragon-kind. The dark entity laid about the foundations of a mighty curse around the dragon eggs, which activated immediately as the malevolent intruder made his exit-the curse quickly blossomed, a never-ending vine of pure evil and darkness that ensnared the dragon eggs and the other dragons within the Nest, corrupting them from the inside out, and ultimately destroying the eggs, bringing the Brood Dawn to a horrifying and startling conclusion.

An entire generation of dragons, wiped out in an instant by what was known forever after as the Shadowspine Curse.

Ryuu felt a spike of anger and resentment as he read that last line aloud. He couldn't imagine why dragons were despised so greatly by the other races; was it because they were jealous of their power and grace? After all, dragons were the first life-forms to inhabit the planet, deposited by Veeshan, the Great Crystalline Dragon herself, after she marked the world as hers with her gigantic and terrible claws.

Ryuu pondered, was this the reason why the dragons were targeted so methodically and maliciously?

One day, I'll find out the truth...