12. Dragon
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1320 DR, plains of the western Shaar
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The vast lands of the Shaar might seem barren and ill-suited to sustain life, but this would only be true from a human's point of view, even if some stubborn and tough human tribe managed to live in those lands. Many other intelligent creatures actually lived and thrived in that savannah-like environment. There lived the mighty wemics, similar to centaurs but with the lower body of a lion, not to mention the even more dangerous thri-kreen, humanoids resembling large praying mantises that had a much more stealthy and deceptive lifestyle than the honorable wemic; some tribes of loxo, the enormous elephant-men, had made their home in the Shaar… not to mention other monstrous creatures such as wives, manticores and dragons.
One of these last gigantic beasts in recent times had disturbed the balance of the western Shaar. A sizeable blue dragon had moved into an underground cave and had chosen a certain territory of the western Shaar as his hunting ground. This had naturally caused migration by any modestly intelligent creature, with one notable exception: the thri-kreen. They weren't even afraid of a dragon. They were convinced that they could escape even the keen sight of the most powerful of monsters, provided they knew how to make the best of their camouflage abilities to hide in the grass. And if someone was found and eaten, well, that's life.
In reality, the thri-kreen did not mind living with the dragon so much: he had chased away all their contenders for food and territory, and in exchange he ate the useless individuals of their race… and since they had no social structure outside of small squads of hunters bred in close ties, it was inevitable that the thri-kreen would see the other thri-kreen groups more as contenders than as allies.
Then, one day, the dragon stopped hunting. The thri-kreen might have remained confused, curious, wondering what happened to it, but in reality they were too instinctive and too simple creatures to ask these questions. The dragon was gone, end of story, soon individuals of other races would return to reclaim the territories they had left.
A single handful of thri-kreen hunters accidentally discovered what had happened to the dragon; they found out when they run into his corpse.
Mantis warriors were hunters, not scavengers. Unlike many other sentient races, they weren't even interested in the treasures that might be hiding in a dragon's lair, so they don't even bother looking for it.
What happened to the dragon's body in the end, nobody knows. No one willingly ventures into thri-kreen hunting territory.