fact, indistinguishable.
Dragons were endemic to the hills of Dwomor for centuries, but none caused serious problems before Y.S. 5220 or so, because until then none ever lived long enough to grow to a formidable size. The dragon Tobas killed had resorted to eating livestock and people only when it had devoured everything else big enough for it to catch; if it had been just a little smarter, it would have moved on to a different area, instead, and gone on eating deer. Dragons have no known limit to their growth; but since young ones tend to be quite stupid and easy to capture or kill, very few ever exceed what humans consider a manageable size. They reach reproductive maturity at about six or seven feet in length, so that the tendency to get killed off when they reach ten feet or so has not seriously endangered the species. The linguistic centers of the draconic brain usually develop around the twenty-foot size, but of course, like a human infant, a dragon cannot learn to talk without someone to teach it. The illegible page in the front of Derithon’s book of spells had once held his notes on the making of an athame; they were rendered illegible when his master found them and impressed on his apprentice with a willow switch that the athame was a secret. The lesson took, and the little code symbol Derithon used thereafter was the result.
The thing that sank Dabran the Pirate’s ship Retribution was Degorran, a little-known sea demon of the Fifth Circle. Shemder the Lame, the demonologist aboard the Ethsharitic trader Behemoth who was responsible for summoning Degorran, had been attempting to contact the much less formidable second-circle demon Spesforis the Hunter when he got lucky and brought up Degorran instead.
The invisible servant Tobas called Nuisance was in the castle in the void when Derithon first created it; in fact, it was arguably the castle’s rightful owner until Derithon placed it under several assorted spells of constraint and compulsion, and its abuse of Tobas was as close as it could come to wreaking vengeance for its enslavement on all wizardkind.
And finally, spriggans really are harmless, except in large numbers, but not quite as stupid as Tobas hoped; it took them three years to figure out that the mirror wouldn’t work in the fallen castle and another year after that to drag it somewhere it would work, unleashing the steady supply of spriggans that continued to plague Ethshar from then on.
