Amethystia

(A placeholder title, drawn from the project that gave me a lot of the initial inspiration)   In the year 2020, the strangest thing happened: a dragonfly in a shaft of sunlight, gleaming silver as stardust. No one imagined such a creature would herald the end of the world.   Or a beginning, depending on how one looks at it.   Weather began to change, more drastically than should have been physically possible, even as much as the climate had shifted. Strange maladies cropped up, and although jokes abounded, the world was uneasy with just how acutely they resembled lycanthropy, vampirism, horses with strange growths upon their heads and bodies- and then the first stories of those whose legs began to grow together, to cover in scales...   Still, humanity is nothing if not incredible at denial, and it took a good ten years before something emerged to unanimously declare the heart of all this change as a suffusion of magic... and even then, there were still a few who refused to accept the thing emerging from the seas as a dragon. Not that their opinions mattered, once he began to take stock of the world.   Magic had emerged, had shaken everything to the core... and that was before the Dragon King learned what it would take to propagate his species...