The Finger of the Dragon

The Finger of the Dragon is a spire of blackened stone rising from an otherwise flat coastal headland on Kyrell's eastern shore -- a column of rock approximately two hundred feet tall and narrowing to a point at its crown that would be geologically inexplicable if its origin were geological. It is not. The spire is the only structure remaining from the site where, by the most consistent account, the dragons of Kyrell gathered at the end of the Spirit Dragon Wars and departed from the world.

The stone is vitrified -- fused by an intensity of heat that the land around it somehow survived at close range. The grass at the base of the spire grows differently than it does fifty yards away: longer, darker, and in a pattern that from any elevation above the headland traces shapes that scholars who have examined it disagree on but cannot dismiss. The spire itself is unclimbable, not because of any physical barrier but because every attempt to ascend it has ended with the climber on the ground with no memory of how they got there, unharmed and unable to say how much time has passed.

No dragon has been reliably sighted in Kyrell since the departure. The site where they left has accumulated over the centuries a mixture of reverence, dread, and scholarly interest that none of the three has resolved into a clear consensus about what the place actually is. The Orders of Wizardry consider it anomalous and do not maintain a formal research presence there. The reason given is logistical. The reason suspected is something else.

On certain nights -- which do not correlate with any known celestial event -- the point of the spire emits a faint light visible from the sea. Sailors use it as a landmark. They also avoid anchoring near it after dark. Both of these things are true simultaneously, and the sailors do not find this contradictory.