The Spirit Dragon Whistles Produced

With conventional military force insufficient against the Great Spirit Dragons, the three Orders of Wizardry -- the White, the Grey, and the Black Robes -- undertook a working that none of them could have completed independently. Each Order contributed theoretical knowledge or methodology that the others lacked. The result was five Whistles, each tuned to one of the five Great Spirit Dragons, capable of compelling its target to come to the wielder regardless of distance.

The cooperation required was unprecedented and, by all surviving accounts, deeply uncomfortable. The Orders had operated under mutual suspicion for generations. The working forced them to share methodology, credit contributions equally, and trust that no single Order would use the process to gain advantage over the others. They managed it because the alternative -- a Spirit Dragon in the valley below -- was a sufficient argument for setting aside doctrinal hostilities.

The Whistles did not end the Spirit Dragon Wars. They changed who chose the terms of engagement. The holders of the Whistles during the Wars held a position of enormous danger: the Dragon summoned by a Whistle remembered the summoning and the summoner. At least two Whistle holders were killed by the Dragon they had previously compelled, in the interval between one compulsion lapsing and the next being sounded.

The formal unification of the Orders into the Conclave followed the working's completion. Three Orders had cooperated to produce the most significant arcane achievement in living memory. The institutional logic of returning to mutual suspicion was difficult to sustain. The Conclave was established, and its first significant act was to classify the records on the Whistles -- a restriction that has been maintained, without stated justification, for every generation of the Conclave since.