The one beast that can answer a Palatine Knight.
Creatures large enough to fight an armored knight on equal terms are rare. The greatest of them are the dragons of the eastern mountains — immense, armored in scale thicker than a castle wall, and crowned with fire. A grown dragon can take a battering that would shatter a golem, strike three times in the span a knight strikes once, and burn a line of soldiers to ash before they close. When one descends, it is the knights — and only the knights — who can ride out to meet it.
For the most part they keep to the high passes. But their numbers swell, and in hard years, or when something stirs them, they push down out of the heights into settled land, and a knight rides to the “rescue.” Rarer still, and far worse, is when one of the great old wyrms wakes with purpose — a Dragon Awakening that empties whole towns and turns a campaign into a hunt.
And there are darker rumors from across the mountains, well beyond the empire: of wizards who can take dragon shape, who keep true dragons for war, and who have spun a false history of themselves as dragon-gods. Whether an exiled prince of theirs will one day bring that war west, no one in the empire can say. They only watch the eastern peaks, and hope the year is a quiet one.
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