It had been thirty years since the incident. Two years since chaos had been unleashed upon the world. Most people expected the military to be able to do something about it, and they'd done their best. Even the finest navy ships had a hard time killing a Kraken, and it took quite a bit of firepower to handle a dragon.

So thus, most of the world had fallen into chaos. The media reported it as the end of the world. It was quite the change, and in some places humanity was wiped out, but in other places people learned how to thrive. Pandora's Box gave us nearly as many gifts as it gave us enemies.

That's what Old Harold said. He's popular here in Boone. Used to be bigger, but now it's down to just a few dozen of us. The Appalachians were the source of most of our troubles, providing shelter for the occasional dragon, but griffons were our biggest problem. I'd killed a few myself, but only the smaller ones. Never one of the giant ones.

Today we were going to try and put an end to a huge roost. We'd named the variants of griffons we'd seen, and these were imperial griffons, one of the most social kinds of griffon there is. They live in groups of ten to thirty, and they're huge. About the size of a suburban house.

All we had to do was go up in the forests, find the communal nesting site, and kill every last one of the bastards. If we didn't kill em now, they'd keep attacking us for months, and we'd be totally unable to show our faces in daylight until summer.