(See also ‘The Nameless One”)

Throughout the City of Lanta, local folklore tells of the Stormrider, a mythical figure that rides a great, nameless Black Dragon, forever stirring the clouds of the Tumultuous Plains until they boil over and become violent storms capable of rending the earth with their fury. As the legend goes, the dragon covets the Silver Moonflowers, but alas, none of them grow upon his lands, for nothing can share a home with those calamitous storms. When one of those twisting maelstroms from the Tumultuous Plains breaks free and travels east, towards the mountain, it is supposedly the Nameless One hunting for the elusive Silver Moonflowers.

The legend of the Stormrider begins with a brazen young boy who took it upon himself to bring the dragon that which it coveted. As the story goes, the Nameless One wasted no time finding the boy upon the edge of the plains. As the sky grew dark around him, the sun faded away. When he presented the Silver Moonflower to the sky above, both the boy and the flower were swept away, engulfed by a sudden storm, and yet unharmed. The nameless dragon, an intelligent but lonely creature, decided that it would bestow its wisdom and power upon the boy, and so the boy became something apart from the human race entirely.

A commonly held superstition around the City of Lanta is that the Stormrider himself will appear before the wicked as a wild-eyed, long-haired teenage boy on stormy nights, warning them of the consequences of their continued actions. The superstition continues, positing that those who ignore the warning will be visited by the Nameless One and put to death by the great black dragon, or one of its mighty storms.