Oblivion is a storm that does not move and does not end, a slow grey whorl of cloud and rain standing over open water northeast of the Emerald Coast, between the eastern reach of the Middle Sea and the ocean beyond. Hulls have charted around it for as long as there have been charts. Underneath, though, it is not weather. It is a knot of Psywind, the thought-and-intention aspect of Ezz, wound so tight and held so long that it has taken the shape and the violence of a storm without any of a storm's reasons. Sail into it and the wind takes your memory the way an ordinary gale takes a sail. You lose your heading first, then your purpose, then your name, and some hours or days later your hull drifts back out the way it came carrying a crew who cannot say where they have been. The calm sea south of it is called the Forgotten Sea, and no one there remembers why.
The storm is not natural and it was not an accident. It is the last act of Nagatayora.
When the titan Hykravones broke the dragon-father open in the sky above the field at the Shattering, his death ran two ways at once. His blood fell east, still burning, onto the mortals below, and the Naga descend from those it changed; that descent is told in their own history. His last breath went the other way. He turned what thought was left in him west, out over the sea, and poured it into the water above the place where his kind had always hatched their young. The breath did not disperse. It set, and it has been turning ever since. He meant it for a wall. An island that cannot be remembered cannot be mapped, and an island that cannot be mapped cannot be found by a fleet, sacked, or carried off. The price of the wall is that it shuts everyone out, the dragons' own kin among them.
Everyone but one bloodline. The Psywind does not erase a Naga the way it erases other minds, because Nagatayora's blood still answers to Nagatayora's thought. A Naga who enters the storm meaning to reach the island can hold that meaning where another mind loses it, steering not by stars or compass, which the storm takes at once, but by intention alone. This is why the riders of Adron, and no one else, could cross Oblivion and come out the far side knowing they had. The seal the dragon-father built to keep the world out is, for his own descendants, a door.
We pulled three of them off a drifter east of Pii, fed and unhurt and out of their minds. One could still say a single word, over and over, and it was not his name. The chart-house keeps a drawer of such words. None of them lead anywhere. — a Verucan harbor-warden of Doga
At the eye, where the cloud thins and the air goes still, stands Nagayeshi, the volcanic island the Adron Naga named, where dragons hatch and where an ancient dragon keeps them. The Wyrmward riders crossed the storm to reach it. What waited there, and who, belongs to that island's own account.