The Megélren Exile is the name the present gives to a casting-out that had nothing to do with the obsidian form when it happened. Around 2976 SD, in the wake of the Severing, Adron expelled a faction of the Waterdark order. They were ordinary Nagashi, scaled like any banking house's children, and they were put out not for what they were born but for what they had done.
The faction was the order's shadow-arm, its darkness adepts, and the souring of the dragon-bonds had been their work as much as anyone's. When the Severing ended the bonds and the kingdom went looking for someone to answer, the order's leadership handed the shadow-arm over and kept itself clean. The faction was struck from the house-rolls, stripped of name and ground, and put outside Adron for good. Stateless, owed nothing and owing nothing, they took up the only trade that would still have them, which was contract killing and the quiet work that travels with it. The cells that sell that work across the Middle Sea today trace back, by their own reckoning, to those exiles.
Then the memory drifted, the way memory does over four centuries, and two older things fused onto it. The first was the cowardice told of Hykravones' field, the blood that ran from the dragon-father's fire rather than spend itself on a lost cause; one treachery reached back and explained the other, and the Exile became the latest verse of a much older song about Naga who break faith. The second fusion was crueler and more lasting. The Megélren, the obsidian-scaled born unbidden in any Naga line, did the same stateless killing-work the exiles had taken up, and so the story made them the exiles' blood returned. They never were. The faction bred no truer to black scale than any house in Adron, and the obsidian form keeps surfacing by its own logic in lines that never went anywhere near the Exile. But the fusion did its work. The case-by-case casting-out of obsidian newborns that Adron still practices now reads itself back into this one Exile, as though an honorable house putting out a black-scaled child and a kingdom putting out its traitors were the same act, four hundred years apart.
The bill of exile is still kept in the house-archive at Adrak, four centuries on. It is a list of plain Nagashi names struck through in a single hand, not a Megélren among them. The city that files past the case reads the same page every year and sees only black scales. The list has not changed. The reading has.