What Is the Bloody August?

Start with the sword. The Sword of Baltanders was a relic Azalie and Krylancelo had recovered from a deserted isle, and Azalie, the most driven student the Tower of Fangs had, secretly tested its power on herself. The sword answered by turning her into a vast dragon. She fled; the Tower declared the matter closed, abandoned her as lost, and sent its best sorcerers, her own teacher Childman among them, to destroy the creature. A dragon is not a student, and killing one raises no questions.

The name came from the calendar: the dragon's presence made itself known in August, and Bloody August stuck. Five years later Orphen, who had never accepted the official story, tracked the sword to the Everlasting mansion in Totokanta and waited, certain she would come for it. She did. What the novels then spend twenty volumes unwinding is the part the Tower buried: Childman had never stopped looking for a way to save her, and Azalie's soul did not stay where the transformation left it. The incident is the engine of the whole series, and the 1998 anime builds its single season entirely around it.