Dragons

Overview

Dragons are remembered only as legends. No one has seen one for a very long time, longer than any record reaches, and the common belief is that they never existed: a fireside beast, a word for fierce fire and hard hide. Yet dragons may still exist somewhere, beyond where the peoples go, and may one day come back. Why they are gone, if they ever were here, is not known. The best-kept of the legends are the draconic-shadow stories of the Kobolds, and the dragon also survives as a word in the speech of the schools of magic.

Appearance

The dragon of the stories is large, low, and heavy, scaled in black and the dull red of banked coals, with a hide like slag that cracks along old seams and glows faintly in them. It lies curled in a nest of mineral, crystals and ore heaped round it like a hoard, among vents that breathe heat. Its breath smells of hot stone and sulphur, its voice is the roar of a furnace drawing, and when it moves the ground shifts like settling slag. Tellers give it eyes like the glow seen through a furnace's spy-hole and claws black with soot. Other peoples' tellings vary the colours and the lair, but keep the scale, the heat, and the size.

Habitat and Range

Where dragons live, if they live, nobody knows. The stories put them always deeper or higher than the teller has been: in the hot places under the cold ones, in the Kobold telling, or past the last ridge and the last run of the sea in others.

The only dragons anyone has seen are in the Muse's Studio, where a thought held with enough focus and feeling takes physical form. A visitor who thinks of a dragon there makes one, and it is a rough draft: a dragon of smoke, flawed and unstable, dissolving as soon as its maker's focus slips. Such a thing is a reflection of the maker's mind, not a dragon that lives, and it proves nothing either way.

Behaviour and Temperament

In the Kobold stories the dragon is a patron before it is a danger. It keeps its nest and the heat-ways round it, favours those who serve it well, and is terrible to those who fire a furnace against its warning or take from the nest without leave. Some Kobold groups tell it as a guardian; others as a master whose protection could not be refused. Elsewhere the legends make it a hoarder, a burner of fields, or a sleeper best not woken.

Abilities

The dragon of legend breathes fire, cannot be burned, and knows the moods of heat in rock better than any living keeper. In the schools the word names a measure, not a creature: dragonfire is fire past ordinary bearing, as when a champion under Dragonhide takes it on his scaled arms and lives, and the working takes its name from the hide of the stories.

Uses and Dangers

A legend gives a great deal. The Kobold tellings keep the memory of the vent-houses alive in a form children repeat, and carry the warning the Kobolds have not forgotten about what protection can come to mean. Old bone or fused stone found in ash-furnace ruins and lower works is sometimes sold or kept as dragonbone, and scholars hold such fragments unchanged under Museum Sleep until they can be studied safely. What any such fragment truly is, no record says.

Lore and Belief

Most people think dragons a story and nothing more. Those who hold so point to the Kobold tellings, which grew from a real memory: the soot-hardened furnace-masters of the elder Ash-Furnace Civilization, who gave the Kobold vent-houses their place and were half-remembered across a very long span as scaled patrons in mineral nests. The tellers who know their own history say the same, and say the stories are myths, not the origin of the Kobolds.

Others are less sure. The dragonbone fragments have never been explained, the legends of peoples who never knew the furnace world have their dragons too, and a few hold that dragons went away rather than never were, and that what went away can come back. Nobody can say where they would have gone, or why, or what would bring them.

Where It Appears

• People: Kobolds; Ash-Furnace Civilization
• Timeline: The Vent-Houses of the Furnace World - rough date range: c. 250,000-c. 168,000 BR
• Cosmology: The Muse's Studio
• Magic: Morphic Magic: Dragonhide; Frozen Moment Magic: Museum Sleep