Scarred Dragons

Those dragons who survived the Disaster. Barely.

Credits to Roman Zawadzki from Artstation for the monstrous cover art!

When the Disaster laid waste to a massive swath of Aitreas, cities were annihilated and millions of lives were lost in the blink of an eye. In the spiral of collapsing islands and boiling seas that remained and formed the region now known as the Scar, it was believed that no life remained. Indeed, entire forests hundreds of miles away from the epicenter of the Disaster had burned for weeks following the event; what hope did those caught in the blast itself have? Besides, with the Collapse of the Imperium that followed, most people had bigger, more immediate problems than investigating if anything had survived the Disaster.
Well, they had bigger problems up until the point when dragons, ranging from wyrmlings to timeless titans, began to emerge from the Scar, physically changed and mentally shattered. On wings of darkness and crackling arcane energy, this new species of dragons -- dubbed Scarred Dragons -- emerged from the ashes of the Disaster and brought its ruin upon any caravan, village, or town with the misfortune of being in their line of sight. Their emergence began slowly, with rumors drifting on war-torn roads and through abandoned streets of dragons, different than any in the fairy tales or seen in the mountains, emerging from the storms of the Scar. 
It has been three months since the first Scarred Dragon was confirmed and they have already brought even greater devastation to the regions immediately bordering the Scar, amplifying the suffering of the Imperials post-Collapse. The Scarred are just as likely to vaporize a village as they are to claim to be its defender. They are neither conquerors nor eradicators and neither guardians nor rulers. They are madness, the madness of the Scar, of the Disaster, of the Collapse, given physical form and amplified to the umpteenth degree, and the only thing more varied than their shattered minds are their broken forms.
Consider Tarviet, a beast nearly thirty feet long and permanently dripping an acidic slime that melts anything less than stone in seconds. He was the first Scarred Dragon to be sighted. He reduced a town of three hundred to a series of acidic pools and half-melted homes and since then, dozens of other Scarred have visited ruin upon the broken Imperium. Catalogues have begun to form of these new mutant dragons, and the only unifying characteristic of these creatures is that they are, in some way, shape, or form, dragons. Other than that, everything from their bodily structure to breath weapons to claw formations differs.

Children of Devastation

The Scarred Dragons were the first creatures to be confirmed as mutants caused by the arcane fallout of the Disaster, and those few that have been killed -- or abruptly died -- have been taken in to be studied by the Imperial Battlemages in Ariminium. When the research began, these scholars hoped to discern some aspect of the Disaster's origin, and they dared to hope that the Scarred could hold the secret to healing the Disaster's fallout. Thus far, they have been wrong. In fact, studying the Scarred raises more questions than it answers. Everything about their existence defies common understanding, even with what little understanding Emaxians have of draconic biology. They are, utterly, children of devastation.
Some are beginning to claim they are the heralds of a new age, and that the Disaster is a taste of the apocalyptic rebirth approaching.