A concise summary of the nature of dragons in all developmental stages
Dragons in Lore, Myth, and Story
Dragons are one of the most consistent actors in stories of nearly all thinking cultures. What is it that fascinates kinvari so about these enormous, scaled, magical creatures? We tell stories of evil dragons, of benevolent dragons, of dragon hunters and dragon friends. No two dragons are alike, and our world seems to teeter always on the verge of losing dragonkind forever--or succumbing to a sudden overpopulation that would eradicate all kinvari in its wake.
Let us discuss the reality of dragons so we may understand the kernels of truth from whence such myths germinated and pragmatically assess dragonkind’s impact upon our world.
Misconceptions of Dragons
Before we begin, we must clear away the cobwebs of myth that have grown to misunderstandings of an unfortunately literal nature. Because so few kinvari alive have glimpsed a dragon, let alone interacted with one, the stories of our ancestors suffice as the sum of our knowledge on dragonkind. However, those stories fail to take simple biology into account in that they only speak of adult dragons.
Make no mistake, adult dragons are the epitomes of the epics. Our legends of their ferocity, intelligence, size, and majesty are not incorrect. An adult dragon is gargantuan, the largest creature known to sky or land, rivaled only by some of the most fearsome sea monsters. A newly-adult dragon’s head is as long as a lun’Aeldvar is tall, and adult dragons do not stop growing at any point through their aeon-long lifespans; the largest and oldest dragons have pupils the size of a kinvar, the stories tell us.
The picture of dragons that our stories paint is awesome: four-legged reptilian creatures of impenetrable scales and ever-sharp talons, bat-like wings grand enough to blot out the sky, and the innate ability to expel elemental magic as though it were just another way of breathing. At the same time, dragons are acknowledged as clever, wise, perceptive, and deeply knowledgeable, even as most legends also expound upon their strange-to-us ways of thinking and feeling, their unpredictability, their fickleness, and their frequent lack of empathy for anything but their fellow dragons.
However, to understand dragonkind only through the stories of their adulthoods is to lose all context, both natural and cultural, that provides perspective on these fascinating and oft-mysterious creatures.
Dragon Eggs
Who has not heard at least one story of a daring kinvar who steals a dragon’s egg from its nest--or altruistically saves one from certain doom? The eggs in stories are bigger than any pumpkin or watermelon, often unbreakably hard, and as beautiful as uncut jewels.
The reality of dragon eggs is much less romantic. They are, on average, the size of a kinvar’s head and surprisingly plain in appearance--one could mistake a dragon egg for an oversized ostrich egg. Rather than being laid in dangerously low numbers in a nest or lair zealously guarded by a mother dragon, dragon eggs are deposited in several groups of dozens of eggs each. To the touch, dragon eggs are softly pliable with an aged-leather texture, the shell providing more nutrients than impact protection for the future dragon within.
Thus we must face the first truth that upsets the majesty of the stories: dragon eggs are not uncommon, always protected, or invulnerable to regular dangers such as predation, accidental damage, or even harvest by unscrupulous kinvari.
Baby Dragons: Wyrmlings
I understand that you may be questioning the unlikeliness of my statement above. If dragon eggs are so unrare, where are the hordes of baby dragons that must eventually erupt from their homely shells?
Thus we come to the second truth that leeches the mystery from dragonkind: baby dragons are, in fact, found in nearly every biome that can bear life more complex than fungus. If that reality is difficult to imagine, you must understand this: kinvari do not recognize baby dragons for what they are.
Wild baby dragons are called by many names in many cultures and languages, but for simplicity’s sake, I will call them “wyrmlings,” as most other terms are much longer and tend to describe what they are not, rather than what they are. Among those alternate names are gems such as “dragon poppets” (dar’Aeldvari), “locust lizards” (wyl’Aeldvari), and “naked tooth-turkeys” (Hymvari).
Wyrmlings are, quite simply, a nuisance to most kinvari. They have no wings, no magic, and no particular intelligence beyond what we might expect from a domestic cat or dog. They hatch as a group and remain surrounded by their kin for their entire existence, choosing safety in numbers as their primary survival mechanism.
When they emerge from the egg, wyrmlings are the size of a featherless crow; at their maturity, they are barely three feet high from nose to ground and slightly more than twice that from nose to tailtip. Their bodies are reminiscent of roadrunners, with long muscular legs and small, claw-tipped forearms usually held close to the body. They have reptilian tails that stick out straight from their rear like a feather stuck in a cap, and their faces are more lizard or short-snouted crocodile than anything we might consider properly draconic.
Now, perhaps, you are beginning to understand the depths of this revelation. Wyrmlings live everywhere with as much adaptability and tenacity as other erstwhile pests like coyotes, raccoons, and crows. They use mobbing behavior to steal food and scare off would-be predators or competitors. They are swift, surprisingly resilient, loud, and more resourceful than kinvari would prefer. They are not easily spooked by anything less than a dire threat, and they are stubbornly persistent in their attempts to achieve something or get somewhere.
Of note, wyrmlings are nearly immune to physical manifestations of arcana, such as common elemental magic; likewise, their anima cannot be manipulated by even a powerful witch, rendering them magically sacrosanct. To the common kinvar, this merely makes them more difficult to deal with when they steal chickens and ruin gardens, but this is one more subtle link between wyrmlings and adult dragons. Wyrmlings do not use magic, nor do they require mana to survive, but their arcane hardiness alone classes them as magical beasts instead of mundane.
These, my dear reader, are the baby dragons that no one sees. Of course, they look nothing like adult dragons! Wyrmlings are lithe, light, fast, and small. They don’t even have the correct number of limbs to be considered a relative to dragons, let alone the infant stage of the same species. And, while some do have colorful scales like a snake, many others are decorated with bright feathers or rabbit-soft fur instead.
Let us explore, then, the process by which a wyrmling becomes a dragon.
The First Metamorphosis
Wyrmlings do not have an adult size so much as they have a physical maturity to which they aspire. Upon reaching this state, if resources are sufficiently rich, a wyrmling will begin the process of creating a cocoon. If resources are too scarce, the wyrmling will remain as it is indefinitely. This is one of the hints that led to the discovery of wyrmlings being baby dragons: they do not seem to age into fragility or die from the length of their years.
Here is where the true advantage of their population density comes into play: of a group of ten to twenty wyrmlings, only two or three will build their cocoons at any given time, leaving the rest of the swarm to help protect them and bring them excess food. If a sudden lack of resources interrupts the process of building a cocoon, the wyrmlings will abandon their attempts until abundance returns, then begin anew.
A wyrmling’s cocoon is its project for anywhere from a month to a year. It is created by a combination of regurgitating a silk-like substance, itself a product of a wyrmling feeding well beyond what its body requires to survive, and embedding found objects within the weave. The cocoon begins as a simple nest, dozens of layers overlapping as densely and finely as a loom’s threads, but as the cocoon becomes too near to completion for the wyrmling to enter and exit freely, the wyrmling will enter it for the last time and seal itself inside.
This, then, is what is often mistaken as a dragon egg: often decorated with jewels that the wyrmling thought pretty, large enough to contain a kinvaren child, and swiftly hardening into an almost stone-like solidity that is difficult to nick, crack, or break. As a purposeful construction, wyrmling cocoons are some of the hardiest objects in nature, reinforced through the sheer number of substances and objects interwoven to create it. They are not known to be preyed upon by any beasts, and they are fabulously magic-resistant, making them undesirable as arcane components or alchemical reagents; even opportunistic kinvari do not trouble them.
A wyrmling will remain within its cocoon for a considerable time, the duration of which seems to depend more on its biome than anything else; it may remain cocooned for only a year or up to five or six years. The wyrmling is alive but in a state of torpor, not quite the shapeless mucus of a cocooned caterpillar, but neither a responsive animal capable of surviving a premature rebirth. If its cocoon is opened at any point that is not shortly after its creation or shortly before its ‘hatching’, the contents truly resemble those of a well-developed egg: a nutritious, viscous fluid surrounds the soft bones and growing flesh of a creature that no longer resembles a wyrmling at all.
Due to the rigidity of the cocoon over time, the emergence of the former wyrmling into the world does resemble the process of hatching as the cocoon breaks away in shards and an outpouring of clear albumen. Thus we see how the myth of dragon eggs became established, but what emerges from this false shell is not yet a dragon, either.
Immature Dragons: Drakes
Unlike wyrmlings, drakes are commonly known to be related to adult dragons, but they are still seen as a separate and far inferior species. Drakes are not rare, but they do not exist in the sheer numbers and varieties that wyrmlings do, as any given environment can only host a few drakes without being overhunted and starving out the excess drakes. They occupy the same ecological niche as other apex predators such as wolves, lions, and tigers, though they rarely form even pair-bonds at this stage and tend to keep their distance from their fellow drakes.
Drakes, upon emerging from their cocoons, are the size of a small wolf and voraciously hungry. Wyrmlings are opportunistic omnivores, but drakes are primarily carnivorous and have a strong predatory instinct as soon as they ‘hatch’. They are not entirely fearless, but are considered dangerously bold in their earliest youth by kinvari. Young drakes are avoided, chased off, or killed before they can grow larger; older drakes are the subjects of focused group hunts when kinvari cannot coexist with them.
If a wyrmling looks nothing like an adult dragon, a drake looks little like either. They are quadrupeds, like dragons and unlike wyrmlings, and like their future adult selves, they only have scales; however, they lack wings, and they have a body shape that many have described as a mixture between a crocodile and a tiger. As with wyrmlings, drakes do not have an adult size so much as a size that indicates full maturity, which is on average five feet from shoulder to ground and three times that in length. They are large, strong, swift, agile, flexible, and clever, all of which makes them beautiful subjects for legends and horrifyingly challenging to survive when encountered awild.
Drakes are penultimate hunters, able to out-compete nearly any non-magical creature that chooses the same prey, but more than that, they are remarkably intelligent while still being classed as beasts. They have the memory and problem-solving abilities of ravens, the social intelligence and nuanced communication of hyenas, and an indescribable presence usually reserved for the most advanced of animals, from gorillas to whales. For all their physical and mental superiority, however, drakes are not confrontational, highly territorial, or particularly aggressive when not directly threatened, excluding their initial post-cocoon “eat everything” phase.
Like wyrmlings, drakes have a stunningly high resistance to magic, specifically physical manifestations of arcana, but in this life stage, they also develop their own elemental affinity and can use it in several instinctive ways. Here, they begin to practice a pared-down version of their adult capabilities of ‘exhaling’ elemental arcana, which resembles more a cobra’s spit than true breath. Much like primitive kinvaren cultures, a drake can perform rudimentary tasks with its magic, such as igniting a flame or snuffing a hearth if it has a fire affinity.
As in their previous stage, drakes will seek out an over-abundance of resources in order to undergo their transition to adulthood. Due to their size and nutritional requirements, it is much more difficult to amass the necessary excess, so drakes will usually revert to consuming mana in order to supplement their mundane sustenance. A drake seeking to hoard food and mana is at its most dangerous, even though a sudden drop of resources will result in it abandoning its readiness to transition, just as wyrmlings will stop building their cocoons. Many mature drakes meet their untimely ends at the hands of kinvari when their search for food and mana endangers nearby settlements after countless years of nonviolence.
Some stories do speak of drakes, not adult dragons, and usually feature their uncommon intelligence paired with a predatory but cautious demeanor. Of course, the myths that are retold the most usually include a unique kinvar who has befriended or tamed a drake, which may be possible but is strongly not advised in the real world.
For those few drakes who succeed in stockpiling enough resources, they have a chance to become the adult dragons of legend.
The Second Metamorphosis
This metamorphosis is theorized to be more similar in execution to a phoenix pyre, yet it relies upon the hoarding preparation that the wyrmling employed to be able to build its cocoon. I have found no reliable first- or second-hand account of a kinvar witnessing either the building of this foundation or the climax of the event itself, so we must draw our tentative conclusions from what newly-adult dragons have left behind.
We have found evidence of enormously potent raw elemental energies permanently scarring the site, as well as the remnants of large stores of food and caches of now-empty mana crystals or similar objects that are often found naturally infused with mana in the wild. We have seen the shattered remnants of what seems to have been a physical nest made of stone and sturdy branches, any finer materials like leaves or twigs presumably destroyed in the process. We have no way of knowing how long a mature drake might spend building this lair, nor how long the metamorphosis itself takes to complete.
However, we are quite certain that the metamorphosis alters the constitution of the drake, which we class as a magical beast, into a dragon, which is a purely arcane creature of kinvaren or higher intelligence. Both wyrmlings and drakes are primarily flesh and blood animals with an innate arcane aspect to their bodies, but dragons reverse that ratio, becoming more magic than meat.
Adult Dragons
Thus we have come full circle, from myth to nature to myth again. Kinvari do not see adult dragons because they are so rare, it is true, but we do not see immature dragons because we do not recognize them as they truly exist, instead of how we imagine them to be. The unusual pattern of dragon life stages makes them even more alien to us than the inner workings of their minds, inasmuch as we may know the latter through generations of hand-me-down folktales.
Remember this essay when next you spot a swarm of wyrmlings racing through a farmer’s fields, chased by baying hounds, or when you hear a hunter retell his chance encounter with a deadly drake in the woods. Dragons are all around us, wherever we are.
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