From the Field Journal of Ambrose Penhallow
The Dragon
Every child in the Midlands can draw a Dragon, and every one of those drawings is wrong. The real thing is less a monster than a landscape. The one I first met was curled in the shade of a ruined aqueduct, its bronze-and-moss scales so weathered that ferns had taken root between them, drinking from a stream with the slow, unhurried sips of a creature that has never once been late for anything. Its horns swept back like the roots of an old oak. When it finally looked up, I felt like a student who had walked into the wrong lecture.
Dragons are found from the desert canyons to the Ashland Peaks, and each seems to have been carved by its home. The canyon Dragons are red and sharp-edged, the ruin Dragons green and crumbling, the mountain Dragons the color of cooling ash. They do not so much live in a place as preside over it.
The Mystery of the “Empty Hoard”
The children’s stories insist that Dragons sleep on gold. I have now seen four Dragon lairs, and not one contained a single coin. What they did contain, in neat and carefully arranged heaps, were stones: river pebbles, broken temple tiles, a cracked millstone, and in one case a perfectly ordinary garden gnome.
A Hesskari merchant captain, who has been trading near the Ashland Peaks for thirty years, told me the stones are memories. Each one marks a place the Dragon has guarded, and an old Dragon’s hoard is effectively a map of its life. A Redcap in the Midland ruins disagreed loudly. He claimed the gnome was his, that he had lent it to the Dragon “for a bet,” and that he would very much like it back. I did not ask about the bet.
On the Matter of Bonding
The lore is right that bonding with a Dragon is the work of a lifetime. What the lore neglects to mention is that most of that lifetime is spent being polite.
The Centaurs are the acknowledged experts, and their approach is pure ceremony. A young Centaur warrior will visit the same Dragon once a year, every year, from the moment she earns her horn. She bows, she greets it by every one of its titles (these grow longer each year, as the Dragon does more things worth naming), she tells it what her clan has accomplished, and she leaves. Most never progress beyond this. The ones who do are the ones the Dragon begins to greet first.
I attempted a greeting myself. I bowed, gave my name and my position at the Midlands Grand Academy, and listed my modest publications. The Dragon listened in total silence, then breathed out a long, warm sigh that singed my eyebrows and scattered my notes into the stream. My Centaur guide assured me this was a very good sign. Her clan-sisters were laughing too hard to confirm it.
Observed Magical Variations
No two Dragons are alike, but the magic in their land seems to settle into three broad temperaments that I have managed to sketch with some confidence.
Bronze and ember-red scales; horns blackened as though held in a forge.
The classic Ashland Peaks Dragon. Its breath melts stone, but it uses it mostly to warm its nest.
Moss-green scales grown through with ferns; horns like gnarled roots.
Found curled in old temples. So still it is often mistaken for a statue. Children dare each other to touch its nose. Some succeed.
Pale gold scales that catch every glimmer of sun; eyes like polished amber.
Very rare. The Centaurs claim it is the first of all Dragons and that it remembers the magics awakening. It has declined to comment.
Ambrose PenhallowLorekeeper, Midlands Grand Academy
