Dragonkin

Dragonkin are rare, and live in small enclaves scattered across the Vale. They are scaled, in bronze and coal-black and emerald and a crimson so deep it shows black until the light turns it, and each carries the dragon’s mark somewhere — a crest of horns, a ridge of heavy brow, a line of frilled spine, talons that keep their edge. No two clutches are alike, and even within one the young seldom match.

Their clutches are small, an egg or two and seldom more, and from this two things have always followed: the dragonkin are few, and what new forms appear among them appear slowly, a little changed across many generations. Where the line first came from, none can say for certain. They tell of an ancestry among great beings of fire, present near the making of the world — an old belief, with nothing left to prove or deny it.

What dragonkin hold to is not where they began but what they were once for. Their oldest memory, worn down now to a name and little else, is of the Dragon Phalanx: an order out of the world’s first ages, raised to stand for order and to put itself between the world and the things that would unmake it. What it was, who it answered to, how it came apart — all of that went with the Sundering.

What remains is the impulse. Most dragonkin are raised to a duty no one taught them to want: to use strength with restraint, to answer for what that strength does, and to stand between the strong and the weak when no one else will. Not all of them carry it, and those who do could not always tell you why. The reason is not lost — only the dragonkin have lost it; it is kept elsewhere, by those who do not forget. But it holds often enough that others have come to count on it, and a dragonkin who has forgotten everything else will still try to live as the dragons of old are said to have lived: steadfast, fierce, and true.