Post by Admin on Jun 20, 2021 11:54:00 GMT
𝐃𝐫𝐚𝐤𝐞𝐧
Biography
Dragons are an object of reverence, awe, and in most cultures—fear. Fear of a being so powerful, it sunders cities with a breath, desolates villages with a flap of its wings, and shatters even the most stout of hearts with its gaze. An attunement to mana and an intellect aided by centuries of experience and knowledge.
Luckily, however, the dragons are no every day occurrence, but the origins of the Draken are no mystery. Dragons, which have long been considered a threat to mankind, have rarely come out to the world, largely living in seclusion - but the times that dragons have revealed themselves to the world have been grand calamities. The Draken are a mere product of such - a plaything, a pawn for the most intelligent of dragons many, many centuries ago. Intelligent and powerful as they may be, world conquest is no trivial task for even dragons.
Hence come the Draken. Birthed out of the workings of the ancient dragons, who created a man in their own image as a testament to their brilliance, the Draken were intended to act as foot soldiers and eyes. Slaves and pawns, and they treated them as such, little more than meat that could obey orders. Centuries before the current era, the dragons utilized the Draken to wreak havoc in their stead, to great success. The damage dealt was so great, it caused a pause in the millennia old war between the elves and giants - until the Draken turned on their masters. There is no recorded history, no certainty on what turned the draken against their creators, but much like the Beastkin did a few years later, the Draken were left without a home. Unlike the Beastkin, however, they had fought against an enemy common with many of the other races, and as a result, they were eventually accepted into society in many places. Draken stick to their own, but it is not uncommon for them to leave the boundaries of Draken neighborhoods and travelling across continents and seas. Many have found places in Human kingdoms, and as far north as the Giant city of Vales.
Physiology
What is certain of the Draken, however, is their physiology; hardy like the mountains they hail from, most Draken have leathery- or outright scaled- skin that many weapons find intrinsic difficulty in dealing with—explaining how, in their early history, they found such easy pickings on frontier farms that had hardy men and strong arms attached to said folk, but lacked the proper tools to pierce the Drakonhide they faced. Their hardy exteriors provide a natural insulation against the cold of their mountain homes, able to eschew clothing in climates that would lead most races to lose limbs from frostbite. The mages of these scalefolk are inclined towards the elements of fire and frost, and the most powerful summon blizzards and firestorms both with terrible efficacy and ease.
Sexual dimorphism in Draken is stark—males tower over the females by two-to-three feet, if not more. Oddly, this difference in height does not correlate directly to changes in muscle mass; it is not uncommon to see a Draken housewife bodily throwing her drunkard of a husband from their domicile in a fit of annoyance at his lack of proper use of their household funds, as much as it is the same to see a Draken husband throw his laggard of a wife from a window for being too slow to pour his evening ale—all told, city guards tend to make very infrequent patrols through Draken neighborhood, and domestic incidents brought to their attention are quietly slid beneath ensuring the sewers are free of goblins and other pests in the order of priority to address. The stratification based on sex returns again, however, when studying the auditory receptors the Draken have in place of ears; the horn-like protrusions on their skulls serve much the same purpose, but are capable of picking up noises otherwise audible only to animals with the most acute hearing—and Draken females have the widest range of hearing in this regard, able to perceive magically-generated pitches the males are completely deaf to.
And it is these strange, bony organs that lend renewed interest in the discussion of the legend of the first-mover, a Drakon tale; as the dragons once thought to be a rare and dying breed emerge from burrows forgotten by all, it is often the Draken who bring warning hours before dragonflame may engulf a city whose walls stood for centuries without failing; it is the Draken who can hear their wingbeats and roars from miles off to lead the reprisal hunts, though they do not describe it as such—they say they merely follow the song of the great winged beasts.
Displacement
Nearly all Draken co-exist with other races in their own respective kingdoms.