Coastal dragons

(Hai perso la strada, viandante? Se stai cercando questa pagina in italiano, puoi trovarla QUI!)


Coastal dragons
(Verusdraco sapiens litoribus)


Origins
Coastal dragons are considered to be one of the last "classical" subspecies to have evolved, in terms of time, making them semi-modern dragons. Their body color, one of the most showy and harmonious among all dragons, has specifically evolved to blend in with the color of sea and foam, and is unique in the Verusdraco panorama, shared, interestingly enough, only with some species of sea dragons (who have no relation to real dragons). According to some researchers, the costal dragons are descended from a very ancient population of gray dragons, that still had an antlered head at the time, which settled near the Diomede Islands, in the middle of the Bering Strait; this is mere speculation, but it is still possible that gray dragons and coastal dragons are related to each other.

Appearance
Coastal dragons are small, colored in various shades of blue with a mottling of a myriad of white streaks, and, sometimes, an iridescence around the base of neck and tail. The horns, that elongate behind the head following the line of the forehead, are white, smooth, in number variable from two to six, most commonly four. They might have a sharp, little horn growing at the end of the nose bridge, but in females is often nothing more than a white or peach colored plaque.
Their back is surmounted by a single row of showy keratin horns, proportionally bigger than those that adorn other Verusdraco, flat instead of having a round section, and often irregular in shape, with a "broken" look.
Coastal dragons' skin, if deprived of scales, is dark purple or black in color. A peculiarity of their scales is that they're of dermal origin and ossified, more akin to fish scales than those of reptiles; the edge of their scales is round, and it's possible to observe the growth of the lamellar bone which traces concentric circles (similar to the growth rings in trees) from which one can deduce the individual's age.
The eyes, big and usually described as having a gritty expression, with dark eyelid edges, and can present different iris colors: yellow, light blue, aqua green, green, white or red; curiously enough, the red color is the most common.
These dragons are light in weight, agile, with slender paws and tapered heads.
The maximum height ever recorded by a coastal dragon was of two meters and seventy-seven centimeters (a little over nine feet), with a wingspan of ten meters and fourty-two centimeters (thirty-four feet).
Their tail is slim, especially long, and lacking fat accumulations, with the ending section thinning out and always terminating in a long keratin tip, extremely resistant ad used as a weapon or as a "spear" when they wish to fish from the shore.
Their fingers have massive claws and are webbed, to improve their movements in water.
Their fire is yellow-tinted, also due to the sodium chloride accumulations that can often be found at the corners of their mouths and on the tip of their tongues.

Behavior
Coastal dragons have a strong racial identity, so much so that it's difficult to see them "mixed" with other dragons, although they share beaches and cliffs with wyverns, Maregens, and demidragons. Their isolation is partially due to a language peculiarity: they speak a Draconic dialect, the Minidraconic (Pilisodor do Draco), characterized by deep and rough sounds and very similar to the ancient Grey Draconic, with very long sentences, articulated, and frequent low roars called “rumbles”, overall incomprehensible to humans and not particularly appreciated by dragons which consider themselves to be more “noble”.
Coastal dragons have no real deities, but a sort of cult of the sea is strictly interwoven with thier culture, and it's not rare to hear sentences (admitting you're able to understand Minidraconic) such as "Thank the Sea!" or "May the Sea protect you!". They write the word “sea” (“Maurrrrooourr” in Minidraconic) always with the initial letter capitalized.
Coastal dragons have, moreover, a fiery, sanguine temperament, and aren't inclined at all to keep secrets or join in intrigues of court; they do not elect leaders, and love to play in the sky and underwater thanks to the big, agile wings that make them unchallenged in the air and also work as excellent fins.
Contrary to most of the other greater dragons, which actively look for a human to bond with, coastal dragons wait for the humans to find them; they don't send their youngs to train in schools that put them in contact with children, but they rather prefer interacting with local communities. The 65% of coastal dragons never bond with a human.
Should a dragon bond with a human being, it's the human that will join the pack and not the dragon that will leave it, even if it may happen that dragon and dragoneer go together on long quests before returning to the pack, which, however, welcomes them back with no problems.

Birth and growth
Coastal dragon hatchlings are born, like most dragons, from eggs that need to be incubated for a variable period of time. Their eggs are relatively fragile if compared to those of other dragons, with a shell that might take on several colors, from light to midnight blue, mottled with rosy veins, and might be preserved quiescent even for hundreds of years.
At the moment of birth, a baby coastal dragon already has the definitive number of horns an adult has and functional wings; it weighs between 200 and 800 grams. The size of the egg and baby depend on the mother's age and size. Females lay from two to six eggs at a time, and they have fertile cycles every seven-ten years.
The baby isn't removed from the group, like it often happens with many dragons that live in the hinterland, but it grows inside the pack, and gets educated in the art of fishing by the entire community. Very often the little dragons don't even know who their real parents are: growing in little mixed groups that everyone takes care of, it's difficult to remember from which nest they come from, and the parents themselves, over time, become unable to tell their babies apart from the others.
Coastal dragons grow slowly, and they obtain the full maturity and ability to reproduce when reaching the forty-fifty years of age.
Due to the long period of time in which they're still fragile hatchlings, coastal dragons statistically have the higher percentage of child mortality among all dragons.

Social life and courtship
Coastal dragons are extremely social, and it's impossible to find one of them living isolated from the rest of the world, or not having a contact with their kin. They live in packs with complex interpersonal relationships, in which males and female benefit from similar rights and duties, despite females being bigger, taller, and stronger, as well as magically more gifted.
To seduce females, males show off their incredible flying prowess, "jousting" in the sky and dashing against each other to veer at the very last second; it might look like a dangerous game, but even the youngest suitors had at least forty years to train their flying skills, and accidents are incredibly rare. Crashing in flight against each other at that speed could kill a dragon on the spot, or at least badly maim them.
Females, more clumsy and generally more ferocious, don't joust in the sky, but remain spectators from the cliffs, from which they enjoy those beautiful stunts. They can choose from one to three males to mate with during the spring season. If a male is particuarly skilled and handsome, it might happen that he will be desired by many females, and in that case loud fights on the cliffs will break out, from which the victorious female will decide with whom the male will mate and how many times: she might, for example, concede a couple of matings to one of her friends, none to the others, and all those necessary to be fertilized to herself.
The winner of the brawl is the last female to be still standing on the cliff, while all the others have been thrown (or have fallen) in the water. The use of wings is banned from these fights, not only because it would much prolong them and risk making them more brutal (preventing the females from throwing the adversaries in the water, they would instead use teeth and claws to wound each other), but also because harming the opponents' wings, which are frail enough to break in a rough fight, would prevent them from fishing and feed, something that would be considered barbaric from any coastal dragon.

Habitat and diet
Coastal dragons mainly live on the sub-Antarctic archipelagos, other than on the coasts of Horn Blu Island, and bear the cold exceptionally well, but they never go as far in the true Antarctic zones, for which they feel a strong awe. Almost exclusively carnivores, they feed on petrels, penguins (especially king penguins and erect-crested penguins), cods, skuas, sharks, and seals, but they do not disdain beached cetacean's carcasses.
The hatchlings mainly feed on small fish and, contrary to the adults, they never hunt birds.

Famous coastal dragons
Skye


Trivia and facts
Almost the totality of human dragoneers that get bonded to coastal dragons are fishers.
Coastal dragons brag about being great experts of hydromancy, the art of predicting the future through water. If this is true or not, though, remains a debated issue.

Image gallery (Click to enlarge!)

+	+	+
+	+	+
+	+	+
+	+	+
+	+	+
+	+	+

🌵🎨 All the drawings in this page (and probably in all the other pages, if not differently specified) were realized by our artists, Furiarossa e Mimma. You can see more of their works and support them on their Patreon page. Become patrons of the arts! 🌵🎨

Gray dragons

(Hai perso la strada, viandante? Se stai cercando questa pagina in italiano, puoi trovarla QUI!)

Gray dragons

(Verusdraco sapiens griseus)

Origins
Gray dragons are a fairly ancient race, so much so that they're supposed to have been the first race to write down the extremely complex and guttural sounds of ancient draconic, transforming and creating some grammar rules for it. We owe to a gray dragoness, Andoraaal, the writing of the oldest Draconic literary work, The Myth of the Dragonixius (Tihodohor dok Draconi Graxius), transposition of one of the oral myths created by the now extinct race of the marble dragons.

Some primitive findings of gray dragons remains occurred on the Andes, in particular the remains of two camps similar to proto-cities were found in the Patagonian Andes, one in Chile and the other in Argentina.

Anyway, the appearance of gray dragons on Earth precedes that of the Homo sapiens sapiens and is considered by many experts vital to the forging of the relationship of dragonery.

It's not known with certainty which races contributed to the creation of gray dragons; it's supposed that it could be the convergence of four or five ancient races that are now completely fused and extinct, if not for this form.

 

Appearance
Gray dragons ara average-sized, which, how the name suggest, appear gray in color. Their scales, rhomboid in shape but tiny and compact, have an opaque coloration, and the resulting effect of this is that their lean and muscular physique look covered in stone. When they stay completely still, especially if balled up, their resemblance to rocks is impressive; an ability that allows them to perfectly blend in the rocky plateaus, even hiding to human eyes

Gray dragons rarely have the typical flat and wide scales on the belly, also known as "ventral armor", which distinguish many dragon races, but more often they exhibit a homogeneous surface of small scales on both the dorsal and the ventral part

They have no horns to ornate their head, althought they present a small conic horn at the end of their nasal bridge, slightly over the nostrils, and these characteristics combined (the gray skin, the absence of horns on their head, the nasal horn) make them resemble, even if not closely, rhinos.
There's a single row of black keratin horns on their back, not particularly big.
Their skin, if deprived of scales, is gray, sometimes decorated by dark blue spots.
The eyes, small but expressive, always have light-colored irises, among which the most common are green and gray. Gray dragons have visible, mobile auricles, with a pointy tip, that got them also the nickname "wolf dragons". Some individuals have two tiny meaty whiskers, similar to those of carps, on their upper lip, but the use of this decorations is unknown.
The maximum height ever reached by a gray dragon is of four meters and seventeen centimeters (thirteen comma seven feet), with a wingspan of ten meters and forty-one centimeters (a little over thirty-four feet). They're good fliers.
Their tail is willowy and muscular, with the ending part that gets thinner and always culminates in a dark gray or black keratin arrow, which gray dragons often sharpen and use to cut meat or cut down trees.
Their fire is orange-red. These dragons have the habit of spitting small amounts of fire inside their own mouth and warm up their saliva, which is dense, much more so than other dragons', and if it makes contact with fire for a couple minutes it will become incandescent and similar to fluid magma. When a gray dragon is angry, it can happen that they unknowingly start warming great quantities of saliva and drooling, giving the impression of pouring lava from their mouth, and it's best not to get too close to avoid being burnt.

Behavior
Gray dragons are considered by many a "basic" dragon regarding to behavior: nor religious fanatics nor completely godless, nor detached and cold nor completely feral or ruthless, clever and curious without being prey to a knowledge craving. Even the gold greed, which makes other dragons go crazy and unapproachable, only has a bland effect on them.
They often seek the company of white dragons, with which they share an important sense of justice, altough not as extreme, other than the love for mountain environments.

What is unknown to many of these dragons, instead, is the destructive intensity of their ire: incredibly hard as it is to be witness to it, since gray dragons have a great patience, when their endurance ends they transform into terrifying war machines barely able to control themselves. During a typical rage episode, it happens that steam cloud, caused by the evaporation of a part of the liquid in their saliva, lift from their mouths, the air trembles around their nostrils reddened by fire, and the rest of their saliva, dense, viscous and now incandescent falls from their open jaws, passing through their displayed teeth and sizzling when it touches the ground, the breathing becomes hoarse and hissing, the voice deeper, the muscle efficiency increases as it does the possibility of accidental realease of destructive magic.

Paradoxically, it seems that human have been acknowledging this altered state of gray dragons more than other dragons: in several written documents it's narrated of the leggendary destructive fury that these creatures are able to unleas, destroying entire cities.

Birth and growth
Gray dragon hatchlings are born from eggs that are incubated inside stone nests, lined inside with animal pelts, that get heated with fire untile they're incandescent and can slowly release heat. Gray dragon eggs are robust, incredibly hard to break, and have an irregual look that can remind of a big gray pebble, often mottled in irregular cream and black patterns. In a cold environment they can remain dormant for one or two hundred years, but if exposed to heat they hatch (if temperatures are over forty Celsius degrees) or tend to mould (at temperature between twenty and thirty-nince Celsius degrees), killing the hatchling. The transport of gray dragon eggs isn't recommended for those who are not experts.
A particularity tipical of gray dragon is that the size of the eggs or the newborn dragon aren't linked at all to the size of the mother; instead, they're standard: nine hundred grams. Bigger females lay more eggs (to a maximum of seven), but all of the same size, once every nine-ten years.

Mothers tend to care little or none at all for their offspring, limiting themselves to protecting the territory in which the baby dragons grow up and inviting them to get out and search for their own independence when they're ready to hunt on their own. Babies learn everything that will be useful for their survival through the observation of their mothers, but it can happen that some of them will be adopted instead by white dragons and formally educated to the use of magic, an art in which they're especially well-versed.
Gray dragons are fairly slow to grow, and reach the ability to reproduce once they have thirty years, but the complete maturation of their body, with strong muscles and the full definitive dentition, will only come at one hundred years.

Social life and courtship
Gray dragons aren't among the most social of dragons, and they live in small territories of around forty-sixty square kilometers, which they call "houses", and from which they tend not to go out too much, being one of the few dragon races that farm cattles, other than being, of course, hunters and gatherers. A series of houses close to each other creates a camp, which the maximum of sociality for them: it's moving inside it, through the territory of other gray dragons that are friendly with them, that they find their reproductive partners.

Males don't actively court females, but they take care to always be handsome and well-groomed: strong muscles, a lean and fit body, ornaments and patterns make them more noticeable. Oratory and personal pleasantness are two other characteristics that strongly incide on the choice of a partner.

Sexual dimorphism, on the contrary of what happens in many other races, isn't particularly definite: females are only slightly bigger than males, and they don't have different colors.
They don't really have a reproductive period.

It rarely happens that these dragons mate with specimens of other races, giving birth to hybrid dragons that almost always look like gray dragons, which genetics is surprisingly dominant.

Habitat and diet

Gray dragons can live a bit anywhere, from plains to deserts, but their places of choise are without a doubt the plateaus, especially those hidden and surrounded by other mountains, like the one of Tibet.

They're omnivores and feed on livestock (especially goats) that they farm themselves, other than deers, ibex, chamois, roe deers, eggs, wild fruit of many kinds (in particular, despite the exiguous size compared to that of their body, they really love blackberries), roots, and leaves. Worth noting their habit of chewing on moss to clean their teeth and perfume their breath.

It isn't considered a social taboo for gray dragons to feed on humans, although it is to kill them with a hunting purpose, so they often don't put off the idea of feeding on human corpses, if they happen to casually find them.

Famous gray dragons

Artenair

Trivia

• Numerically, gray dragons are among those more frequently chosen as rulers by other dragons, second only to white dragons.

Image gallery (Click to enlarge!)

	Rare specimen with ventral armor	+
+	+	+
+	+	+
+	+	+
+	+	+
+	+	+
+	+	+

🌵🎨 All the drawings in this page (and probably in all the other pages, if not differently specified) were realized by our artists, Furiarossa e Mimma. You can see more of their works and support them on their Patreon page. Become patrons of the arts! 🌵🎨