I absolutely love dragons. I'm pretty sure this is abundantly obvious to anyone who has had any sort of extended interaction with me: "Oh, him? Yeah, he's obsessed about cartoons, swords and dragons." I'm sure conversations about me are much more colorful than that, but I like to imagine that something so innocuous has happened at least once.
Still, I've never been happy with the whole good vs. evil, colored vs. metallic, and a lot of other fantasy aspects of draconic sub-systems. Then again, modern/urban fantasy tends to categorize them as either some feral beast, or some old man on a mountain type of meme. Both of these bothered me.
And then I stumbled upon Temeraire and Naomi Novik. To say her stories were inspiring would be an understatement. The idea itself was absolutely amazing (The Napoleonic Wars with dragons as an air force?? That's just made of win!!), but more so than that, I fell in love with the dragons, and how they had grown in the human culture. It wasn't the question of what they were, but how they came to be that way, a question that I had not thought to ask at this point in the development.
And so I looked at dragons from a different point of view. Why are they in the world? Not only why am I including them, but also why are they a part of the world. As I began to answer these questions, the dragons themselves started to take shape on their own.
I started with the original question, of why I wanted dragons in the world. In my case, I wanted to include them as a sort of living embodiment of misunderstood prophecies. Dragons, I had decided, were often included in both end-of-world predictions, as well as saviors, and these legends/beliefs shaped the very societies in which they were found. As I wrote some more notes, I included more and more superstitions in with myths and religious texts. Eventually, something as simple as having a white dragon licking your hands could mean you would lose money that day, while a dark dragon rubbing against your back meant you would have unexpected support.
Then I began to approach their origins. A few days of brainstorming put them as not a creation of the gods but of the guardians, a balance to the humanoid races that is neither truly immortal or mortal. At first, I considered scrapping this, considering making their origins as enigmatic as the animals or monsters within the world. Eventually, though, I didn't want to make an intelligent (well, mostly intelligent) race quite so forgotten, especially when some of them might have lived long enough to remember when it happened.
Eventually, the dragons began to form themselves, the notes defining them far better than I could have if I stated from this end first: a race of creatures that share pieces of one soul that resides on a parallel plane, one that maintains the balance between life and death (the Veil). Some, gifted with a large part of the unnamed soul (ok, it has a name, but at this point it didn't), would have great power and intelligence, and even rule over humanoids in their domain; in others, it would be akin to a dog or cat, with its own personality but far from intelligible.
It was a strange concept, but one I really enjoyed in the stories for the world. My favorite plot with it involved a strange magic that was preventing pieces of the soul from rejoining the unnamed one. As such, the number of dragons in the world slowly began to dwindle as they were unable to return to the world in a new body (which doesn't seem to be a bad thing until the Veil was removed, causing life and death to run rampant around the world).
All in all, though, it was a fun jaunt through discovery, that actually managed to start with the story. My favorite way to start.
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