Kobolds
True dragons were hunted to extinction a generation past. The last living dragon hunters grin toothlessly when they tell the stories of their hunts and fondle fangs yellowed by time. Dragons were great, dragons were terrible, but dragons weren’t able to shrug off cannon-fire. In the end they were only beasts. The moment human ingenuity was leashed to the contest for territory, the drive for glory, their doom was sealed.
True dragons are extinct, but their descendants remain. Hunts targeted the biggest and fiercest dragons, leaving the runtiest and most cunning to brood, until all that was left were clever little things without even wings who would make but a light snack for their forebears: kobolds.
Kobold isn’t what they call themselves. It’s what we call them, a portmanteau of the sounds they make the most. “Kob” is their word for something good (and gold, “kobkob”, is best of all), and “old” is their word for something bad. Your average kobold can go weeks without saying anything else, relying on context to relay full meaning.
Draconic instinct is still strong in kobolds, tempered more by circumstance than dimming in the blood. They long to hoard, to lair, to lord over their lessers - yet their desire dwarfs their frames. It spills out from their mind's eye, illuminating designs for devices to make up for what their bodies lack: fiery explosives, beartraps with jaws that snap, snaking tunnels, gliders to soar, and so on. They can trade and work together with others of their kind or anyone else for that matter, but the changes in their minds haven't kept pace with the changes of their bodies. Pro-social mores and emotions are still alien to kobolds - sympathy, guilt, gifts, and so on aren't in their range of experience - unless they learn to adjust intellectually for what they intuitively lack, they tend to work off selfish, reptilian utilitarianism. Kobold societies tend toward a controlled chaos of everyone trying to screw everyone else over for personal benefit, with a few coming to dominate the largest hoards and then coordinating in cartels for mutual self-interest.
Ingenious, hardy, prolific, pernicious - haunters of mines and mountain passes - kobolds can be more of a nuisance than dragons ever were. There's certainly less glory in fighting them.
Dragon-Dreams
People once thought that dragon-dreams were a curse that afflicted the families of dragon-hunters, a terrible vengeance on their slayers. Victims would one day start to slip away more every time they slept, until they snapped, or found drugs that could drown out the dreams - for when they dreamed they were visited with visions of being dragons, in detail as clear as if they were truly living as them, feeling their hearts pump fire and their wings carrying them across the sky. At every dawn it was as if they were waking to find themselves flayed, amputated, and blinded, such was the gap between the capabilities of dragons and humans.
It was shameful, it was tragic, decent members of upstanding families suddenly jumping from towers, becoming arsonists, tearing others apart with their teeth and nails - all covered up wherever it could be, of course. But then it wasn't just the families of dragon-hunters getting the dreams. Whole communities would gather in tents and squares to roar and share charred meat. Cities burned. The source of the dreams was narrowed down.
Humans beings are simple creatures, physically speaking, just flesh and blood, but we die complicated: a moment for the heart to stop, minutes for the brain to die, a day or two for the little sperms swimming around in your nutsack to wind down - as a few examples.
Dragons are flesh, and blood, and fire, and sorcery. Imagine how many more pieces of them there might be, each rotting in its own way.
Some invisible putrescence was seeping from the dragons' remains kept as trophies by their hunters, and from the charnel-pits of old battlefields of man vs. beast. Exposure to this caused the dreams. Every last skull and set of dragon-scale armour was gathered up, brought far from what was deemed worthwhile civilization, and buried in mountainous heaps that would come to smoke and smoulder without fuel or end.
This worked to contain the most obvious spread of the dragon-dreams, but their embers linger. The expendable people on whose land the remains were dumped still suffer from them. On days when the wind blows wrong their fumes can be carried very far indeed. Some find the dreams an acceptable malus if it means wielding a blade of dragon-bone.
Dracoliches
It's said that human liches learned the secret of their metamorphosis from dragons, but dragon-liches - dracoliches - don't sentimentally preserve a single corpse, they invent histories - they are histories.
Where a dracolich lies, monuments will begin to spring from the earth, entire temple complexes following after, the artifacts of an extinct culture sprung from the creature's own soul, every angle of their architecture and symbol of their iconography serving to glorify it. The stones remember new shapes, extruding fossils into the air. When fully emerged these fossils will take on flesh, becoming drakes, wyverns, linnorms, dinosaurs, and every other variation of the draconic form - except of course, for dragons themselves. Humans too sometimes slink into their lairs, seduced by the promise of their retroactive golden age of power and domination.
At the center of it all the dracolich lurks, its flame inverted into cryogenic stasis. They think eonic thoughts, hold geological grudges. It's not any individual human they hate - it would be like us hating a single ebola virus - but the whole human super-consciousness, every culture and society. In their empty eyes, annihilation is too easy, and too gentle. The dracoliches want to see us utterly debased, our great paintings used to wipe the asses of tyrants and mothers forced to eat their children like starving hamsters. They mentor the worst of necromancers and whisper in the ears of explorers to bring imperial slaughter across oceans.
At least, this is what can be gleaned from the most communicative dracoliches, which isn't saying all that much.
This is really good stuff.
ReplyDelete> unless they learn to adjust intellectually for what they intuitively lack
Good inclusion. You do a good job explaining the context around kobolds and how they think and behave, while making a point of allowing for the possibility of change and dynamism, treating them more as a culture than as a stereotype or monolith.
The dragon dreams is also a cool idea, working in itself, but also as the basis for something like the ergot/witch phenomena, or a metaphor for toxicity in affluence, or maybe even a metaphor for radioactive waste. You could do all sorts of horror or mystery or adventuring off of this premise.
The dracolich too is a cool extrapolation of the concept of a lich for a more innately powerful being, and how their undeath extends not just to their physical person but to their Presence, that they are operating at the level of a superorganism and their resentment towards humanity is likewise at that level.
It's also interesting in that humans are relatively small, and our power comes from our social interdependence, whereas dragons are typically portrayed as being large, few in number, individualistic, and individually extremely powerful, so in a weird way, it's almost like a regular lich is a subversion of what it is to be human, and a dracolich is a subversion of what it is to be a dragon.