What About Dragons ??

During the first fase of existence dragons are strict carnivores, they eat about the same a feline with the same body mass would in the same environment. However, if there is no food available, or not enough, they can sleep most the time and grow slowly in order to consume less nutrients. Or hibernate for centuries, if they have nothing to eat. Eventually they will reach the first change and die if no adult arrives to help but it may take as long as one thousand years for a small predator in hibernation.        They begin fase 2 as carnivores, but may develop a taste for vegetables and fungus along the way. Dragons are a highly adaptable specie and their changes depend deeply on the environment there they passed the first fase. Those who overcome the first fase in a hot clime with no water and almost no food are likely to be cold blooded during the humanoid part of their life. Those who lived in a region with no life on dry land and large oceans may have long strong tails and just vestigial legs. Usually the ones brought by the Vortex in their second fase are like Xiirsh, hot blooded humanoids who eat about 25% more than humans of same size would, and could have a omnivore diet if their lives depended on it but really prefer to be strict carnivores.              Fase 3 dragons grow to be far larger than most animals, and before the specie develop technology that was the period of life when most individuals would die of starvation or became weak enough to be eaten by other dragons. The specie is naturally equipped to travel between planets, and their original system had many habitable celestial bodies where place eggs but few ecosystems up there could sustain the dietary needs of dragons in that fase.        Adults        After their last change dragons have no need of eat to stay alive.            They consume any material substance, because their digestive systems brake the nuclei of atoms for energy. Most of them still eat lower animals, and talking animals, both for social reasons and for the taste. They also eat other dragons, and prefer above all other adults older and more powerful than themselves, or as close to that as possible.        Cannibalism is a positive value among dragons, since after the first change. It happens in the first fase of life by instinct as well. In adulthood however the habit became more than just a matter or taste.       The individuals grow in power mostly by consuming other adult dragons, and they improve themselves in another way by eating any member of the specie who has not yet reached adulthood. Each time an adult eats an dragon who has not reached fase 4 the information accumulated in the genes of this youngster is integrated to the adult's radioactive vomit, and will give a better chance of survival for the children helped by this dragon in the future.          Even before they leave the eggs the young dragons are in contact with the radioactive substance used by their parents to cover the eggs and keep them safe.

Dragons in their home Universe live a little more than one billion years, if nothing kills them first. In most cases another member of their specie kills them long before that, but they grow larger and stronger every year after their last change and that makes being killed less likely.     The specie leaves eggs in wild areas. Each egg is about twice larger than a domestic cat, and a female place many dozen at same time, in one place; hundreds in the case of older dragon ladies. After a period that varied depending on the environment (mostly about three years for planets like Sharitarn and Earth) the newborns came to light as for legged animals with articulated antennas protruding from their backs.      

Fase 1: Non-Talking Predators.

      They are little larger than cats when they leave the eggs, and about as intelligent as those felines. Their body shape resembles more a dog or a cat than a lizard, but their skin and facial traits are beautifully reptilian.       For their entire life they will be primarily identified by their pairs according to a choice made in this first hours after they breath for the first time. Some individuals will leave the nest alone and became solitary hunters, others will form groups of around 7 members. This groups will continue for all lives of their members, they are the closest personal bond individuals in this specie establish, close to hive minds. The individuals who left the nest alone develop personality traits very different from those of pack predators, they became usually stronger, more independent and self-confident, but lack social skills and usually don't became as successful in their society.       Those small hunters are able to survive almost any environment, on water or on land, as long as they have other animals to kill and eat. They are very adaptable, just not adaptable enough to survive on eat vegetables. Whatever path they follow, after 50 years living in the wilds the dragons will be about as large and heavy as humans, and ready for the first change. When that happens the parents are attracted instinctively to their offspring, they arrive usually in couples (unless one of them is dead).       Changes are extremely painful, the shape of the skeleton is changing, all the muscles protest trying to resist while the internal organs push in opposite direction each one with his own ideas about what do the next. The young need an adult dragon to vomit on them the dense radioactive substance that carries the genetic information necessary to guide the change, without it the young dragons will die. The parents look for their own children, and while they are doing that take the opportunity to kill and eat any other young dragons they found.    

Fase 2: Reptilian Humanoids

        Is common for humans of Sharitarn to mistake dragons in this fase for lizard-folk, a confusion Xiirsh strongly disliked but had learned to accept as a annoying aspect aspect of humanity in general. Naturally, the humans who worshiped her kin as deities knew best but they where the exception.       After the change dragons became almost humanoids. Their proportions are closer to those of a gorilla than to human shape, and they have a articulate tail that may be like the tail of crocodiles of a bit closer to those of a cat or monkey, something in between is more likely. Also, the two antennas on the back of their bodies came more to the side, and gained small hands.       The dragons at that period have four arms, two large and strong like gorillas arms, and two smaller than human arms proportional for their size. They continue able to breath water as much as air, and have a skin as thick as those of alligators, that grows stronger with the time. In the first change they also gained brain structures equivalent to those of adult humans in size and complexity, and as ready to learn language as those of human newborns.       During this period of life the infants live with their parents. Even couples long separated move back together for imposition of both instinct and cultural morality. Ideally for about 9 million years, which is how long second fase lasts, but at very least for half that time. The young learn all about society, moral, civilization and science from their parents and from older dragons in their community. Packs continue in contact, and share their grow, with helps their respective parents to develop their own strategies for share responsibility in the educational process.      The second change follows the same base of first change. It is just as painful, but usually lass scary since the young dragon knows what is happening.    

FASE 3: SMALL DRAGON

      After the second change the young dragon looks a lot like the draws of dragons in the 5 Edition of Dungeons and Dragons Monster Manual. They are your typical occidental dragon as it appear in most of occidental mythology: four legged, with two powerful wings on their backs that remind those of bats, and a tail.       Young and small for their own parameters those individuals are more than 9 million years old and strong enough to fly caring a buffalo in their posterior legs. The flying capacity is one element they gained in this process, another is the corrosive spit capable to eat walls of stone and non-magical armours in a couple of minutes or considerably less time.       The internal changes are more important than the visible ones, but take longer to manifest. Their brains change even more radically in this second change than it did in the first. Their senses expand to aspects of reality beyond human comprehension, and their body grows from the weight of a pair of elephants to fifteen time that.       This fase lasts about 90 million years on average. During this time the corrosive spit changes, and the young dragon learns to ignite it into a deadly fire. Third and final change comes like the others, but is more common for dragons at this point to seek for the help of other adults instead of their parents.      

FASE 4: STAR DWELLER

            Up to third change the only way to know who is a male and who is a female is by performing a genetic test in a lab, back in the days before technology they had no way to know. Probably that helped their society to develop as a gender egalitarian one.       Adult dragons don't leave the third change larger than they entered it, but on average 25% small. They look more or less the same in the eyes of humans, except for a bunch of details that could be taken as merely cosmetic. However, the structure of their bodies has changed radically all levels between cellular and sub-atomic, and many new organs have appeared while others are no longer there.       Adult dragons have wings, but they don't need them to fly any more than a human needs the hair in his head to walk and to swim. They still eat other animals, and are more attracted than ever for the flesh or their on kind, but their organisms can digest barely any piece of matter. Takes time to get used to their new selves.       When they mature, after a sort of "adolescence" dragons live their birth planets for the stars. Or at least that was what happened in their home Universe.      Adult dragons can fly in space, between planets of a same stellar system at first, and when they are ready for the challenge between stars. They cannot travel as fast as light (which isn't faster in their Universe than it is in ours) but the best long distance fliers are able to reach more than half of it.       Dragons form couples at this point of life, and those unions are up to death. Dragons are supportive to their companions, in some case they are also romantic lovers who share most moments of existence. In other cases couples stay together only for a few years and move separate ways, but each partner will came to help the other if needed. Only during the periods after the first changes of their children is that couples must stay together, even in the rare cases where they actually dislike the necessity (only way to avoid it would be to kill the children).       Living as a couple or not, the dragons are partners for life. They will always feel each other, knowing where the partner is, and if it is in danger or not. They will never have have children with any other dragon, even when a dragon hates his partner and would love to have more children without endure this person that is just not possible.       Adult dragons can control their electromagnetic fields, and they have a breath of energy hotter than the core of most stars, and even mess with gravitational constant in some extent. They can and do fly inside stars, and black holes. Except for magic is all but impossible to hurt one of those dragons on Sharitarn, and with magic you will need a actual mage to have a fair chance of fight, not a mere sigrax.       In their home Universe there was no magic, least not any ostensible magic Sharitarnes can recognize. For compensate that they have a inter intergalactic civilization with highly advanced technology. Ships able to travel faster than light and portable weapons more than powerful enough to kill each other.

For most civilized humans on Sharitarn the most distinctive cultural element of dragon society is the cannibalism. Native humanity of Sharitarn considers the habit of individuals eat members of their own specie to be a sign of barbarism. They consider themselves superior to the wild tribes of humans, and one argument to sustain this believe lies in the insistence of those barbaric people in eat human flesh. So the common people in most human cities tends to assume that cannibalism is essentially a mark of cultural inferiority.        That is a believe hard to sustain when you find yourself having a conversation with a actual dragon. Even one just a few thousand years old. They have a perfect memory, beyond the dreams of any normal Scholar Caste, and intellect to match.        As for adult Dragons: those are too intelligent to be affected by mind spells of sigraxes, unless they choose to be. Mind Carver Archmages sometimes aim to magically improve their own minds using adult dragons as model. One can end up mad trying to find a base to sustain that those fine rhetoric masters, inexhaustible sources of cosmopolite sophistication, are in fact barbarian just because they follow a unsettling diet.

     Dragons came from a Universe tuned by the Vortex some thousands of years before Imperial Age.       Like most ii species with advanced technology an natural capacities they started existence on Sharitarn raising a war against the Mage's Brotherhood, and loosing. In their case that coincided with the fragmentation of their human enemies in nations that tried to take down each other. The Brotherhood itself was barely reduced to a criminal organization, a sort of secret society the Emperors had to deal with but didn't liked.       Humanity itself was in fact reduced to a vassal of powerful iis, the immaterial beings they worshiped as deities.       Perhaps the dragons could have won the war, if it had started a little later, or if they had been a little more strategic in their moves. In any case, they succeeded in grant a territory for themselves, and a population of subjects that included humans. Going along with the religious theme prevalent at the time the dragons assumed the status of living deities in their territory.       About 100 thousand years later the Imperial Age ended, with the immaterial deities mostly imprisoned or destroyed by ephemeral humanoids who had learned ways of trap them.       That could have been the opportunity for the dragons fight a second time for escape Sharitarn, but the Imperial Age had costed most of them the will to fight. The specie entered a collective crisis of morbid depression and most of them committed suicide far away from Iborn, in solitary desolated areas of Sharitarn. That was the end of Draconian History on Sharitarn, the surviving individuals having little impact in the destiny of nations in the following Ages.       Until Xiirsh reach the fase 3 of her existence and decide to fly back to the ruins of Iborn in order to restore the Draconian Empire.              She sounded the magical alarms that all dragons in the world should hear, inviting them back. No member of Xiirsh's specie answered. Least not the ones she expected.        By this time the Vortex had entered a Transition Period and a different specie of dragons was being brought in considerable numbers. They are not similar to Xiirsh's people, those wyverns, but those are close enough to be able to hear the call. Perhaps other dragons would not welcome those small distant cousins from another Universe, even Xiirsh could not feel much sympathy for them in different period of her life. As things are, the Dragon Lady welcomed those newcomers as natural citizens of Iborn, and with their help started rebuilding a civilization that never existed before, not really, in the way it is now.