## Notes for myself - R. *Updated several times over the centuries. Read the whole thing before trusting any part of it.* --- ### The Death and the Deal I was there. Remember that. When the memories get soft, remember: you saw her die. Tiamat was killed in five parts. Each head separately, over centuries to us, but on the plateau it would have been much faster - time was strange on the plateau. The final head was the red. The party that killed it - the mouse, the owl, the goliath, the bugbear, the dwarves - we made a deal with her before the end. **The Deal:** Her eggs would return to the world. In exchange, she accepted death and blessed her killers. The kobolds took four of the eggs. Borin and Entay took one. Five dragons hatched. --- ### The Five Original Dragons Each egg received one-fifth of the red aspect's power. The red aspect was itself one-fifth of Tiamat's total divine essence. So: each original dragon inherited **one twenty-fifth of a god's power**. This is still *vast*. | Color | Sex | What I Know | | --------- | ------ | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ | | **Blue** | Male | Kerral. Never bred. Founded the Accord. Patient, calculating, empire-builder. Has the full original portion. The most dangerous of them because he *thinks*. | | **Red** | Male | Scaldor. Never bred. Borin raised him. Fought against his nature his whole life - the red aspect pulls toward rage, greed, impulsiveness. Founded an order of paladins who channeled anger in service of Order. Then Nergal killed Borin and... *see below*. | | **Green** | Female | Never learned her name. Bred extensively. Cunning, secretive, manipulative - the green aspect suits intrigue. Her descendants are *everywhere* in the Wild. Each one weaker than the last as the power divides. | | **White** | Male | Also bred extensively. The white aspect is animalistic, impulsive, territorial. His descendants are numerous but not clever. Dangerous in the way wolves are dangerous. | | **Black** | Female | Did not mate, but produced a spontaneous brood. The black aspect is patient and cruel. Her offspring are few but each retains more power than the common greens and whites. Solitary. Take over abandoned places or kill everyone in isolated settlements. | --- ### Power Inheritance - THIS IS IMPORTANT Dragon power **divides** when they breed. Parent and offspring rebalance - a dragon with ten offspring has one-eleventh of what they started with. The offspring each have one-eleventh. When a dragon **dies**, the power does not transfer immediately. It lies latent until it can flow into a newly-hatched batch of dragons somewhere. I do not understand the mechanism. Divine essence finds a vessel or it waits. **Consequence:** Dragons that never breed retain their full original power. Kerral and Scaldor are both undiminished. This is why "Greater Dragons" and "Common Dragons" are meaningful categories - the difference is not age or size but *how much of Tiamat remains in them*. --- ### Greater and Common Dragons **Greater Dragons:** Those with undivided or minimally-divided portions of Tiamat's power. - Kerral (full 1/25th) - Scaldor (full 1/25th, lost) - Possibly a few black dragons if the brood was small enough **Common Dragons:** Descendants of the extensively-breeding lines. - Most green dragons - Most white dragons - Still dangerous! A green dragon with 1/1000th of Tiamat is still a dragon. --- ### Scaldor *I need to write this down because I do not want to forget, and I do not want to remember.* Borin took the red egg back with us. Raised that dragon like a son. Scaldor - the name came later - spent his whole existence fighting what the red aspect wanted him to be. Borin was his anchor. When Nergal killed Borin (the specifics are elsewhere, I cannot write them again), Scaldor broke, gave into his rage and left to hunt down Nergal and was lost. I presume he was slain, but we do not know and Nergal does not speak of it. --- ### Dragon Nature **They are causality-aligned.** This is metaphysical, not moral. A dragon can be chaotic in temperament and still, in its essence, reinforce the causal fabric of reality. This is why fae and dragons have ancient enmity - they represent opposing principles of how reality should function. **They are territorial.** Even Kerral, who builds an empire, thinks in terms of *his* territory. The Accord is not a nation to him. It is his lair, extended. **They remember Tiamat.** Not personally - she died before they hatched. But they *know* she was real, that the stories are true. The kobolds told them. They carry her essence and feel her absence. --- ### What I Do Not Know - Where exactly the green and white breeding lines are thickest - How many black dragons exist - Scaldor's final days - Whether killing a Greater Dragon releases power that could be... directed - What Kerral actually wants beyond territory *These gaps in my knowledge concern me. Add to this list.* --- *Last significant revision: 47 years ago when I learned about the Accord's formation. Update as needed.*