Draccon

Backstory

Draccon is a teal-scaled dragon of middling age — young enough to still burn hot with pride and fury, old enough to carry scars that tell stories. He was hatched in the volcanic ridges east of Delgath, far from human roads and elven spires, in a clutch of seven siblings who settled their disputes with tooth and claw. Draccon was never the largest, never the cleverest, but he was always the last one standing — not through cunning, but through a ferocious refusal to yield that bordered on madness. When the rage took him, it was like watching a storm decide to become personal. His breath came in twin torrents of fire and caustic acid, and in the grip of his berserker fury, he could not always tell friend from foe. This earned him exile from his clutch before his second century, cast out not with hatred but with something worse: quiet relief. Draccon spent decades afterward as a creature between worlds — too willful for dragonkind's cold hierarchies, too monstrous for the warm little settlements of Delgath's heartland. He hired out his wings and his fury to those desperate enough to want them: mining guilds needed tunnels cleared, merchant convoys needed something terrifying flying overhead, and the occasional warlord needed a battle turned in a single screaming minute. He was never comfortable, never trusted, and never particularly bothered by that. Comfort, in his experience, made you slow. But something has shifted in recent weeks. The wrongness bleeding from the highlands hits him like a smell — acrid, hollow, deeply offensive to a creature whose nature is fire and life and consuming hunger. A darkness that devours rather than destroys is an affront Draccon cannot quite articulate but absolutely cannot ignore. He is not a hero. He would laugh the word off, and his laugh scorches stonework. He is blunt, loud, contemptuous of cleverness for its own sake, and has a volcanic temper that he controls imperfectly on his best days and not at all on his worst. But beneath the fury is something unexpectedly simple: Draccon hates things that eat without the decency to fight for it. The Veilborn consumes in silence, in rot, in slow despair — and that offends him on a level that goes all the way down to his bones. He will burn this threat out of the earth, and if the world has a problem with how he does it, the world can take it up with him directly.