Concerning Ivy Dragons
“Documentation of Ifig, Young Adult Ivy Dragon” by Emma Paterson
Your foot catches on a root, the shock sending a wave of adrenaline throughout your body. Reading about the Bloodwood Forest is one thing. Hiking its forgotten trails is very much another. Under any other circumstance, you would forego the need to set foot in the shade of these vampiric woods. The gold rattles around in your coin-purse, which in turn catches on your sheathed dagger now and then. Odd that they paid you up front. Desperation addles the mind of the eastern Caravansary plains. Whatever lay beyond these forested hills could very well be the reason that livestock and dragon litters alike have been going missing from the local lord’s fields. Now is the time when you begin to smell something like sulfur and rotting fruit as a cloud of green mist descends from the forest canopy above. Your hand on your sword, you look up.
Eyes like orbs of emerald blood stare deep beyond your eyes. Not into your soul as the poets of Campara might put it. The ivy dragon is staring into the delectable marrow-stores of your fragile bones. You draw your sword, pull your scarf over your face, and wonder if ‘hunter’ was ever an appropriate label for yourself.
Found roosting in sprawling jungles and old growth forests, ivy dragons can be found defending their territory with tyrannical pleasure. Their anatomy is incredibly light, bones almost hollow for whip-fast movement across the treetops. Scaled natural armor crests their head and spine, a chitinous mockery of the forest’s vines. Leaves made of organic steel and tight hide sunder arrows as they fly to kill the beast. An ivy dragon’s skin ranges from the hues of rain-thick soil, sap-darkened bark, or even the deep green of benighted moss. With retractable canines longer than scimitars, the ivy dragon flenses its prey after softening them with toxic breath.
Where tastebuds would be found on the tongue of most creatures, the ivy dragon also has a bed of activated carbon buds. These can be used to heal the effects of any poison, but more importantly, create a choking death well known across the continent. The ivy dragon filters a controlled drip through hollow fangs of chlorine and carbon monoxide from a third lung. The gas that results from the tongue-to-tooth catalyzation is imbued with the innately magical souls of dragonkind, stifling just about any attempt made by humanoids to heal the effects of the gas before death. Alternatively, the gas can be immured in a gobbet of spit and fired out like a smoke bomb. Ivy gas is sometimes captured in anti-magic glass receptacles, a deadly chemical weapon that saw limited use in the Second Batho-Camparan War and the Waomatuan Civil War. This begs the question, how is ivy gas collected?
The reaction that creates it can be artificially forced out of the body of a dead ivy dragon for approximately ten hours after its death. In fact, ivy dragons have been known to wire their anatomy with a sort of dead-man’s switch in which they cloud their corpse with a thick, continuous, and impenetrable cloud of gas with their last death. Now we come to the nature of ivy dragons, and why not all who seek their natural gifts must do so at sword-point.
Ivy dragons are far and away the most practical of the species on Mytyrra. They take on their role as apex predator with honor, delight, and sly pleasure. Always seeking new prey, exotic meals, and ways to test their lethal agility against the species of the world, the ivy dragon taps into the primordial glee felt by all draconic beings. While their prideful ways often lead them to overstep and incur the wrath of an army they cannot conquer, there are those that have tamed their needs and desires to the point of symbiosis.
Ivy dragons are favored as the familiars and mounts of many rangers, especially when they are young and in early adulthood. Trained as highly intelligent hunting animals by some rangers, these beasts carry with them the promise of big game yield. Like all dragons on Mytyrra, an ivy dragon is capable of shifting its size and shape relative to its environment. Ivy dragons use this technique as a means of camouflage, which in tandem with their natural camouflage creates nigh invisibility. True shapeshifting becomes possible for all dragons upon reaching the ages of late adulthood and elderhood. Ivy dragons disguise themselves often as lost hunters, wandering herbalists, and, when power hungry, the quartermasters of country-spanning lodges. When they wander about the world of humanoids, they delight in deception and murder. Cases do exist, however, of elder ivy dragons shifting into the shapes of humans or halflings and living peacefully in hermithood.
As familiars and benefactors to wizards, Ivy dragons provide a window into primordial alchemy and natural magic. Ivy dragons carry dormant ancestral memories as well as the stories of past lives within their souls. These are extractable through high level divination and have led to some of history’s greatest discoveries in medicine and herbalism.
As mounts, ivy dragons can turn camps into mass graves in a matter of minutes. While hard to train for aerial combat, ivy dragons are quite capable fliers. They are by no means the most skilled dragons in the air, but what they lack in wing-control they make up for in sheer capacity for death dealing. Those bred by the Camparan military seldom meet the standards of imperial elven warfare, but the ones that do go on to melt the lungs of many human knights.
Ivy dragons can be found most often in Glasswater, Brae, northern Batholith, western Xivonia, all over Waomatua, and on every treetop in the Bloodwood. Some stalk the plains of the Caravansary, but many suffer the wrath of their more gregarious cousins. A healthy crop of them are bred by the Camparan empire, but as mentioned, only rarely make the cut for battlefield deployment.
Notable ivy dragon elders include:
Mulmiel Thyroot, Chair of Herbology and Alchemy at Fafner Academy
Gulletrum, Scourge of Xivonian Woods
Hibernical of the Penny-Graves, Bane of Dikranum Enclave
Ensieve Blood-Glut, legendary hunt master and former companion of Athelir the Farseeing
When hunting an ivy dragon, one must always carry some form of anti-magic with which to ward themselves from that terrible green gas. While best hunted in large groups of experienced dragon killers, ivy dragons have been brought down by singlehanded clever rangers. The leaf-tyrant’s lime green eyes are the nightmare of every woodsman, and every wise traveler venturing into the shadows of Mytyrra’s primordial woods.
Could any character really go toe-to-toe with these monsters? Is it wise for wizards to dabble in chemical warfare, wise for kings to use ivy dragons as mounts? Where is the line between apex predator and natural deity? All of these questions and more to be explored here at The Gallowglass Rat, so stay wise!
