Diplomacy: Krennotets - The Price of Loyalty Worldbuilding V · 7:24am Oct 20th, 2014
Classified
An Analysis of the Persistent Threat of Draconic Migration and Invasion
on the Safety of Equestria
by Adorable K. Yearling, D.A.
For the eyes of Cpt. Vigil (R.G.) and Cmdr. Coil (H.G.), or their successors only.
Dear Guardsponies,
I hope you’ll forgive me if I’m not as formal for this report as you’re used to. I’m a fiction-writer.
Okay, I guess that isn’t really true. But you know what I mean. I don’t know what all you’re hoping for out of a report like this, but if this is the price for you two keeping quiet about my unique position, I’m glad to be of assistance.
I’ll start at the top. First off, dragons aren’t monsters. Not, at least, in the sense that a timberwolf or a manticore or a windigo is a monster. They aren’t purely magical creatures, they aren’t intrinsically predatory or evil, and they aren’t the lost souls of the dead. In fact, they’d be no different from ponies, or griffons, elk, or boars, except that every single one of them is cursed.
We use dragons as a metaphor for greed for a reason. Turns out, there’s a very long story behind that in their culture. The story goes that in ancient times, the dragon race was dwindling. It takes a dragon almost one hundred years to reach sexual maturity, and surviving that long isn’t easy for the small, pony-sized creatures. Of course, a fully grown adult dragon (a wyrm) is nearly invulnerable, but there are rarely more than ten wyrms in the entire world. The dragons were going extinct, from simple biology.
Unlike ponies, or griffons, or really any other ‘civilized’ race in the world, dragons don’t have a government, or even a village or clan structure. As such, they don’t have what we would consider a ‘leader’ to turn to. All they have is Krenn (Aside: this typewriter doesn’t have draconic keys, so you’ll have to make do with my phonetic transcriptions). Krenn, which means something like ‘crooked’ or ‘twisted’ or ‘crippled’ in an archaic variant of draconic, is the dragon’s equivalent to Princess Celestia or Princess Luna; he has the power to shift the Earth’s tectonic plates, creating volcanoes and earthquakes as well as raising up new land from the sea.
Back to the legend, Krenn (who didn’t have that name yet) saw his people dying, and when they approached him for advice, he went to the only creature more powerful than himself: a half-pony, half-dragon spirit (whom I now assume would likely be Discord). Krenn asked this spirit for a way to make the dragons age more quickly. The spirit offered the power to make any dragon grow to its full size in a mere instant, though it warned that the magic would be expensive.
Krenn offered the spirit literal mountains of gold, and diamonds the size of caves, but the spirit laughed. Then Krenn offered magic, in the form of land and fire. Still, the spirit mocked him. Finally, desperate, Krenn asked why the spirit didn’t want his offerings of untold value.
The spirit explained to Krenn that value doesn’t mean the same thing for every creature. Krenn might have loved gold and gems and magic, but the spirit didn’t care about them. It told Krenn that he would have to give up something truly valuable in the spirit’s eyes.
The dragon asked what the spirit wanted.
The spirit demanded three things. First, it wanted the flesh of one of Krenn’s wings. Without it, the dragon could never fly, and no pillar of stone would ever be the same as the feeling of the wind rushing past his scales. To this day, if you see Krenn, you’ll see that the webbing of his left wing is torn and missing. Even dragon hatchlings know that he can’t fly, and even wyrms I’ve met aren’t old enough to remember a time when he could fly.
Second, the spirit wanted one of Krenn’s hind legs. Amongst the dragons, walking on all four legs is considered childish. Young dragons prefer to walk upright, while those older dragons too bulky to stand on their own instead most often choose to fly in their travels. Without his leg, Krenn would be stripped of his dignity amongst his kin. In the modern day, Krenn walks with the aid of a staff as a substitute for what remains of his right leg.
Finally, the story goes, the spirit demanded Krenn’s legacy. The dragon was confused by the request, but the spirit refused to answer further. Krenn was told that either he took the deal, or his species died. And so, Krenn reluctantly gave up his ‘legacy’. To this day, no one save Krenn himself knows what that price entails. What we do know are the consequences.
I don’t need to tell you that when a dragon gains wealth, it grows in both size and greed, until it becomes a titanic, uncontrolled creature that seeks only more and more from those around it. What most ponies don’t understand is what Krenn learned from the spirit: value is a relative term. Not all dragons value gold, though many do, as even the dragons use it for currency. I knew a delightful wyrm who’d made a home on the slopes of Kilimarejaro in Zebrica, who valued friendships, particularly with non-dragons. I’ve heard stories of another dragon living somewhere near Krennotets who keeps a massive private library, and vales knowledge above all else.
We refer to these desires, these ‘vices’, as a dragon’s hoard. A dragon who keeps a large hoard is generally larger, more powerful, and more influential in dragon society, but is also prone to be crueler, more prone to greed, and more likely to offend the other species of the world.
When the spirit’s “gift” first settled, the cruelty and greed of the physically grown but intellectually immature dragons led to immense violence between them and the other races. Dragons died by the thousands, and even worse than under the lack of population, they approached extinction. Worse, Krenn soon discovered, any dragon male (a drake) who gave into their greed and grew would only be able to fertilize three eggs, before becoming completely sterile.
In fury, Krenn returned to the spirit and demanded that the curse be undone. The spirit replied that it was a matter of value. Krenn got what he had asked for, and the spirit was enjoying the resulting chaos. If the dragons wanted things the way they had been before, there would have to be another trade.
The story doesn’t tell just what the spirit asked. What we know is that Krenn could not bring himself to take the deal.
The older dragons tell this story gladly, as a way to teach each other about value, and in hopes of teaching their young to resist the temptations of growth and greed. Unfortunately, draconic youth are competitive, violent, and magically powerful. The only way to secure power is to grow. It’s a vicious cycle, and more often than not, it ends in death.
The best estimate I’ve ever heard says there are two million dragons in the world. About half live in, around, and under Krenn’s volcano, Krennotets. Another third travel in huge migrations all across the world, and the remainder are settled down in mountains and caves throughout the lands of other races.
I’ve only ever been to Krennotets once, when I was trying to find the headpiece of Clover the Clever’s staff. She died in an eruption there, a few decades after the founding of Equestria. In any case, it’s a noxious place, where the air is poisonous to ponies, and magma is more common than water. Don’t expect to survive long without magic. It isn’t the sort of place one simply walks into.
Though many dragons live on the ash flats (and the surprisingly fertile far-side of the mountains), the real attraction is the city of Peschera (lit. cavern), built in the caldera of Krennotets itself. The city is magically warded, and guarded by a puzzle door. Krenn himself lives inside, along with the dragons he deems pure and worthy. By his rules, at some age (I believe twenty-five or thirty), young dragons are banished from Krennotets and sent out into the world. To earn their way back into the ‘capital’, a dragon from the outside has three options. Firstly, they can solve the puzzle of the door (said to be impossible, though I didn’t think it was that hard. If you need the answer, you know where to find me.) Secondly, they have the possibility of doing something so notable that they grab Krenn’s attention and he invites them inside personally. It’s said one dragon in a century manages this feat. Finally, a dragon can gather a hoard great enough to make them grow to their full size, and then willingly give it up to Krenn.
Obviously, with the ability to control the plates of the earth, Krenn has no use for such huge piles of gold and gems. Rather, the exercise is said to prove that a dragon has the willpower to resist the temptation of greed.
In any case, the dragons of Krennotets are generally disciplined, easier to interact with, and more rationally minded than their migrating kin.
The migrating dragons are where most of our stereotypes of dragons come from; they’re much more prone to giving into the curse, resulting in huge beasts sleeping on piles of gold in mountain caves, or raids on livestock, or whatever your favorite ‘dragon attack’ myth is. I’m not sure there’s much more I can add without getting into really academic details about the migration path, or their really complex past with the Diamond Dogs, most of which isn’t going to be of concern for you militarily anyway.
I’ll also make brief mention of ‘sub-dragons’; in the same sense that we ponies have similar species like the donkeys, and elk have all their different flavors, the dragons come in a few other shapes. The only one we know anything about worth mentioning here are the wyverns, non-growing dragons with poison-stingered tails who seek out gold as a way to try and influence ‘true’ dragon society. They’re essentially second-class citizens to the real dragons, but they are numerous enough to be militarily interesting to the two of you, if someone managed to get them all together in one place.
Sea-serpents are also a species of dragon, although getting much knowledge of them is difficult, given that they live at the bottom of the ocean. We know that they are avid and cunning traders, though whether they experience the curse is unknown.
I’ve heard whispers of other species or subspecies, but I’ve never seen a living example of any of the following: the Lung Dragons who live past the Empire of the Claw to the East, the deep wyrms that the dragons call ‘Linnorms’, and the snake-like Naga are all creatures that I can tell stories about, but can’t attest to in fact. Feel free to request such information, and I’ll write you an addendum, but for the moment, I can’t imagine you want old mare’s tales in a military report.
Returning to the military analysis, as I mentioned before, Krenn is the analogue of Celestia and Luna because he moves the earth. He isn’t their leader, because the dragons have no organized government, military, or religion. They generally will follow Krenn’s direction because they respect his wisdom and his power, but he actively avoids making decisions for his kind whenever possible.
In short, the dragons aren’t a singular government. You can’t easily negotiate with them, you can’t easily manipulate them, and you certainly can’t approach them in any way as a group. If you absolutely have to get to all of them, talk to Krenn. But don’t cross your feathers.
I really hope that tells you what you want, but I’ll be glad to add more if you’d like.
D.D.
Adorable Kitten Yearling?
Hmn, his legacy? Given the "give in to greed, go infertile" part of the curse, I bet Krenn is infertile too, and that's why he wants his last egg back so badly.
2545111
Isn't that part of the first deal already, though? I assume his legacy is another thing.
2545006
Adorable Krenn Yearling?
2545006
I could get behind that. It's a made up name anyway.
2545391 No, the three eggs then sterile seems to be a "side-effect" of the "gift". I could agree that the egg isn't part of the legacy, though.
Also, I like Adorable Kitten Yearling better.
ONE DOES NOT SIMPLY TROT INTO KRENNETROT!
Loyal, I would be interested in seeing the stories for the Naga and such.
How exactly can the number of members of a certain species suddenly start dwindling if, according to the paragraph above, they shouldn't have been able to sustain their population, not to mention multiply and spread in the first place?
1)That's a lot of f-ing Dragons, especially considering the hard-capped population growth rate and the fact that they had 'near extinction' as their starting point.
2)How could those seismically active barrens sustain one million of big gluttonous creatures for any extended period of time?
That's the subject I would really love to hear more about, but alas, I know that there probably is a lot of more essential world-building to do before you would even consider doing a DD section.
Nice D&D reference there, but shouldn't they have a name that would be a derivative of a Draconic root?
P.S.
What exactly did Adorable K. Yearling write in your AU, since Daring Doo series was Mr. Up's creation?
2553452
I think you might be misreading that. The first sentence and the last sentence don't refer to distinct events. As far back as the legend being recounted goes, dragons were always "dwindling"—at least, for as long as anyone but Krenn remembers.
Male dragons who give into their greed are immediately sexually developed; they no longer have to wait to grow up. It's just that they can only fertilize three eggs.
Although they don't like to do so, dragons can survive nutritionally on a diet of only gems and minerals (which Krenn can produce at will). Also, much like in Mordor, the far side if Krennotets is a vibrant evergreen forest grown in rich volcanic soil.
A.K. Yearling is getting a PoL one shot eventually, but consider the following: Yearling is a similar age to Twilight, but Twilight has been reading Daring Do books since she was young. For Yearling to have always been the author, she would have had to write her first book (and thus go on its adventure) when she was 10.
Linnorms are much older than D&D. ;) Not all dragons speak Russian, just like how not all ponies speak English, and not all elk speak Quenya.
Huh. I missed this world building post. Interesting stuff.
Krenn's hatred for Discord is pretty understandable and justifiable now. He must of underestimated how much of a prick Discord could be.
Did this deal go down before, after, or while Krenn was a Bearer of an Element?
Was Discord's deal enough of a help to properly stabilize the dragon population?
Could there have conceivably been other options?