Dragonblooded

In all the annals of history, there is no species that has accomplished as much as our kind.

It was we children of the dragon-blood who built Tharena into an empire to stand the test of time. It was our cousins to the West who united the disparate tribes of the steppe. The same fire eternal that burned within Kallia's heart now smoulders into flame within yours.

So hold your head high, child. Let the world know who you are. And remember…

This is your birthright, and your responsibility.

— A dragonblooded parent to their child.

Ferocious and built-for-war, the Dragonblooded's martial prowess has led them to stand atop the totem pole wherever they have made their homes under the sun. The dragonblooded are at the same time a proud and aristocratic people, and a people of warriors — even when they are set at the heart of bureaucratic or court-based societies, such as the Southern Empire.

The dragonblooded are as a living furnace. While they can live up to twice as long as most of the other mortal species, their physiology runs hot, burning readily through as many as ten thousand calories in an idle day without putting on weight. In turn, their bodies are practically living weapons: dense muscle lies beneath leathery skin, with thick scales covering their most vulnerable points and ridges jutting out from the bony prominences of their body. One prominent scaly patch is often where the neck meets the corners of the chin, hiding below it the flame sac, an organ which produces dragon's ichor, a slick, oily gel which combusts within seconds of contacting the air. With training, a Dragonblooded can spit the ichor up to 30 meters.

Both male and female Dragonblooded are characteristically lean, though males tend to be somewhat more stocky. They have distinctive horns atop their head, with shapes, pattern, or even the number of horns being inherited within the family. Scales often form on the sides of the neck and on the bridge of the nose and forehead, and lower down at the narrowest point of one's hips. Dragonblooded have tails, with females' tails ordinarily being longer relative to their size while males' are thicker and more muscular. Both are somewhat prehensile, though are more commonly used for lashing, sweeping, or merely keeping one's balance in a fight.

Such strength is a double-edged sword. The Dragonblooded see themselves as almost necessarily aristocratic, both because many have used their might to climb to the top within a social hierarchy, and because doing so makes it far easier for them to meet their calorific needs. It is all but impossible for a Dragonblooded to live as a subsistence farmer without substantial support from the community around them, and a family of Dragonblooded in the urban middle classes would have to spend much of their income on food simply to survive. To have the agricultural excess of a nation funneled up to them allows them to not only survive, but to reach the potential for strength that their frames allow.

While male and female Dragonblooded differ meaningfully in build, they do not in terms of their roles within society. In most cultures, the most prominent difference between the two roles is their place in the order of battle: men's brawnier frames are seen as lending themselves to fighting in the infantry line, while women classically fight as skirmishers or cavalry. The genders tend to express themselves differently, and although medical transition is impossible, social transition is generally fully accepted.