𝕯ᴀᴇᴍᴏɴ 𝕿ᴀʀɢᴀʀʏᴇɴ 𝕸ᴏᴏᴅʙᴏᴀʀᴅ
Forged in Valyria and first borne by Visenya, Dark Sister came to Daemon as a blade tempered by conquest, its edge carrying the weight of Targaryen fire and fate.
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This is the very first page of my Aemond Targaryen comic! Know this is done for fun so I apologize if there are any spelling or anatomy errors! 18+ pages will be censored. Enjoy!
Perhaps they ought not to have eaten the dragon. There had been people objecting to it at the time. Surely such meat was poisonous. Perhaps it was even an affront, an insult to some intangible order of nature they ought to honour.
But the city was starving, the siege had gone on too long, and the king's troops were still a week's march away. The scorched earth would be fertile again in time, but right now it was barren. Right now there were mouths to feed. So they changed their crossbows for butcher knives and got to work.
None of the royal commanders asked any questions that could not be answered. After all, their aid had come shamefully late. The dragon's horned skull made a noble gift, a fitting tribute from a triumphant city to its humbled king. Who would have thought to question them?
And none of the townsfolk spoke up, when the first golden-eyed babes were born. Children who grew up barefoot and fearless, clambering over the city's patched and rebuilt roofs like they had no notion of falling, with a strange glitter to their skin when the sunlight hit it just so. No one breathed a word about dragons.
Because soon enough there were deft, young hands taking loaves straight out of the oven, heedlessly lifting iron from the forge, plunging into boiling laundry water. And some of them more wondrous still, wild, warm-skinned youths, with inexplicable knowledge and peculiar remedies.
A blessing, their families said proudly. A blessing after so much hardship. Which it was, in its way. This city would never fear dragon fire again.
The real reason your sapient dragon character needs a "rider":
- Dragons on the wing are vulnerable to being mobbed by smaller, more agile flyers, particularly in your large rear blind spot, like a bird of prey being mobbed by crows. Having a human armed with a long spear perched on your back helps to dissuade anyone from getting any funny ideas.
- Breath weapons are impressive enough on the ground, but in flight they're really only good for strafing stationary targets; trying to use your breath weapon in an aerial dogfight is a good way to get fire up your nose. A real fight calls for sterner measures – and, concomitantly, a crew to aim and reload the cannons.
- In today's competitive world, it's not enough to devour a flock of sheep and call it a day if you want to keep your edge. You're accompanied at all times by a qualified personal alchemist tasked with carefully regulating your internal furnace to ensure peak performance, and sometimes you even listen to them.
- No dragon of any quality would be caught dead without their valet. It's not as though you can announce your numerous long-winded titles yourself when introductions are called for, can you? You suppose next you'll be expected to pick up the spoils of your conquests yourself, like a common brigand. Perish the thought!
I’ve reprinted this Smaug risograph a few times now and I’m really digging the HOT fluorescent orange on brown paper in this batch 🤌 These have been restocked and are up in my shop!
I have exciting information for you! Bird bones are not entirely hollow, rather they are filled with large air pockets. I find the result both delightful and terrifically unsettling!
To expand upon this: a lot of birds’ bones aren’t hollow in order to make them lighter, but instead so that they can take in more oxygen. This is because when you’re flying through the air at speeds of Fast™, it’s very hard to convince the air around you to flow into your nostrils at speeds that let you get enough to breathe. So, birds evolved hollowed out bones to circumvent this, as it allows them to store air.
I feel like not enough people are aware of the fact that birds are nightmare creatures that have respiratory systems that extend directly into their bones. And the same thing was the case with lots of dinosaurs, light bones let birds fly and let dinosaurs grow huge.
thecoffeelorian