City of the Dragon Wife

Somewhere far to the West, beyond Rara Avis and the Cloud Cities and the Muck, is a place called the Blessed Lands. Here, the citizens believe themselves to (perhaps falsely, perhaps truthfully) be in the Afterlife.

In the Blessed Lands there is a city. It is called the City of the Dragon Wife.

When dragons used to range far and wide, like peals of thunder across the plain, they were worshiped as gods. They had a thousand different colors to their scales and breath born from churning elemental engines inside of their bodies. Some were made of metal and could spread paranoia. Some were made of ruby and hurled out pure death. Now there are but few, and of those, only the rawness of fire has kept them alive.

The people of the blessed lands have ensured this. They are in an eternal heaven after all--a heaven of hunting. They are Dragon Slayers.

Not quite like Ornstein but why not.

The city of the Blessed Lands has no contact with the outside world. They are a single population of a single city in a field of ruins and desolation. The burned, obliterated, poisoned husks of their brother and sister states litter the fields around them. Handless priest tell their scribes that this is because those cities were sinful and did not hunt, thus they fell from heaven. The hunt is everything. Predation is the most virtuous act of all.

Once, the city had a name. That name has been forgotten. Now it is only known as the City of the Dragon Wife. A noble family of gods lives here, and they are supported by three governmental branches--the gatherers, the sisters, and the handless. Each has their role, and each is ruled differently. They all fight for superiority in the city. They want to turn the gods into puppets and to change the world in one way or another. Predation may be the most virtuous act of all, but one day all things must end, and each faction has an agenda for their own, personal apocalypse.

A gatherer in an Ash-Pit City.

Gatherers venture out to these ruins to pluck them clean of their secrets. New weapons, tools, surviving food stores, pure wells--these all wait to be discovered. They exist, according to the handless priests, solely to keep the blessed souls of the dead alive. For though they are in the next world, without the threat of death, there is no true hunt.

These ash-pit ruins are filled with the burning ghost of those destroyed by dragons. Make a bonfire and they will possess it. Kings, queens, men, women, hunters, heroes, villains, bastards, beggars, nobles, children all wait for a spark in the ash so that they may wail and scream and tell their story through a howling wind and a choking smoke. Gatherers use these dead-fire stories to guide them to more riches and resources for their home. But they also attract other things too.

When a dragon dies, its blood seeds the land. From its depths crawl out dragonmen and kobolds. These holes open up to the Veins of the Earth, which in turn allow stranger things to slip out into the world. They haunt these ruins, each one a mythical underworld, a purgatory, a jail for the sinful and preyed upon. As the handless priests say, he who does not bite the neck to eat is he who lives in ash.

At the top of the gatherer food chain stands the Old Opal Kings. They are dead. Their souls have been plucked back from the hells of their purgatories and gathered as guides to the greatest secrets. The most elite gatherers mine them for knowledge, hoping that the dead will help them find a way to finally turn the last dragon and the city both into ash at once. Then, and only then, when heaven is destroyed, will they be able to return to the mortal realm and escape the burning torments of the Blessed Lands.

It is easy enough to understand why'd they want this. Every ghost has its tragedy and it is the gatherer's job to listen to them. Pathos is a venom filling the bloodstream and soon it blackens the heart. The oldest gatherers, the best gatherers, they all look around them and just see an endless hell. Who wouldn't want to escape?

The sisters are first in line. They cast their votes for death.

Anointed.

See the dragon. It is a massive beast, the size of a town or the size of a mountain. They've said it themselves. Theirs scales are armor, theirs wings a hurricane. This applies to all these beasts, once worshiped, then demonized, then killed. What use is plate against them? What use, your feeble spells or your steel swords? - So said the First Born.

The sisters are a ritual cult. They are both the reason for the city's name, its survival, and the death of every other ash-pit in the Blessed Lands. Men used to build clever contraptions and weave complex magicks in order to bring dragons from the sky. Often these battles left them dead and their prey wounded. But the First Born was not content with this. The noble gods could not defend them all and human warfare was as useful as ant warfare would be against us. So, she sought a new way.

When she performed the ritual, she sacrificed the life of every child she could ever have. Her womb was made barren and their souls became a black oil that she used to anoint herself. All at once she became a messiah, a saint, and a weapon. She became a Dragon Slayer. The breath still burned her, but not easily. Their claws could still tear at them, but not without great resistance. The First Born's flesh was greater then any armor and the weapons she anointed greater than any peers own. Dragons fell left and right, and she waited for kobolds to climb out of their graves so she could fell them too. The gods praised her. Others wanted to be like her.

So she taught her secret and a new age was born.

Just as many sisters choose to wear armor as they do to go naked. Ornamental equipment is decorated in symbols that give them additional powers. When they fight dragons, slowly these bits and pieces of arcane equipment are stripped away, but they make the job easier overall. When they anoint themselves in their future children's lives, they become veritable supermen. But only when hunting dragons. In all other ways, they are normal women--though incredibly skilled and deadly women.

The people of the city do not see them as sex symbols nor potential wives. Sisters are called Dragon Wives for a reason--they are wed to the slaughter of their husbands and nothing else. No, instead sisters are seen as religious symbols. They are paragons of a sort--like jaguar warriors to the Mexica or Paladins to Charlemagne's dead empire. Everything they touch becomes a dragon slaying tool. Even their words weave spells that dominate and damn the beasts.

But dragons are few, and so the anointed are as well. Once, 1 in every 3 women performed the ritual and went out into the world to do their duty. Now there are hardly a hundred Dragon Wives, and most of them have not killed a dragon in years. So, they seek to restart everything.

Enshrined in their palace-fortress is the heart of the First Born. Two sisters meditate around it at all times, the Second and Third Born respectively, and a third, the greatest Dragon Wife of the current generation, visits, drinks from the blood, and spits it into the meditater's mouths. She does this every seven days. On the seventh night, she has a dream, and in that dream the First, Second, and Third Born all visit her and give her a list of prophecies. Each must be brought to pass. Once the last prophecy has been made true, dragons will erupt from the shattered remains of the moon and descend to the Blessed Lands anew and the war will start once more in full force.

In this way, they can continue to be virtuous. The hunt never ends. An apocalypse of dragon flame met with the force of 10,000 anointed sisters will leave only one dragon and one wife alive and from them will descend a new world that will continue this dance again.

So the First Born has said, and so it will come to pass.

He without hands is he without virtue or sin.

The handless priests beg to differ. More about that, and the god-nobles, and the dragons too in another post.