Dragons haven't vanished. They've chosen to disappear — and the world has almost stopped believing in them.
A dragon doesn't die of old age. It dies when it's forgotten. A dragon remembered — through legend, fear, or love — persists, its soul cycling back into the world inside a living creature the moment its old body finally gives out.
Roughly sixty or seventy dragons exist at any given time, in forms ranging from limbless wyrms to two-legged wyverns to the four-limbed, two-winged dragons of old myth. None of them remember their past lives. They only carry a trace of what that life gave them — strength, speed, a gift for magic — with no memory of ever having been a dragon at all.
Believes dragons should stay scarce and hidden — feared precisely because they're rarely seen. Every reborn soul he finds and trains only reinforces his own legend as the greatest of them all.
Believes the opposite: without a greater dragon presence in the world, dragonkind will fade into myth and be forgotten for good. She searches for reborn souls to merge with, convinced that uniting them under her own power is the only way to save her kind.
Neither Bahamut nor Tiamat searches the world directly — both act through human vessels, agents who hunt for signs of a reborn soul on their behalf. It's through one of these searches that Shii's life changes forever.
The seat of civilization — order, protection, and rationed safety, for those close enough to its borders to receive it.
A small adventurer town near the Empire's edge, where green adventurers come to prove themselves — and where most of them fail.
Nomad-like settlements too far from the Empire to be protected, and too close to its borders to build anything permanent. This is where Shii is from.
The flashiest and most common path — elemental fire and ice, beast-imbued berserker strength, holy protection, and stranger beast-born gifts. Easy to understand, easy to admire.
Rarer and less flashy — power drawn from unlocking what's already hidden in raw natural ingredients. No mana pool to drain, only time, knowledge, and preparation.
Power that comes from within — inherited, involuntary, tied to will and emotion rather than training. Shii's own power falls here — though its true source is a secret even she doesn't understand yet.
An adventurer who survived a childhood most people wouldn't — twelve years spent surviving alone outside the Empire's protection after everything she knew was destroyed. Blunt, quick-tempered, and carrying more inside her than she knows.
A berserker who never loses his temper — as long as he stays close to Ma, the axe he's never without. Unfazed by nearly everything, and fiercely loyal to the people he calls friends.
Book One's greatest threat. What she's done is unforgivable. What she is remains a secret worth discovering for yourself.
"Nobody remembers a dragon that never earned a legend."