Dragons haven't vanished. They've chosen to disappear, and the world has almost stopped believing in them. Almost.
A dragon doesn't die of old age. It dies when it's forgotten.
So every dragon spends its life building a legend: a name spoken in enough places, by enough mouths, over enough years. Some build it loudly, with fire and dread. Some build it quietly, when that serves better. It isn't vanity. It's the only thing standing between a dragon and simply ending.
When a great dragon finally dies, its legend is what remains. In time, that legend finds its way into something living, a soul settling into a new vessel. A hawk. A hound. A blacksmith's son. Dormant, usually. Waiting, sometimes for centuries, before it wakes into whatever it was always going to become again.
The vessel never remembers being a dragon. It only carries a trace of what that life gave it: strength it shouldn't have, speed, a gift for magic nobody can explain. Most never learn why. Even among dragons, the ones who can pick a vessel out of a crowd are rare.
Dragons come in many shapes: limbless wyrms, wingless four-legged drakes, two-legged wyverns, and the four-limbed, winged dragons of the old stories. Shape says nothing about power. Legend does.
The most remembered dragon alive, and he means to keep it that way. Bahamut believes dragons should be rare and feared: seen seldom, spoken of always. He decides which of his court may be seen by mortals, and when, so no legend ever outshines his own. A king can't walk openly among mortals, so he doesn't. He walks among them in disguise, testing whoever he likes, with no crown to tip the outcome.
There was only ever one throne, and once, the two of them shared it as near-equals. Then came the split. Ask his court and they'll tell you she rules nothing, that she has followers, not subjects. Believers. Ask why her name is forbidden, or why her brother goes cold at the mention of her, and the court goes quiet. She is seen rarely. It is never good news when she is.
He gave Shii a plain silver ring, faintly warm, and didn't say why. He asked how old she was when her memories began, and didn't like the answer. Whatever the King of Dragons sees in a girl who calls herself the Dragon Princess as a joke, he isn't telling her. Or anyone else.
Every dragon builds a legend meant to outlive it. This is his, sealed under wax centuries old.
I am Bahamut. I am the first breath drawn before the first fire was lit. I am the silence that follows a roar, because nothing dares speak after mine.
Kings kneel and call it wisdom. Armies scatter and call it strategy. The ocean does not part for me — it simply remembers that it once did, and never forgets the lesson.
I do not chase glory. Glory follows me, begging to be remembered alongside my name, and I allow it, because even glory understands its place.
There is no throne built that could hold what I am. There is no crown forged that would not shame itself by sitting upon a lesser head. I am not the strongest dragon. I am the reason strength has a name at all.
Remember me, and you have already won something. Forget me, and you were never anything to begin with. I am Bahamut. There is no second line to this legend. There never needed to be.
Written in Draconic.
Most people never see past the walls of their own town. Fewer still could tell you the name of the world they live in.
An old name, older than any nation or language in it. Scholars, elders and dragons call the world Vaelith. Almost no one else does.
A land ringed and broken by mountains: a great range along the south, snowbound peaks in the northeast, and dense forest to the west. Other continents lie beyond the sea, with stories of their own.
Named for the settler who founded it, and roughly thirteen hundred miles from edge to edge. Order, quest halls, protective wards and rationed safety, for anyone close enough to its center to receive them. To most of its citizens, the Empire simply is the world.
The seat of the Empire, at its center, built in rings within rings. Every road eventually bends toward it. Home to the finest theater in the land, and to the people who decide which towns are worth protecting.
A big walled city three or four weeks' walk northeast of Foresta, with walls three times the height of anything Foresta has. Busy quest halls, busy streets, and a jail that has seen more adventurers than it would like.
Further inland, past Brightwater, and bigger than Foresta. A good place to find work. The place Shii least likes to talk about.
A small town near the Empire's western edge, about a week's walk from the true border. A timber-and-stone wall, a North Gate, a watchtower, a tavern called the Rusted Tankard, and about a thousand people the Empire is quietly thinking of cutting loose. Green adventurers come here to prove themselves. Most of them fail.
Settlements too far from the Empire's heart to be protected or rationed, and too close to its borders to build anything that lasts. Raids are a fact of life out here. This is where Shii is from.
Foresta's neighbors down the trade roads. Brackenfell, two days out, has the iron. Larkhaven, three days past that, used to have horses, until the hobgoblins got to them first.
A crossroads town where six roads meet, halfway between Brightwater and the capital. Everyone passes through. Not everyone passes through quietly.
A vast range shared, warily, by two peoples. Dwarven warrior clans hold the western end, deep in stone halls; the high elves, the noble class of their kind, hold the eastern end. Their peace runs on treaties, not trust.
Wood elves live in the dense forest west of the Empire. Further north, the mining clans of the dwarves live underground, and know every rock by name.
Snowbound mountains that swallow nearly a quarter of the land the Empire could have claimed. Hardly anyone goes there. The old stories say snow elves live in those peaks, and that they remember things the rest of the world has forgotten.
Many races settled inside the Empire centuries ago and their bloodlines have mixed with humans ever since. Their pure-blooded kin still live outside the borders, the old way.
Every adventurer picks a path. A few never quite fit any of them.
The flashiest and most common path, and the easiest to admire. Magicians are sorted by color:
Elemental magic: fire, ice, lightning, earth and wind.
Healing, protection and support. The rare few who reach the very top become Holy mages.
Inherited and bloodline magic, and everything that won't fit elsewhere: elven magic, berserker strength, the power to take a beast's shape.
Rarer, quieter, and badly underrated. A witch's power comes from unlocking what's already hidden in raw natural ingredients, spoken into being with an incantation. No mana to run dry, only knowledge, time and preparation. Most witches swear a recipe has to be exact or it won't work at all. Most witches.
Power that comes from within: inherited, involuntary, tied to will and emotion rather than training. No incantations, no ingredients. Shii suspects she might be one. It's never quite fit, and she's never been able to say why.
Widely written off as the useless class: songs, stories, a pretty voice in a tavern. That reputation is very convenient for bards. A voice that can carry a story can carry a great deal more.
The path no one should walk. Where a dragon's soul turns gently from one life to the next, a Warlock tears souls out and wears what's left like a puppet on a string. There is no creature on Vaelith a dragon loathes more. Dragons rarely speak of the last one. Pride is part of it.
Adventurers are ranked from E to S by the Empire's quest halls. Shii, the self-styled Dragon Princess, is E-rank.
An adventurer who survived a childhood most people wouldn't, then spent twelve years alone outside the Empire's protection, learning everything the hard way. Blunt, quick-tempered, and fond of introducing herself as the Dragon Princess. Her blade is named Clarissa, and it is menacing, not beautiful. Her eyes are brown, until something stirs behind them. She's carrying more inside her than she knows.
Half-orc, half-human, about seven feet tall, and unbothered by nearly everything. A berserker who never loses his temper, as long as Ma, the axe he's never without, stays close. Fiercely loyal, sings better than the bard, and his fishing story gets a little bigger every time he tells it.
Small, quiet and far more dangerous than she looks. Half Duskkin, half Reptilian, with lavender-silver hair and a scientist's curiosity, she's happiest elbow-deep in vials and half-tested ingredients, with offensive alchemy sewn into the lining of her vest. Underestimate her once. You won't get a second time.
A traveling bard who invited himself into the party, and whose reputation walks into a room well before he does: dangerous, storied, best not crossed. Vain about his lute and his lyrics, brave when it counts. Whether any of the legend is actually true is a different question.
A farmhand Shii trained into Foresta's town watch. Quiet, watchful, eager to get it right, and quicker under pressure than anyone expected, herself included. Foresta is going to need her more than it knows.
A white-robed healer Shii found bleeding out in front of a cave, who stayed to look after them all. Cheats at cards without shame, is terrified of climbing trees and climbs them anyway. Shii decided they were sisters. Gretchen never argued.
"Nobody remembers a dragon that never earned a legend."
Book One launches January 2027. Want to read it first? Advance copies go out in December.