#Beast

Artwork by Dean Spencer

Drakōpyryks¶

These great lizards of the north are often called Drakōpyryks in the common Ārdmerian tongue, though this is itself a borrowing from the older Drakōpyran, in whose language the creatures were never named at all. The name used among peoples who traded with the Drakōpyran folk and needed to refer to them in their absence was Huescaranza, a word whose precise etymology is now unclear but which appears in at least six pre-Purge languages with some variant of the same meaning: the ones who made the sky their floor.

The land Drakōpyryks are gone. The last confirmed land sighting was the death of the Draconic Matriarch Njora in 919 UA, the third year of the campaign that would come to be known as The Drakōpyryk Purge. By 920 UA, the land variants were considered extinct. What remains are ruins in the Eldeann Mountains, stories carried by the few Drakōpyran peoples who traced their lineage from them, and the deep-water variants that still move through the lightless trenches of The Sea of Elmterrel.

The Land Form¶

No living observer has seen a land Drakōpyryk, and accounts from before the Purge are unreliable. Pre-Purge illustration work from Esreahan archives, measurements inferred from the spaces they left behind, and the physical evidence of the Eldeann Mountains themselves are all that remain to attest to them.

What can be gleaned is that land Drakōpyryks were enormous, with larger specimens apparently achieving sizes at which flight became impractical. The mountains' folklore holds that some of the range's most striking peaks are not geological formations at all but the petrified remains of Drakōpyryks who grew too large for the sky and simply lay down against the ridgeline, calcifying over millennia into the landscape itself. This is either a beautiful myth or a straightforward geological explanation, and the scholars who have tried to resolve which have never reached a consensus.

These Drakōpyryks came in varieties corresponding roughly to elemental temperament: fire, stone, ice; each occupying a different band of the mountain range. The fire variants occupied the volcanic central ridgelines; the stone variants the southern reaches; the ice variants the northern glacier peaks. Their relationship with Magnithōran peoples, who shared these environments, appears to have been one of mutual recognition rather than conflict.

The Sea Form¶

The water variants, sometimes called Sea Huescaranzas, are still present in the deep trenches of The Sea of Elmterrel, where the Myran peoples have maintained uneasy coexistence with them since before recorded history. They share the same basic form: long, scaled, vast, but are adapted to pressure and cold rather than heat and altitude; and as such lack wings. The luminescence reported by Myran deep-divers suggests a bioluminescent quality absent in the land variants.

No serious census of the sea variants exists. The Myran consider detailed inquiry into their numbers and behavior beyond dangerous. What is known is that they persist, that they are larger than anything else in Elmterrel. The sea above their trenches is left alone by every seafaring culture with enough experience to know better.

The Purge¶

The Drakōpyryk Purge began in 917 UA as a coordinated campaign attributed in most historical accounts to REDACTED, though the precise mechanism by which a single actor orchestrated the extinction of a species has never been satisfactorily documented, and the Queen herself has never been concretely proven to have existed.

What is notable here is the aftermath. The extinction of the land Drakōpyryks was followed within a generation by the effective extinction of the Drakōpyran peoples, who did not survive the disruption of the relationship that had organized their society. The last Drakōpyran communities are recorded as having dispersed by 942 UA.

Cultural Legacy¶

In several northern and central Ilhdeinian traditions, the Drakōpyryks are treated not as extinct animals but as ancestral presences still there in the mountains. Rīōnne's clergy note that the wind patterns over the Eldeann are unlike those anywhere else in the continent and have referred to them, without entirely committing to an explanation, as "occupied." Whether this is theology, meteorology, or superstition is left as an exercise for the traveler.

The Magnithōran peoples, who shared the Eldeann with the Drakōpyryks for longer than recorded history can trace, have a custom of pausing at a mountain pass and speaking aloud the name of whoever lived there before entering. The name spoken is often not a Magnithōran one...