Bronze Wing: Dragonriders of Dhaz [Archive] - Giant in the Playground Forums

Palanan

2021-09-29, 09:52 PM

Why?

Why should the noblest of all flying creatures, the epitome of power and grace and cunning, suffer an upright ape to straddle and cling to the sleek and lordly neck, to babble coarse words through fleshy lips in between bouts of frantic screaming?

Why indeed—for even the noblest of fliers must allow that lesser beings do, on rarest occasion, have some echo of inherent value and even tattered scraps of insight to share.

For, despite their painfully small stature and transitory lives—to say nothing of their reedy fragility and rather stunted intellects—humans and kindred races do have a wealth of experience in combat of every kind, from isolated duels that pit soul against soul to the roaring clash of massive armies, surging together like opposing tides.

And in the great crucible of thousands of years of such conflicts, the dross of petty ambition is burned away to reveal the pure essence of combat—and humans, so blithe and oblivious to so much of the world, are ferociously attentive to the lessons of war, and they record and distill and apply those lessons with a diligence which is almost admirable.

Almost—and never more so when those lessons can be applied to the curious combination of lordly dragon and babbling ape. The virtues of dragonkind are self-evident, and far too numerous to enumerate here; but it shows only a nobility of spirit to acknowledge an elevating truth, that dragons have never refined the art and science of warfare as a rational pursuit unto itself, whereas it often seems that humans and their kin have done little else.

And some rare few of them, schooled in theory of war and experienced in its practice, have the knack of applying these lessons in ways that exceed all (admittedly modest) expectations, even unto the lordly fliers themselves. The babble-apes may be foolish, frail, and temptingly ready to bake in their flimsy armor; but they have a dim sort of gift for spotting weaknesses, anticipating strikes, devising strategy and counters in an instant—and their limited language of necessity obliges them to pare down their words to the barest essence, accidentally ideal for the breathless whirl of combat.

And so against all sense and probability, a dragon bearing a babble-ape may in fact be more effective in combat than one without—a fact which may seem somewhat distasteful, even nettlesome to one’s pride; but even the greatest of soaring-lords should not be too high to acknowledge the clever tricks of trained primates.

After a certain age, of course, the benefits fail to match the advantages of flying as a pure emanation of the deepmost spirit of dragonkind; the swirl and slash, lunge and dive of aerial combat is perforce a game for the young. But for one of proper age, the babble-apes offer a wafer-thin but undeniable advantage—and their belief in an equal partnership in service to some greater cause is charmingly naïve, and often quite adorable in small doses.

— preamble to an essay on the theory of human-dragon combat tactics, by one of the Eight Celestial Guardians; the main text is sequestered in the third ironbound vault of the Library of the Royal Guard of the Dhazanate.