Chavux is a green dragon who lairs among the northern islands of the Blades and preys on the shipping that threads the strait beneath them. He is cruel in the ordinary way of green dragons, and poison is the whole of his craft: a breath that fouls the air over a deck and a bite that festers in whatever it does not kill outright. He is not large as dragons go, not yet. But he is old enough to have stopped fearing anything, and young enough to still find the work amusing, and the two together make him worse year on year.
Like every dragon of the present world he traces to Nagayeshi, the hatch-ground at the eye of Oblivion, and like the rest of his kind he left it grown and went out into Alaria to do as he pleased. He came to Adron's waters in the Return of Dragons, the long re-emergence that carried wild dragons back across the sea after an age in which their kind had dwindled to almost nothing. Most of the returnees wandered on. Chavux found the Blades and the strait beneath them, found that the ships came through whether he troubled them or not, and stayed.
The strait
The channel below the Blades is the southwest approach to Greyport and the shipyards of Shipmarsh, and Chavux has made it his table. He does not hold the islands as a territory to rule, and he demands no tribute. He simply takes what passes when the mood is on him. A hull he wants is a hull he poisons and picks apart at his leisure; one he does not want he lets through, for reasons that are his own and probably amount to nothing. The raids come more often than they used to. The merchants read that as appetite. It is closer to boredom.
Untouchable
No Naga in Adron will kill a dragon. The kingdom holds all dragonkind in trust to Nagatayora, the dragon-father whose blood every Naga carries, and the trust cuts both ways: it won Adron its bonded war-dragons in the age of the Wyrmward, and it forbids a Naga hand against even a wild beast like Chavux, who was never bonded and is wanted by no one. So Adron suffers him, exactly as it suffered the loss of the dragons it loved. That leaves the question of what else Adron might do, and the answers all run out before they arrive anywhere.
If anyone has a claim on him, it is Eyatora, the dragon-father's eldest living child, who keeps the hatch-ground and raises every clutch the island's fire brings up. If every dragon of the present world began on Nagayeshi, as the Naga hold, then Chavux began there too, and Eyatora reared him before he ever saw the open sea. None of which gives her a lever. A grown dragon is no one's to command, not even hers; she blesses bonds and judges riders, she does not order dragons about, and she owes Adron nothing in any case. Whether she would so much as hear a petition over one of her own, no one in Adron can say, because no Nagashi has crossed Oblivion to ask her anything since the Severing cut the last of the bonds. The road to the one being who might move Chavux runs through a storm Adron no longer sails.
And the trust binds the Naga, not the world. The merchant houses of Greyport and Shipmarsh are bound by Adron's law and by their own ledgers, but not by a blood-debt to a dead god, and they would pay a great deal to see the dragon quietly killed by hands that are not Naga. A foreign sellsword under no such prohibition could in principle do what no subject of Adron will. What no one has tested is what the kingdom would do afterward: whether the trust asks only that a Naga keep his own hands clean, or whether it asks Adron to avenge a dragon killed in its strait by anyone at all. The houses that would hire the blade do not know the answer. Neither does the throne. That uncertainty is the only thing that has kept the strait's problem unsolved this long.
Hooks
- The purse. The merchant houses of Greyport and Shipmarsh have pooled a standing bounty for outsiders willing to kill Chavux. Collecting it means surviving the dragon and then learning, the hard way, what Adron does to a dragon-slayer in its own water.
- The petition. Someone proposes crossing Oblivion to ask Eyatora to call off one of her own. Reaching her through the storm is a Naga's problem; persuading a dragon who owes Adron nothing is everyone's.
- The appetite. The raids are escalating. A green dragon old enough to stop being amused is a green dragon casting about for larger game, and the Shipmarsh yards sit a short flight up the coast.
Game mechanics
Run Chavux on the Dragons statblock, one size below the baseline; he is not yet full-grown. His breath is poison rather than fire or acid: a cloud that settles over a ship's deck and keeps doing damage for several rounds instead of a single blast, and it does not disperse on its own in still air. A bite that does not kill leaves a festering wound (recurring poison damage until treated).