For most of the early Seventh Dawn, Adron fought from the air. Its Nagashi bonded war-dragons and rode them, and the practice ran long enough and mattered enough that the rest of the Middle Sea stopped naming the kingdom's dynasties and named the whole age instead. They called it the Wyrmward, after the riders who warded the realm from dragon-back. Adron has never argued with the name.
The bond was not a saddle and a broken beast. A rider and a dragon were joined down to the soul, each carrying a thread of the other, and the join could not be faked or forced. The Nagashi did not call this mastery. They held it as the dragon-father's old trust made literal, Nagatayora's blood reaching back across the ages toward the kind it came from. A dragon was never beaten into the bond. It consented or there was no bond, and to kill one was the gravest thing a Naga could do, a line Adron holds without exception to this day.
Where a rider met the dragon that would carry him was never in Adron at all. The bond was made at Nagayeshi, the hatch-ground hidden at the eye of Oblivion, and it was Eyatora, the dragon-father's eldest living child, who judged each pairing, blessed it or refused it, and sent the unchosen home through the storm with nothing.
A wing of the Wyrmward over the Drakespine at first light. Eleven dragons in a loose stagger, riders flat against the neck-ridges, the lead beast's shadow running down the snow of the eastern face faster than any horse could cross it. The watchtowers below kept no garrison. They did not need one. The sky was the garrison.
At its height the Wyrmward made Adron the strongest power on the eastern Middle Sea. Riders patrolled the length of the Drakespine, the mountains that still carry their name, and no fleet crossed into Adron's waters without leave. The riders were the kingdom's ruling caste, and the houses that bank and broker and mine red gold today are the diluted descendants of that caste, trading on a memory of what their line once was. The age ended at the Severing, when the bonds were cut. What rose in the space the riders left is the kingdom Adron is now.