Naga

The Naga descend from Nagatayora, the dragon-father who fell in the war against the titan Hykravones, the Shattering, the same war that took the lion-father Shara Bolasi and the wolf-mother Ulvma. He did not fall cleanly. When his body broke open above the field, his blood came down still burning, and the mortals it struck did not burn with it. They changed. Scales rose through their skin, their eyes took on a reptile's set, and a measure of the dragon-father's temper lodged in them and stayed. What fell on the parents passed to the children, and to theirs after them. Every Naga alive carries it.

That blood does not breed true, and this is the fact outsiders most often miss. The Naga are not three peoples. They are one bloodline that comes out in three forms, and which form a child takes is no one's to choose, not even the parents'. A house of common scale can bear a child whose scales come in black. A line that has bred for the heavy mountain form across ten generations can still throw a child marked with nothing but the faint lowland patterning. The blood decides for itself.

Three forms keep returning. Most Naga are Nagashi, their scales fine and patterned and easy to miss in plain light; this is the kind the rest of Alaria has met, and the ruling people of the Naga homeland at Adron. The Nagakani carry a heavier ridged scale that holds against cold and thin mountain air, and a culture in the Lyagnadarr peaks has built itself around that form and ranks it above the others. The third form is the one no household says aloud before it must. A Megélren is born with scale of obsidian black that takes in light and gives none back, and when one appears in a line the Naga read it as the old betrayal surfacing again. What that costs the child, and the house that bore it, belongs to the Megélren's own account.

Whatever scale a Naga wears, the inheritance underneath is the same. Any of them can call up a measure of Nagatayora's shape, scales spreading and the head turning draconic, and any of them carries the dragon-father's pride and his long memory for a wrong. The Naga hold this not as a tool but as a trust. It is the one thing the three forms never argue about.

Vitals

• Size: Medium
• Height: 5.5-6.5 feet
• Weight: 120-200 pounds
• Max Age: 160 years

Aspects

• Iron determination
• Pride runs deeper than blood

Heritages

• Nagakani (Scale Riders) — A Lyagnadarr mountain culture built around the heavy-scaled form, sworn to an old orange dragon's crusade and mounted on giant lizards. See Nagakani.
• Nagashi (Dragonheart) — The common form, found across Alaria; artists, scholars, and the ruling people of Adron, who hold the dragon's transformation a sacred trust. See Nagashi.
• Megélren (Shadow Naga) — The obsidian-scaled form that surfaces unbidden in any Naga line; read as the traitor's blood returning, and pushed into exile and the killing trades. See Megélren.