The Nagakani are a people of the naga: a mountain culture organized around the heavy-scaled form, a draconic oath of conquest, and a rider's life in the Lyagnadarr peaks. The Nagakani hold the high valleys of the Lyagnadarr peaks, and they are best understood as a people organized around a single form of the blood, not a separate Naga line. The mountain form runs to heavy ridged scale that keeps its wearer warm in thin cold air, and the Nagakani prize it the way other peoples prize noble birth. A child who comes in with that scale is raised to ride and to fight. A child born among them in the lighter lowland form does not ride; it tends the lizards, works the holds, and lives a rank below the kin it grew up beside. Because the blood will not breed to order, the peaks throw plenty of both, and Nagakani recruiters travel the lowland Naga towns buying or claiming heavy-scaled children born to parents who have no use for the form.
At the center of their order sits an old orange dragon, who long ago set them a charge: carry Nagakani dominion outward until it covers the world. They took the charge as holy. The Nagakani build mountain fortresses, push their borders a valley at a time, and carry themselves as the sworn knights of a draconic order with a war to win. The bond between rider and giant lizard is the spine of the whole society. A Nagakani and its matched mount train and hunt and go to war as one animal, and the death of a mount is mourned like a sibling's.
Tombs found in the deserts below the range have hardened the belief. The Nagakani read the old graves as proof that their dominion once ran far past the mountains and is owed back to them, and they hold that when the last campaign comes their dragon lord will leave the peaks and ride down at their head to finish it. Until then they take the world in pieces and wait for the day they are told it is time.
Aspects
- Conquest is our divine mandate
- My mount and I fight as one