The Nagashi are a people of the naga, not a separate biological lineage — the form the dragon-blood throws most often, named for the scale they wear rather than any divergence from naga kind. The Nagashi are the form the dragon-blood throws most often, and so the face the rest of Alaria puts to the word Naga. Their scales come in fine and patterned, sometimes no more than a sheen that surfaces in slanted light and vanishes when they turn. A Nagashi is not a separate line within the Naga; the word names the form, not the family. Two Nagashi parents can raise a black-scaled Megélren or a heavy-scaled child the mountain clans would claim, and a Nagashi can be born to parents who wore neither. The scale is the accident. The blood beneath it is the constant.
Where the Nagashi settle in numbers they build for art and argument. They take up a craft or a question and drive at it well past the point most people would call enough, on the conviction that anything worth doing is worth being consumed by. The same heat that makes them patrons and scholars makes them dangerous to cross. A Nagashi who believes a wrong has been done to kin does not forget it, and does not usually forgive it.
Their transformation runs close to the source: the plain channeling of Nagatayora's fury that carried him through his last fight. The Nagashi treat it as something held in trust rather than wielded at will. To take the dragon's shape for a small cause is, to them, an insult to the ancestor who took it for the largest cause there ever was.
Adron, on the Middle Sea's eastern shore, is the one realm raised as a Naga homeland, and the Nagashi are its ruling people: the banking houses, the shipwrights, the keepers of the old draconic rites that give the kingdom its identity. Elsewhere they spread through port cities, scholarly halls, and merchant guilds in numbers that show a people at ease settling among others without dissolving into them.
Aspects
- Boiling vengeance
- Excellence demands total commitment