sentimentality draconified

its rambles #3 except i dont feel like i got good rambles in me rn oh well here we go

Imagine being Icewarden, you just brewed up a hot batch of dragons, shiny and new and ready to serve Your Glory, you address them all, address your mass of fluffy children, and for now, they are your PRIDE, they are your JOY, they are going to do WONDERS, you give them your godly lecture on history and preservation and how to survive in the ice, you release them into the world-

And about a week later they’re all flailing about because they’ve forgotten the entire thing. Half of them don’t even remember who you are. One of them has swallowed eight rocks because they’ve forgotten what a plant is. You realize that somewhere down the line, you fucked up. You think about your brothers and sisters in their other lands, creating their wonderful children who can actually remember how to function in a society.

Tundra Dragon’s memories function in two parts: Traditional memory which is very very short term and an olfactory memory that is extremely long term, possibly even ancestral, but limited to only the vague positive or negative.

So these dragons are both the perfect jurors and the perfect prison guards. 

They can take on multiple trials in rapid succession and be perfectly non biased in those trials because they’re guaranteed to only consider factual evidence presented in the very recent past. Everything else is forgotten. 

They’re amazing guards and trackers who will be able to sniff out anyone who’s ever been in their custody and maybe even those who were in the custody of their ancestors and tell whether they were friend or foe (prisoner) from a considerable distance regardless of any disguises or the time elapsed. 

Furthermore, they’re impervious to pleas and manipulation because the friend/foe metric in their mind predominates all other memories of them and thereby eliminates any susceptibility to anything a captured prisoner may say to try to get away.

tl;dr

Icewarden was very very careful in creating tundras to serve a specific purpose and he did an excellent job. They are less an embarrassing mistake and more a highly specialized force.

i forgot how much i enjoy drawing dragons?? here’s a couple fr commissions from today ~

Ko-Fi | Commissions

would you pet this boy? 

“It - it worked.” Rubric could hardly hold the scroll in his trembling claws. “By the Eleven, it actually worked.” The Archmage was silent for a moment. Then she delicately plucked the eyeglasses from her face, and considered them sombrely before - with a swift motion - snapping them clean in half.

“Then our work here is only beginning.”