#cecilverse

A 3rd year student in Ignihyde dorm. Despite being an introvert he can often be seen with a group of people from other dorms he met as a kid before developing his more shy tendencies.

Name: Cecil

Dorm: Ignihyde

Grade: 3rd

Birthday: February 28th (Pisces)

Age: 18

Height: 160cm

Dominant Hand: Ambidextrous 

Homeland: N/A

Club: Equestrian Club

Best Subject: Ancient Magic

Hobbies: Gaming

Pet Peeves: Pay to win games

Favourite Food: Potatoes

Least Favourite Food: Capsicum

Tentatively naming this as part 1, since the Cecilverse is still in progress and I’m sure there’s more stuff I might want to talk about later.

Anyway! The Cecilverse is a project in the works by non other than @tyrantisterror who you probably recognize if you’ve been here for any length of time. I’ve talked about his kaiju Tyrantis before, and reblog stuff from him all the time, so definitely go give him a follow. The Cecilverse is part of the same world as Tyrantis, but set in midievil times, with magic, dragons, and the other fantasy staples you’d expect. Tyrantisterror has put a lot of detail into how this world works, with a special amount of detail put into the various magical Serpents.

Serpents refer not just to snakes, but to the entire evolutionary tree that spawned snakes, including their originator, the Komodo dragonesque Ur Serpent. Descended from the Ur Serpent are Dragons, Basilisks, Hoogah, Horned Serpents, Amphisbaena, and several others, all of whom are going to be getting pages on his website Horror Flora. There’s a whole article dedicated to the Serpents already, which I highly recommend checking out.

The ones I’m focusing on right now are the most well known of the Serpents, the Dragon. Dragons in the Cecilverse follow specific rules, such as their wing structure, horns, tail spade, and their alignment with all four Elements. Having them be aligned with all four Elements was a great way of showing why and how Dragons are so wide spread, and the sheer amount of different kinds of Dragons is insane. It is a testament to Tyrantisterror’s love for dragons that he has done so much research and discovered so many different depictions of dragons that can fit snugly together in this world. He also has plenty of dragons from outside of mythology, from references to other media, to concepts submitted directly to him.

The way Tyrantisterror draws dragons is amazing, with the amount of different details he uses helping each individual to stand out. He also has a talent with coloring as well, using vibrant colors to aid each dragon in their individuality. The way he captures what me and other people live about reptiles is incredible, and he does it again and again without fail. This man really understands how reptiles work.

According to all known laws of biology, there is no way a bee and a fish should be able to breed. The bee's "compartment" is too small to allow the fish's "equipment" to fertilize it. This astounding hybrid, of course, exists anyways. Because wizards don’t care about what humans think is impossible.

Name: Apicamp (alternate names: merwasp, sea wasp)

Type: Chimera

Base Creatures: Any type of bee, hornet, or wasp + any type of magical fish, including leviathans(!)

Notes: A bizarre experiment in stretching the limits of animal hybridization, the apicamp was first created completely by accident, when a vial of leviathan blood was accidentally spilled near a nest of hornets. After the workers drank up the blood and fed it to their babies, some of these larvae began undergoing a bizarre transformation as they grew into adults, developing more fin-like wings, and more importantly, a long abdomen with translucent fins resembling the tail of a fish. These strange hybrids were largely ignored and seemingly vanished without a trace, until a hive-like structure made of mud was discovered in a nearby lake a few months later. These water-dwelling “sea wasps” turned out to be even more aggressive than regular hornets, not to mention a good deal larger, swarming and killing a fair number of monster slayers before their hive was finally destroyed by a squadron of knights with sting-impervious armor.

The word was out, however - after it was discovered that feeding the blood of any magically attuned fish to the colony of any species of bee or wasp would result in this weird combination, a number of enterprising wizards tried to create sea bees/wasps of their own, letting them establish hives in their castle moats to try and deter intruders. Bee-based apicamps were the most successful of these attempts, being relatively more docile - like mundane bees, their barbed stingers lodged in anything they impaled, forcing them to pull out part of their abdomens to escape and die later, so their stings were only used as a last resort. Wasp-based apicamps, of course, were a disaster in physical form, being able to sting repeatedly and unable to distinguish friend from foe. Sea wasps were thus phased out in favor of sea bees, which even became heraldic emblems in a few places.

Apicamps are able to swim like fish and fly like bees, but aren’t good at walking. They’re thus limited to areas near or in water like swamps, rivers, and coastlines. Without flowers or nectar, they can’t and don’t produce honey, and prefer to feed on plant juices and carrion residue instead, but their regurgitant is often touted as a useful potion enhancer. The venom of an apicamp, being magically enhanced, leaves an agonizing sensation for up to a week after being stung, and multiple apicamp stings in succession can lead to paralysis which can rarely be fatal; not only is it more beneficial for certain potions of harming than mundane bee venom, but being larger, apicamps naturally produce more per sting and can be brought under control more easily.

While apicamps can be encountered either above or below the water, their queens have to remain underwater at all times to spawn, typically within the confines of the hive. It is thus unknown how large they can grow, though given the immense size of leviathans in general, a fully-grown apicamp queen would be a terrifying sight indeed.

@tyrantisterror - Since two other people submitted Cecilverse concepts I might as well. The Sea-bee is a heraldic emblem listed on Wikipedia, but the article is a stub and only has one source that I can’t access online, and Google turns up some kinda Navy mascot or something. Um. ._.’

Happy birthday @tyrantisterror

Something that can be both frustrating and intriguing when studying dragons is how the term can be applied both in and out of universe when it comes to fiction. A popular example of this would be Godzilla. Godzilla exists, within his own universe, as some sort of dinosaur or retrosaur creature, but he is never classified as a dragon. However, if one were to look at Godzilla, and the traits and tropes he embodies, they would find little reason to not classify him as a dragon outside of his world. And this is something that can be seen multiple times. Something which is not, due to in universe rules, a dragon can still fit the archetype, making it a dragon, yet also not. Schrodinger's Dragon, if you will.

Today, I would like to examine the works of Tyrantisterror, and see what sort of Schrodinger's Dragons he brings to the table.

I won't be looking at his Retrosaurs of ATOM, though they would be a great place to start. Like Godzilla, many of them fill the tropes required of dragons while still being distinct. However, today I would like to take a look at his Serpents.

In Cecilverse, Serpents are the group of creatures, evolved from Varanids, which include Dragons, Hoogahs, Basilisks, Snakes of both the magic and mundane varieties, and some other fantastical reptiles. Though they are all related to dragons, since dragons are classified among their ranks, they themselves are not dragons.

You see, in Cecilverse dragon has a very specific definition. Only Serpents on a specific branch of their family tree can be classified as such. Dragons include Drakes, both Lesser and Greater, Wyrms, Loong, Wyverns, and some others. They have key defining features, including but not limited to an affinity towards all four kinds of magic, beaked snouts, horns, and specific ear and wing types. Anything not within this branch of the Serpent tree cannot and is not classified as a dragon in universe.

But as I mentioned, there are related creatures which, when looked at with an outsider's POV, have little reason not to be considered dragons in the archetypal sense.

The first would be the Hoogahs, which is also the closest kin to Tyrantisterror's dragons. Created by a young TT, who was frustrated with how dragons in media and myth were almost unanimously evil, Hoogahs are the good, or at least more sociable, answer to Cevilverse's more stand offish dragons. There are both flightless and flighted varieties, and they have the ability to turn themselves to stone.

While not classified as dragons within the confines of the universe, to a outside observer they would appear to be rather obviously dragons. They are large, magical reptiles, with unique and clearly fantastical features which sets them apart. And they are, both in and out of universe, closely linked with dragons. They share a fairly close ancestor on the Serpent Tree, and their meta origin was an attempt to subvert the more popular, and less pleasant, dragon tropes.

Other Serpents in Cecilverse have more mythical origins, and here is where Schrodinger's Dragon truly comes into play. In Cecilverse creatures such as the Basilisk, Cockatrice, and Amphisbaena are all related to, yet distinct from, the dragons they share their world with. Yet when one looks at the creatures in mythology, it can become fuzzier as to whether or not they are dragons. Some people have a more narrow view, and would not consider them dragons. Others have a wider view, and would view them as dragons. Some would have a viewpoint that is more fluctuating, perhaps seeing one variant on the Amphisbaena as a snake while another would be a dragon. The term Dragon itself has such a flexible definition, being more a word to describe a collection of possible traits rather than a concrete creature, that it can be tricky figuring out which serpent deserves it and which doesn't.

Which brings us nicely to the final Schrodinger's Dragons I would like to discuss in Cevilverse, ones which aren't Serpents at all.

Leviathans are a group of fish where many members have evolved elongated, serpentine bodies, and draconic heads. These are one of the many sea serpent varieties, yet it would be hard for them to be further from dragons in terms of taxonomy.

Originally Leviathans were dragons, yet due to the harassment of others TT was forced to change them into fish. This is not uncommon in fiction. Despite the earliest dragons being water dwelling serpents, Sea Serpents are some of the most common Schrodinger's Dragons in media. They are draconic enough to fit the archetype, yet are so different from the modern perception of dragons that they are rarely classified as such by their creators.

Birthday: 2/28

Affiliation: Frostmoon Scions

Moonwheel: Hydro

Constellation: Lunam Stellam