Section I

The Accords

Eight hundred years ago the great wyrms fought a war that cracked a continent. The survivors met at the Emberwright Forge and beat the terms of peace into a ring of iron plates, one per signatory. Each plate carries a bloodline. It cools when the last of that line dies, and cracks when the line breaks terms.

I.1 · The original clauses

I. No dragon may kill another dragon.

Every other clause and eight centuries of case law hang off this one. All conflict between dragons must therefore run through intermediaries, which is why adventurers exist as a recognized profession.

II. No dragon may hold land it cannot personally overfly in a day.

A hard cap on empire, forcing vassalage, client states and tributary arrangements in place of annexation. No Wright can grow its way to dominance.

III. The Forge is neutral ground.

Every realm keeps an embassy there. No signatory may take true form inside the walls. It is the closest thing the world has to a capital.

I.2 · The Second Beating

Two hundred years ago a supplementary clause was hammered onto the plates. It followed a war in which two Wrights spent eleven years personally burning each other’s realms and both emerged ruling ash. The lesson taken was economic. A Wright’s power is its realm, meaning granaries, bloodlines, tribute and tax base, and taking the field is the fastest known way to lose all of it.

A signatory who takes wing in war forfeits the protection of the Accords for the duration.

The clause withdraws coverage. The instant a Wright is airborne over a battlefield every other dragon may legally kill it without forfeiting anything itself.

This is the correct shape for a deterrent, in that nothing enforces it. It also scales with holdings, which is why the great Wrights are the most cautious rulers alive and the landless ones the most dangerous.

I.3 · Enforcement

The Forge has no army and has never needed one. Three cracked plates hang in the ring, dating from the first century after signing. No court sat on any of them. The other signatories acted together, and the accounts agree they were glad of the excuse.

Restraint rests on the expectation that a house which breaks terms and fails to correct itself will be destroyed within a season of its plate finishing the crack.

The question nobody at the Forge will put in writing is what happens if a plate cracks and nobody comes.

I.4 · The loopholes

The seams were found early and have been worked ever since. A Wright going to war retains a plate-reader the way a modern state retains counsel, and pays accordingly.

Indirect killing: A dragon may not kill a dragon. May it collapse a mountain a dragon happens to be under? The Forge has ruled eleven times and contradicted itself at least four.
Duels of Restraint: Formalized non-lethal combat, witnessed, usually in humanoid form and with weapons rather than breath; the loser concedes a claim. They settle a real share of border disputes, being the only circumstance in which two dragons may legally strike one another. Ancient Wrights display the scars.
The unsigned: Setting a True dragon on a rival is the gravest accusation one Wright can make against another and nearly impossible to prove. Setting an Unbound one is the same accusation and easier to arrange, because an Unbound dragon can be offered a contract and a True dragon cannot.
Attribution, not method: Method is immaterial under Clause I. Poison, a knife in a hosting-hall and thirty years of occult work arranging for an heir to go mad are the same offence, and in each case the only contested question is attribution.

I.5 · How wars are fought

Two dragon realms at war deploy no dragons. The wars that result are long.

Mortal armies matter: Unsuppressed military development has given the realms professional officer corps, proper siege trains and standing legions, and mortal generals with continental reputations. A famous general is a strategic asset, and is guarded and targeted as one.
Cities are built for it: Siege-cellars, dispersal plans and dispersed granaries, inherited from the era when dragons did fly. The measures never repelled a wyrm; they raised the cost of a visit enough to deter one, and they are still maintained at public expense.
Nothing forces a decision: The only assets that could end a war quickly are the two forbidden from being used. Wars are therefore decided by siege, attrition and sustained pressure on a rival’s tax base, with most of the work done by people the Accords do not cover.