The Wrights and the True
Enforced restraint has produced an aristocracy that rarely has occasion to behave like one of predators. Ruling Wrights are in humanoid form almost permanently, out of habit rather than concealment, and the second shape is where the work happens: audiences, ledgers, marriages and succession disputes.
Their instruments are patronage, debt, grain and information. The true form is seldom shown outside a Duel of Restraint, and a whole generation of ambassadors has never seen one.
III.1 · The True dragons
They never signed. A True dragon may kill a Wright freely and suffer nothing but the consequences of having done it, and every negotiation the Forge conducts with the Reach proceeds from that.
The Wrights call them unfinished. The True call the Wrights , and neither term is meant figuratively. The True hold that Change Shape is a wound: a wyrm taking a second form trades away a portion of its draconic essence for a mask, and the Wrights decline to acknowledge the trade. The Kinsworn are the exhibit they raise at every opportunity.
When a True dragon comes down out of the Reach, no Wright will fly up to meet it, because the moment they do their neighbours are free. A True dragon attack is therefore answered by mortals. Some of the True have worked out that the Accords are a suicide pact the Wrights signed with themselves.
III.2 · Where does the line run
A Wright can wear any humanoid shape it likes. In practice it has exactly one, worn for centuries, struck on the coinage and known on sight by every subject it has. So the shape is a declaration, and what it declares is the answer below.
- The Undivided
- The line runs between dragon and mortal. The shape is an instrument, no more binding than the chain of office that comes with it, and an Undivided Wright reckons its peers to be the other wyrms. To them Clause I is close to fraternity. The name was chosen as a reply to the halved, and the reply is that a second shape divides the body and not the loyalty.
- The Kinsworn
- The line runs between peoples, and they stand on their own people’s side of it. A dwarven Wright is a dwarf who is also the oldest and largest member of the clan, enrolled in its genealogies and bound by its law. Ask it to choose between the hold and the draconic order and it chooses the hold, and does not experience the question as difficult.
The Undivided call them worn-through; the Kinsworn call the Undivided tenants, quartered on a people and drawing rent. Neither term is used to a dragon’s face at the Forge, and both are used constantly one room over.
III.3 · The ancestral map
| Ancestry | Position | Why it settled that way |
|---|---|---|
| Dwarves | Kinsworn | A dwarven realm is a clan before it is a state, and clan law has no vocabulary for an owner, only for an elder, so a Wright seated in a hold is enrolled as its eldest member and inherits the obligations that go with the title. |
| Humans | Undivided | Forty generations turn over inside a single reign, which leaves no continuous body of kin for a Wright to be enrolled into, and the human courts are the richest tax base on the continent. Human shape is the working default at the Forge for the same reason. |
| Elves | Neither | Because they remember the same centuries their Wright does, neither kinship nor subjection describes the arrangement, and elven realms have refused both positions in writing at four successive congresses. |
| Kobolds | Undivided, from below | The one place the hierarchy is insisted on by the ruled rather than the ruler: a kobold Wright that claimed kinship would be understood by its own subjects to be committing blasphemy. |
| Gnomes, goblins, orcs | Contested | Small holdings and thin borders, mostly under primal wyrms, and no settled answer: the question has been reopened by force nine times in two centuries. |
| Halflings | No Wright at all | The largest ancestry with no dragon of its own, living inside realms held by other people’s. They hold no plate and are represented at the Forge only by whoever currently employs them. |
III.4 · What it does to the Accords
Clause I assumed draconic solidarity, and the punitive flight assumes dragons will side with dragons. A Kinsworn Wright will not join a flight against a dragon that has done its people no harm, and will join one against a dragon that has, treaty or no treaty. Their compliance is coincidental rather than principled, and it has happened to align for two hundred years. How many would answer a summons has never been tested.
The ring is cruellest to the Kinsworn. A roster is kept by marrying other plated houses, there are not many, and almost none are dwarven, so a Kinsworn hold must repeatedly bring in a dragon raised Undivided who then sits at the clan table with a claim under clan law. They make the match anyway, because the alternative is a cold plate.
Clause II was written for a surface. A dwarven realm goes down, and overflight measures a footprint, a hold’s footprint being a gate in a mountainside. Dwarven Wrights are systematically wealthier and more populous than the clause was meant to permit, the case law is voluminous and contradictory, and pressing the point gets you a dwarven ambassador politely asking you to define land.