Robes of The Dragon's Teeth

The Robes of the Dragon’s Teeth is an organization shrouded in speculation, mystery, and prestige. Dating back to The Great War and the creation of the first dragons on Avlis, the Dragon’s Teeth maintain a tradition of partnership between dragonkind and practitioners of the arcane arts. Throughout the ages, as they have practiced their art of dragon-bonding, they remain one of the most secretive and independent of The Trust’s institutions.

During the late portion of The Great War, the White, Silver and Green Orders assembled a group of dragon experts in a rare inter-order cooperative aimed at stopping the hostilities ravaging the continent. Together they devised rituals to summon goodly metallic dragons and worked to convince them to join the fight in close association with the Fold. Though the metallic dragons summoned by their rituals proved to be able combatants, most of the beasts had little experience with magic outside of self-taught practices. This made communication between the mages and their dragon counterparts difficult in the early years.

In addition, as the first generation of dragons native to Avlis began to hatch, the mages discovered that the magical talent of young dragons rarely developed at the same pace as their physical bodies. Further, the covetous nature of dragons made it difficult for them to focus on the arcane studies necessary for development of a permanent telepathic bond between a mage and a dragon to form a more effective and cohesive fighting unit. Due to these difficulties, there were limited numbers of successfully functional dragon-mage units during the Great War.

Once the enemy side acquired dragons of their own, they began to emulate the practices with the Evil mineral-based dragons, and eventually both sides began to field small squadrons consisting entirely of “bonded” pairs of mages and dragons shortly before the end of the war. While many of these pairs perished in the Orcish Destruction, there were enough survivors that the Fold made a conscious decision to attempt to repopulate the units and preserve the practice. The remaining five orders which had not participated in the Great War were asked to contribute young mages and expertise to reconstituting the numbers of bonded pairs, and this brought about the formal creation of the Robes of the Dragon’s Teeth.

The modern incarnation of the order reformed shortly after the events surrounding the Vortex of Chaos from surviving members of the Robes of the Dragon’s Teeth. Though the organization draws members from all orders of The Trust, its membership remains fairly small and secretive. There is thought to exist between three to four hundred bonded mages and dragons at any one time.

Mages groomed for participation in this order begin training at a young age, usually during their first years of arcane training. Many come into the process through circumstance of birth, as children of existing bonded mages. At the age of twelve, these children visit a hatchery, where a specialized spell determines if the candidate is suited for the eggs currently in maturation. The dragon within the shell will choose its bond mate by changing the color of its shell to the color of the candidate’s order. This process is repeated until all the dragon eggs of that generation find a bond-mate. Once the pairs unite, they train in a specialized curriculum which ends around the time a dragon reaches juvenile age.

Typically dragons raised in the order mature more quickly than feral dragons, reaching young adulthood in as quickly as fifteen to twenty years. This is the result of generations of selective breeding and careful magical grooming by both dragon and mage alike. The lineages of these dragons tend to be somewhat convoluted due to the breeding programs, and most metallic and mineral dragons have some mix of blood in their longer ancestry. In effect, and not as something any dragon would admit, the breeding and pair bonding has created a domesticated series of dragon breeds with expanding differences over the generations compared to their more slowly growing cousins.

Rarely, some feral dragons will bond with a mage, and gain acceptance into the order, and these often go through a far more rigorous testing and training schedule to make up for many years of intricately planned education. The order prizes such dragons as they help introduce fresh blood into the breeding lines.