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Hemalurgic and Awakened dragons


Ripheus23

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IDK if dragons are supposed to at all look like "usual" dragons, in the Cosmere, but can you imagine a classical dragon that had been Spiked? Do you think that outer-space battle might involve dragons in space? Could you Awaken a statue of a dragon? A metal dragon-statue?

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Assuming things don't change much in the canonical version, Dragons as seen in Dragonsteel Prime do indeed look a lot like traditional European dragons. Four legs, wings, serpentine neck, big teeth. They're also sapient and can shapeshift. He's called them the one standard fantasy race he wanted to include. No word yet on whether dragons don't require an atmosphere to breathe (and thus whether they can 'fly' in space) but we do know they're naturally immortal.

Presumably they're affectable by hemalurgy in both ways, though getting a spike into them (when they're not in human form) is likely to be a bit of a challenge given that they're huge. I wonder how being spiked would work with their shapeshifting and whether their body would adjust around the spike. There's also the question of how the spiritweb would react to different species' sDNA getting spliced together. As for Awakening a metal statue, I suspect that it would work exactly the same as awakening anything metal. In other words, it would require a lot of Breath and for the Awakener to be at the Ninth Heightening since the metal was never 'alive'. Wood would be easier.

That said, Brandon's mentioned that Awakening an actual statue would pretty much be a waste of Breath since statues aren't exactly limber so you'd be spending a lot of Breath to get a result that isn't very good at moving around. Which is why the D'Denir are skeletons encased in stone to resemble statues rather than being actual Awakened statues. We do know that in the hypothetical example of a corpse Soulcast to a statue, the statue would be easier to Awaken both because of a Spiritual connection to something that was once alive and because it's in the exact form of something that was alive. A dragon statue would presumably be similarly easier to Awaken, provided you have whatever perception is necessary to convince the magic that yes, this thing resembles a living creature and so the 'Law of BioChromatic Parallelism' applies. Nalthis has stories of dragons so...

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If dragons are like dragons in D&D or Shadowrun, I can imagine them having as many spikes as humanely... er, as dragonly - possible, since they're pretty hell-bent on acquiring wealth and power wherever and whenever possible. No matter the cost.

That being said, it's also possible that bind points on dragons are:

  1. Hard to get to, behind a thick layer of scales,
  2. Unknown to anyone except preservation since Hemalurgy may not have existed pre-shattering.

On the other hand, if dragons are not generally evil, then I bet that hemalurgically modified dragons would be rare due to the reasons listed above, in addition to the reason that hemalurgy is pretty much the most inhumane magic system out there. With the possible exception of Dakhor rituals, of course.

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