Dragonshards

Before the gods knew fear, the Titan tried to end everything at once.
  He did not march. He did not conquer city by city. He reached outward in a single, catastrophic surge, a wave of raw annihilation meant to scour the world clean in one breath. It was not war. It was erasure.
  That act revealed him.
  The gods, who had been unaware of his existence, felt the wound forming across creation. And in that moment, Eanna answered. Her power did not cancel the Titan’s strike. It transformed it.
  The raw, destructive force meant to kill the world was given living shape. Where apocalypse would have spread as formless ruin, it instead took wing. Fire grew scales. Cataclysm grew bone and breath.
  Thus were dragons born.
  Dragons are not merely large beasts. They are chaos given anatomy. They are the memory of an extinction event interrupted. The eldest among them have learned restraint, shaping will from fury. But beneath even the wisest dragon’s discipline, the storm still coils.
  The Dragonshards came later.
  Some of those first dragons were unstable, bodies fractured by the Titan’s violence, minds splintered by too much power too quickly. They did not die cleanly. They broke. Their forms shed fragments of living chaos tempered by Eanna’s life-force.
  Those fragments endured and they became the Dragonshards.
 

Living Fracture

Dragonshards are not merely diminished dragons. They are fragments of chaos too great to be contained in one being.
  Where dragons are towering expressions of chaos, Dragonshards are splinters, smaller, more focused, more survivable. They stand between four and five feet tall, winged and unmistakably draconic in silhouette. Horns sweep from narrow skulls. Scales gleam in chromatic variation. Wings stretch wide enough for true flight, though not with the dominating power of their progenitors.
  They carry chaos in their marrow, but it does not consume them. Most of the time.
  Their scales often show subtle fissures, glowing lines, crystal growths, irregular patterns that hint at once-greater forms. Their eyes burn with intensity disproportionate to their size.
  They are beautiful in a dangerous way.
 

The Clutch and the Storm

Dragonshards now reproduce independently. They lay clutches of thick-shelled eggs, often warmed by carefully controlled flame or geothermal heat. Though no longer born from broken dragons, each hatchling carries the echo of that first catastrophic transformation.
  Clutches are communal. Dragonshards value collective cleverness over personal dominance. They learned early that solitary chaos dies quickly.
  Most clans are matriarchal. The Shardmother is not always the largest, but the one whose inner storm is best mastered. She reads omens in crystalline fractures, interprets shifts in chaotic resonance, and guides the clutch away from destabilizing impulses.
  They do not worship the Titan, nor do they worship dragons. A few worship the gods of men and elves but even that is rare.
 

Drawn to Chaos

Dragonshards are less destructive than dragons, but the pull remains. They are drawn to unstable magic, to ruins heavy with lingering force, to conflict on the edge of eruption.
  Some become raiders. Some become scholars of broken relics. Some attach themselves to primal dragons, feeling in their presence a near-overwhelming resonance, a reminder of what they once almost were.
  The oldest dragons view them with varied reactions: irritation, curiosity, distant kinship. Dragonshards feel the call more strongly than dragons admit.
 

Playing a Dragonshard

They are not mindless agents of destruction. Eanna’s intervention gave them autonomy. They can choose.
  They are communal but ambitious, clever but cautious of awakening what sleeps within. They may adventure to:

Secure resources for their clutch

Serve or study a primal dragon

Seek relics resonant with their shard

Prevent signs of Titan stirring

  They are not comic relief. They are embers of a failed cataclysm. And in numbers, embers become wildfire.
 

The Dragonshard Lineages

Fragments of Fallen Fire
 

Voidfract – Shadow-Born

Voidfracts are slender even by Dragonshard standards. Their scales absorb light rather than reflect it. Deep obsidian, starless violet, void-blue.
  Their wings are thin and wide, membranes nearly translucent black. When folded, they wrap around their bodies like cloaks. Their horns curve backward tightly against the skull. Their eyes glow faintly silver or pale blue in darkness.
  Small shard-crystals sometimes grow along their forearms, matte rather than gleaming.
  They move quietly. Even their wingbeats seem muted.
  They look like pieces of night given claws.
 

Flamecrack – Ember-Blooded

Flamecracks are broad-chested for their size. Their scales range from deep crimson to copper-bronze, often veined with faint glowing fissures like cooling magma.
  Their wings are shorter but powerful, membranes tinted orange or gold. In low light, embers seem to flicker beneath their scales. Their horns are thicker and sweep outward dramatically. Their eyes burn amber or molten gold.
  Heat radiates subtly from them when angered. Smoke sometimes curls from nostrils during exertion.
  They look as if they were broken off from a dragon mid-roar.
 

Ruinshard – Crystal-Echoed

Ruinshards carry visible shard-growths more than others. Small crystalline protrusions along brow, shoulders, or spine. Colors lean toward muted stone: ash-grey, pale teal, sand-gold.
  Their scales are smoother, less serrated. Their eyes are bright and alert.
  Their wings are angular, membranes faintly iridescent.
  They often carry tools and relics woven into belts and harnesses. Their posture is curious rather than aggressive.
  They look like something that climbed out of a shattered relic and decided to keep studying it.
 

Mistwarp – Fractured Light

Mistwarps are visually striking.
  Their scales shimmer like oil on water, blues shifting to greens, silvers melting into violet. Light fractures across their bodies unnaturally. Their wings are broad and thin, almost gossamer. When they move quickly, afterimages seem to linger.
  Their horns are slender and elegantly curved. Their eyes are bright, often mismatched in color.
  Shard-growths on Mistwarps are glasslike and clear, refracting light in strange ways.
  They look less like broken dragon pieces and more like distorted reflections of something whole.
  When a Mistwarp laughs, it sounds like chimes struck underwater.