In normal years, weird magic sustains the food belt of Dragon Pass. Strange hybrid beasts, like sheep and cows but with odd reptilian features, browse the pastures of Dragon Pass, fattening themselves on quick-growing weeds and grasses.
Massive plough oxen drive deep furrows into the fi elds. New grains, such as vell and kreet, sprout tenaciously, grow speedily and, once milled, bake up into fat, bulging loaves. Their seeds dissolve into slime when taken across the Empire’s boundaries.
At the moment, though, the region trembles in the grip of an unending winter. Herd animals die of starvation. Hard caps of icy snow cover the fi elds. Ordinary people wait hungrily for their wyrmfriend priests to pull a mystical solution from the air – yet no relief comes.
Unlike the quickly-constructed dragon cities of Ormsgone, the original wyrmish cities of Dragon Pass generate themselves through a combination of ordinary building techniques and mystical self-propagation. They become living things, apparently empowered by the dragon Sh’hakarzeel that was turned into rock and became a dead thing. Boundaries between categories blur. What one moment may seem to be a verbal abstraction can the next prove itself to be a physical manifestation, like a wall, pool or plaza.
The magically unaware fi nd navigation of draconic cities confusing at best and literally maddening at worst. Their thresholds abound with drooling beggars, once sages and warriors of foreign lands, who arrogantly tried to wend their way into them without the necessary adjustment of psychic viewpoint. Those schooled in the wyrmfriend way, or at least accustomed to devoting their worship energy to the Great Dragon Project, can make their way through their winding streets easily enough. However, even they must accept their cities’ tendency to shift boundaries and move about, as if in response to esoteric fl uctuations from the higher realms. Their residents move about not by remembering spatial relationships between landmarks and destinations but by feeling the city’s present state of meditative attunement.
Each city possesses two names, a draconic name which is diffi cult to render into normal, one-tongued speech and a name in the local Orlanthi language which is easier to pronounce.
The largest city, where newcomers and foreigners are sent, is Orin Jistrel, City of the Mouth. Its education centres welcome new cultists. Each missionary organisation staffs is own centres and see to it that their converts go to the right processing station. Although such jostling is unseemly and metaphysically damaging, certain rival groups nonetheless attempt to poach one another’s converts. Diplomats and traders who do not at present intend to convert to the wyrmfriend path are diverted to orientation stations, where they are provided with prayer beads and protective aphorisms allowing them to move, with experienced guidance, between authorised points in the various cities. Once they have achieved orientation, converts and outsiders alike are directed to their ultimate destinations, whatever these may be. The city’s draconic name is Darmislangastrofey, or ‘Great Hidden Soul of Knowable Dragons’. Lesser cities include:
X Banjarn, City of the First Eye, perches on the south end of Liorn Island, at the headwaters of the Oslir River. Its School of Cyclic Rising educates outstanding recent converts and trains missionaries. Its Leaping Faculty practices spiritual inquiry through bodily contortion and claims responsibility for several of the Empire’s more recent animating insights. The Consulate of the Egg, an ovoid structure on by the city’s sweeping gates, is the headquarters
Orfanmangostobos, or ‘Draconic Learning for the Middle Education Classes of Spiritual Opulence’.
X Nevelmarkan, City of the Reaching Claw, takes new converts after their initial orientation in Orin Jistrel. The War Dragons maintain training centres here, where the Wyvern Corps and the Wyrm Riders drill and garrison.
In draconic, it is Markanbandaranstos, ‘Insightful Centre of Relaxation between Love and Hate’.
X Salor, City of the Dragon’s Tongue, serves as the Empire’s commercial hub. Local merchants trade among themselves and with caravans from foreign lands (who must stop at Orin Jistrel fi rst). Visitors must take care not to stray into the Market of Illusion, which resembles the ordinary marketplace but is actually a living parable of mystic consciousness. Customers buy products for coins that cost them pieces of their souls and receive in return food that does not nourish, weapons which will not cut and luxuries that instil discomfort. Believers who turn the experience into insight receive back their soul parts in better condition than they left them but the spiritually undistinguished can be harmed forever. In Auld Wyrmish, the city is Kermalanaladeen, ‘Process Barracks of the Right to Left Hand’.
X Olorost, City of the Third Eye, is the city of government and administration. The Guiding Council, when it deigns to convene in physical form, meets here. The Throne Hands convene in the spiralling Hall of Anonymity, which only they and their retinues can ever fi nd and which preserves the illusion that it is the Guiding Council that directly manages the Empire’s day-to-day affairs. Retired generals and heroes while away their contemplative days in magnifi cent piazzas, whose splendour is only visible to their peers. Others see austere structures of abiding humility. Known in Auld Wyrmish as Forstobordar,
‘Magnifi cent Centre of High Luxury’, Olorost is also nicknamed the Fort of the Outer Brain.
X Orostaban provides second-stage education to the masses. Its ever-ringing chimes allow converts to separate themselves from their ordinary desires, burning away the need to possess, love or achieve grandeur.
Unwary visitors may completely lose their ambition and goals here, without acquiring the mystical attunement sought by knowing students of the wyrmfriend path.
Draconic speakers call the city Markarastanarbos, which means ‘Insightful Centre of Emotional Suppression for Delight’. Outsiders fi nd its nickname, the Cavernous Throat of the Soul, confusing, expecting it to consist of a series of underground passageways or at least a labyrinth of some sort.
X Dragon’s Eye, the City Before All Else, is the original dragonewt city, from which all the other cities are bizarre humanoid elaborations. Missionaries claim that is both more and less disorienting to the untutored visitor than the constructed cities. Although the meaning of this
said that the dimensions of the city are less forgiving to the human frame and that most of its inhabitants are dragonewts and intelligent dinosaurs. Even high-ranking human practitioners of the dragon way may be set upon and torn to pieces by its reptilian inhabitants, for infractions as obscure as they are undoubtedly grave.
The wyrmish name for the city, Darfostalabos, literally translates as ‘Great Leadership in Luxurious Education of the Mind’.
X Banamabar, Wall of the Inner Brain, is encircled by a serpentine, curving wall which doubles back in on itself and, in several places, intersects with other structures, so that both occupy the same point in physical space.
Unschooled visitors receive violent shocks when they touch these points of intersection; they do not kill but can throw one into a multi-year sleep. The truly aware may decide whether they wish to interact with either wall or building. The choice of one over the other unpredictably forecloses certain choices in their future lives. In a vast double-domed building, the Banambarites manage a huge language school. Initiates come here to undergo a ceremony in which their brains and tongues are split, enabling them to speak Auld Wyrmish. Depending on their course of study, this may happen early on in their spiritual development or near its climax. Afterwards, they may correctly pronounce the city’s name as Orfandarobordar, which means ‘Draconic Learning of Liberation of the Great Luxury’.
X Pald, City of the Snout’s Tip, is mainly a centre for the redistribution of agricultural produce throughout the Empire. It is most famous for its Round Temple, a school for curious, respectful outsiders who wish to learn about dragons without joining the wyrmfriend religion. It is covered in iridescent blue ceramic tiles and constructed in the shape of a snake eating its tail. They say that what you learn here depends on which door you enter through. Its graduates never learn the city’s true name: Ingyastrobos or
‘Foreign Teachings Useful without Extravagance’.
X Bevjarn, City of the Second Eye, houses a school for advanced studies which looks like it is situated atop a hill during the day and at the bottom of a deep gully at night. Its meditative scholars explore their dreams, learning the so-called Walking Method, which allows them to access both their personal dreamlands and the ordinary senses of the waking world at the same time.
Bevjarn also garrisons the bulk of EWF troops in the pass, from traditional infantry and cavalry to units augmented by dinosaurs and Rinliddi warbirds. Its deep name is Ingforslanabordar, which translates to ‘Foreigner Education Basic to Greatness’. This may seem pUzzling, until one remembers that the Guiding Council perceives its thundering war legions as their most reliable tool for the education of incorrigibly stubborn foreigners.