It's considered by most as a last resort. When all other options have been exhausted, when all ammo has been spent, when you're backed into a corner with no other choice, you let your Light take over. The primal essence of you. The wild, untamed, unbridled power that sleeps within.
Your Light is a dragon. To set your dragon loose is to simultaneously release your most powerful self, and risk final death of the worst kind; to kill a dragon is to kill a Guardian's Light, as it is not truly a creature of flesh and blood, but a powerful embodiment of your power. To cut a dragon is to make it bleed Light, is to wound you in a way you cannot normally be wounded.
But with this risk come reward; the raw power you feel when in this form is unequaled. Should you feed your Light well, should you let it grow, should you hone and train it and care for your other self well, that other self shall grow with your Light in size and strength.
Such is the way of the dragon. Heed it.
When Uldren first scouts earth, he is forced to land by hostile aliens. Aliens! He couldn't wait to tell Mara! ALIENS!
He meets the four-limbed creatures in battle, eager to say that he had fought aliens. Then the big one caught him in the neck with a rusty blade, and he started to wonder if the bragging rights were worth it. He's about to finish the monster off when a roar shake the air. A shadow descends on them. Uldren listens to his instincts, rolls off the alien he's about to finish off, and is rewarded by the sight of the alien, who is still inches from his face, being snatched up by a pair of massive, leathery talons.
Heart threatening to pound it's way through his ribs, breath coming in gasps, he tries to prop himself up on elbows, but his limbs feel like jelly. It doesn't help to see the alien get dropped to it's death against the backdrop of sunset. That had nearly been him, too.
Uldren lays on the cold dirt, blood still running sluggishly from his neck, and watches a wyrm twist it's way far into the clouds.
Forget aliens. He'd nearly been carried off by a fucking dragon, and Mara was never going to beleive it.
The first time Osiris transforms is... less than elegant, to say the least. It was always recommended to shift in a controlled environment the first few times, so that you could get used to your dragon, and learn how to manage your new limbs(if you got wound up with six limbs, that is, though everyone had to learn to live with a tail) without getting shot at. He winds up a feathery wyvern, a body comprised mostly of burnt umber and burnt orange, with a bright, fire-colored crest about his head.
When he first shifts, he does so forgetting to warn Sagira. She thus doesn't get the chance to dissipate his clothing as he transforms, thus the only outfit he truly owns is destroyed, and it makes the transformation more than a little painful. There is nothing more embarrassing than nearly being strangled by your own shirt, but if he turns back out of panic, he knows he'll be naked, and the situation is already humiliating enough as it is.
He's lucky his mentor isn't the type to tease people. Felwinter has to spend an embarrassing amount of time cutting restricting scraps of cloth off of Osiris, but he doesn't tease; only admonishes with things along the lines of 'if you keep this up you'll be dead before you're a decade old'.
Sagira on the other hand, got enough material from this singular accident to supply jokes for the entirety of said decade.
Sometime he wishes he could trade Ghosts with someone.
There is a hole in the flock. Marin filled it a day ago, and now he was dead.
He and Osiris have reached the winds of the seaside, and the updraft of the area helps them soar despite their massive sizes. It was a good thing. Every wingbeat sent pain tearing through Saint's body, and he could see that Osiris felt it as well, though the Warlock remained as stoic in this form as he did in the other. A severing of the Link between Light-siblings tended to do that; it was a metaphysical wound to their Light, the sudden culling of Marin from their lives.
The snuffing of his Light had created a sort of whiplash against both their own. He and Osiris weren't the only ones left in the flock, but they were the only ones here, and they had to dispose of their friend and his Ghost respectfully before he started to stink.
And so they took turns carrying Marin's deadweight to the seaside, where he'd always expressed the desire to be buried. But now that they are here, Saint must take a few moments to ponder how they were to go about this. There was a whole system of in-flight body language their team had worked out, tail flicks, head motions, the tilting of wings, but none of them can convey his plans for what to do next, and neither of them had spoken to the other since the incident. It shouldn't be so hard to talk to a friend, but it is.
He is about to signal that they should land on the cliff-face, when Osiris, who is the one carrying Marin at that moment, tilts his wings up, curls his tail inwards briefly, and gapes; the tilt said he is about to break formation and ascend, the curling and gaping directed that Saint should line up an intercept trajectory and ready his fire. Saint feels secret relief that they won't have to plan this as men.
A feathery wyvern drops a body-sized wrapped bundle from the sky, and a mechanical, six-limbed dragon intercepts it, engulfing it with devouring void breath. The two circle the remaining particles for a while, and, with their sky burial completed, they bank and fly home minus a Hunter.
Cayde tackles his packmate, and Andal squawks indignantly as the mechanical dragon pins him. He yelps when Fairwind's jaws close around the nape of his neck, and tear him away from his fellow like a disobedient child. She drops him when a she-drake pounces on her tail, and he, Andal, and Shiro take the opportunity to make a break for it.
The Hunter Vanguard is trying to teach her pupils how to coordinate as dragons.
It's going as well as can be expected.
Reptiles cant laugh, but as soon as the three of them land, shift, and hide in the shadows, they're howling with it. 'Organize Hungers', ha! Like they would ever cooperate with that endeavor. They may be young, yes, and their dragons still small, but their Light was perfectly in synch. The brothers didn't need fancy tail signals or training in formation flying; ever since they had found each other, such thing had come as naturally to them as breathing. They were one of those rare packs that were unnaturally attuned with each other.
They duck through several tent 'alleyways', and eventually find a hole in the wall the Titans and Iron Lords are erecting. Once in the wilds, they shift once again, and fly low through twilight gap. They are still small enough that they can fly or run beneath the trees, and once they are certain Fairwind's fare-seeing eyes cannot find them, they take leave of subtlety and begin their own form of training.
Andal is a long, thin wyrm of washed-out greens and brown mane, Shiro a wyvern of all black with a yellow spine, and Cayde a silver and dark cobalt four-limbed dragon. There was still debate amongst Warlocks as to what separated wyvern from dragons, though four limbs were more common amongst the former than the latter. Common consensus was that a wyvern's Light manifested it's power through their bite, and a dragon's manifested as fiery breath.
The Hunter pack didn't care about semantics. They soared and twisted around each other in games and practice. They dirtied their talons in the mud, and tried to do stupid flight maneuvers. Andal tried to carry off a Fallen Captain at some point, but wound up dropping it.
Tallulah would have been mortified; all it would take out here was a talented Fallen sniper, and one of them could be RTL. And while that was correct, the three of them, though they were mostly messing around, knew better than to so naively trust their surroundings.
That was to say, they may be idiots, but they weren't idiots; they were Hunters. Their talons were knives, and their three sets of eyes were just as sharp. Woe to anyone who challenged their big-headed pack.
The summer has been unusually hot this year. The warm weather has more Guardians shifting just for kicks than usual, and you can find a dragon splooting in just about every remotely wide enough space along the wall. Osiris suppress a sigh when he walks past the Eververse building; Andal, his fellow Vanguard and a great wyrm, had draped his massive length across the roof of the building. He peers sleepily at Osiris as he approaches.
"Haven't you reports to fill out?" He asks the wyrm testily. Andal twists his head and brings a hind leg up to scratch at his mane, ignoring the Warlock.
"Just because the weather is nice doesn't mean you can neglect your duty!" Osiris fumes as Andal curls up with his head facing away from his irate colleague. "I don't see Saint or Zavala slacking off!"
Andal whips his tail into something, and an unseen dragon yelps. Saint-14 and Deputy Commander Zavala both peer over the edge of the building blearily, the latter casting a glare at the Hunter Vanguard.
"... I give up."
His first transformation is accompanied by incredible joy. In this form, there is nothing to recognize. At first he is only a little bigger than a person, but his Ghost tells him that the more he exercises his Light, and the older he gets, the more his dragon would grow.
He has six limbs, and feathers run from along the top of his forehead all along his spine, right down the tail. They also cover a great deal of his shoulders and back, some even went down his legs a little bit. His wings, too, were feathered, like a bird's. His neck and underside has thick, armoured, overlapping scales, and there are smaller ones running along his sides. He finds them on his legs as well, some of them tougher than others, especially near the joints.
He find a clear pool and discovers his horns are long and curve slightly upwards towards the end, each of them having a single 'branch' near the middle that curves in the direction of whichever side the horn corresponded to. He is almost entirely pitch black, though his belly scales are more of a dark gray. Aside from that, there is silver banding on his wings, and that's it. His gold eyes glow even brighter in this form.
He tries to smile at the pool, but he's a reptile at the moment, and lacks the facial muscles to do so. He discovers though, that he is capable of vocalizing to a degree. He spends half the day testing the range of his 'voice's, unintentionally attracting a patrol of corsairs who were convinced, much his embarrassment, that he'd been dying and in need of medical attention.
Not his finest moment. But compared to the trials that lay ahead for him, hardly an inconvenience.
The first Lightborn dragon the people of the Reef see is not, in fact, Savin.
It is Saladin Forge.
A fool tries to get close to the Queen with a knife, and her orders to throw him in the Prison garner no remorse from him; he simply spits. It is during a negotiation for aid in the Hildean campaign, and Lord Saladin stands as a representative of the Vanguard. Perhaps that had sent him hoping his legacy was intimidating enough to cow the politicians amidst her council, and respectable enough to be appreciated by the career soldiers among them.
While for the latter it was true, for the former it was not, and both Sovs were becoming irritable. If Lord Saladin is likewise irritated, he is better at not showing it than most would give him credit for. This latest interruption sees Uldren mocking comment that if the prisoner true isn't worried about prison, perhaps he should be fed to the dragon instead. Most people look to him in horror, thinking he meant Riven, and that he'd mentioned her before a Lightbearer was unforgivable.
Saladin does not look particularly hungry at the moment, but Queen Mara invites him to add his input, dinner-related or otherwise, on the punishment of the man, as it was Lord Saladin's business the man had interrupted.
She would not have done so if she'd known what she was inviting out to play. More specifically, had she known how truly massive Saladin's dragon was. The ancient Lightbearer narrows his eyes at the offender, and begins to grow. Mara immediately curses herself and hopes that nothing breaks.
Armor is replaced by scale and feather, and in an instant there is a massive wyrm coiled in the council chambers. He must balance on his hind legs in order to fit, as there is not enough room for him to stand on all fours. At length, he could, perhaps go to to toe with Riven at her largest possible size. His jaws were large enough to swallow a man whole, no doubt. He is coiled elegantly to fit in the space he has to work with, and his front talons grip the balcony the Sovs, their guards, and the culprit stand.
His scales are a rich bronze color, and his mane is the same shade of green as that on his armor. Long barbels droop from his muzzle, and his left horn had been snapped off. There were glowing scars all along his body, places where there were no scales, Light seemed to push it's way to the surface of his flesh, as though the wounds remembered and wanted to weep again.
Saladin levels his head with pathetic, would-be assassin, and the guards and Uldren scrambled away from the man. Saladin fixed him with a glare, and lunged. The snap of his jaws is a like a thunderclap. His teeth close an inch from the man's face. The smell of urine permeates the air, and he crumples to the ground in a heap.
Several members of the council follow suit.
Uldren later complains that he'd wanted to see someone get eaten. He's been like that, recently.
The first time Misraaks sees his Warlock's dragon, it is in battle. Their backs had been against the wall, and things had met that desperate point where the power of dragons was called for. She rose from the dust like an ethereal whisp, body long, thin, and twisting, tail lashing several Cabal off the cliffside.
Her jaw closed on a psion and the sound that follows is equal parts disgusting and curious. He and the Hunter give her cover fire as she flows elegantly across the battlefield, like a dance of death.
When it is over, she comes to them. He fights the urge to fall to his knees in supplication to the manifestation of the Warlock's Light; they have discussed before how most Eliksni viewed the dragons, and his fireteam has no desire to be worshipped, least of all by him. She circles around the two of them, and gives the Hunter an affectionate nudge before backing away to shift back into a human.
Misraaks is sad to see the dragon go; she's just as magnificent as he'd thought she would be.
Spider laughs when Crow inquires about the Key. He says that just because he'd honored the agreement to free him, didn't mean he knew how to remove the device without killing him. Glint, thankfully, no longer has a bomb in him, but Crow's hands ache, and he keeps trying to stretch wings that he doesn't have. He wants to flex his talons, he want's to fly.
The Key is a small capsule filled with viscous, ontological muck that would certainly kill you if released into your bloodstream, even in such a small amount, and this poison would have the unique effect of 'muting' a Guardian's Light, rendering them powerless, unable to heal, and unable to transform. It is wired directly to the internal carotid artery, and is extremely fragile. Any attempts at removal would kill him, any attempts to shift would kill him. Attempts to die and rez without it in his body failed due to the ontological nature of the device.
Spider hadn't wanted a dragon in his house unchecked, especially after rigging Glint go explode. He was probably less inclined to set Crow's dragon free now that the threat on Glint's life was gone. Whether he was lying or not, Spider was useless. Osiris saw no way to solve the problem either. Every moment spent under the free sun now made him want to tear his skin off and be free. He wants to slough off his accursed face and fly away.
Lord Saladin berates him several times to let his dragon out before it drives him crazy. Crow says nothing. He tells nobody. If Osiris, a legend of a Warlock, doesn't know what to do, there's no point in telling strangers about his problem, not to mention that he still isn't sure whom among them he can trust.
What possesses Osiris to tell Ikora about it, he'll never know. He just knows that, one day, she tells him that when he's ready, she might have a way to remove the Key. It isn't long afterwards that he, desperate, takes her up on it. She takes him to the Praxic healers halls, to a small room. There is medical equipment all around, and there's an experienced dawnblade healer one shot away if anything went wrong. The level of precaution Ikora takes is almost excessive, yet there is still no guarantee he can be saved if things do go wrong.
The device is like a gun. He's not listening, he's too busy trying not to vomit. He still isn't sure how much he trusts her. Glint tries his best to calm him, and Ikora lays one hand on his shoulder bracingly as she readies the device and tells him to relax. It hurts.
But then it's out, and he's alive, and suddenly the sky is all he can think about.
"Such is the way of the-the-whoops!" Cayde and Shiro laughed as their friend dropped the book into the fire.
"Guy thinks he knows dragons!" Andal chuckled. "I don't know about y'all, but 'primal essence' is the last thing I feel! Those damn feathers..."
"I don't remember what itchiness is, so expect no empathy." Cayde declared, swishing his drink around in his cup. The fire cracked and the smell of burnt book plastic permeated the air. "If anything, the dragon is a first resort."
"Eh, it all depends on the Guardian." Shiro shrugged. "Pass the squirrel, will you?"
"Case in point, we should have caught a moose and roasted it." The other exo slashed his knife through the air. "I could done that easy!"
"Would have been a waste, eating as dragons; you know it doesn't count when we turn back. And there's no way we would be able to eat a moose by ourselves in these forms." Andal reasoned.
Cayde snorts. "Killjoy."
As with Saladad: This is more of a detailed concept than a proper fic, but I hope people enjoy it. I might put the concept up for adoption; I like it, I kind of want to write it, but I just don't have the patience to make it into a full-length fic. Saladin said Light is a dragon, and I took that metaphor as a challenge. Let me know how I did, and what you think of this.
Before you get on me for the 'Wyvern vs. Dragon' 'mistakes', I went with the old, traditional definition of wyverns and dragons, that being that dragons breath fire and wyvern have venom instead(in this case, Light-infused bites). Limb number had nothing to do with it. For those who don't know, Drakes are flightless and most resemble real-life moniter lizards, though on a much larger scale, and for this instance, Wyms most resemble the dragons from AtLA, but without fire breath.
Fare Thee Well!