The last dragon

Ten thousand years ago dragons ruled Brackenwake and the first riders made a pact with them at the Firstfire Crater: a soul shared willingly, rider and dragon each carrying half. The Dragonsworn kept the peace of the continent from the Eyrie in the Stormpeaks for an age.

Then a man found the other way. Malachar, a knight of the Eyrie, learned that a dragon's heart eaten fresh gives the eater the dragon's fire without the dragon. He ate nine. He is the Wyrmking now, something no longer a man, on a throne in a live volcano, and the dragons are dead to the last egg.

The last egg is the one that hatched on your arm this morning.

You are nobody in particular: a farmhand, a hedge knight, a hedge wizard. But the hatchling chose you over every knight in the kingdom, and in choosing you it made the old pact for the first time in a thousand years. You share a soul with the last dragon in the world. Every realm you cross, it grows, and it takes back something its kind lost there. The Wyrmking wants its heart. You cross nine realms to become strong enough that he cannot have it.

He is what happens when you take. You are what happens when you are given.

The dragon beside you

The player names it at hatching, and the name is used everywhere. It has a true name too, which it does not know: it learns it in the Boneyard, from the bones of its mother, and from then on the player may use either. It cannot die. When it falls in a fight it goes still and the Bond empties, and it wakes when the Bond has climbed back to a quarter. It cannot be sold, stabled or left behind: it follows you into every dungeon and onto every boat, and it is the one companion in the game.

The Bond

The Bond is the number between you. It fills from fighting beside the dragon (every hit either of you lands while both are in the fight), from feeding it (meat it likes, which changes by age), and from taking a blow meant for it (stand between it and an attacker). It empties slowly when you are more than forty metres apart and faster when it has fallen. At full Bond you can call Wyrmsoul.

Wyrmsoul

For about ten seconds you and the dragon are one creature. Your eyes go gold, wings of fire spread from your back, and the world drops into dragon time: everything but you and the dragon moves at a fifth of its speed. Arrows hang. A wolf mid-leap hangs. You move through them at full speed, the dragon's breath comes out of your hands, and when the ten seconds end everything you touched happens at once.