If Dragon Week has taught us anything, it’s that dragons are inherently cool. For example – all the awesome dragons from Warhammer history.
It’s no surprise, then, that from the 41st Millennium to the Mortal Realms, and even back to the World-that-Was, there have been many pretenders eager to claim the dragon mantle, despite being no such thing. Today we’re looking at a few of these shameless souls.
Fire Dragons
Aeldari Fire Dragons. Dragons breathe fire, right? That checks out – maybe we’ll be proven wrong after all. Let's take a closer look.
We’re noticing a distinct lack of wings and long necks on these guys. Their armour is cool, but is it scales? We think not. And as for fire breath, there’s more bad news. We were fooled – with the exception of their Exarch, their guns aren’t even flamers. That leaves them low on draconic characteristics.
Black Dragons
“Ah ha!” you’re probably not shouting at your screen right now, “Black Dragons TOTALLY have to be real dragons – you can buy an aelf sorceress riding one and everything.” Alas, dear imaginary reader, we’re really referring to the Space Marines Chapter.
Successors of the Salamanders, the Black Dragons trace their origins to the Cursed Founding. Let’s consult the checklist – no scales, wings, long necks, or fire. Just bony, blade-like growths jutting from their bodies*. That’s pretty gnarly, but they’re not dragons.
Dragon Ogors
Of all the beings on our list, Dragon Ogors are perhaps the closest to being actual dragons. They have the scaled hide and clawed limbs, but there, sad to say, the similarities end.
Where a noble upper body with wings and a slender neck should be, there are instead, well, something that looks like ogors. So near yet so far, and there isn’t even a flicker of fire-breath. They’d have trouble getting airborne too, we reckon, but we’re too scared to find out.
C’tan Shards of The Void Dragon
A Void Dragon sounds all kinds of cool, doesn’t it? You’re probably picturing a vast, winged behemoth gliding through space, dwarfing starships. You may even have heard the rumour that the Emperor Himself fought the Void Dragon and trapped it in a labyrinth beneath Mars. Man vs dragon. That’s legendary and definitive, right?
Nope. Sorry. The Void Dragon is, in fact, one of the C’tan, the star gods who tricked the ancient Necrontyr into giving up their comfortable flesh bodies in favour of cold metal skeleton suits.
Today the Void Dragon, like the rest of its kind, exists in countless shards, many of which have been trapped for aeons in Necron tesseract labyrinths. Maybe they have hoards of gold in there – there’s no way of knowing – but they are absolutely not real dragons.
There we have it – these fakes may all be dragons by name but not by nature. Of course, the opposite can also be true – just look at the sinister daemonic Heldrakes of the Heretic Astartes for creatures that are (admittedly semi-mechanical) dragons by another name**.
Keep an eye out for real dragons across the rest of this week, including Krondys and Karazai done up all nice by some expert painters, and an investigation into the dragons of Black Library. Sign up to the Warhammer newsletter so you’re in the loop when the real Draconith emerge.
* You can find out more about this mutation, and the Black Dragons in general, in David Annandale’s Black Library novel The Death of Antagonis.
** In modern parlance, a drake is a male duck, but the word’s origins lie in the same roots as dragon in a number of languages. Scientists have yet to confirm that this means ducks are dragons. Mercifully, there are very few ducks in Warhammer lore.