Creature Feature: Dragons, Loretober Day Twenty-Seven!

Now thought to be extinct, dragons were once the most intelligent apex predators in Kree's world, but I'll use the present tense while talking about them in this post for funsies.

Able to live for thousands of years, dragons come in many shapes and sizes, their appearance and abilities adaptable to the environments they grew up in and who their parent was. I say parent singular, because dragons are able to reproduce asexually through a complex and intensely magical process that can modify the child's genetics to be as different or similar to the parent as one chooses. They can technically also reproduce sexually with two parents, since they have the sex organs to do so, but this method is quite rare since dragons lose the ability to alter the child's genetics this way, the baby simply sharing the genes of each parent. Because of their typically low sexual urges, how long dragons live, and them never truly being threatened by other species, they are very slow to reproduce, with some dragons never deciding to have children their entire lives.

Dragons are one of the most "magical" species ever to exist and, as such, must live in areas rich with magia in order to keep their biological functions in order. This means that the equator was once ruled over by dragons and was ultimately inaccessible for humans or any other low to no magic creature that wasn't good enough to eat.

Hundreds of millennia prior to modern day, dragons were only ever that: dragons. But over thousands of years of selective breeding, they gained a powerful skill that no other in Dracentra has ever been able to master, the ability to shapeshift. Later era dragons were able to mold their bodies into many different shapes, creating entirely new creatures or disguising themselves as creatures they saw, even ones that can withstand living in the north, like humans. This, however, had a consequence. Empathy. Being able to turn into other things and experiencing what they experienced began to shatter the dragon's godlike image of themselves. Some even fell in love with non-dragons, their shapeshifted bodies being similar enough to breed with them and create children who still kept the ability to shift their bodies, but only between dragon and their other parent's species.

Towards the time period dragons were headed towards extinction, there were very few pure-blooded dragons left. Rather, most "dragons" were descendants of half-breeds who spent a majority of their time outside of their dragon forms. These particular beings were called dragon shifters, and eventually, even they seemed to vanish from Dracentra. Some think they entirely integrated into other creatures/ societies, their draconic blood too thinned out to shift any longer. Others think they died out after humans began a crusade against them to stop their rule over the equator. But some think they're still around, hiding in plain sight, waiting for the day they can reveal themselves.