general profile.

[shenandoah]

Basic Stats

Name: Cyrus Montague
Species: dragon; Pyrenean blackwing
Age: He hasn't kept track of his actual age, but he was hatched in the American colonies some time in the 1700s. While posing as a human, he gives his age as 42.
Appearance: The Pyrenean blackwing is a large species of dragon, though not quite as large as those native to the Alpine regions; Cyrus is of average size as a full-grown male, measuring about ten meters high and twenty-five meters in length. His scales are uniformly black (as is the thick membrane of his wings), though they produce an iridescent luster when exposed to moisture, and his eyes are a tawny gold. The form he most commonly adopts while posing as a human is one he's used for years, the first human he'd ever successfully glamoured in his life: adult, white, of tall and lean build, with brown hair, pale eyes, and a gaunt, narrow face.

Note: The magic by which Cyrus and other "higher" dragons adopt a human disguise is virtually the same used most notoriously by switchtail foxes. While the magic is functionally the same, however, it's a great deal more difficult for a huge dragon to "size down" into a human form than it is for the considerably smaller fox. As a result, Cyrus is unable to continuously maintain his human guise without the aid of a Medean band to forcibly prevent him from reverting to his natural state.

Strength: B-
Endurance: B+
Agility: F
Magic ability: A++
Luck: C

Setting

The world of Cyrus’s origin is much like any standard Earth, save one key difference: the existence of magic. While the history of his world otherwise greatly resembles our own, this key difference has led to many other differences in global culture and society; this is most apparent throughout the world in the relative acceptance of magic and supernatural occurrences in the development of Judeo-Christian religions, as well as in the existence of fey, creatures either born of magic or with an uncanny aptitude towards it.  These fey exist in a number of forms as widely varied as non-magical fauna, resembling the most common of animals or even being completely humanoid. The most legendary and fabled sort of fey, however, is often considered to be of a separate class than all others, and that sort is the dragon.

Dragons are known to exist throughout the world, on virtually every major landmass explored by man, and the range of their species is more vast and varied than most other fey: the antlered and long-bodied lóng of the Far East, the feathered serpents of Central and South America, and the swift-winged hunters of the Great Plains are but a few examples of the dragon’s global spread and variation. Many other fey are considered part of the wider dragon family, such as the similarly scaled and winged wyvern and lindwyrm, but what marks dragons apart from these lesser fey are three traits: their size, their intelligence, and their capacity for magic.

All three of these traits are connected, so it is widely accepted that the larger a dragon is, the greater their intelligence and magical skill. At the lower end of the scale would be the dragons most typically found in North America, which are generally of a size just large enough to carry off a horse and possess intelligence comparable to a human’s; at the other end are the dragons of East Asia, which have long been worshiped for their fearsome power and wisdom. In the middling ranges would be the dragons of Europe, who possess great size and intelligence and magic prowess greater than that of most humans. Their magic skill affords them the ability to communicate easily with humans, and also at times to disguise themselves as one of them, not unlike the notorious switchtail fox. But unlike other fey of similarly-possessed intelligence and ability, who often choose to attempt integration with human society, these dragons instead choose to adhere to their bestial instinct and commonly live in areas that are far secluded from human settlements. To a dragon of the European class, humans are at best little more than particularly populous vermin, useful only for the livestock they cultivate, and at worst would-be predators who must be avoided at all costs.

(Further details on the functions of magic, the culture that surrounds it, and the existence of fey can be found on this page.

Background

In the 18th century, when the New World was still very much under colonial rule, a witch set sail across the Atlantic with high ambitions and a very precious piece of cargo: a single dragon egg, hunted at great risk and purchased in defiance of the law. Dragons were truly fearsome creatures in the days before humanity had developed the magicks and technology necessary to combat them, but the value of their parts made them more than worthwhile targets to the most foolhardy of hunters. Every part of a dragon could be put to significant purpose—the hide and scales for magicked, wear-resistant armor, blood and bones for potions and poultices of healing, teeth and scales for decorative fashion and small weapons, etc.—and so could be sold at a high price, but one dragon remnant was by far the most valuable of all: a clutch of eggs, each one containing a hatchling from which all of its parts could be freely harvested. Of course, keeping a dragon for this purpose was not only incredibly dangerous but also highly illegal, but this witch could not be deterred when there was a promise of riches to be had. She established herself in the colonies, protected herself against any possible discovery, and watched over her precious egg until its more precious contents hatched from within.

Naturally, the fledgling dragon could not consider this environment anything but his home. He knew nothing of the snow-capped peaks in which his species was meant to reside, or of the dragons who were his “true” parents. The witch raised him with kindness and care from the first moment he hatched, and so he easily bonded with her as his mother. The fact that she would sometimes collect his shed scales and outgrown teeth did not seem strange to him, and neither did the fact that she would very occasionally bleed him; he never had any reason to doubt, after all, that she had nothing but his best interests at heart. To thwart the constables that would sometimes drop by, she taught him to use magic to assume the form of a human child, and also to speak and read English well enough to pass for human. Nothing about his situation seemed even the least bit unusual to him, and so he spent his earliest years in perfect contentment.

However, as those earliest years passed, he grew larger and larger, making it more and more difficult for him to successfully maintain his human disguise, and eventually reached a size that was simply too unmanageable for the witch to keep up her ruse any longer. She made the decision to finally slay her prized dragon and harvest his various parts, but before she could bring herself to perform the act—indeed, even before the dragon himself had any inkling that this was her true intent—the constables finally discovered once and for all that she had been illegally keeping a dragon, and they swiftly moved in to arrest her. Despite his urge to protect his mother at all cost, the witch urged him to flee in the resulting fray, and so he reluctantly complied. His bestial instinct guided him to the nearby mountains, the fey-thick and yet-unsettled ranges of easternmost Vandalia, and it was there that he mourned her loss in solitude.

The years continued to pass, and as he grew to adulthood, his instincts continued to serve him well in the mountainous wilds that were comparable to his species’ native home. The wood wyverns and basilisks, ordinarily apex predators in their own right, proved easy prey to a creature of his size. As time went on, as the colonies won their independence and the newly-born United States fought to expand their territory ever further, the mountains came to be sparsely populated with small pockets of human settlements, but the dragon did not look upon these encroachments with any significant amount of unease. Rather, they provided him with some use as well; though he was unwilling to directly prey upon them, and though his instinct and traumatic experience with the constables dissuaded him from attempting interaction with them, he discovered that he could make use of their magicks by simply observing them at work, and the livestock they tended were far easier and higher-yielding prey than they fey he had been feeding on previously. Though he took great care when he hunted in this manner, it was in this way that he first began to gain a reputation as a fearsome dire dragon, unlike any beast truly native to Appalachia.

One day, he returned to his cavernous lair to discover something most curious and most unexpected: piles of gold bullion, silver pieces, and bits of paper stacked in piles and strewn about. Though he wasn’t sure what to make of the paper, the precious metals had a sweeter scent to him than anything he had ever encountered in his life thus far, and their lustrous shine captivated him in a way that nothing else ever had. He didn’t know how or why the stuff had ended up in his lair, or who might have been responsible for it, but so long as it was in his possession and proximity, he didn’t particularly care. As it turned out, however, the answers to those mysteries would soon become apparent: a pair of human thieves had decided to use the cavern as their secret storehouse, completely unaware that the place was already occupied by a dragon, and one of them soon returned to claim his share.

This was the first direct encounter with a human the dragon had experienced since his run-in with the constables so long ago, and considering also that this took him entirely by surprise, it was only natural that his first and immediate response was aggression. But the human was even more surprised, not to mention far less capable of standing his ground, and so his immediate response was to submit and beg to be spared. It was here that the dragon discovered another curious thing: his ability to glamour lesser beings into doing as he willed them, simply by maintaining direct eye contact with them, or by having them breathe in the smoke he exhaled from his lungs. This talent is natural for dragons of his species, but given his unusual upbringing, he had previously been unaware of it; now, however, he recognized this skill for what it was, and immediately put it to good use. He glamoured the thief into not only keeping his presence here secret, but also into bringing him more of the precious metals that he coveted so dearly.

This arrangement worked for some time, though whether the thief continued to do the dragon’s bidding because of the glamour’s control or out of fear for his own life was unclear. Eventually, however, the dragon returned to his lair once more to find an unfortunate sight: his precious hoard had completely vanished, and the thief lay dead at the mouth of the cave. Initially, he mourned more for the loss of his hoard than his accomplice, until he came to realize something—whoever had killed this man was more than likely the same person who stole his treasures, and, perhaps more importantly, there was a chance that this person now knew a dragon lived here. Considering the potential repercussions of such an outcome were chilling, and it also led him to find some opportunity in the man’s death. If he disguised himself with the man’s appearance, just as he had disguised himself as a human child so many years ago, then he could easily infiltrate whatever settlement he had come from and find whoever was responsible—and whether his presence in the mountains was known.

Once he had successfully assumed the man’s appearance and disposed of his corpse to the best of his ability (i.e. devoured it, much to his discomfort), the dragon put his plan into action. Though he never did discover the identity of his accomplice’s murderer, much less what became of his stolen treasure, he did discover quite a bit of useful information while passing for a human: that there were a great deal of prosperous and unprotected farms dotting the Shenandoah Valley, and while there were some murmurs of a rumored “dire dragon” lurking in the mountains of Vandalia, few believed that such a creature could truly exist, much less that it could exist any further east. Clearly, his future path had been laid bare.

From that point on, he adopted a new pattern of hunting in the wilds, picking off livestock from one of the farms in the Shenandoah Valley, and infiltrating nearby settlements under his human disguise to ensure the safety of his whereabouts. No matter how many precautions he took, of course, his reputation as a blight upon the region only continued to grow, and the dire dragon soon gained such names as the terror of Shenandoah and Blue Ridge Beast, but all efforts to fight him off or capture him were thwarted by his power, cunning, and “human” intervention. It was in this way that he first encountered the human legend Jesse Morrow, famed for his knowledge of dragons and skill in handling and taming them. On one of his ventures into human society, he discovered that the man had been summoned to Harper’s Ferry to help rid their land of the dragon menace. Curious, still in his human disguise, and eager to mislead the man into failure, the dragon attended an assembly held by Morrow to discuss his plan of attack; his curiosity was duly sated, and Morrow was easily misled into resounding failure.

The dragon counted this as a victory, but he did not account for the possibility of Morrow making any further attempt to capture him. Some thirty years passed, and the dragon continued to go about his business as usual: hunting, picking, and learning what he could from the towns nearby. On another one of his human ventures, however, he realized too late that he had been lured into a trap. Jesse Morrow, now thirty years wiser and still bitter over his humiliating defeat, had allied himself and his men with the Byrne Society, helmed by their matriarch Sophia Byrne—bearer of the Morgan grimoire, and sole heir to Elijah Morgan’s legacy as a master hunter all manner of fey. Morrow smoked him out of the town streets with burning comfrey, a more effective dragonsbane than any other substance, and when the dragon fled to the neighboring forest to revert to his natural state and take to the skies, Byrne ensnared and restrained him in his human form.

What followed was the most harrowing experience the dragon had ever suffered in his life thus far—bound by restraints both physical and magick, beaten and threatened by Morrow’s men at every attempt to free himself, and surrounded on all sides by the witches of Byrne’s coven, all prepared to lay down even more magicks to keep him from escaping. But instead of being immediately killed or carted off, he was subjected to an interrogation, held by Byrne herself. She asked him where he came from, how long he had been here, and what he knew of himself; his glamours were blocked both by the restraints and by Byrne’s warding magicks, so all he could do was answer to the best of his ability. It was then that Byrne told him a single truth, one that had never occurred to him in his entire two hundred-some years of life so far: he was not meant to be here. His species was native to the Pyrenees of Europe, the only place where creatures like him were meant to flourish, and his existence here was a strain on the local ecology and communities that they could no longer afford to bear. Their intent was not to kill him, she explained in soothing tones, but rather to send him back where belonged—to his true home.

His head swam. He didn’t understand how any other place than these mountains could be called his true home when he had spent his entire life among them, when they were all he had ever known. It was a truth he refused to accept.

When Byrne’s witches finally moved to transport him, he finally spotted a chance to secure his escape, and he wasted no time before taking it and slipping away. His flight for freedom was more difficult than any other he’d been forced to make, made all the more so by the fact that he was injured, hobbled, and still bound to his human state, but through clever trickery and sheer force of will—and no small amount of desperation—he made his way to safety. As he spent his time in recovery, though, he came to a dark and unsettling realization: Byrne and Morrow would surely continue hunting him down, perhaps to the point of setting the task upon their descendants. He could no longer afford to go about his usual business as he had done for years upon years; he doubted he could even afford to move about in his natural state at all, as surely he would be much easier to spot and track with his large size and unmistakable silhouette. If he wanted to stay close to his home, where he truly belonged, he had no choice but to permanently assume a human identity and wait for the hunters’ ire to pass him over.

He took up a human name he had used on occasion in previous years, Cyrus Montague, and established a new pattern of action: find safe accommodations, glamour his way into obtaining whatever he needed to survive, and move his location the instant he sensed any risk of detection. As he grew accustomed to this transitory (and very much human) lifestyle, though, he began to grow complacent as well, and he also came to adapt some aspects of his old ways into his new life. After some years of drifting about in this manner, while never straying too far from the region he considered his home, he found some permanent residence in a small city, in an apartment above a mom-and-pop apothecary. The elderly owner of the apothecary was easily charmed by him, no glamour necessary, to the point that she allowed him to run his own business of appraising (and occasionally pocketing) jewelry and enchanted objects out of her shop.

It’s there that he remains to the present day, always keeping a watchful eye and attentive ear out for the likes of the Byrne Society and Morrow’s men. He’s content with this life, content to seek small pleasures as he keeps as low a profile as possible, but at times he still yearns for the days when he could freely take flight and live as he was truly meant to be . . .

Personality

Though he was not raised by fellow dragons, nor has he ever met one similar to himself in any way, he nevertheless possesses some personality traits that are distinctly draconic: a level of pride that borders on dangerous, a tendency towards hedonism behind his motivations, and just enough of a sense of self-preservation to keep from getting himself captured or killed. These base traits are tempered in some ways—and exacerbated in others—by his personal growth and the experiences that have shaped him, but to these three he generally remains true.

Pride. He’s on the older side of the fence for his species, and with his age comes no small amount of vanity and arrogance. He has nothing but self-assurance in his power, strength, ability, or virtually anything else about him, and any attempts to put him down on any of those fronts are met with a laugh and immediate brush-off. In fairness, much of this self-assurance is fully earned and well-deserved; he’s survived by his own wits and capability for well over two centuries and thwarted nearly every effort to capture him or fight him off. When that self-assurance edges into arrogance, however, is when he begins to falter.

He’s learned from the few experiences in which his own ability wasn’t quite enough to save himself from peril, but those learning experiences have done little to temper his confidence in all things. Unless a task set before him is clearly insurmountable, there is no question in his mind that he can and will surmount it, and it will take only the most abject of failures for him to admit his defeat. The idea that he could possibly be incapable at anything within his range of skill is laughable to him, and it isn’t one that he’s willing to entertain for even a second, not even when all evidence points to the truth of it. While he isn’t completely opposed or turned off to new ideas, this attitude also gives him a tendency to dismiss the thoughts and opinions of those whom he considers below his station.

Hedonism. His primary motivation in life is to live as peacefully as he can manage, but also as pleasurably as he can afford. The thought of ever having to settle for second-best of anything is one he considers with disdain. (Of course, being a dragon, his idea of best and second-best in most things is entirely relative and not always in line with what might be considered as such by any ordinary human, but that’s another story.) Most everything he does in his present day-to-day life is in search of things that bring him pleasure: fine food, comfortable clothes, metals with a sweet tang and lustrous shine, and so on.

Countering this, however, would be another trait that stems from his desire to live only as he pleases—his own inestimable laziness. On most days he would much rather spend his free time sleeping and lazing about than doing anything else at all, and—unless it has his utmost interest and attention—if he deems something as requiring more effort than he’s willing to expend at any given moment, then he won’t even bother with it. Things that interest him are usually the only things he’s willing to overcome his lazy tendencies for, though the list of interests for which he’s willing to skip or wake up from a nap are generally limited to food, sex, and shiny trinkets.

Self-preservation. As a dragon, of course, one of his strongest (if not his absolute strongest) instincts is that of his own survival. His instinct has guided him well in this aspect, allowing him to easily adapt to an entirely different environment than that which his species natively calls home, and to adapt to it with gusto. Similarly, he’s adapted fairly well to his life among humankind, having quickly adopted as much of their mannerisms and culture as it takes for him to pass as one of them. He still has some draconic tendencies which he can never fully eradicate, such as his hoarding habits or small quirks of movement, but as long as they aren’t enough to give away his identity, he sees no reason to change them.

On the other hand, if he suffers even the slightest cause to fear that he’s been found out, his immediate priority becomes dropping everything, changing his location, and keeping an even lower profile than before. Though he knows (or at least believes) that the people who seek him have no intention of harming him, he is so deeply tied to his home in the mountainous wilds that his single greatest fear is being uprooted from it. To prevent this fear from becoming reality, he is willing to do absolutely whatever it takes. For now, at least, he prefers to rely on his cunning, to keep hiding himself away and maintaining his human cover, but should there ever come a time when that will no longer suffice, there is no question that he would resort to all his strength and might to keep his captors at bay.

Basic Skills

Dragons are well-known, feared, and at times even revered for a number of traits, such as their monstrous size and strength, their ages-old wisdom, and their remarkable skill with the workings of magic. Cyrus has some portion of each, and while his talents are considered nothing remarkable compared to others of his species, they easily mark him as superior to the humans he deals with on a day-to-day basis. Of course, his physical ability is drastically limited by his human disguise; while some of his natural biology remains intact—e.g. his heightened body temperature, ability to produce smoke, and one other that will be discussed below—his strength is solely proportional to that of any other human and most of his senses, while still keen compared to a human’s, are markedly duller than in his natural state.

His other talents, however, remain just as effective. His species is naturally predisposed to cunning and quick wits, which he makes use of as often as possible to stay one step ahead of all those around him. He is also highly capable with magicks, which is no unique talent among dragons but notable nevertheless; dragons have an ability to sense the presence and workings of magic like no human could ever hope to achieve without years to study and a mighty grimoire, and Cyrus is no exception when it comes to this skill. If he sees magic being done and takes the time to study it, then he can learn to reproduce it, perhaps not perfectly but at the very least functionally. (However, while he has done this in the past, with his current attitude towards things that don’t interest him, he is generally not inclined to go to such lengths to teach himself such magicks ever again.)

But the ability to work magic as humans do is far from the only capability he has. One of his natural talents is the ability to glamour a creature of lesser power than himself—i.e. put them into a pliable, easily suggestible state in which he can sway them into doing as he wills—which he can achieve through one of two different means: direct eye contact, or having the subject breathe in his smoke. (Both of these methods work through magic in some way, but the latter is considered more of a physiological function than the former.) His other notable natural talent is that of self-healing; dragon’s blood is an incredibly powerful and inherently magically-charged healing agent, and so any superficial wound he sustains will usually heal completely on its own in a relatively brief amount of time. (Of course, this method is not even remotely sufficient for more serious injuries, such as broken limbs.) However, as this is (again) a function of his magic just as much as it’s a function of his natural biology, any manner of magical dampener or nullifier will suppress this ability and leave him virtually defenseless.

Miscellaneous

Played by: Mads Mikkelsen