How Do You Teach a Dragon? Inside the Faewilde’s Scaleguard Apprenticeships

There are dragons who guard treasure, dragons who guard thresholds, and dragons who guard the old places where the mountains still remember fire.

And then there are dragons entrusted with something considerably more unpredictable: other dragons.

More specifically, young dragons.

Aranbrid’s records identify these elders as Scaleguards, experienced dragons charged with protecting and instructing younglings who have not yet grown fully into the weight of their wings. This discovery answered one longstanding question about how young Faewilde dragons learn the ways of their kind.

It immediately created approximately nine thousand others.

An Education in Dragonhood

Younglings travel close to their Scaleguard, following the elder through the Faewilde while learning the ancient disciplines expected of dragons.

Some are exactly as formidable as one might hope.

They learn where fire may safely be kindled and, perhaps more importantly, where it must be swallowed. They learn to hear danger moving beneath stone, to navigate through smoke and glamour, to recognize promises worth keeping, and to understand the responsibilities that accompany possessing enough firepower to make poor judgment everybody else’s problem.

Other details of their education remain frustratingly absent from the Chronicles.

At what age does a dragon learn to land gracefully?

Is there a period during which crashing into shrubbery is considered developmentally appropriate?

How many accidental fires constitute a lesson rather than an incident?

Aranbrid does not say.

This is particularly inconsiderate of her.

The Matter of Scaleglass

One lesson, however, is unusually well documented.

Green tiger’s eye is sometimes called scaleglass in the Faewilde. Its bands of green, blue, and hidden light seem to move beneath the surface rather than merely across it, reminiscent of light traveling over the scales of a turning dragon.

Younglings train their eyes upon that wandering shimmer.

They learn to follow it as it shifts and disappears, then find it again from another angle. Over time, the exercise teaches them to detect movement through smoke, darkness, and glamour, places where trusting an obvious outline can be a remarkably poor life decision.

Whether younglings occasionally abandon the lesson entirely and pounce on the scaleglass has not been recorded.

This should not be interpreted as evidence that they do not.

Before There Is a Hoard

Eventually, every young dragon must confront one of the great questions of dragonhood:

What is treasure?

Interestingly, the Scaleguard does not appear to answer it.

A youngling is instead expected to find something it considers worthy of becoming the beginning of its own hoard. It then returns to its Scaleguard and fellow pupil and explains precisely why its selection is excellent.

It is, essentially, dragon show-and-tell.

The treasure need not be expensive.

It need not be rare.

Evidence suggests it may not even need to be something another creature would immediately recognize as treasure.

This is important because a dragon that merely learns what other creatures consider valuable has learned very little about keeping a hoard. Gold is easy. Gemstones are obvious. Any magpie can develop opinions about something sufficiently sparkly.

The more difficult lesson is deciding that something matters to you.

And then, apparently, presenting your argument.

Dragon Show-and-Tell Is Serious Business

Aranbrid’s accounts of youngling hoards contain the sorts of treasures one might expect: coins, gemstones, small pieces of jewelry, and curious objects whose original purposes have been forgotten.

They also contain buttons.

A silver thimble.

A key for which no corresponding lock has yet been identified.

And one exceptionally smooth rock.

The rock appears to have required considerable explanation.

This does not mean it was an unsuccessful presentation.

Quite the opposite.

No record suggests that a Scaleguard judges a youngling according to the monetary value of its choice. What seems to matter is that the young dragon has noticed something, considered it, chosen it deliberately, and can explain why it deserves to be kept.

One suspects this occasionally results in lengthy speeches about objects whose virtues are not immediately apparent to anyone except the dragon delivering them.

The Scaleguard listens anyway.

There is probably a lesson in that, too.

What a Dragon Keeps

This changes the way one might think about the legendary dragon hoard.

Perhaps a hoard is not merely accumulated wealth.

Perhaps it is biography.

The coin might commemorate a first journey beyond familiar mountains. A cracked cup might have been found somewhere important. A bit of colored glass may catch the afternoon sun in precisely the right way. A button might have belonged to someone remembered.

And an exceptionally smooth rock may simply be an exceptionally smooth rock, and anyone failing to appreciate this has clearly not heard the presentation.

As younglings grow, their collections grow with them. Someday, the two circling their Scaleguard will leave its keeping. They will claim skies of their own, gather strange and wonderful hoards, and decide for themselves which things deserve their protection.

Perhaps, eventually, they will take young dragons beneath their own wings.

Because before a dragon can guard treasure, it must learn something far more difficult: how to recognize what it treasures.

Aranbrid has not yet determined whether an exceptionally smooth rock can become a treasured family heirloom.

She has wisely declined to rule it out.

A Little Piece of the Faewilde

This particular glimpse into dragon apprenticeship began with Scaleguard, a green tiger’s eye necklace depicting an elder dragon with two younglings circling close beneath its keeping. The shifting light within the stones inspired the Faewilde’s scaleglass, and apparently one necklace was all it took to uncover an entire educational system for dragons.

Meet Scaleguard and see the necklace here.

And if you’d like more dispatches from the Faewilde, join the Fairlight by Moriarty mailing list at the bottom of this page for new jewelry, creatures, lore, and whatever else Aranbrid discovers while asking questions that were probably safer left unanswered.