Dragon Cave: Dragon Descriptions (Approved): Gemshards

Since I write a lot of gemshard descriptions, these have their own page. For an overview of all approved dragon descriptions I’ve written, check out Dragon Descriptions.

Neimakanaash – Female CB Ruby Gemshard
Accepted sometime before 21.06.2015.

Neimakanaash is a vindictive, capricious creature, quite unlike her more social kin. When in an especially impassioned foul mood, she’ll hunt down drakes to submerge them in the nearest river or lure them into elaborate traps, simply to enjoy their frantic terror. While her sadistic tendencies are known to her clan mates, she’s taken good care not to target them or their friends, which has let her remain tolerated, if only narrowly so. Herself afraid of isolation more than anything else, she does have some use to her ‘social circle’: If any of them were threatened by an outside force, she would defend them to her last breath.

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I didn’t really want to describe dragons in 2015 because the description system had accrued a massive backlog, outright looking like an abandoned site feature, but my gemshard naming convention created such a strong urge that I couldn’t resist the temptation.

My gemshards are all named after words in my kraiaKy conlang, kendaneivash. Generally speaking, my ruby gemshards have negative concepts associated with them, my jade gemshards have neutral concepts associated with them, and my azure gemshards have positive concepts associated with them.

The word neimakanaash (or rather, ne͡imakanaas̈) means ‘a feeling of claustrophobia; the illusion of being unable to breathe’. Accordingly, I had to give her a particularly evil personality to go with that.

Raashelek – Female CB Ruby Gemshard
Accepted sometime before 21.06.2015.

Raashelek is very particular about the pronunciation of her name, but patient in her explanations. According to her, the ‘sh’ in her name should best be written as an ‘s’ with diaeresis, denoting a sound far more akin to an exhale than what people would normally vocalise. Unfortunately, to her mild, recurring annoyance, the human keeping record of her on its scroll has proven incapable of getting her name right even in writing.
She’s a playful, forgiving creature, quite pleasant but for one detail: She seems convinced that pygmy dragons exist purely to be pets for larger dragons and has a selection of dark myst pygmies that she keeps in cages, obsessively pampering them, but completely, deliberately oblivious to their pleas to be granted freedom, regardless how explicit they make their desire.

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The word raashelek (or rather, raas̈elek) means ‘prison; cage; trap’. I didn’t want to make her quite as vicious as Neimakanaash, so I decided to write about it as a disturbing but mostly harmless habit.

Adaryr – Male CB Ruby Gemshard
Accepted sometime before 21.06.2015.

Adaryr is a nomad, travelling between social clusters of dragons, rarely staying anywhere for long. While he’s gotten used to this mode of living, it’s not entirely by choice: Wherever he settles, the locals tend to begin to be haunted by nightmares that they, in their bewilderment, eventually attribute to his presence. While it’s clear given his gentle nature that he is not consciously causing them, he nonetheless finds himself predictably cast out after a few days. Meticulously honest about his history, he’s often warmly welcomed to new clans regardless, as few have cause to believe his tale despite his insistence. He does not know if it truly is his presence that causes this affliction in those nearby, or if there are more benign explanations for the phenomenon – bad luck, perhaps. He hopes that he might eventually find someone with enough experience with inherent magical properties to solve the mystery, so that he may have either certainty or peace of mind.

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Accept: Good luck with that, poor guy
Accept: Over all I really like the description as a whole. I’m guilty of this sort of thing myself a lot, I use “-” or “—” where a period would suffice. Keep being awesome! Very nice to read :).
Wow. o_o I didn’t know ‘being awesome’ was a thing I was doing. That’s really nice to read!
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The word adaryr means ‘nightmare’. I was toying with a few separate ideas for Adaryr, beginning with the wilful afflicting of nightmares, going over affecting daydream dragons to produce involuntary ‘daymares’ rather than regular daydreams, and then finally to this very simple narrative. I rather want to give him a hug.

Coraa – Female CB Jade Gemshard
Accepted sometime before 21.06.2015.

Coraa has a gift to inspire people and dragons with a common goal to work together with uncanny precision. While often central to any undertakings she takes part in, she’s only a skilled mediator, not a leader; she has no power to bend people to her will in particular, nor any desire to. Her involvement is a game to her, and she is just as likely to make herself the proverbial keystone in a violent raid as she is in a concerted rescue effort. She has no moral compass of her own and no interest in acquiring one, interested in a functioning team and realistic plans coming to fruition, not so much in their mission’s outcome.

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The word coraa means ‘middle; center; focus’. Figuring out a description for Coraa was tricky – I did not want her to be a leader, after all. I think it worked out reasonably well in the end.

Jalok – Male CB Jade Gemshard
Accepted sometime before 21.06.2015.

Jalok has a grasp of reality so accurate in its predictions that others occasionally mistake him as clairvoyant. He has a tacit understanding of human and dragon psychology and is deeply fascinated by subtler, long-term effects of the physical laws that govern Valkemare, giving him a good gauge for cave-ins of both the social and literal sort. A means to easily demonstrate that he cannot predict the future is to ask him about any chaotic system, such as the weather even just a few days ahead of time. Nonetheless, some of his loose acquaintances think he may simply deliberately be giving the wrong answers to such enquiries to deflect from his true abilities.

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The word jalok means ‘certainty; confirmation’. I didn’t want to make Jalok directly clairvoyant as being able to predict the future is not quite the same thing as being certain that something will occur, but as you can see, the notions are definitely related…

Ganirr – Male CB Jade Gemshard
Accepted sometime before 21.06.2015.

For all intents and purposes, Ganirr might as well be a regular dragon, were it not for one fine detail: By all objective measurements, he does not actually exist. More of a collective apparition than anything else, what’s astounding is how seamless people’s perceptions of Ganirr mesh together to form a coherent whole. Most that are witness to him would never question that he’s real – he appears tangible, friendly and communicative – but deeper probing into the fabric of reality reveals nothing. The few people that have investigated the phenomenon believe it may have something to do with the latent mana fields interacting with the weather in the area, causing internally consistent hallucinations in sapient passersby. Others have proposed that he might be a ghost of some sort, but as there’s no associated spectral signature, this is not a popular theory. Meanwhile, children often roll their eyes at the whole thing, muttering something about ‘imagination’ and ‘obvious’.

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The word ganirr means ‘imagination; creative ability or prowess’. My first instinct was to have the dragon be good at imagining things, but Jalok already has that role by implication. Then I decided it would be awesome if he were simply, as a whole, purely imaginary.

Jabenash – Ungendered Frozen CB Azure Gemshard
Accepted sometime before 21.06.2015.

Jabenash has nicknamed verself The Great Untangler for ver love of explaining people’s motivations to each other. Ve keeps a set of notes in ver lair that serve as a repository of past astounding trip-wires for ver. Each time ve’s wrong about something, ve investigates what preconceptions or missing data exactly caused ver to make an incorrect assessment. Once ve’s discovered the error in ver thought, ve writes verself such a note in a jargon of ver own. Occasionally ve can be seen poring over the collection, trying to reduce some of the discoveries to axioms for future use. Several people have come to start using Jabenash’s insights to gain some clarity in disputes, a service ve eagerly (and at least usually humbly, nickname notwithstanding) provides, especially if offered food in exchange, as ve often accidentally neglects ver physical needs if unattended, leaving ver frequently undernourished.

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The word jabenash means ‘clarity’. In Jabenash’s case, I feel ve has a lot in common with Jalok, but ve’s more obsessive about the psychological aspect and would not be able to make any physical predictions. Generally, ve explains, ve does not predict, though ve probably could.

Hebenash – Ungendered Frozen CB Ruby Gemshard
Accepted sometime before 21.06.2015.

Hebenash occasionally wakes from ver dreams without a sense of conclusion to differentiate the real world from the dream, a situation that is only resolved after ve falls asleep and later breaks out of the state after waking up ‘properly’. On days ve is trapped in ver dream mind, ve is understandably disoriented and confused, suffering primal existential fears that ve would not struggle with when truly awake. Ver worst streak so far involved ver enduring a three day marathon of this mental state, something that brought ver to the brink of death from sheer mental exhaustion. Recently, ve seems to have found a partial remedy in tisanes and (perhaps ironically) exposure to daydream dragons, the combination of which allow ver to, afterwards, almost reliably catch a restful sleep that lets ver wake normally.

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Accept: Ah. I hate dreams like that. -DT

The word hebenash means ‘disorientation; confusion’, with a visceral connotation. Regular disorientation doesn’t cut it, in other words, and I wanted ver description to reflect that. The idea of not waking properly from dreams came quite randomly, though, and I have to admit it actually terrifies me.

Rhaal – Male CB Azure Gemshard
Accepted sometime before 21.06.2015.

Rhaal voraciously hungers for knowledge. Any insights discovered, he tries to pass onto others to best of his ability, tutoring anyone who is willing to listen to his rambles. The topic he’s most enamoured with sharing is a self-referential one: He loves nothing more than to teach people how to absorb information more effectively. To him, ‘learning how to learn’ constitutes the most important thing that anyone could acquire knowledge about, and he labours to teach his pupils how to put their minds to best use. By now he’s quite skilled at this general approach. However, perhaps ironically, he’s often a clumsy teacher for less abstract topics – in particular, his attempts at explaining how the physical world functions especially elicit more head-scratching than enlightenment.

Accept: Love! ~E
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The word rhaal means ‘intelligence’, so I wanted Rhaal’s skills to have something to do with the absorption of knowledge. It was especially tricky coming up with a way he can cause more intelligence in others, but I think this works the way it is.

Yuheiden – Male CB Azure Gemshard
Accepted sometime before 21.06.2015.

Yuheiden is a firm believer in the good in every dragon that hasn’t proven itself unmistakably malicious. While he does not go out of his way to interact with sketchy individuals and rather prefers to stay amongst the safety of his own clan, he’s been known to allow all sorts of characters to use his horns, whiskers and tail for various purposes. His favourite so far involved a young dragon using the tip of one of his whiskers as a pen, dunking it into ink and drawing glyphs with it, but not all of his experiments in trust have been that painless. Where possible, he endures unpleasant manipulation, however, rather than trying to put an end to it.

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The word yuheiden means ‘permission’. It’s usually used as a prefix; yuheiden-raas̈eles would be a permission to imprison someone – in other words, something one might expect a hypothetical police force to have at decree of a hypothetical ruler.

The dragon Yuheiden meanwhile is a complete pushover who permits whatever he can and I like him this way.

Pranash – Female CB Azure Gemshard
Accepted sometime before 21.06.2015.

Pranash tries to be respectful of all things, even to obvious detriment of her own well-being. She puts effort into not doing any visible, living thing any harm and is crestfallen each time she as much as harms a literal fly. She prefers, if at all possible, to eat fruit that has only just fallen from trees, though in a pinch she will harvest fruit herself. She can’t fathom wilfully killing any creature, though she doesn’t scorn the meat of creatures that have already died, assuming it hasn’t rotted past the point where she can safely consume it (which it unfortunately very rapidly is). Together with some friends, she seeks a way to turn non-living matter into something edible by way of magic, thus side-stepping any ethical issues. She figures that if plants can convert lifeless matter into energy using the sun’s energy, dragons surely can do the same with sufficient research.

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Accept: Sounds kinda like me, I really like this

The word pranash means ‘respect’, and my immediate association with that as a deep-seated concept for a dragon was to make her live out something inspired by Jainism. I combined that notion with test-tube meat, extending it to test-tube nourishment in general.

Szamha – Female CB Azure Gemshard
Accepted sometime before 21.06.2015.

Szamha is a fiercely protective dragon, but necessarily rogue in affiliation as she does not discriminate between friend or foe when acting out her urge. She’s of the firm opinion that all disputes can be resolved peacefully and any violence she observes – even violence enacted in arguable self-defence – will make her intervene. Her forked tail is battered and scratched from her past interventions and chances are she won’t be able to use it as a shield much longer, as it’s likely to crack or snap apart the next time she tries to block the assault of a physically stronger dragon.

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The word szamha means ‘security; safety; protection’. I imagine the dragon Szamha will eventually get herself killed. At the very least she manages to alienate anyone that’s ever needed to defend their lair from intruders!

Damakei – Female CB Jade Gemshard
Accepted sometime before 21.06.2015.

Damakei is an excellent acrobat, seeming in perfect harmony with her sense of balance, performing feats slightly unusual even for her kind. She prides herself in a high awareness of her own body and has often asked friends to blindfold her and touch random parts of her body with a claw while making her guess the exact point. There are still a few blind spots on her inner map of herself that frustrate and perplex her for their stubbornly opaque nature, but she keeps trying to improve her understanding. Meanwhile, she trains every day to improve her balance, taking joy out of discovering new postures that take very little energy to maintain all the while looking quite adventurous.

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Accept: Sorry about the “civilised” thing. I’m usually pretty good at not making stupid mistakes like that. I like your descriptions. <3
This is a reference to a review left on Sovamak, which I used as a refresher on the forum to remind people that moderators sometimes incorporate comment spelling fixes while approving descriptions, and to take care about that. I wasn’t expecting an apology! Especially an anonymous one. This is awkward. :D
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The word damakei (or rather, damake͡i) means ‘consciousness; awareness; self-awareness’. Rather than give her a description harkening to the obvious associations I had with those words (self-consciousness, chiefly, or perhaps an ability to make others reflect on their behaviour), I thought it would be great if I could apply this to her proprioception instead, ideally without using that word. The above description is the result!

Dasurmaak – Female Frozen CB Ruby Gemshard
Accepted sometime before 21.06.2015.

Dasurmaak struggles to pay attention. A lot of what she does she’s prone to forgetting about, occasionally resulting in her taking actions several times in a row, such as cleaning herself. Strangely enough, she has no trouble remembering names or events that she witnesses – her forgetfulness seems to be confined purely to her own actions. The drake Geleira has taken to liking Dasurmaak, on the one hand mischievously enjoying how she constantly forgets that she’s already petted Geleira, on the other trying to help out by moving items involving completed tasks out of the way.

Accept: D’aww, sounds like me on a daily basis except I think I DID already to it so it never gets done.
Accept: adorable description!
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The word dasurmaak means ‘absent-minded; scatter-brained; forgetful; inattentive’. About halfway through my description of this frozen darling, I felt sorry for her and sought to give her a companion to help her out a bit, but Geleira wanted to be a bit more ambiguous in her helpfulness.

Vaashu – Male Frozen CB Ruby Gemshard
Accepted sometime before 21.06.2015.

Vaashu would describe himself as cursed if anyone bothered asking. Anything he does seems to end in some kind of catastrophe – not out of clumsiness or incompetence, but out of sheer bad luck. That, at least, is what it feels like to him; onlookers are more likely to put the blame on him, if only because the misfortunes that tend to transpire around him strike them as unbelievable unless they’ve witnessed their occurrence themselves. The catastrophes Vaashu fabricates have left him cynical and passive, minimising his actions, and refusing any complex tasks outright.

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Accept: “cursed, if anyone” -DT
While I consider this optional, I think it does read better with the comma, so I’m resubmitting with some rewording. Thanks, DT!

Vaashu would, if anyone bothered asking, describe himself as cursed. Anything he does seems to end in some kind of catastrophe – not out of clumsiness or incompetence, but out of sheer bad luck. That, at least, is what it feels like to him; onlookers are more likely to put the blame on him, if only because the misfortunes that tend to transpire around him strike them as unbelievable unless they’ve witnessed their occurrence themselves. The catastrophes Vaashu fabricates have left him cynical and passive, minimising his actions, and refusing any complex tasks outright.

The word vaashu (or rather, vaas̈u) means ‘grave misfortune; cataclysm; catastrophe’. Since the dragon Vaashu is a frozen hatchling, I didn’t want to lean too far out of the cataclysm-window, so I went with personal catastrophes that’ve robbed him a will to participate in the world. Quite a sad story, really.

Amanoth – Male Frozen CB Azure Gemshard
Accepted sometime before 21.06.2015.

Amanoth takes a curious liking to creatures not sapient but demonstrably sentient, and is known to fuss over them when given opportunity. Largely he leaves them to their own devices, but should he find a creature abandoned by circumstance, such as the eggs of a songbird slain by a raptor (or the eggs of a raptor slain by a dragon, for that matter – the supposed frailty of the species hardly matters to his perception), he’ll gather the creatures under his proverbial wing and raise them to best of his abilities.

Accept: Sounds poetic.
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The word amanoth means ‘caretaker; parent; guardian’, in the social connotation of the words. Giving him things to care about that couldn’t object much to his fussing seemed like the obvious thing to write as a description.

Sovamak – Male Frozen CB Jade Gemshard
Accepted sometime before 21.06.2015.

Sovamak is deeply suspicious of so-called ‘rational’ arguments. Convinced that instinct and emotion should play a strong role in dragon behaviour, he largely lives at instruction of his intangible subconscious thoughts. Bizarrely, this has yet to result in wildly errant behaviour; his friends are divided on whether this means he simply has an inherently odd set of instincts that are compatible with civilised behaviour, whether he’s cheating, or if they’re simply not around when he’s demonstrably crazy. Either way, his outlook seems to work for him, if not necessarily for anyone who tries to follow his example.

Abstain: Civilised -> civilized, otherwise it looks good to me.
I appreciate the correction attempt (I really do, it’s super polite), but I’m to equal parts amused, because this is such an obvious derp on the side of the reviewer. I’d love to extend them a hug.
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Accept: My logical side is grinding its teeth at his rejection of being rational! -DT
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The word sovamak means ‘subconsciousness; subconscience; instinct; gut feeling; hunch’, which gave me an excellent opportunity to write a mild parody of my own philosophic take on reasonable behaviour. To contrast: Sovamak takes matters a bit further than I would by being sceptical of rational arguments, whereas I just feel that they ought to be supplemented and brought to agreement with emotions. I can still empathise with his mistrust, though.

Neivash – Ungendered Frozen CB Jade Gemshard
Accepted sometime before 21.06.2015.

Neivash has an uncanny ability to remember even trivial events. While ver memory is not photographic by a long shot and ve would struggle to recall the precise wording from a conversation just like anyone else, ve’s memories just don’t seem to deteriorate over time once established. Ve can tell you about the sequence of events from some mundane happenstance lying an arbitrary number of years in the past just as easily as ve could narrate the same of something that happened only a few hours ago. This trait has made ver about as many enemies as it has friends, of course, as not everyone likes to be eternally reminded about their failings, even in a roundabout way; ve does not intentionally hurt anyone’s feelings, but ve can get carried away by the sheer delight inherent to simply knowing with certainty how events truly transpired.

Accept: Very nice, but did you intend to keep the “ve/ver“s instead of changing them to other pronouns… -MC1
Yes. :)
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Accept: I learned it as xe rather than ve, but I suppose that’s irrelevant.

The word neivash means ‘memory’; it has no symbolic connotation but refers to actual information stored in a mind. The obvious cue here was to let Neivash be good at remembering things and in this case I was entirely happy to indulge in the obvious slant.

Sesaka – Female Frozen CB Jade Gemshard
Accepted sometime before 21.06.2015.

Much to her chagrin, Sesaka’s behaviour is frequently opaque – not only to others, but to herself as well. It’s a mystery to everyone why she occasionally loses her composure over minor quibbles but can just as well be entirely calm through storms of verbal abuse. Similarly, there seems to be no deterministic way to make her happy, and she occasionally appears chillingly flippant when one would expect her to grieve. None of this would pose much of a problem, she suspects, if she were at least consistently off kilter, but four times out of five she reacts as one would expect. The frequency of her unexpected behaviour has left her very nearly without friends, owing to the distress she’s caused them. Despite her own best efforts to control her behaviour, true self-control continues to elude her, something that frustrates her… four times out of five.

Accept: Very nice indeed. -MC1
Accept: There’s nothing wrong, but a large chunk of it reads kind of like a vocab list-in-prose
…I don’t even know what a list-in-prose is supposed to be. Unless they’re terrible at punctuation and mean ‘vocabulary list, in prose’? In which case, I’m sorry I broke your wee brain, reviewer. XD Thanks for the indirect compliment.

The word sesaka means ‘mystery; puzzle; enigma’, which I was originally going to write about in a less negative way, but ran away with me a little. From the description I now have, I strongly assume Sesaka is not quite neurotypical. Poor dear. :(

Rarresh – Male CB Ruby Gemshard
Accepted sometime before 23.06.2015.

Rarresh, himself weaker than even the average gemshard due to circumstances of his upbringing, has long since – illegitimately and with some trickery – wormed his way into the heart of the magma dragon Sumendir, who protects his unlikely gemshard protégé with his life. While Rarresh is not foolish enough to boast of his control of his protector’s actions to others, he nonetheless transparently holds considerable sway over the magma, and has at times made the dragon do the one or other foolish thing simply to test his persuasive abilities. Nonetheless, he would not harm Sumendir or any other dragon; his mischievous, manipulative streak does not extend into maliciousness outright. Were any ill to befall Sumendir, Rarresh would hardly forgive himself.

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This description was accepted sometime before 21.06.2015, but the és in protégé got butchered, so I had to resubmit the description:

Rarresh, himself weaker than even the average gemshard due to circumstances of his upbringing, has long since – illegitimately and with some trickery – wormed his way into the heart of the magma dragon Sumendir, who protects his unlikely gemshard protege with his life. While Rarresh is not foolish enough to boast of his control of his protector’s actions to others, he nonetheless transparently holds considerable sway over the magma, and has at times made the dragon do the one or other foolish thing simply to test his persuasive abilities. Nonetheless, he would not harm Sumendir or any other dragon; his mischievous, manipulative streak does not extend into maliciousness outright. Were any ill to befall Sumendir, Rarresh would hardly forgive himself.

The word rarresh means ‘puppet-master; puppeteer; manipulator’. You can see what I turned that into.