It’s especially funny when you remember that Tundra have the memory of a goldfish, cause like.
Imagine being Icewarden, you just brewed up a hot batch of dragons, shiny and new and ready to serve Your Glory, you address them all, address your mass of fluffy children, and for now, they are your PRIDE, they are your JOY, they are going to do WONDERS, you give them your godly lecture on history and preservation and how to survive in the ice, you release them into the world-
And about a week later they’re all flailing about because they’ve forgotten the entire thing. Half of them don’t even remember who you are. One of them has swallowed eight rocks because they’ve forgotten what a plant is. You realize that somewhere down the line, you fucked up. You think about your brothers and sisters in their other lands, creating their wonderful children who can actually remember how to function in a society.
Eventually your children pull themselves together and make a habit of surviving, because habits are stronger than memories, but you’re already humiliated. Sure, you can keep addressing them en masse, but what’s the point? They’ll forget it in three days anyway. You go home to sulk. Flamecaller didn’t have this sort of trouble, and all she made were fat snakes that hum.
nobody messes up as bad as Lightweaver though.
Okay this post is back on my dash and I feel the need to reiterate that the tundra memory thing was probably perfectly intentional.
Tundra Dragon’s memories function in two parts: Traditional memory which is very very short term and an olfactory memory that is extremely long term, possibly even ancestral, but limited to only the vague positive or negative.
So these dragons are both the perfect jurors and the perfect prison guards.
They can take on multiple trials in rapid succession and be perfectly non biased in those trials because they’re guaranteed to only consider factual evidence presented in the very recent past. Everything else is forgotten.
They’re amazing guards and trackers who will be able to sniff out anyone who’s ever been in their custody and maybe even those who were in the custody of their ancestors and tell whether they were friend or foe (prisoner) from a considerable distance regardless of any disguises or the time elapsed.
Furthermore, they’re impervious to pleas and manipulation because the friend/foe metric in their mind predominates all other memories of them and thereby eliminates any susceptibility to anything a captured prisoner may say to try to get away.
tl;dr
Icewarden was very very careful in creating tundras to serve a specific purpose and he did an excellent job. They are less an embarrassing mistake and more a highly specialized force.
He’s only disappointed because they wanted to do other things instead.
Their heavy coats and adversity to leaving the clan makes sure they stay
On the other hand, they are also kind, vegetarian floofs. I have a feeling Icewarden had a massive ‘oh fuck’ moment and made every possible step to fix it. He made a jailer dragon with such planning and premeditation it’s scary. But, when these floofs were created, he also made sure that they would never turn out like his previous creation: Tundras are the only herbavores with no hunter instinct, and are combat adverse. Even his quote is a hope that these guys stay forsaken: “the cold reclaims.” His name is the IceWarden and most of his apparel is whips and chains.
Makes me wonder just how terrible these Gaolers are. Or, perhaps the gods came together and decided they needed an Australia
As an aside, it would be really interesting if Tundras had an instinctive fear/hate for Goalers. Suddenly this fluffy dragon everyone knows becomes terrifyingly aggressive during a cave exploration. Paranoid, knowing there are things wrong with the world, but unable to place. Teeth out, trying to convince the rest of the expedition that they must continue and find the source, that they must destroy or contain. Bonus points if there ends up being an escaped, dying Gaoler and it’s cub, and the rest of the team must convince their increasingly feral friend to not fucking kill the baby.
Oh this is interesting.
I’m personally of the belief that gaolers and tundras are of the same stock. They were intentionally hobbled by their diet and disposition as Icewarden had never intended to let them leave their duty and their home. There was some kind of schism which left some of the population on the outside to become tundras after mixing with the rest of dragon kind, and some to remain in the fortress where centuries of isolation twisted their gene pool into the hulking beasts we call gaolers. Perhaps those who left had their more fearsome features stripped away as punishment for their ultimate irreverence?
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