The webcomic was started in January 2022. The setting has an extensive amount of character profiles, worldbuilding information, and side stories in its main site
. It can be read on either the author's DeviantArt page or on ComicFury.
This work contains examples of:
- Abusive Parents: Parent-child relationships among Warfang's upper class aren't especially good as a rule, in large part due to noble parents viewing having children primarily as a duty and as a means of furthering their dynasties and often neglecting emotional connections with them. A particularly prominent example is Vitreus, the youngest of his parents' several children; his father only speaks to him when Vitreus is reporting Hayze's activities and deliberately allowed an injury that Vitreus sustained to form a prominent facial scar as a political tool, while his mother doesn't even recognize him by sight. That's not even getting into Vitreus's older brother Frostir, who his father didn't even deign to talk to in his egg, leaving many to speculate in-universe that that's why he's a psychopath. There's also Vitreus's grandmother Isrun, who was even worse than Frossar, Vitreus's father.
- Adaptation Expansion: The original games are fairly light in describing what dragon society was like before Malefor's war, and don't feature any dragon characters outside of Spyro, Cynder, the Guardians and Malefor himself. As such, the comic expands significantly on dragon culture and society, and includes a number of wholly original concepts regarding their naming conventions, their government, the origins and cultures of dragons with "secondary" or corrupted elements, and the relationships between the dragons and other cultures of the era.
- All There in the Manual: The comic has its own wiki, which not only talks about the various characters and their backstories, but also facts about the world, Warfang's laws and history, and more.
- The Archmage: In a general sense, dragons who achieve the highest possible level of mastery in magic are referred to as "Magicals"; these are fairly rare, and it's not guaranteed that one will be around in any given period. Formally, the title of Grand Master of Magic is reserved for the most powerful and accomplished magic-user in Warfang's society. The current holder of the title, Eurune, is also the only living Magical at the story's time.
- Back from the Dead: It's possible for an exceptionally powerful user of healing magic to resurrect a deceased individual, provided that the subject has only died very recently. Jordhin technically died and was brought back four times as a result of health complications from their failed attempt at self-corruption.
- Basilisk and Cockatrice: Titan basilisks are immense serpents native to lakes and swamps. They can live for over 200 years, grow all the while — an elder specimen's head is around the size of a grown dragon's body — and are indiscriminate predators with a particular taste for dragons.
- Blow You Away: Wind manifests in its most basic form as a strong gust of exhaled air. It does not deal much damage by itself, and is instead mostly used to keep opponents off-balance or to throw them into harder objects. Basic mastery allows its users to create longer-reaching and more controlled gusts. More extensive learning allows for the creation of localized whirlwinds and whips of air, the use of wind currents to enhance flying speed, and the ability to suck the air out of an opponent's lungs.
- Blue Means Cold: The most common color variant of Ice by a good margin is blue, followed by white and aqua. The most common of the rare variants is deep blue, a slushy kind created by Fire or Water impurities. Ice of other colors, such as purple or black, is very rare.
- Breath Weapon: Usually the first form of elemental manipulation to manifest in a dragon, and which all individuals can do to at least some degree, is a breath weapon. Increased training allows this to be sustained for longer and to cause more damage.
- Earth is a stream of nature energy, tinged either green, brown or grey and flecked with leaves, dirt, or pebbles depending on the variety.
- Electricity manifests as a lightning bolt shot from the mouth.
- Fire is the classic stream of flame.
- Ice is a cloud of chill wind and powdery snow that freeze whatever they touch. Practice allows this to be condensed into projectiles of solid ice.
- Water is a jet of high-pressure liquid. High training allows this to be ejected with enough force to serve as a pressure cutter.
- Wind is a gust of buffeting air.
- Shadow can be exhaled as a cloud of icy, asphyxiating black smoke, though most Shadow dragons only learn to use their element as a breath weapon later on.
- Casting a Shadow: The Shadow element originated as a corrupted version of fire. It retains some properties from it, such as manifesting as cold, smothering smoke or dark flames. Unlike most elements, direct manipulation usually comes before a breath weapon. Shadow dragons can exhale clouds of choking dark smoke, transform into and move as a patch of indistinct darkness, and harden shadows into temporary slashing blades. The most advanced can use it to exert mind control over other beings.
- Color-Coded Elements: Dragons have common color patterns derived from their elements. A dragon's primary color always matches that of their element (i.e., a dragon that breathes red fire will mainly be red, while one that breathes yellow fire will mainly be yellow). Deviations are not uncommon, but these typically signal the presence of inter-element crossbreeding at some point.
- Earth dragons are typically green, brown, or some mixture thereof. They usually have mid to dark colors, and the highest variety of secondary colors.
- Electric dragons come in shades of orange, yellow, and blue. They tend to have very contrasting palettes, with a mix of dark and light colors. The Stormbringer clan is unique for its predominantly grey-and-black "storm" coloration.
- Fire dragons are usually red, orange, yellow, blue or pink in color. They tend to have very bold, saturated colors.
- Ice dragons are almost always grey, grey-blue, or blue, leaning strongly towards light colors, and tend to lack contrasting secondary colors or bold inclusions. The lack of colored Ice variants outside of this basic palette means that Ice dragons have the lowest variety in secondary colors.
- Water dragons are blue and teal, in saturated shades. Their elemental markings are sometimes bioluminescent.
- Wind dragons are mainly light gray or teal. They can have a variety of secondary colors, but these are always light, desaturated, and low-contrast, and usually in cool shades.
- Hayze the Shadow dragon is almost entirely black.
- Color-Coded Speech: Both the speech bubbles themselves and the text within them are colored to help distinguish which character is talking. These typically match the color-coding of the characters themselves; Hayze's black bubbles and blue words, for instance, are the same shades as his scales and highlights, respectively.
- Conspiracy Theorist: In-universe, there is a belief in Warfang society that Zseurael, the former heir of the Scions Aether, did not simply die in an accident as is commonly believed but instead deserted Warfang in favor of the dark dragons. This is motivated by skepticism that the adult heir of a major leading clan could simply die without his body or killer ever being found, combined with his vocal criticism of Warfang's conflict with the dark dragons and stoking of civil unrest on this topic. Terrenus is a firm believer in this theory, which is a cause for conflict with the other Guardians who are much more critical of it.
- Dark Is Not Evil: The more reasonable dragons in Warfang, such as Hayze's flight's teacher Master Therris, Lynerius, and the Elder Guardians believe this, in contrast to most of dragon society that believes that dragons with dark elements are all evil. We see this is true outside of Warfang as well, as one short story on the comic's wiki is about a group of young Warfang dragons who accidentally find themselves in Shadow Dragon territory, and upon discovery are...escorted home, rather than being killed.
- Deadly Decadent Court: Warfang's noble society is much like this, with the various houses jockeying for power and influence with arranged marriages and more.
- Defector from Decadence: Both the Water and Wind types of dragons have left Warfang, forming societies of their own in other parts of the world. They still do diplomacy with Warfang, however, with Lynerius being heavily pressured to marry a noble dragonness from the Zephyr Kingdom. Hayze himself attempted to be this, trying to leave the city to find his own fellow Shadow dragons, but due to Malefor distracting him was caught by the guards and falsely accused of trying to kidnap Malefor.
- Deliberate Values Dissonance: After Hayze is found to be using Shadow in the first chapter, Lynerius punishes him by whipping him with his lightning breath. The comic's author note explains that corporal punishment is widespread in Warfang's culture, especially in its higher classes, and that Lynerius would have been raised with it as a fact of life. In fact, he's subjected to the same punishment himself by his father Tordner later on in the story. Similarly, Isolda, who is presented as a level-headed and sympathetic character, is also willing to use physical punishment to make her violent nephew Frostir get back in line.
- Dishing Out Dirt: The Earth element covers a combination of soil, stone, and plant life. Generally, green Earth is focused on flora, grey Earth on stone and minerals, and brown Earth on soil and wood. The element manifests in its most basic form as blasts or streams of nature energy, which with practice can be manipulated in more complex ways. Advanced techniques shift to controlling physical aspects of the element, such as vines and branches and, with greater power, stone and Earth.
- Distant Prequel: The comic is set an historic age before the events of the games, during the old golden age of dragon civilization before and during Malefor's rise to power.
- Doorstop Baby: Parents who cannot afford to care for a new child will often leave the egg at the door of a Temple, where it will be taken in to be raised as an orphan. This is technically illegal — formally, it's considered to be egg/child abandonment — but the Temples do not report these cases.
- Elemental Dragon: The comic expands on the system hinted at in The Legend of Spyro and fleshes out additional types of dragons. Their names are always derived from terms relating to their personal element.
- The basic fire, ice, electric, and earth dragons are the most common and dominant types in Warfang. They're typically colored-coded to their elements — reds, oranges, and yellows for fire dragons; light to medium blues for ice dragons; yellows, greys, whites, and light greens for electric dragons; and browns and dark greens for earth dragons.
- Dragons attuned to secondary elements came about from the interbreeding of primary elemental dragons. Water dragons, with blue scales, fins, fish tails, and a jet of water for a breath weapon, descend from fire and ice dragons; wind dragons, white and slender with feather-like scales along their spines and tails, descend from electric and earth dragons. They have their own cities, respectively on the seafloor and on a flying island.
- Dark dragons voluntarily corrupted themselves and lost their original elements in exchange for the artificial elements of shadow, fear, and poison. The original transformees are mentally very unstable, but their children inherit their elements without their psychoses. The only one seen in the comic is Hayze, a black-scaled new-generation shadow dragon.
- Elemental Fusion:
- Originally, there were only the four primordial elements from which the world was shaped — Fire, Ice, Electricity, and Earth — and all elementally-aligned beings were tied to one of these. Secondary elements arose later, as the result of interbreeding between elementally aligned dragons. Intermarriage between Fire and Ice dragons sometimes resulted in children with the ability to manipulate water, while pairings of Earth and Electricity dragons, both of which manipulate wind to small extents, resulted in some children whose powers revolved around air alone. In the modern day, both types have become well-established enough that Water and Wind have become recognized as true, albeit secondary, elements.
- A less extreme version of this results in variants of the main elements influenced by genetic influence of others. For instance, deep blue Ice, a variant characterized by a slushy consistency and tendency to cling to targets, is created by traces of Fire or Water heritage, and white Electricity, which is much hotter but less shocking than other kinds, is influenced by Fire heritage.
- Elemental Personalities:
- Earth is associated with peacefulness. Earth dragons tend to be calm and slow to anger, but are often perceived as stubborn, dumb, or stone-hearted.
- Electric dragons tend to be quick-witted, hyperactive and impatient. Their element usually awakens in response to intense surprise, fear, or emotional shock, or sometimes just at random.
- Fire is associated with passion and strong emotion. Fire dragons usually discover their element during a bout of strong feelings, often anger.
- Ice dragons tend to conceal their feelings, giving an impression of being cold and calculating, and tend to aloof and stubborn. Ice is usually discovered by its users as a result of grief or turmoil.
- Hayze the Shadow dragon is taciturn and reclusive, preferring to stay by himself rather than to interact with others of his own accord.
- Elemental Powers: All dragons and some wild animals are naturally attuned to an element, which grants them a variety of physical traits and abilities. These are divided between the primordial elements of Fire, Earth, Electricity and Ice, which have been present as long as history has been recorded; the derivative elements of water and wind, first produced by the interbreeding of elemental dragons; and the artificial or dark elements of Fear, Poison and Shadow, which were created through magical intervention.
- The Empire: Warfang is referred to as one in no uncertain terms. The city is constantly at war with the other races of the world as they conquer more and more territory (and see said races as inferior to dragons), military participation is mandatory among the citizenry, and the nobility is vastly favored over dragons that aren't part of noble clans. Many dragons, like Lynerius, hate the system, but are unable to truly change it.
- Exotic Eye Designs:
- Most dragons have human-like eyes, although irises with two or three concentric colored rings are relatively common, as are lightly tinted sclerae.
- Dark dragons are described in the webcomic's lore pages as having either colored to dark sclerae or no distinction between sclera and iris at all. Their pupils are always vertically slitted, and may be white or red when the rest of the eye is solid black.
- Half-blooded dragons usually have intermediate traits, with either slit or round pupils and white or colored sclerae. A mid-tone sclera with a slit pupil is the only arrangement that appears in both half- and full-blooded dark dragons.
- Fantastic Light Source: The dragons use clusters of large glowing crystals as light sources in their buildings.
- Fantastic Naming Convention: Dragons names are based on things pertaining to their element — for instance, Hayze the Shadow dragon, Vitreus the Ice dragon, Incendis, Kindra and Scorchis the Fire dragons, Rayne and Hydris the water dragons, and so on. In addition, they also use patronymics in the form of "X, Son/Daughter of Y", using the name of their same-sex parent. Dragons of unknown parentage use their place of birth instead (such as "X, Son of Warfang City"), while dragons from high-status clans use their family names (such as "Lynerius of Stormbringer").
- Fantastic Racism: There is no love lost between the Warfang and dark dragons. In Warfang, dark dragons are viewed as evil and terrible monsters, and Hayze is always seen with suspicion and distrust as a result.
- Feathered Dragons: Wind dragons have crests of feather-like scales running along their heads and spines, alongside ornaments emulating feathered fans on their tails.
- Floating Continent: While they don't appear in the comic itself, the schoolteacher Therris and supplemental material mention floating islands within a perpetual hurricane to the south, where the wind dragons live.
- Green Thumb: The basic form of the Earth element focuses on the direct manipulation of plant life. All Earth dragons begin by crating blasts of nature energy. The most common variant, green Earth, focuses on controlling flora, such as by creating and controlling vines or breathing out streams of leaves. Brown Earth also includes control of wood and roots alongside soil.
- Glowing Gem: Illumination crystals are large quartz-like gems that glow brightly when charged with magic. Dragons frequently use them as light sources, as for them charging them up is as easy as breathing over them.
- An Ice Person: Ice manifests as an exhalation of cold wind and snowy particles that freezes what it passes over, which with practice can be transformed into solid ice. More experienced Ice dragons can shoot icicles from their mouths, and coat themselves with blades, horns or armor of ice. More powerful ice dragons can manipulate naturally occurring ice and snow. Magically-created Ice dissolves after a while, without leaving water behind. Different variants emphasize coldness, sharpness, or durability; deep blue Ice, created by Fire or Water elemental impurity, tends to be slushy and breaks up easily but clings to targets and freezes them more easily, while black Ice, caused by dark elemental impurity, is extremely sharp.
- Incompatible Orientation: Hayze's classmate Cerau is noted in supplementary material to have had a crush on his friend Quarris, which was doomed from the start since Quarris is straight.
- Internal Reveal: In Chapter 4, Malefor, as a byproduct of his emotional turmoil, taps into and uses Ice for the first time after having already discovered and become proficient with Fire. The audience, who already knows about purple dragons going in, is expecting this to happen eventually — but in-universe, where dragons attuned to more than one element are still seen as a fantastical absurdity and not really thought about, this is world-shaking revelation.
- "It" Is Dehumanizing: As a result of the Fantastic Racism between Warfang society and dark dragons, Hayze and dark dragons in general are often referred to as "it" by other dragons.
- Kangaroo Court: Hayze's "trial" on top of the Ancestor Temple is essentially this, as the Frostspears attempt to browbeat the Warfang Council and its Guardians into having Hayze either imprisoned or executed for wanting to leave the city and supposedly trying to kidnap Malefor, using circumstantial evidence and blatantly untrue accusations while playing on racism against dark dragons.
- Lightning Lash: Electric dragons with sufficient control over their element can produce long, whip-like tendrils of electricity from the corners of their mouths. These are often used to administer corporal punishment within electric clans.
- Magical Eye Streamers: Intense or emotional use of an element can cause it to trail from the user's eyes as streams of flame, electricity, frost, earth energy, wind, or water. Magic produces a similar effect. In Chapter 2, during Hayze's trial, Lynerius is angry to the point that he starts to lose control of his element and it begins to manifest around him, including streamers of Electricity trailing from his eyes.
- Making a Splash: Water is the youngest hybrid element, having originated from the crossing of Fire and Ice. Its breath form manifests as a stream of water that batters targets or, at very high mastery, can outright pressure-cut, while its manipulation allows for the creation of shields of water around oneself or others. Water dragons who live mainly underwater tends to develop manipulation first and the breath second, in an inversion of how other dragons manifest these powers, and use their manipulation to control existing water around themselves.
- Mana Burn: Magic can be used to drain another being's magical reserves, which will render them temporarily unable to use elemental abilities or spellcasting. This is typically done to enforce safety measures or to neutralize potentially dangerous individuals.
- Mind Over Matter: Levitation, one of the most common kinds of magic, allows its users to make objects float. Higher mastery of this skill allows mages to float larger objects or greater numbers of small objects, as well as the ability to make objects float permanently.
- Moving the Goalposts: During Hayze's Kangaroo Court "trial", the Frostspears repeatedly do this as more and more holes are poked in their case by Lynerius. At first they claim that Hayze was trying to leave the city and kidnap Malefor. Then they accuse him of trying to give the shadow dragons information about the city. Then they try and damn him for getting his element stronger.
- Pattern-Coded Eggs: Dragon eggs display the color and basic patterning that the gestating hatchling will have in life. This is useful to the clans, as they often breed themselves selectively to maintain specific appearances; usually, eggs will be kept or rejected based on whether they display the clan's signature traits.
- Playing with Fire: In addition to the basic fire breath, which becomes increasingly far-reaching and powerful with experience, Fire is associated with a variety of powers. Trained Fire dragons can produce explosive fireballs, shield themselves with flame, and superheat their claws, fangs, spines and horns. Very experienced dragons can also control, extinguish, increase or sustain natural fires.
- Purple Is Powerful: In addition to the special status of purple dragons, whose details are not known at the time of the story, purple variants of dragon elements are usually stronger, purer, rarer, and considered more desirable than others. Purple Fire is the hottest of all Fire variants and only comes from very pure elemental lineages, but is so rare that no users of it are known from recent history and dragons that have it are believed to be marked form greatness. Purple Ice is also very rare, although not to the same degree, and is the coldest of all Ice variants; like purple Fire, it only comes from very pure and strong lineages.
- Screw the Rules, I Have Connections!: Dragons that are part of noble clans are given preferential treatment under the law, to the point of being able to get away with murder even if there's evidence. Clanless dragons are treated a great deal more harshly.
- Shadow Walker: Shadow dragons can dive into their own shadows in order to move intangibly for a short distance. On the one hand, this makes them invulnerable until they pop back into physical space; on the other, they're also blind and deaf until they do so.
- Shock and Awe: Electricity manifests in its most basic form as lightning breath, forming as singular and largely undirected bolts at first. As a dragon advances in mastery, they learn to direct these more purposefully, extend them for longer, imbue them with greater strength and fork them into multiple points. More powerful users can also create floating balls of electricity or shields of electric force. The most powerful dragons can call down lightning from storm clouds. Electricity mainly functions through a combination of heat and paralysis, with different variants emphasizing one or the other; for instance, red Electricity is cooler but causes stronger effects on living matter, while white leaves stronger burns.
- Sleepyhead: Scorchis, one of Hayze's classmates, is lethargic to a chronic degree — she's typically shown drowsy or tired, yawns when she talks, and tends to nod off when she sits or lies still for any amount of time.
- Stronger with Age: Male storm raptors grow progressively larger, stronger, and fiercer as they age. Elder alpha males are colossal and dangerous monsters, and can command immense hunting packs of females and juveniles.
- Super Breeding Program: Dragon clans often engage in selective breeding by carefully vetting proposed matches and brokering one-off breeding encounters, in order to strengthen elemental bloodlines or to introduce desired elements or elemental variants into their families. It is also common for this to be done in order to produce and maintain desired physical traits. Isrun, for instance, partnered with an ice dragon that had purple Ice (the most desired type due to perceptions of it being the most "pure") so that the children of the mating, Frossar, Skadin, and Isolda, might obtain it as well. Of course, if the breeding doesn't produce the desired trait, those dragonets can very quickly find themselves ostracized and abused.
- Supernatural Suffocation: Particularly powerful Wind dragons can suck the air directly out of a restrained target's lungs.
- Tangible Darkness: Shadow dragons can manifest their element physically. In its basic form, such as when initially summoned or used as a Breath Weapon, it forms into a sort of asphyxiating, choking smoke. More practiced use allows this sort-of-gas to become physical enough to push and cut objects, and for the manipulation of existing shadows; skilled Shadow dragons form their elements into piercing and slashing blades during combat. The most powerful users can use their element to physically invade a target's body through a cut and puppet them from within.
- Technicolor Fire: Dragon fire can come in a rainbow of colors, although it leans towards more mundane hues on average. Its most common and ancestral shade is orange; red and yellow, the next most common, are charcterized respectively by being cooler and longer-burning and hotter and erratic; red comes from crossing with Ice or Water dragons, while yellow from crosses with Electricity dragons. Blue Fire, the next most common, is also very hot and comes from very old or pure lineages. Green and purple are also possible, but very rare. Purple is essentially a more extreme form of Blue, being extremely hot and pure, but is also incredibly rare and considered to be an omen of greatness. Green Fire is instead a sign of latent dark dragon ancestry — the very first dragons with green flame were born to a Fire dragon and a Shadow dragon — and, as such, eggs likely to produce a dragon with this color flame are usually smashed to avoid scandal.
- Technicolor Wind: The magical energy associated with the Wind element comes in a variety of colorations. Grey is the most common, followed by teal, derived from Earth-heavy lineages, and by a variety of desaturated colors, produced by Electricity ancestry. The rarest variety consists of a grey lining around a brightly colored core.
- Thunderbird: Downplayed by the storm raptors. They cannot directly manipulate the elements, but they have innate connections to either Wind and Lightning that make them exceptionally fast flyers and much more agile in storms than other flying creatures.
- Toothy Bird: Storm raptors are giant predatory birds with beaks full of large bone-crushing teeth.
- True-Breeding Hybrid: The first Water dragons were the children of Fire and Ice dragons, while the first Wind dragons were children of Earth and Electricity dragons. Both types breed true, and, while new hybrids are sometimes still born, both types mainly exist as self-sustaining populations separate from the central draconic culture.
- Water Is Blue: The most common color variant of the Water element is light blue, followed by deep blue. Clear water is very rare, and only emerged in very recent times.
- With Great Power Comes Great Insanity: In the past, some dragons used forbidden magic to alter themselves and their innate elements in order to become more powerful. In so doing, they created the artificial elements of Poison, Shadow and Fear and became the first dark dragons. This did give them the power that they wanted, but such a fundamental alteration of one's self is a dangerous thing, and many of them gradually went insane as a result when they simply didn't die outright. Notably, this risk is only present for dragons who alter themselves in this manner — any children they might have afterwards would naturally possess links to their parents' new elements and do not risk going insane.
- "World's Best" Character: Elemental mastery is divided into a number of ranks based on power and skill; those dragons who have achieved the absolute possible peak of control, talent and raw strength are referred to as Elementals (a parallel title, Magical, is used for those who have reached a similar peak of magical power). Elementals are extremely rare, since reaching this rank requires both immense innate power and an abnormal drive and dedication; the only two Elementals around at the story's time are Lynerius and one of the Elder Guardians — the other three are Masters, the next rank down, but the specific identity of their strongest member is kept secret.
- Yellow Earth, Green Earth: Earth comes in three distinct color variants — green, brown and grey — each with a specific elemental focus.
- Green Earth, which includes near-yellow shades, is focused on plant manipulation. Dragons with this element have energy breath lined with leaves or petals, and can learn to create and direct magical plants.
- Grey Earth is associated with stones, minerals, and sand. Grey Stone breath is laced with pebbles.
- Brown Earth has an affinity for soil and for woody flora. Brown Earth breath is lined with twigs and bits of soil.
- Multicolored Earth, the rarest kind, arose as a hybrid variant and manifests as two of the three kinds mixed into a single dragon, typically with one being primary and the other secondary.
- Yellow Lightning, Blue Lightning: Electricity comes in a variety of colors, influenced by several possible factors:
- Yellow is the most common and original form of the element.
- White Electricity is the hottest, and leaves the strongest burns. It is believed to originate from mixing with Fire lineages.
- Purple is cooler than yellow, but is more shocking. It is a relatively common variant.
- Blue Electricity is the inverse of purple, being more hot than socking.
- Green Electricity is rarer but not excessively so.
- Red Electricity is the rarest kind. It is the coolest form of Electricity, but also the most shocking.
