The Rock

At the southern edge of New Antioch’s mountains stands a citadel that has never fallen, a fortress of brass and stone known only as the Rock. From its gates come the dragonborn, a people without childhoods in the ordinary sense, and without histories they themselves can name. To the empire, the Rock is both arsenal and reliquary, a sealed engine that produces soldiers who burn with conviction even as they wrestle with questions no one dares ask.

No outsider enters its halls. No map marks its interior. The Rock is less a city than a forge, less a home than a crucible. What lives within remains behind its bronze-clad walls. What steps beyond is already made into something else.

The Making of the Dragonborn

All dragonborn trace their beginnings to the Rock. Some claim they are born of natural parentage, others that they are shaped from ritual fires or ancient vats of metal and blood. The truth is unknown, even to the dragonborn themselves. They are raised not by families but by orders: cohorts of hatchlings shaped by tutors, priests, and drillmasters who treat their charges as sacred commissions.

Education is relentless. From the first moment a dragonborn can walk, they are drilled in scripture, drilled in the handling of arms, drilled in the secret languages of demonology and binding. They are not asked who they will be, only what role they will fill. Those who falter disappear into chambers below, their names stricken from rolls. Those who endure are hardened into inquisitors, generals, or silent scholars whose eyes have already seen too much.

To live in the Rock is to live in preparation for wars most will never understand.

Rumors of the Deep Vaults

The Rock’s walls conceal more than barracks and temples. Whispers speak of the Deep Vaults, subterranean chambers lined with brass machinery that no living artificer can repair. Automatons pace the halls, sleepless and wordless, their bronze faces blank beneath tarnished helms. Some vaults are sealed with scripture so old it no longer matches the flame-tongue of Antioch’s priests. Others thrum with unseen engines that shake the stone but produce nothing visible.

A few dragonborn recall flashes of memory not their own, as if they were walking echoes of something older. The Church Militant calls these visions a gift of Matra, evidence that the Rock was sanctified by the Kindly Flame herself. Skeptics whisper of a war long before Antioch rose, a war that demanded weapons born, not made.

The Servants of Fire

Beyond the Rock, dragonborn serve as the sharpest instruments of New Antioch’s will. Many become inquisitors, trained to root out corruption, blasphemy, and heresy with uncompromising precision. Others take command of legions, their presence on the battlefield both a rallying point and a warning that something more than ordinary war is at hand.

Some are dispatched as loremasters and demonologists, charting the secrets of the Severance and the scars it left behind. They speak the tongues of fiends with uncomfortable fluency, and to hear one chant the words of binding is to be reminded that Antioch wages wars against more than flesh and steel.

The Burden of Silence

The Rock shapes soldiers, but it does not answer their questions. No dragonborn knows why their kind alone are born resistant to corruption, or why they carry instinctive knowledge of infernal pacts and names long buried. Some accept the silence as faith, believing themselves forged by Matra to guard humanity against eternal foes. Others are haunted by it, suspecting that they are not children of the flame at all, but remnants of something no priest would dare admit.

The Rock offers no explanations, only duties.

Dragonborn in the World

To the people of Antioch, dragonborn are awe and unease in equal measure. They are revered for their loyalty, their brilliance in war, and their incorruptible discipline. Yet few will meet a dragonborn’s gaze without shuddering, for in their eyes lies the reflection of things better left unnamed.

In the Concordat, dragonborn are received warily. Their precision and their service are respected, but their loyalty to Antioch is never in question. Many Concordant folk see them not as neighbors but as reminders that the empire’s shadow stretches farther than any council chamber.

Dragonborn rarely wander without cause, but when they do, they carry the Rock with them. Every silence, every scar, every word they speak in low fire-tongue reminds those around them that their lives began in a place no one else may ever see.

The Question That Remains

Every dragonborn must one day ask what they are. A soldier of the flame, or something forged for wars older than the Severance? A mortal race, or a warning cast in flesh and brass?

The Rock will not answer. It only watches. It only makes. And still, its gates open, and still, its children march.