One of the driving forces in my novelle The Odd-Job Wizard is Celabramar the dragon. He has an intense personality, big appetite, and a quick temper. He has also been living in my head since I was thirteen years old and doodled him during my one year in private education.
I started one class with a pencil sketch of a chess piece. Later that drawing became a tower on a lake. Yet another class later I decided that tower needed a dragon. That dragon would become Celabramar.
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| Doodle of a Dragon and Tower Pencil on lined notebook paper by A 13-year-old Overthinker with wobbly penmenship and poor spelling skills |
Celabramar is fun to write. His wants are simple, a full stomach and a warm quiet place to nap. The conflict comes from the fact his is a large obligate carnivore with no need for human norms. He doesn't have to be malicious to cause problems.
The backstory conflict in The Odd-Job Wizard starts because ranchers settle in his hunting ground. Celabramar still needs to eat. The native prey is gone, so he just eats sheep. This is reasonable in his mind. However, much like in the U.S.A.'s Great Westward Expansion, the settlers freak out about 'marauding savages' threatening their lives and livelihoods.
Thankfully, Mundus is not America. Celabramar is not a human facing the combine forces of colonialism and the federal government. He is a fire-breathing dragon. Young, inexperienced, but still a dragon.
In human terms, he's just moved out from his parents house for a steady job. His 'job' for lack of a better term is managing his hunting territory. Keeping the land stable and reporting problems to his elders. I drew inspiration from interactions with ranchers, wildlife management, and my own education in environmental engineering. Celabramar acts as a key-stone species. He hunts mega-fauna and keeps the dangerous monster population in check – one bite at a time.
Madam Vircroc, the dragon diplomat, and Sage Owdigee, didn't exist before I started writing this novella. Originally, they were just to provide exposition. However, they quickly became an excellent way to contrast Celabramar's maturity and hint at the greater culture of the Dragon Nation.
The Dragon Nation is a, hopefully, polite nod to the First Nations of America. They have a different culture, a different society, and so treat the land differently than their neighbors do. The history of Oklahoma contains repeated clashed over ecological use and management between colonists and indigenous people. My story mentions fencing off water sources and how ranching, farming, and mining changes the land. This are the least horrifying things real people use to hurt each other. Illegal settlements due to misread maps, corporate interests, and misinformed pioneers was endemic.
Homesteaders having to abandon their claims and return to civilization actually happened. Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder ends with the family having to leave the Osage Reservation because Pa Ingalls was too eager to get a choice location for his homestead.
Celabramar, much like the average citizen of the Osage and other First Nations, is in a painful situation Anything he does can spiral into a political disaster. He still needs to hunt and eat. He has random people wandering into his cave hoping to become 'glorious heroes' by picking a fight. It's exhausting.
And so, Celabramar decides to move. I expect some readers to mixed feelings about the message it sends. Traditionally, when the native population gets displaced, they don't get to come back.
However, Celabramar is a dragon, not a human. The Odd-Job Wizard is a fantasy fiction. To dragon, moving a few valleys inland is more like changing your phone number and buying new locks. He's not giving up. He's keeping himself from escalating the problem.
The young dragon with a literally fiery temper wants to be the bigger person. This is the core of his character. Over decades of daydreaming and writing, his mannerism, appearance, and even name have changed. However, the silver scales and lake island remain in honor of that first doodle.
