This will contain spoilers for, primarily, Last First Snow and Four Roads Cross - including a major climactic scene for Last First Snow. Read on at your own risk.
And a reminder disclaimer - my ereader has messed up page counts in some of the books so at times I can only cite chapters. Thank goodness this isn’t an academic paper.
Dragons as magical jumbo jets
One of the first descriptions of the Craft Sequence I used on the site, and used with friends to sell the series, is: “There are literal gods (who sometimes die), necromancer-sorcerer-lawyers (who sometimes kill them), gargoyle poets, dragons that deign to act as jumbo jets, vampire pirates, flying universities, and some of the best worldbuilding descriptions you’ll ever read.”
The dragon jumbo jets bit has consistently garnered the most excited response of the lot. Sure, it’s not a central part of the series but it’s a key part of worldbuilding and - to the best of my knowledge - a unique depiction of dragons. And it makes complete sense in the world of the Craft, like a puzzle piece pressing satisfyingly into place the first time you read it. Of course commercial long haul flights involve dragons. Of course they do!
But, being Gladstone, it’s not enough to have a cool bit of worldbuilding. Instead, we get some deep introspection about dragons, their place in the world, their reasons for performing this task when they are, well, literal dragons, and a capitalist critique.
Can’t have Gladstone worldbuilding with a good old critique of capitalism.
Our main look at dragon air transport is in Four Roads Cross, but we’re going to jump around the chronology (it is the Craft Sequence after all) so we can get a few more references in before we dive deep.
In chapter 21 of Four Roads Cross we get a little foreshadowing for our later dragon scene, with Tara thinking of how rote dragon flight can become to a Craftsperson when Shale grabs her by the waist and leaps from a skyscraper:
I believe this is the first time we hear of dragon gondolas specifically, and we of course see more of them later as part of the practicality of flying a dragon.
Heading now to an early scene in Ruin of Angels, Kai demonstrates how, actually, dragon flight can be just as bloody irritating as real life flights. Naturally, this scene serves the dual purpose of showing us the weirdness of Adgel Lex before we even get there, but on first read the main impression is how similar Kai’s experience is to ours.
The next bit is less about dragons themselves, and more about the indignities of air travel we mentioned above, and I’m including it here because it a) amuses me, and b) serves to highlight what dragon travel entails in a practical sense.
As someone who has done many a long haul flight, with both a chronic illness and 6’4 travel companion, I feel this frustration deep in my soul. I see you, Kai. I see you.
…though I am yet to need to do a blood sacrifice to pray to my goddess slash make a phone call in the middle of said long haul flight, so you’re on your own there, Kai.
Again, the worldbuilding here is next level - prayers interfere with navigation? Even when your aeroplane is an ‘enormous, basically immortal lizard’? Gladstone playing around with fantasy to represent the absurdities of our own world remains one of my favourite elements of the Craft Sequence. Having to turn off devices even on flight safe mode when you take off and land is one of the most admittedly minor but irritating things (especially when only some airlines require it, making any justification much harder to accept). Just let me listen to some kpop while we descend from the heavens, please.
…with that rant over, let’s take a look at Dead Country. We only get a brief scene of dragon travel, when Tara dazedly leaves Alt Coulumb for Edgemont, but there are a couple of significant differences to Kai’s journey that are worth exploring.
Let’s unpack this.
First of all, Tara has a cabin not a row of seats like Kai. Is this an economy versus business class distinction? That doesn’t sound especially sensical, given that Kai is actually travelling on business with a business budget, whereas Tara is flying for her own means and definitely doesn’t have a massive bank balance of saved soul.
That being said, Kai’s trip was a last minute addition to her schedule and her boss doesn’t seem particularly happy about it, so she may be trying to cut costs. We don’t read about how Tara booked her flights, but we know that Seril and Shale were trying to make her journey easier - perhaps they upgraded her ticket?
Or perhaps different routes have different styles of accommodation, more akin to different train options than modern flights. On a sleeper train, you will indeed get a cabin rather than a seat in a crowded carriage. Maybe the cross-Kath route is different than the Agdel Lex route - after all, Kai is not travelling from Kavekana or the New World, but from allegorical Europe. Maybe her flight is considered short haul, or even a budget airline, compared to Tara’s?
Either way, the comparison is interesting.
Secondly, we see that people are able to leave dragon journeys outwith scheduled stops. This makes a lot of sense, particularly for the Craftsfolk of the world, and would mean fewer dragons are required to do fewer trips, likely a necessity in this world. There surely can’t be that many almost immortal truly gigantic magical beings that are willing to act as aeroplanes? More likely, there are a few key routes and a few dragons who fly each. It does appear that Northern Kath, at least, is rather less populated than North America, which may also help on the practicality (no citation for that, that’s a future article).
We hear a little more about this later in the book when Tara briefly considers leaving Edgemont:
A question here is what flies from the small airfield? Smaller dragons? Or are there other beings or machines that fly shorter routes? We know that Craftsfolk can fly themselves, and in Dresediel Lex there are airbuses, optera and couatl for various purposes, but is there a more inter-city equivalent?
Now let’s get into the real detail offered in Four Roads Cross:
There is more detail before and after this to add colour to the airport experience, but - as much as I love it - this article is already taking me long enough to write so we’re going to focus purely on the dragon-ness.
Dragons in the Craft Sequence are unspeakably, unfathomably vast. Even a Craftswoman trained in seeing unspeakable magic, breaking down what’s in front of her to its constituent parts, can barely conceptualise the size of a dragon in front of her. We get even more of this vertigo inducing description once Tara has boarded the dragon, and in the middle of the night leaves her cabin to explore the observation deck and beyond.
“Nothing large enough to be landscape should move” truly encapsulates the scale of dragons. I don’t think there is a flight equivalent in our world - even the largest Airbus A380* couldn’t compare to a dragon.
(*my brother is obsessed with planes and I know far too many details about them off the top of my head, send help).
Perhaps a better equivalent would be the humongous cruise ships that seem determined to drown Venice and other tourist destinations. Imagine one of them sentient, moving of its own accord, breathing, heart beating. It would be a terrifying sight to behold.
We learn more about dragons and how they operate as passenger vehicles in the next passage, an excellent example of Gladstone’s ability to interweave humour, existential musings and worldbuilding. This next quote is quite long, but absolutely essential.
Well that’s not at all ominous, is it?
Dragons as weapons of mass destruction
On that portentous note, let’s move on to the That Dragon Scene. If you, like most people, read the series in either publication or chronological order rather than one of our weird and wonderful sequences you will have come across this scene in Last First Snow before the jumbo jet scenes; on my first read I hadn’t noticed many, if any, of the references mentioned in part one, and this was my first introduction to dragons in the Craft Sequence at all.
Let’s get into it.
If the Skittersill Rising wasn’t bloody and destructive enough already, with magical napalm dropped on protestors, bloodthirsty gods rising and supping on their faithful, the dead being raised into angels, now we have the King in Red astride a dead dragon transformed into a weapon that shocks Elayne - ELAYNE - so much she nearly loses focus.
By this point in the battle we’ve seen great horrors of war, godly and Craft weapons aplenty, but this one supercedes them all.
This tells us a hell of a lot about both dragons, the Craft, and the God Wars.
Dragons appear to typically live somewhat outside the rest of the world, with “their quiet slow empires and millennial games” - with millennial in this context meaning multiple millennia as opposed to the IRL generational term. Like many ancient and / or immortal fantasy creatures, human lifespans, empires and wars are trifling to them, our lifespan that of a mayfly compared to their countless years. Yet, the God Wars were so immensely destructive and threatened to destroy the entire world, so dragons chose a side - that of the Craft.
We don’t know exactly what living dragons did to intervene in the God Wars, but we do know that Craftsmen - capitalist necromancers that they are - saw the power of dragons and wanted to use it, preferably once the dragon in question was happily deceased. The dragons don’t mind, not caring for their dead, but there is another, darker rationale that connects back with something Tara’s dragon conversational partner says in Four Roads Cross:
Dragons, whether they consider themselves individuals or a broader society, intervened in the God Wars because Craftsfolk were on track to break the world; even after the Wars ended, those same Craftsfolk continued to experiment with unknown magics making huge swaths of the world unliveable. We read in Last First Snow that “Some, young and curious, hired themselves out as carriers for air freight, but the elders kept apart.”
Young, of course, could mean a great many things in relation to a dragon’s lifespan, but let’s focus on that second part: hiring themselves out as carriers for air freight. Curiosity doesn’t seem to be the primary motivation of the one dragon we hear from directly, though it doesn’t seem to be particularly burdened or bothered by its job. Rather, it seems like it was a dragon that fought in the God Wars and doesn’t trust that Craftsfolk will allow dragons to live in peace unless they make themselves useful. Acting as an aeroplane is preferable to becoming a weapon, for this dragon at least.
A dead dragon is a weapon in a different way than a living one could be. As we see above, they lack “the living’s supernatural cleverness” but their bodies offer a framework unlike anything else in the Domain. Expensive to actually use in battle - a thousand souls for a minute’s combat - but it doesn’t seem that Kopil requires more than a few minutes of combat to take down the Skittersill angels.
So what weaponry is actually built into this fearsome dragon corpse?
Elayne says “within, between, beneath he scales of the King in Red’s dragon, she saw Craftwork weapons spin to absurd heights of power. And, as the Skittersill angels broke for cover, the guns spoke.” We see a bit more from Chel, Temoc and Elayne’s perspectives throughout the battle:
This dragon is something of a nuclear power source for Craft weaponry that can go up against gods - weakened gods, sure, but gods nonetheless. The King in Red is bringing down the God Wars on a civilian uprising. Dropping the gripfire-napalm on Chakal Square was but a warm-up; the dragon is to sweep up the straggling survivors.
Kopil didn’t, it seems, necessarily plan on using the dragon against god-powered angels; nobody, not even Temoc, seemed to expect the gods to use their faithful in this way. So Kopil’s dragon-powered weapons weren’t for the gods, or even Temoc - they were for the people, the civilians still gathered in the Square. He made it clear earlier in the book that anyone remaining in Chakal Square were declaring themselves combatants, and that he could and would use God Wars weapons on them.
And he did.
We don’t know what happened to the dragon after this battle. Is it a one-use weapon, like an atomic bomb? Or is it a Chekhov’s gun for the endgame? Will dead dragons rise against the skazzerai? Will their living brethren?
Two books to go. Guess we’ll have to wait and see.
Do you think we’ll see more dragons in the last two books of Craft Wars? Let me know in the comments, on Twitter, or on Tumblr!