A fracture with light behind it

Dragons Crack

Every dragon starts in a shell.

Climb out of the dark

Hatch three kilometres down. Eat what you kill, steal what it knew, and climb when the dark has nothing left to teach you.

You hatch three kilometres under a village that has never heard of you. Eat what you can kill and take what it knew — every animal down here evolved something worth stealing. Climb when the dark runs out of teachers. 2.6 m of basalt and fire by the time you see the sun.

Every dragon starts in a shell.

A dragon is not a species. It is the world venting — deep rock takes on more heat than it can shed, and what calcifies at the bottom of the shaft hatches and starts climbing toward the only low place it knows.

You climb because the deep runs out. The world has dragons in it, so nothing else stayed ordinary: everything down there evolved something, and every one of those is a skill you can take. Watch a thing hunt and you learn the tactic. Eat enough of it and you take the organ. Eat enough chalk grubs and you can move through rock; eat the crawler that ate your siblings and you inherit its eyes.

Then the band runs dry — nothing new left to learn, prey too small to grow on, and something younger already coming up the shaft behind you. The warrens first, where you are the smallest thing that hunts. Then the middens, where something hunts you on purpose. Then the mines — straight lines, square corners, lamps, and the first enemy that has been told you are coming. They are also the one animal you can gain nothing from by eating, so you watch them instead, for a year, for free.

Then daylight, at 2.6 m, starving and unable to stop. A village is food. A town is a fight. A city is a decision.

Five lineages, told by the route each took up: the drake grows its wings last because wings are useless in a tunnel; the wyvern climbs on its wing knuckles and spits one compact bolt, because a sustained gout in a chimney cooks the animal that made it; the lung swims the flooded route and arrives without hunger. Each is built to be unmistakable at thumbnail size, and each has a signature attack that is a different *shape*, not a different colour.

Every dragon starts in a shell.

You hatch three kilometres down. Everything else down there evolved something too, and all of it is on the table: watch it to learn the tactic, eat enough of it to take the organ.

You climb when the dark runs out of teachers. Warrens, middens, mines, and out.

Below, the thing that kills you is bigger than you. Above, it is smaller than you and there are four hundred of it.

Dragons Crack.

Dragons Crack is a game about climbing out. You hatch at the bottom of a shaft and grow by taking what the dark knows — watched, or eaten — until the band has nothing left to teach, then you climb, out into a surface that has heard of you only as a mining problem and is too busy fighting itself to agree on an answer. Five lineages, each explained by the route it took up, all authored in code: proportions, pose, palette and polygon budget are parameters, not baked assets.