Writing partners Jaida Jones and Danielle Bennett have been entertaining readers for years with stories of magic, machinery and dragons. With Havemercy, Shadow Magic, Dragon Soul, and now Steelhands, Jones and Bennett have created a world as compelling as any in modern fantasy.
As dragons play a significant role in their ongoing saga, I thought I’d ask these two to share some of their thoughts about these majestic and mysterious beasts.
Danielle Bennett
I’ve always had a thing about dragons, one that probably started with Smaug from The Hobbit. Tolkien’s illustration of that slender red body curled around more gold than even a dragon could use in its lifetime is an image that’s stuck in my head for years. I’m still not sure which was more appealing, the glittering scales or the glittering jewels—or whether they became one and the same to me, the treasure and the dragon, both things rare and valuable, one guarding the other and both impossible for a true adventurer to resist.
Even then I wasn’t sure which I’d rather have: a cave full of coins, or my very own dragon to visit. To me, both were equally precious.
Growing up, my favorite dragons were always the ones with distinctly human characteristics. After Smaug and his mortal greed came Kazul from Patricia C. Wrede’s Enchanted Forest Chronicles, who collected so much treasure in her caves that she had to ‘kidnap’ a princess just to make her into an indentured servant. That sounded like the perfect job to me, since apparently a dragon’s instinct to hoard doesn’t go hand-in-hand with an instinct to keep her spoils neat, or even organized. When I realized Kazul didn’t know how to cook, and needed a princess to make her soufflés and other nice desserts, I liked that. A lot.
As I grew older, my perception of dragons evolved. I became more interested in the dangerous, volatile nature of dragons, their cleverness yes, but also how useful they’d be as weapons. George R.R. Martin touches on this in his A Song of Fire and Ice series with the Targaryen family who used their close bond with the dragons to conquer Westeros. The image of a dragon’s flames scouring the battlefield for an army’s victory was a departure from anything I’d read before. So I guess you can say my feelings on dragons have changed over the years, but the interest itself remains a constant.
Jaida Jones:
Like Dani, dragons have always been on my mind. I was a nervous kid, always afraid of something, a shadow in the basement or a noise in the closet. I slept with a night-light, required a cotillion of stuffed animals to offer tactical support at every turn, and I had my fair share of night-terrors—because I believed in every ghost story I heard. Despite my fear, I wanted to believe in them.
Because if ghosts were real, then fairies were, too, and trolls lurking under the bridge, and frog-princes and wicked spells and magic itself. I had to be afraid in order to believe, but the one supernatural creature whose sharp claws and sharper eyes I wasn’t afraid of was dragons. I always wanted to be kidnapped by one, like Cimorene in Wrede’s Enchanted Forest Chronicles. I wanted to put on an apron and make tea-cakes and discuss a shared love of great big piles of shiny gold; I wanted to deal with dragons myself, not let someone else in shining armor deal with them for me.
Maybe it was all part of my grandpa’s greatest lesson—he was talking about baseball at the time, but I had to turn it into a metaphor—about always rooting for the underdog. Every lance that pierced a dragon’s weak-spot was something I felt, the soft underbelly or the lighter scales over the heart was something I wanted to protect. Dragons that could talk, dragons that could joke, dragons that were wicked and wicked funny—my love for those began with Dealing With Dragons, and it only grew from there.
When the dragon in the prologue to Bioware’s Dragon Age II melts from scale to flesh, she’s still a dragon. She’s always been a dragon. You can see it in her eyes, the firelight that lingers, the wisdom in her smile. When she laughs it sounds like claws on stone, and how can you help but laugh along with her?
I am glad there others with a love for dragons as much as myself. Honestly I am obessed with stories, myth, tales, and legends; mostly about mythical things such as unicorns or griffins. But what captivated me the most was and is dragons. I have got hundreds of books just on them alone let alone the mass of information on other special creatures. I think what attracted me to them is the vitality of there race. Their so different from us yet so similiar. They imbodied man’s every quality that we portray in the most beautiful way.That is what drives me like a moth to a flame. Their lore makes me crave for their exsistence, so I read and keep them alive. We all want to live in these fantasies that we read and more than anything I would want to live with in the one with a dragon by side.
Anyway I have heard of this series several times and have been itching to read it. By doing so I hope to broaden my veiw on an ever changing race from the traditonal, now over used race.
While I appreciate the lore of Dragons, no one has mentioned one of the greatest series about dragons, The Pern series. If ever there was a great series that told of Dragons and their riders that is a wonderful series.