(Note: The origins and nature of dragons are so deeply shrouded in mystery that attempting to classify them in any meaningful way is essentially hopeless. Certainly they are deeply bound up with the sorcerous world, but the sheer range of draconic descriptions, together with their rarity -- most places in the Black Steel world tell stories about dragons, but many have been passed down for generations since the last sighting -- make it nearly impossible to make any definite statement about dragons as a whole, or indeed to consistently separate myth from the world's reality. Their size and rarity are such however that their origins are uncertain in the extreme; the continuation of a species with such an apparently tiny population spread over such widely distant regions would likely be as impossible by strictly non-magical biological means as would their flight and very living existence given their enormous size. As such, whether dragons constitute a single species, or whether the notion of species or any other taxonomical classification applies to such beings, is by no means a certainty.)
Dragons are so rarely seen by human beings, and legends of their appearance are so diverse, that describing even their physical appearance is an uncertain business at best. It is entirely possible that many reported "dragon" sightings were actually of other types of creatures altogether, from transformed sorcerors to non-sentient beasts. This article will restrict itself to dragons that share the most common characteristics associated with their wide-ranging descriptions: Thinking beings, enormous in size, with at least vaguely reptillian features and functional wings.
Most reasonably-contemporary reports of dragons come from areas rarely frequented by humans, which could well simply mean that travelers to distant places like to embellish or invent the events of their journeys, or that unusual creatures seen in previously-unexplored places may be called "dragons" by default. Some believe that for reasons of their own, dragons actively avoid human habitations however -- while others hold that the wilderness areas frequented by dragons remain untamed wilds simply because humans who attempt to claim them do not survive the attempt.
Black Steel personnel, in their far-flung and disparate travels, with the penchant of certain of their important members for exploration of the unknown, and their interest in unusual and magically-charged places, have themselves encountered an exceptional number of dragons for a group of their size: A total of two dragons, or possibly three. (The first, seen briefly and at a distance, might have been some other especially large flying creature, mistaken for a dragon by those who saw it.) Obviously, this is not a sample from which a great deal of information can be inferred, but dragons are obviously capable of wielding sorcerous power -- the dragon best known to Dargon and Quix in fact agreed to act as their tutor in its use -- and of communicating in language comprehensible to human beings. Any description of draconic nature overall however must wait for more information to be gathered, if enough of it ever can be.
