Wyvern

Weight: 1,500-2,500 lbs

Length: 30-40 ft

Tail: 10-18 ft

Social Unit: Group

Status: Common

Native to: Ryu 108

Habitat: Small islands

Known variants: Fire, Ice, Lightning, Poison, Water

The largest and most common dragon in the galaxy, the wyvern is the only one to only have 2 legs. The largest specimens can be up to 40 feet long and weigh over a ton. Like their counterparts on Ryu 97, wyverns mostly avoid sentients and inhabit remote areas. They do not view sentients as food, since they are very small compared to wyverns and are not worth their energy. Wyverns will usually only eat sentients if they find them as carrion. They nest in huge groups of up to 100 on small, rocky, uninhabited islands. From these islands, they make forays out to the coasts, where they prey mostly on mammoths, cave bears, and whatever other large animals they can carry in their claws. If wyverns can find any reasonably fresh carrion, they will consume that as well. Water wyverns will also voyage underwater for extended periods of time, where they prey on sharks and other large sea animals. However, water wyverns sometimes fall prey to krakens while attempting this. Although wyverns usually avoid sentients, they will not hesitate to attack any livestock they find on the coasts. As a result, farmers view them as extreme pests. Often, tribes will send expeditions against nests of wyverns that they find are raiding their farms. Due to the fact that wyverns nest in groups, these expeditions are rarely successful and almost always end in the deaths of everyone involved. During early autumn, male wyverns will fight each other in intense, all-out brawls that almost always result in serious injury or death for the losers. The winners get to mate with all the females they like (however, wyverns can only mate with wyverns of the same variant). A week or so after mating, the females will build nests out of fur from animals they have killed and lay 1-3 eggs. Female wyverns will defend their nests vigilantly, making sure to chase any invaders far out to sea. Like other dragons, wyvern hatchlings will imprint on the first creature they see when they hatch. It is worth noting that a wyvern imprinted on a sentient will never attack sentients unless directed to by its owner. As a result, many have tried to take advantage of this and steal wyvern eggs to raise the hatchlings as pets. Nine times out of ten, this ends horribly for the thieves, most of which are killed by female wyverns. However, the ones who are successful are faced with an extremely daunting task: incubating a wyvern egg requires a near constant source of heat; and when the egg finally does hatch, the owner would need to find a way to milk a female wyvern (wyvern hatchlings spend the first few months of their lives consuming nothing but milk from their mothers until they progress to meat). However, a complicated mixture of sheep's milk, mammoth or mastodon blood, saltpeter, charcoal, and sulfur can be used as a substitute. In fact, the king of Ryu 108 owns a colony of domesticated wyverns, which he uses for Ryu 108's military. Although wyvern eggs are currently illegal to own without a permit granted by the King of Ryu 108, they can be found being sold on the black market for prices in the millions of galactic credits.