#27. Ragnir Malakkar Rex

Lore

The Dragon

"A dragon who takes human form to compete? How is that fair?"
"How is that human form?"
"I know, right? It still breathes fire. Things are really slipping around here."

– Ada, Jhala, and Cassidy, eating lunch.


"The Fangwild is collapsing. Enemies strike from all directions, even this one. There’s more going on in Asgard than you know. I just fought a feathered serpent in the hall."

– Ragnir to Ember

As the story goes...

Ragnir Malakkar Rex is an apex predator, a dragon ninety feet long in his natural form. He hunted the Fangwild Forest and its neighboring lands, and everything he met was prey or plunder.

The first years after Ember’s disappearance from the Fangwild were good for the dragons. Without its heart, the eldritch forest descended into chaos, opening paths to new lands to ravage. Ragnir's favorite entrance to a new land was to emerge from an erupting volcano silhouetted against gouts of lava. In fire and battle, Ragnir's hoard grew. He collected mountain hearts from unlucky dwarf kings. He wrested so much gold from the Madman of Barbados that he is the pirate’s Moby Dick. His Fangwild lair grew so vast it was mistaken for a city of gold.

But now under mysterious assault, the forest is knotting itself into pure madness, and disaster looms. Ragnir knows the Fangwild's only hope is to restore its Heart, and he journeyed to Asgard to bring Ember back. To that end he takes humanoid form and fights in the Tournament, reveling in the battle. At night he reverts to dragon form, soaring over Asgard to find the path back to the Fangwild or just eat Odin's sheep.

Connections

•  He and Ember loathe Dusk as a betrayer

Context

As Ada, Jhala, and Cassidy have complained, Ragnir is a frickin' dragon! A lot of the vicious, plundering actions described in his lore are typical of European/fantasy-based dragon stories.

Ragnir Malakkar Rex is Ragnir's full name. As a fan of Dungeons & Dragons, this sounds a bit like a name a dragon (or a dragonborn) would have in the game. The Malakkar part sounds especially "draconic" to me. But alas, I haven't found any significance to the names Ragnir or Malakkar. Rex brings to mind "tyrannosaurus rex," a fearsome dinosaur with a name that means "king of the tyrant lizards." The "king" part of that name comes from the Latin word rex. So, perhaps "Rex" is more of a title: Ragnir Malakkar the king (of dragons? of the Fangwild?). His lore page describes him as "an apex predator," the predator at the very top of the food chain.

There is a fun little nod to J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit: "He collected mountain hearts from unlucky dwarf kings." This is a reference to the main antagonist of the book, a dragon named Smaug, raiding the dwarven kingdom of Erebor (later called "The Lonely Mountain"). Smaug claimed the dwarven king's massive treasure hoard, including a precious stone known as "the heart of the mountain."

Ragnir apparently caused a lot of problems for Thatch, "the Madman of Barbados," so much so that Ragnir is called Thatch's "Moby Dick." What does that mean, exactly? Moby Dick is a novel published in 1851 by American writer Herman Melville. In the book, Moby Dick is the name of a great white whale that had previously bitten off the leg of Captain Ahab, leading the obsessive sea captain on a quest for revenge against the monstrous sea creature. Thatch seems to have all of his limbs intact, but it sounds like Ragnir crippled him in a different, more monetary way.

Katars and axe? Well, giving him katars is a fun, creative way to have Ragnir attack with dragon-sized claws. As for the axe, there isn't a clear connection between the weapon and dragons in general, although one could argue that any double-bladed axe does bear a certain resemblance to a dragon taking flight with its giant wings.