Kadanth is loosely based on snippets from T.S. Eliot’s cycle of poems, Four Quartets. Unless otherwise attributed, all quotations come from this text.

The Fire and the Rose Egg

How can one of the clutch's larger eggs look so weightless? This ovoid nestles feather-light into the sands, embraced by the cradle its dam has fashioned for it. The wide base is dappled with rosy pinks as soft as a maiden's blush, the colour shimmering with pastel glint of petals traced with the morning's dew. Inch by imperceptible inch the shades intensify as they rise up the egg, a flower transmuted into flame. Carmine tongues are in-folded to a tangled knot at the shell's very peak, twisted into a crown of fire.

Hatching Message

The Fire and the Rose Egg is not one for waiting. On the fiery heat of the Reachian Sands it has hardened quite enough. The flame at the peak of the shell is spreading glow lower, lower, as inside the dragonet sets steady back-and-forth rock. Tap, tap, tap, and a wingspar breaks free first. Talons scrabble clear shards. As Alasooth watches damp bronze limbs stick out at awkward angles. A pause. A gathering of potential. And then — a tense of new-made muscles and the egg breaks apart revealing the large dragonet within.

At the Still Point of the Turning World Bronze Dragonet

Massive and heavy-set, Kadanth looms above most other nowtime dragons. Each inch of sinew and hide is solid-knotted and dense with power, brute force twisted in his thick hindquarters and the tightwound muscles packed over his shoulders. His well-oiled hide is a deep burnished bronze; darker colour swells across broad wings and burly haunches, while over his blunt muzzle and squareset jaw glows the lighter almost-gold of smelted metal. Where other dragons may be beautiful, Kadanth is awesome in the true sense of the word: huge, threatening, as full of waiting force as a coiled spring.

At full growth Kadanth is 69 feet (23m) long, with a wingspan of 115 feet (38m) and a shoulder height of 17 feet (5m).

Public Impress Message

For long moments that largest of the bronze hatchlings has stood trembling still in the wreckage of his egg. Heavy jaw and blunt muzzle have swung back and forth, taking in the rows of white-clad boys before him. Many-faceted eyes swirl red. The movement when it comes is sickeningly quick, a lurching mess of awkward limbs ending in razor-tipped talons and powered with unappreciated strength. A green struggling with her shell is trampled over, screaming pain as delicate ‘sails are torn. The boy who crouches beside her cries out his own echoed fear and hurt. He himself has a lucky escape: the two Candidates beyond him are not so fortunate, one then another not quick enough to evade the stumbling bronze dragonet who creels out his confusion — his hunger — his desperate loneliness.

It makes no sense, that Fenordan steps towards him. No sense and the only sense there’s ever been. Suddenly everything is silent as if the shocked hissing and startled cries from the Galleries are nothing. There is no Alasooth. There is no heat. There is only the bronze crying in confusion, attempting to extricate bloody talons from their tangle.

Fenordan crouches, reaches. The dragonet smells of blood. His hide is glistening damp. He is both very small and very big. Under the boy’s fingers his talons are slick and sharp, cutting tender skin as they are picked free of their fouling in the dead Candidate’s robes.

They happen in the same moment, the best thing and the worst. A terrified wriggling stumble slices those talons deep across Fenordan’s torso. And there, higher — white-rimmed hazel eyes widen in terror and meet the sudden whirling where red breaks on burst of rainbow.

Private Impress Message

There isn’t pain, not at first. Only wetness, heat, a sudden weakness that shatters young strength. The world is torn apart and fashioned anew, Fenordan’s chest ripped open so that something else can be pushed inside. Something old. Something that has always been here on these Sands, waiting.

There are no words. There’s only the breathless fright and the hunger and the togetherness that sears along nerves and sinews and heartstrings, destroying everything that came before. A forest already ancient and pulsing with life. The feeling of new muscles and unblemished hide and clumsy newborn legs.

And the knowledge, through all of it

Egg Inspiration

Physicality

Before the Oldtimers arrived Kadanth was one of the largest bronzes on Pern. Massive and heavy built he gives a great impression of solidity and force. His build is like one of Earth’s big cats: dense muscle over long lines, every feature honed towards survival. A multitude of larger and smaller ‘scores and scars tell the story of previous skirmishes.

In the air Kadanth is graceful in the way of an apex predator, possessing the unrelenting and uncompromising beauty of a creature doing exactly what it has evolved to do. Not for him the aerobatic agility of greens or blues: Kadanth is made for brute force in attack. It can take some time to power that massive bulk to full speed, but once there he is tireless.

On the earth is quite a different story. There the bronze is lumbering, those heavyset limbs cumbersome. All of the stamina and energy brought to drills and Falls is replaced with a catlike laziness: Kadanth seems to spend a large percentage of his time on the ground dozing. When he does rouse himself it is normally to enjoy the prodigious amount of washing and oiling a dragon of his size requires — especially after he has feasted in the pens with his usual stomach-turning level of goriness. Unusually for a fully mature dragon F’dan is still required to actively fight Kadanth’s tendency to overeat.

Personality

Many dragons have humanlike personalities: Kadanth is not one of them. More force of nature than person, the bronze has a truly alien feel to him. After decades together F’dan still has no idea what he thinks much of the time. Their bond is unbreakable and fathomless, but it is also curiously distant. Like the longtime couple who go to a party and do not interact at all before leaving together, the man and his dragon feel so secure in their unity that they feel little need to demonstrate it. They are each the perfect balance for the other, but as two dominant personalities their partnership took several turns to negotiate. In adulthood they have found stability in accepting which areas of their shared life each controls: Kadanth takes flights and falls; F’dan is master of their political ambitions. Often they do not consciously communicate for many hours at a stretch, content in the knowledge that the other is always there to return to.

Kadanth is a creature of contradictions. In stillness there is force. In silence there is presence. He has a great sense of stability, of the unchanging order of nature and time’s passage through it. Rarely does he feel strong emotion: things are what they are, and that is as it should be. His approval is felt not for the rightness or wrongness of things but for their existence. Good and bad, happy and heartbroken are human concepts which make only the faintest of ripples on the bronze’s mind. This endless detachment can infuriate F’dan, but it also provides crucial balance to the man’s personality.

It is possible sometimes for Kadanth to be mistaken as passive, but that is far from accurate. Instead he is grounded, timeless, a creature dancing to a different drum.

Mindvoice

Kadanth’s mindscape is based on the cedar forests of Yakushima, Japan. Ancient, timeless, the woods of the bronze’s mind are alien — a landscape not really Pernese at all. The trees stretch endless, an otherworldly gloom collecting under the canopy. A sense tingles at the back of the neck that all is not quite what it seems. There are no living creatures to be seen, but here are the cycles Kadanth is so at one with: the forest is always dying, the forest is always being born anew.

Leaves sussurate on agitation. Everywhere is the smell of wood mulch and fresh air. Pathless, unmapped, the wilderness spreads at once ominous and beautiful. It is not a welcoming space: there is no reaching for closeness or more human neediness. Rather Kadanth simply is, entirely sufficient to himself.

Kadanth avoids using actual words if at all possible. When he does see fit to constrain his thoughts to language the voice that comes is startlingly like that of his lifemate — if F’dan’s voice were cast on impossibly larger lungs from very far away.

When Kadanth experiences deep emotion, something begins to move deep in the forest. The canopy is rustled on heavy winds, and far into the trees is the sound of treetrunks crashing to the earth as a huge force moves. There is a sense of something that has been long asleep waking, watching, nearing…

The Other is the alien core of Kadanth, the distinct difference which even F’dan doesn’t understand. Based on the Forest God of Studio Ghibli’s film ‘Princess Mononoke’, the Other is the strangeness at the heart of the bronze. The peace, the balance, the harmony with the fundamentally indifferent order of the universe, the things which both infuriate F’dan and provide the perfect balance to him — all have their root here. The Other only very rarely comes to the edges of the trees — but there, sometimes, is a felt-rather-than-seen sense of a riotous blossoming, of antlers and wings and fur and scales. Something not human at all. Often this is very uncomfortable:

Thread

Threadfighting is the purpose for which Kadanth lives. He is single-minded to the point of obsession, utterly devoted to the pursuit of his ancient enemy, and thinks of nothing else during a Fall. Not for him the nerves or excitement of other dragons, only a cold-blooded determination. Through instinct, training and an unerring ability to be in just the right place at just the right moment he is a formidable fighter.

Aware as ever of the cycle of things, Kadanth knows that one day he and F'dan will give their lives in the fight. The thought does not concern him.

Flights

Kadanth rarely brings himself to rise for greens, but nothing on Pern could stop him from pursuing a queen when she flies in heat. He is a voracious predator in the pursuit, using all of his brawn and all of his cunning to gain his ultimate goal. Other bronzes might woo or flatter, but Kadanth's mind is silent — though his mouth is not.

Once flights are done Kadanth returns to having little interest in females whether he has caught or not. As a clutch father he is viciously protective but with no softer care for the eggs or the dragonets they hatch. Being constrained to the Sands is a stressful, restrictive thing for a dragon so physical.

On-Camera Clutches

• 28th day, 7th month, 3rd turn, 12th Pass
  • Senior Weyrwoman Sadaiya's gold Jivayath
  • 37 dragonets: 18 green, 12 blue, 5 brown, 2 bronze
• 22nd day, 6th month, 4th turn, 12th Pass
  • Junior weyrwoman Mayte's gold Rhiscorath
  • 37 dragonets: 20 green, 8 blue, 7 brown, 2 bronze
• 1st day, 8th month, 5th turn, 12th Pass
  • Senior Weyrwoman Sadaiya's gold Jivayath
  • 29 dragonets: 15 green, 10 blue, 3 brown, 1 bronze

Clutch:

F'dan (Fenordan) and bronze Kadanth
R'xim (Rixim) and bronze Shalnth