My mind has always chased dragons. As early as I can remember, I was enthralled by the very idea of them. I read through dinosaur textbooks in search of some reality to the magic. I raised reptiles seeking their equal in nature. But nothing could compare to the awe I felt the first time I saw the movie Dragonslayer, the Flight of Dragons, or even the weird cat thing they called Smaug the dragon in the Hobbit cartoon. (So happy they made him more dragonlike in the new movies.) I'm sure I yelled Falcor's name for weeks while playing after "The Neverending Story." My first NES rpg game was Dragon Warrior. Even my favorite stuffed animal was a dragon named Dragodoon I received one year for Christmas.
Many nights my mother would come into my bedroom and tell me stories of a boy who rode across the moon on the back of dragodoon. It instilled in me a bit of my magic of creation.
Every time I picked a book out from my father's fantasy library, I always grabbed the ones about dragons first. That was the reason I fell in love with Melanie Rawn's Dragon Prince series and Michael Whelan's artwork.
Dragons even inspired my first piece of creative writing. In second grade I wrote "Brandlin and the Bad Dragons" about a bumbling wizard who accidentally creates two dragons that go rampaging across the countryside. Only Brandlin, the wizard's brave apprentice, dared to chase them.
I cannot count how many stories revolved around this love for dragons when I first began practicing my art. And this passion has carried through my life. I still find myself in awe when dragons blaze across the screen in a movie or show. It stirs something within my soul, a piece of magic carried from my childhood when I believed riding upon the back of a magical dragon was possible.
I haven't officially added dragons to my universe, at least not in anything published yet. But there was no way I could become the god of my very own universe and not set a special place aside for the beasts that brought magic to my life. They have carried me to worlds beyond my own when I really needed an escape. I could do no less for them. I guarantee you as creation unfolds, the dragons will have their time. Their story is part of a much larger one hidden within all the worlds and lives of Brand's universe.
The truth is, dragons have always enthralled me and carried my mind to places I never thought imaginable. And I think perhaps I love writing fantasy so much because I love the idea of making worlds for beings like them to exist, because I feel their absence so much in my own.