Dragons are the largest predators anyone has measured, and they live where almost nobody does. Their range ends at what mariners call the Dragon Line, which runs along the northern coast of Feldia. South of it there are no dragons and no credible record of one. North of it there is very little else at the top of the food chain.
The Erka Fjords are the only inhabited land beyond the Line, and the Erkish are the only people who have made anything of the fact rather than simply living somewhere else.
What they are
Large enough that estimates from different observers disagree by half, cold-adapted, long-lived, and slow to breed. They hunt sea mammals and whatever comes ashore, nest on cliff faces and high scree, and are as territorial as anything that eats that much has to be. Erkish accounts describe animals that recognize individual people, hold a grudge for years, and can be worked with by someone raised to it — the same list a Kornfeld horse-breaker would give you, only much larger.
That is the whole of it, and southern visitors are regularly disappointed to hear so. The dragon of Feldian church art — the one that speaks, hoards gold, and puts questions to knights — is a picture, not an account. Erkish traders in Seehaven have been enjoying the misunderstanding for as long as they have been coming south.
Why they stop at the Line
The Kirchberg position is climatic: the animals cannot shed heat and cannot feed in warmer water, and the Line is simply where the cold ends. It is the tidiest explanation and it has the advantage of matching the seasons, since the Line reportedly shifts a little from year to year.
Mariners who work the northern coast do not dispute the reason so much as the map. They will tell you the Line is not a line at all but a broad and moving band, that it sits further south in a hard winter, and that a chart drawn from one summer’s soundings will get somebody killed in another. The Erkish, who have the only useful evidence, keep most of it to themselves and sell the rest as pilotage.
What comes south
Very little, and it is expensive. Rendered dragon oil is the main article of trade: it burns hot, burns long, and does not thicken in a cold hold, which makes it the preferred lamp oil on northern ships and in the deep mines of Steinmark. Bone comes next, sold by weight for tool handles, inlay, and the carved work the Erkish sell better than anyone. Hide reaches market rarely and is bought mostly as a curiosity by people with money to spend on curiosities.
The Erkish also sell passage. A ship that means to work north of the Line without an Erkish pilot aboard is regarded, by everyone in a position to know, as a ship whose owner has done the sums wrong.
The skull at Kirchberg
A dragon skull hangs in a hall of the University of the High Seat at Kirchberg, bought from an Erkish trader four generations ago for a sum the university does not publish. It is nine feet from the crest to the tip of the jaw. Every intake of students argues about whether it is genuine, whether it has been assembled out of two animals, and whether the trader who sold it was laughing. No consensus has been reached, and the university has declined every offer to have it taken down and examined properly.