Since I seem awfully keen on gushing about Dragon Kings lately in favor of finishing up this Alchemical essay, lemme just touch quick on something that probably needs pointing out since so many people are focusing on "souls" as though that were the only thing stopping the resurgence of the breeds across Creation.
There isn't a need for every aspect of the setting to match an arbitrary, undefined "maturity".
Not disagreeing with you directly, azoicennead, since largely I do agree with you that not everything in Exalted needs to take itself so unbearably serious, but I think the point Shyft was getting at was there should probably also be recognizing that the plight of the Dragon Kings
has a mature-storytelling component
at all, outside of snappy "well we'll just fix this
one thing and everything is smooth sailing from here, free dinosaur buddies!" which is a thing extremely easy to miss/dismiss when you're talking tangentially about kung-fu ankylosaurs in mesoamerican trappings. One of Exalted's many stumbling blocks, after all, is the lack of especially dedicated Storytelling chapters causing people to lose sight of the messaging and potential plot-arcs being laid out in favor of riffing on wild surface-details, and exaggerating them through fandom-telephone past the point of being anything but cartoonish anecdotes about heroin-pissing dinosaurs.
So that said, the topic of the Dragon King revitalization, and why a greater population is not the silver-bullet answer: Because the essential essence of a Dragon King is inextricably tied to Shared Cultural Heritage. The fundamental structure of Dragon King life is built atop a cycle of rebirth, from beast to sapience, sapience to enlightenment, enlightenment to death and through death back to beast again, to remind themselves of their humble origins and retrace their place within the world. But currently the world is out of sync, which
has no place for them - the remembered-world within their past heritage and souls has been ripped out by the roots. Having stared down a societal genocide, living memory is all they have together anymore. The great empire has fallen, the cultures supporting it fully disintegrated and the institutions, Paths, laws, legends, beliefs, hopes, dreams and aspirations of its people have disappeared from all but moldering books, ancient crystal libraries, and the records of heavenly scribes.
Memories within their souls contain the last remaining shreds of what it means to
be a Dragon King, because 'the Dragon Kings' are
who, rather that
what they are. A
Dragon King ruled in a land before mankind, fought the beasts of the primordials and interim wars of spirits alongside gods as fused hosts, and the paired tragedies of the War annihilating swathes of the mighty society built from their intertwined communities and the Sun proclaiming a new Chosen, shredding his saurian form for human, are now carved indelibly into that heritage. Without those triumphs and tragedies, without the past context which shaped their kind, you simply have the individual breeds Mosok, Pterok, Anklok and Raptok, all minor distinctions of material biology that not even their spirits or Paths treat as inviolable differences. You can add more of the
breeds to Creation, but they would not see a broken home in Rathess, mourn the loss of the Holy Speech, pride the great astrological sciences and Paths their species pioneered, feel the sting from looted tombs and wrecked wonders, or labor under the injustice of an usurping force which does not even permit them the dignity to call itself their enemy, having already forgotten they existed except as a footnote to an irrelevant prior age.
Those few would see a foreign and desolate ruin of the Old Guard, an archeological and scholarly curiosity, once populated by breeds like themselves but now just a site for salvaging opportunists and relic-seekers. Any the connection to that heritage, to the old Dragon King people, would be utterly lost on them. Because the era of those old Dragon Kings to rebuild an empire as they once were is over, and any new generation of breeds looking to start over and
call themselves Dragon Kings would not act in their fashion, would not uphold the old ways and respect the cruelties fate had laid on their shared ancestors. Like a photocopy of a photocopy, they would build from the meager trappings left behind and relative guesswork to replace what can't be, and something
else, something more modern to the Creation of the Now and a breed apart would emerge instead. In many ways, this mutation and reinvention of what was lost would be an even worse outcome to the Dragon Kings left who can know and acknowledge their long past, because now they would be struck with the curse of perspective towards a greater people who have even forgotten
themselves and the legacy of where they come from.
If the only future left for the Dragon Kings of old is to either break who they are to be rid of the pain, or stand aside and watch while their beloved cultural memory is deformed and corrupted by uncaring ignorance and the passage of time, it seems to me that the dominant camp would sooner gird themselves for war and march headlong into Malfeas, where they could spite their ancient enemy in a last bid to give their kind a nobler death by their own terms.
