Editing Age Of Dragons: Birthrights and Flaws (section)

=Universal Flaws=

All dragons share these flaws.

===The Birthing Sickness===

Dragonkind is blessed with long lives and great natural power, yet dragons themselves remain relatively lacking in numbers compared to most races. This is not a result of infertility (as indeed almost every draconic coupling results in conception and offspring) but due to the curse of the ''Birthing Sickness''.

Essentially, to have children the draconic parents must sacrifice their own lives. Such is the nature of the curse that no dragon will ever see his or her own children.

The rules for this are detailed in full in [[Age Of Dragons: Reproduction and the Birthing Sickness|this chapter]]

===The Sleep of Stone===

Senescence for dragons happens very different than for mortals.

A dragon will remain at full health until his thousandth year. In fact, thanks to gaining experience in lifepaths he will usually grow more powerful till that time.

After that, old age will strike suddenly and irreversibly. For each year that passes, he will lose -1 from Soma, Sophis and Pneuma. During this time the dragon will seem to be transmuting physically into stone - a hard and smooth rock akin to pale grey marble but with a slight translucent quality. Their muscles will grow stiffer and more sluggish, their minds will grow sleepier and their breaths more shallow.

When any sphere rating reaches zero, the light leaves the dragon's eyes, and he is effectively turned into a statue, never moving or responding again.

Dragons call this frozen state the ''sleep of stone''. The statue that they become is no more or less resilient than a marble statue, and if broken apart is made of the same stone all the way through. No dragon ever returns from the sleep of stone, and the stone is not known to have any especial magical qualities, though certain macabre dragons and mortals might seek to acquire such statues for their own collections.

Note that dragons that die from any cause other than the millennial senescence do not enter the sleep of stone, instead rotting away as any other organic creature might. 
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