Feuerschwinge

Feuerschwinge in Human form from SR:R Dragonfall

Feuerschwinge (English: "Fire Wings", "Fire Maw" or "The Firewing") is a Great Western Dragon and is popularly known as the first dragon to be killed by metahumanity. Subsequent events brought her death into question, and her current status remains unclear.

History

Feuerschwinge awakened around the same time as Lofwyr, Nebelherr, and Kaltenstein in Germany in 2012. She was first sighted in May of that year over the German Harz Mountains, where she promptly began her assault on a number of towns and villages in the area.

According to official reports, the German military killed her on September 16, 2012 over the SOX, ending a four-month campaign of her terrorizing the nation. Her body was never discovered. Civilian casualties from her rampage were reported to be in the thousands.

Despite her death, there was one reported sighting of her over Iceland in 2015, but it was not confirmed.

Her lair in the Harz Mountains has never been discovered, leading many treasure hunters to the mountain range to attempt to discover it.

Alive?

It is believed by some that the German military did not kill Feuerschwinge, and that the radiation of the SOX has trapped and driven her insane.

The leader of the toxic shaman cult, Disciples of Cleansing Fire, is believed by some of her followers to be Feuerschwinge trapped in human form. The cult is known for following the dragon totem while also practicing toxic magic.

There is some speculation that the 2015 sighting of Feuerschwinge over Iceland was her astral form; this assumption stems from the idea that her body was killed but her astral form still exists, or that she is somehow trapped in human form and cannot physically leave the SOX, possibly due to the unpredictable effects of nuclear radiation on Awakened beings.

In the Dragonfall series of events transpiring in 2054 it was revealed that Feuerschwinge was incapacitated by Adrian Vauclair via the usage of a specialized weapon that separated her soul from her body. The dragon's soul was trapped in the body of a human woman that Vauclair's organization captured, while the dragon's body was kept in hibernation underground. In an attempt to exterminate all dragons, Vauclair spent over four decades engineering a virus and planned to use Feuerschwinge as a carrier to infect metahumanity and dragonkind.

Feuerschwinge's ultimate fate in Dragonfall depends on the player character's choices when confronting Vauclair:

Feuerschwinge is made whole and freed
Feuerschwinge is euthanized
Feuerschwinge is enslaved to the APEX AI
Feuerschwinge is abandoned, her human host left in captivity
Feuerschwinge is reunited with her body but used to deliver the Panacea biological weapon. She goes on a rampage over Berlin, killing and infecting thousands with the virus before being shot down by corporate air forces.

Comment

There are conflicting statements on the gender of Feuerschwinge, but for the purpose of this article it is presumed that the dragon is female, since that is how recent books such as the o34954845Sixth World Almanac describe her.

o45457298Dragons of the Sixth World states that Feuerschwinge was shot down by the German Military in May of 2012. o34954845Sixth World Almanac gives the exact date and says she was shot down four months later, in September. Shadowrun Returns Dragonfall confirms the date to be September 16, 2012, and has possibly retconned the time when Lofwyr, Nebelherr, and Kaltenstein had their duel to be the same date as Feuerschwinge's fall into the SOX. That would mean that the motivation for the duel was probably Kaltenstein attempting to save Feuerschwinge while Lofwyr and Nebelherr were attempting to stop him.

Harlequin implied in a statement in Dragons of the Sixth World that Kaltenstein and Feuerschwinge were mates, which may explain Kaltenstein's violent attempt to intervene in her downfall. This is, however, complicated by the fact that Kaltenstein began to actively hunt down and destroy toxic shamans after the Dragonfall, a strange course of action considering the fact that toxic cults such as the Disciples of the Cleansing Fire were believed to be tied to Feuerschwinge.

While Feuerschwinge is often thought by metahumanity to be brutal and antagonistic due to her post-Awakening rampage, Lofwyr privately imparted that she was perhaps the kindest and most pure-hearted of all of the Great Dragons. According to him, her violent attacks on Sixth World Germany were an instinctive reaction to the environmental devastation wrought by humanity upon the Earth since the closing of the Fourth Age.