Dragonborn

The Elder Wyrms were created to take the place of the Primordial Dragons as defenders of Aiaos, as the latter put more and more of their power into the World itself. Later, mortal Dragons were created as the vessel by which time entered the world.
When the Colossus War claimed the Elder Wyrms, however, the Primordials saw that their mortal dragons would not be enough to hold together the world, and so they created the dragonborn. Shaped by the First Generation Elder Wyrms, using power granted by the Primordials, the dragonborn blended draconic heritage with the eladrinate form and scale, with the inten­tion that they would be an efficient, easily deployed work force, able to support the dragons in their work. As one of the oldest mortal races, the dragonborn naturally promote an origin myth that less directly regards them as slave labour, instead telling of manifest destiny and the inheritance of the elder wyrms who died in the Colossus War.
Alas, the schism of the Primordial Dragons, the Fall of Ladon and the subsequent civil conflict across Ladonia meant that the Ten Clades of dragonborn were outstripped by the other mortals before their reconquest could even leave the archipelago. In some ways, however, the Cataclysm was a blessing for them. It shattered their homeland, but only fuelled their sense of superiority. The deaths of so many senior dragons gave the dragonborn the chance they needed to shape their own destiny. They seized Ladonia - the archipelago that was all that remained of Ladon's northern domains - and built their own society, enslaving its non-draconic population and developing bitter, inter cladistic feuds in the process.
Dragonborn are expected to uphold the honour of their family and to accept death before dishonour or betrayal. A part of this honour lies in conforming to cladistic expectations, as well as accepting one's place in the dual hierarchies of blood and clade.
The clade is the core of the social order, seen as deterministic of potential, and influencing everything from access to education to employment prospects. A dragonborn’s clade is determined by scale colour, and passes from parent to child. The child of a mixed pairing will join the clade of the parent whose colouring comes through strongest, and be educated in the academy on that clade's island. Dragonborn who do not fit their cladistic destiny are those most likely to leave Ladonia to travel in the outside world.
In addition to cladistic differences, the dragonborn have a caste system, based on the strength of draconic traits. The highborn have wings and tails, and are long-lived, although not so long as a dragon. Whether they are a breed apart is unclear, but they tend to inbreed to strengthen their lines. Regardless of cladistic disputes, most highborn would rather breed across clades than risk 'contamination' from a lowborn mate from the same clade.
The lowborn have no wings, and either no tail or only a vestigial stump. They make up the bulk of the population, and living in the shadow of the highborn they seek a sense of superiority in the purity of clade. Lowborn rarely mate cross-clade.
The lowest of the low are the impure. Usually the result of outbreeding with Lizardfolk or other races, they lack the characteristic scale ridges and horns of the draconic heritage and, most notably, the dragonborn resilience and breath.
Each metallic and each chromatic clade claims one of the ten largest islands of the archipelago. These islands are not held as exclusive territory by that clade - red and gold highborn govern all of the islands, with other clades fulfilling their presumed social roles and lowborns filling out the skilled labour pool, and impure doing the hard labour - but members of the clade living on their home island are considered 'inlanders', and enjoy an elevated status over outlanders.
The dragonborn live in communities called weyrs; citadels built into the honeycomb tunnels of the mountain lairs of the long-dead Elder Wyrms. They also collect draconic relics, including the hallows of deceased dragons, either stolen or granted by will. These relics, gathered together in the vaults of a weyr, with the weyrs of each island dominated by inlanders, cause the islands to develop similar environmental eccentricities to the land around a dragon's lair. As a result, some of the clades whose islands have developed less favourable affects have a tendency to accuse others of 'stealing' the better land.
The relatively small geodic clades have traditionally seen to the administration of the Ladonian capital of Axia, located on an artificial island at the centre of the archipelago. This island, Draqien, was one of the first great creations of a reuinified Ladonia, built on vast pylons sunk into the sea bed to provide a neutral ground where the Council of Ten could mediate between the clades. This Council consists of one representative from each metallic or chromatic clade.

Dragonborn and Identities

The dragonborn are raised to be supremely arrogant. They know that they were forged to be the master race, and tend towards the authoritarian, with those of evil temperament often downright fascistic, and the best among them likely to favour the word of the law above its spirit. Much of this arrogance is directed towards the lower clades and castes of dragonborn, seeing them as a weakness in the perfection of the race. As the children of the Primordials, they will not lower themselves to worship the Young Gods, instead praying to Hrabram, Malcidis and those few Elder Wyrms believed to have passed beyond the Web to live as Gods. A handful of cults worship Abyssal Elder Wyrms, or Tropos the Undying.
Dragons do not recognise gender, because dragons do not, although unlike dragons they have a definite and identifiable, largely binary sexual component to their reproductive cycle. They deliberately suppress all sexual expression, including outward gender, helped by the fact that there is little in the way of secondary sexual characteristics among dragonborn. They are, however, typically highly-sexed, and more than most races are prone feel attraction towards races very different to their own. They mask their drives beneath strict codes of social propriety, scorning open displays of desire or affection. As a result, they have something of a reputation for hypocrisy and even perversion.
According to convention, dragonborn offspring arrive by means of a ritual process, involving months of isolation for the parental cluster, and managed by a specialised clerical caste who maintain a record of familial and dynastic lines (including biological sex.) Informal liaisons can, of course, result in offspring as well, and it was in part the emergence of these unplanned and unoptimised children which lead to the emergence of the stratified caste structure.