Zhao Ming

Zhao Ming, the Iron Dragon, is a son of the Dragon-Emperor and the warden of Cathay's harsh western frontier, ruler of a land of deserts, iron mountains, and creeping warpstone taint. Like his sister Miao Ying he wears both human and dragon shapes, but where she is the storm, he is the mountain — patient, hard, and unyielding, his dragon-form armoured in scales like burnished iron. He guards the western terminus of the Ivory Road and the caravan-cities that grow rich upon it, defending them against the greenskins, ogres, and raiders that boil out of the west without end.

Zhao Ming is the most pragmatic of the dragon-children, a ruler who has learned to wring strength from a poisoned land. He has studied the corrupting arts of warpstone more deeply than the Celestial Court would openly permit, harnessing its perilous power to arm his legions, and he walks a knife's edge between using that power and being consumed by it. His enemies mistake his pragmatism for weakness and his distance from the Celestial City for disloyalty, and both errors have proven fatal. Cold, calculating, and immensely powerful, the Iron Dragon holds the west by whatever means the west requires — and Cathay, wisely, does not look too closely at how.