Wyvern

The wyvern is a legendary creature with a dragon’s head and wings, a reptilian body, two legs, and a tail. It is particularly popular in British literature and is often associated with cold weather and ice.

Wyverns are often depicted as having the tail of a viper-a venomous snake-and that fact is reflected in the etymology of wyvern: it comes ultimately from the Latin word vipera, which means “viper.” (“Vipera” is also, of course, the source of our word viper.) The creature the wyvern most closely resembles, however, is the also-mythical dragon. “Dragon” is a much older word-it has been in use since the 13th century, while “wyvern” dates to the early 17th-but it too has snakes in its history. The word originally referred not to the lizard-like creature we imagine today but to a huge serpent.

Wyverns are species of animal that lives in Sothoryos, kin to dragons, although they do not breathe fire. Wyverns have great leathery wings, “cruel” beaks, and an insatiable hunger. They are more ferocious than dragons, if smaller in size. Wyverns are called “the tyrants of the southern skies”, and are one of the reasons why Sothoryos is thinly populated.^[Septon Barth wrote about wyverns in Dragons, Wyrms, and Wyverns: Their Unnatural History, and speculated that Valyrian bloodmages may have created dragons using wyvern stock.