i think that killing a dragon should have catastrophic nuclear-fallout level environmental consequences tbh. their blood should scorch and wither the earth with fire and poison, the toxic fumes released as they decay should choke the land and all nearby living creatures, and the entire landscape where they fell should be transformed into a blighted wasteland where bleached leviathan bones loom upwards out of the ground as a warning that can be seen from miles away, the boundary markers of an exclusion zone.
I’d like to imagine it similar to a volcanic eruption or geothermal vent
Absolutely deadly and toxic in the moment, permanently altering the landscape. But as the dust settles, a specialized class of creature comes in— the extremophiles.
Humans can’t get within 500 yards of where the dragon fell, but the most beautiful fungus that you’ll never see is breaking ichor down to metal salts.
A fly whose entire lifecycle centers around dragon carcasses— the dragon’s death is so rare that they lay their eggs between dragon scales and hope. Then the moment the dragon dies, all burning hatches the eggs (like pinecones releasing seeds only after a forest fire)
I want there to be precious gemstones that only appear where dragons died a millennia ago
I want to study a thriving ecosystem that would melt the skin right off a human
