World: Any
Diet: Meat
Wingspan: 10’11”
Lifespan: 25 years
Habitat: Desert
Activity Cycle: Diurnal
Some flying animals are masters of maneuverability, using their wings to make tight turns. Others focus all their efforts on speed. Jaculi are the latter, the fastest of all dragons. Their lightweight bodies never touch the ground, and they rarely slow down to slower than a galloping horse. Rather than a direct attack, even their breath weapon is only meant to increase their speed, a purple ring of fire that changes the air in front of them and allows them to break the sound barrier.
Jaculus are predators, their main prey being birds caught on the wing. Larger prey is hunted by mated couples, who require more food to sustain the children that develop within their mother’s body (infants are born in flight and never touch the ground). The jaculi will dive at max speed to strike their prey, impaling it with their beaks. One of their favorite targets are thagomisers, a larger species of aerial dragon. This is partially because of the grand quantity of meat they can get, partially how easy it is to move a corpse that floats in the air, and partially because the two species generally dislike each other, both perceiving the other as arrogant.
Jaculi are intelligent beings, but have short attention spans and little interest in speaking to “slow folk”. No two share the exact same color scheme, but they are always strangely geometric in patterning.
