Fic Updates 48

[Norgarth]

A Thing of Vikings
https://archiveofourown.org/works/104089...2#workskin

Another less salutary aspect of both human and draconic societies was that both of them made use of forced labor by members of their own species as a direct result of social stratification. While humanity’s more intricate social structures allowed for more sophistication in the forms of unfree labor they used, ranging from direct chattel slavery to bonded labor, serfdom, forced marriage, and more across the vast majority of historical human civilizations in every inhabited region, dragons likewise made use of unwilling labor by their fellows. Thengills routinely required significant ‘rents’ in the form of food and other services to allow access to nesting sites, such as forcing dragons with significant adaptations towards tunneling and digging to expand the volume of the nest, despite the personal risks of entombment or asphyxiation, along with other abuses such as forced matings and brood parasitism.

Resultingly, it is generally seen as an inevitability that, following the Norse alliance with dragons as equal partners backing an ideological opposition to exploited labor, oppositional groups quickly arose based around humans exploiting dragons and, in mirror, dragons exploiting humans. After all, they were already used to exploiting their own species and extending that exploitation was a natural outgrowth.

—The Dragon Millennium, Manna-hata University Press Ltd.