Wise Dragons

Wise Dragon Statistics

Eleven dragons, four stages, five thousand years.

When each civilization crossed between the four dragon stages — baby, young, adult, wise elder — and what its hoard earned at every transition, clench, bite, regression, and recovery. The step-downs are real: stages run both ways.

Four ages, as the book names them. Baby, young, adult, wise elder. Clenching, the bite and the ouroboros are postures and moments of an adult, not ages. The Dragon’s Hoard page carries the same vocabulary: the four ages, the adult’s road, and the six fates.

The four stages (the piles read as ages — click to collapse)

Baby

bread + spears

Nothing outlives the counter.

Type specimen: Tasmania (L293)

Young

+ gilt

Smelting yes, compounding no. May hold a script as a bread-pile tool.

Type specimen: the xenia palaces (L124)

Adult

+ treasure (the mint)

The mint runs; the count outlives the counter — but the claw can close.

Type specimen: Uruk's crossing (L120)

Wise elder

+ interest

compound interest on the four piles

Compound interest on an open, managed hoard: tribute in, harboring, standing self-disruption.

Type specimen: Britain 1854 (L933–39)

Clench, bite, and ouroboros are not stages — they are the adult’s disease. They render here as event markers and hatched regression bands over the adult band. Stages run both ways: the step-down is real.

Baby
Young
Adult
Wise elder
Regression / clench band
Dimmed = low/medium confidence

SortLinear time

◆ Transition
● Wisdom
▲ Scar
✦ Windfall
○ Clench
◎ Bite
⊙ Ouroboros
▼ Regression
△ Recovery
Checkbox adds a row to the treasure-rate comparison below. Click a row for the full ledger.

Compound treasure rate

Is the hoard earning compound interest, or just sitting in the cave? Treasure minted per thousand carriers per generation, indexed against each era’s world ceiling.

Tick up to four rows on the timeline above (or use a preset) to overlay their compound treasure rates.

Sources and honesty labels

Four-stage dragon taxonomy (2026-09). Staged by Fable 5.1 against scribes-advantage-reader-edition-25ch-2026-09-20.txt and memos/fable-four-stage-geopolitical-mapping.md. CTR values are Fable-scored v1 (see method.ctr); dates before 1500 CE are scholarly approximations. Cave vocabulary updated 2026-09-22 to the cave-as-territory lock (see method.cave, method.caveSystem, method.technologyIsNotWisdom).
Compound Treasure Rate = treasure minted per thousand carriers per generation, indexed 0-100 against the era's world ceiling (the best-performing open cave alive at that moment). Era ceilings v1: Song China ~1080, Abbasid Baghdad ~900, Florence ~1490, Britain ~1870, Germany ~1900, USA ~1960, South Korea ~2026. Proxy stack is era-appropriate: pre-print manuscripts per capita; print-era book production and literacy; industrial patents and publications; modern novelty-discounted publications and patents plus inbound tribute. Values are comparative estimates against the manuscript's own sources, not measurements.
high | medium | low per span. Low and medium spans render dimmed with dotted borders; dates before 1500 CE are scholarly approximations.
The Mughal band is unstaged by the book (one clause, L364) and is shown as a gap, not smoothed over. China is staged as the book stages it: an adult on a managed-burn schedule, not a wise elder, because it keeps its hand on the gate (Ch 24). The Rus dragon is staged as an adult whose cave was colonized in 1240 (Ch 21).