Eyes of Sornieth headcanon
It’s commonly known that the eyes of a dragon are key to determining an important aspect of their identity. All flights have their own distinctive colours: the luminous gold of Light, the seething crimson of Plague, the keen cyan of Lightning, the soulful browns of Earth, and so on.
But although the Flight that a dragon was born in determines the primary colour of their eyes, their ancestry shows up in their eyes too. This manifests itself in different ways for different dragons, such as flecks of colour, multicoloured rings around the pupil, dilution of the nest colour, heterochromia, etc.
For example, an Ice-born with one Ice parent and one Plague parent may have light blue eyes with flecks of red, while a Nature-born with Lightning parents may have a sharper and brighter quality to the greenness of their eyes. The more varied the ancestry, the higher chance that the nest colour will be more heavily diluted.
This led to a sort of hierarchy where dragons (especially aristocracies and other similar-minded dragons) strove to keep their eyes as ‘pure’ as possible and snubbed other ‘inferior’ dragons, though attitudes nowadays are not what they were centuries ago.
It should be noted that dragons given life by the gods themselves have an almost unearthly radiance to their eyes, which fades slightly with each successive generation until the sheen is all but gone.
Of course, this phenomenon leads to some dragons being gifted with spectacularly beautiful eyes and others being stuck with embarrassingly drab or clashing combinations. In response various eye-changing services have sprung up around Sornieth, and their main service is either removing a certain colour, rearranging colours to be more aesthetically pleasing, or even changing the colours outright (which is ill-advised).
Requiring knowledge in optometry, elemental magic, and soul magic, the ritual takes about 5 minutes to an hour minutes depending on the complexity of the client’s eyes and the procedure in question. A well-trained cosmetic mage can perform the ritual with little difficulty albeit for a price, but a cheaper procedure performed by a dragon with magic veering into darker territory can have disastrous consequences.
It is also considered common courtesy to show your eyes to another in public (medical reasons are naturally exempt), as it is indicative of your pride in your parentage. Deliberately obscuring one’s eyes or changing them to be truly devoid of pigment is often frowned upon and can even be seen as rejecting one’s ancestry outright, depending on how traditional one’s school of thought is, and a saying stemming from this belief goes “Dark eyes, darker secrets”.
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