The Duke of Chalced's Throne Room *Spoilers all books incl CoD*

['thul]

Hmm... These beings got to thinking...

The Ducal palace was clearly once an Elderling fortress of some sort. Thus it was once home to dragons. But considering how the Chalcedans view dragons, something clearly happened to turn them against each other.

These beings have a theory on that. Most likely it was a different faction of Elderlings than the Kelsingrans. Just as humans come in many flavors, so must Elderlings have. Perhaps the Chalcedan Elderlings were of the very cruel sort, especially towards the end? Perhaps they oppressed the humans more than most Elderlings did? Then, when the cataclysm struck down Dragonkind, the people rose up against them. Anything even remotely related to them would then have been seen as bad. In time, because there was no reason to heal such wound, it would fester and turn, going from merely unwanted to hated. It would become the symbol for evil.

It is clear that with the new dragons and Elderlings cooperation will become more important. Perhaps they will then avoid the mistakes of the past, avoid the same fight for essential resources. At least for a few centuries (until population is of such size that it won't make sense to have a single "seat of power")

What do you think of that whole theory?

[Luckheart]

As a whole, that would seem to fit in quite well with what we know of Chalced - especially considering that in BoD it was discovered, or rather, pointed out that there were multiple factions of Elderlings/Dragons. This would lead one to believe that some factions are more cruel/harsh in their policies - and this could also relate back to silver as a resource; to me Spit seemed a lot less aggressive when he had a small amount of silver (not to mention having a bigger vocabulary) in BoD, so perhaps not only does silver fuel the *magic* of the dragons/elderlings but also humanizes them to a point ? I use humanize as a loose term.

To continue that theory, perhaps Chalced was a main aggressor to Kelsingra for silver resources, and due to the lack of silver were a harsher government ?

['thul]

Silver was stated to be directly linked to Dragons intelligence. So it doesn't really humanize them so much as make them smarter and wiser. It also appears to be linked to their ancestral memories, so that would explain how his vocabulary improved.

Position-wise it could be, but at the same time, it was quite far away. Its hard to say not knowing how far apart the various cities were.