If you aren't even vaguely interested in the Heresy Dragon, don't read this rambling tale as it will likely mean less than nothing to you. It also gets a bit emotional near the end, so... fair warning.
Once upon a time, way back in the closing years of the last decade, a young-ish man, with little or no grey hair, decided he might have a quick go at doing a Dragon, especially because somebody had posted somewhere on the internet that he wouldn't be able to make a good one.
Ever the easily goaded fool, the young man spent his Christmas break gluing some wire to a lump of concrete that was a bit rocky, which he had ripped off his converted old plastic GW dragon that had once been pictured in White Dwarf magazine and which he always liked the shape of. He bulked it out a bit, and made a face for it, and was so smugly pleased with himself that he posted a picture online and suddenly, people asked if they could buy it.
Well, he thought, it'll only take me a month or two, so why not?
That was Christmas 2008, when I started this project. If I knew then what a terrible, dragging weight it would become on my time and resources, what crushing pressure it would begin to bring to bear as the weeks trickled by and no discernible progress seemed to be happening, how much it would haunt my every thought as more and more people put a deposit down and the thing still wasn't finished... well, I wouldn't have done it, obviously. I mean, September last year I very nearly had an actual nervous breakdown because it had become The Thing That Would Not End. Endlessly resculpting scales, layer upon layer, each one individually sculpted and shaped. Staring blindly into a future where parts of the dragon that didn't exist yet would reposition themselves over and over, flailing madly in their desire to be the one position that got used in the end. The limitless possibilities of final choices. Riders, armor, two horns, four horns, six horns, long snout, short snout, tiny teeth, massive teeth, long neck, short neck, wings, membranes, leathery, scaly - on and on and on.
I am not lying or embellishing when I tell you that this Dragon was an arduous and by the end mentally painful process that almost beat me. Almost. I have definitely aged, the white hair is plentiful, the business is almost non-existent because so few new figures have been made in the last year whilst I worked on the Dragon.
But here it is at last, the first test-casting assembled!
It's not a perfect cast, there are a few bubbles and things as the molds are tweaked, these parts are literally the first ones out of the moulds and the thickness of resin, the timings and pressures, etc., are being played with to produce the perfect casting. But it is, for the moment, at a stage where people who've waited over two years might actually get hold of theirs in a few weeks, rather than some random far-off future. It marks the beginning of an era, or the end of an old one. It is the moment where suddenly, I'm not that guy taking forever doing that Dragon, I've at last become the guy who took ages to do that Dragon.
People came up to me and shook my hand at Hammerhead last Sunday when they saw the final thing. They glanced at it as they went past and then stopped and came for a closer look. One guy patted me on the shoulder and just nodded whilst looking me in the eye. I assume it was to do with the Dragon... anyway, I suppose he could just have been some random Community Affirmer there to acknowledge my basic existence.
Now, as though I was the Ancient Mariner, rotting albatross around my neck - except it's a scaly one - the Curse of the Dragon is finally lifting. Any week now, the first batch of actual honest-to-goodness Dragons will arrive at the Heresy Dungeon (Ian has to balance production with keeping his own business going and dealing with day-to-day castings of his own stock, so it will be slow but sure as I certainly don't want to kill his business like I almost did Heresy with this thing and I know my customers won't either). I can get on with frantically making some multiple-purchase bread-and-butter-type figures like sci-fi troopers and Goblins and whatnot to get the sales starting to come in again.
To begin with, there will be six new figures on the cart in the next few days, a last few trenchcoat gangers and a crazy Were-Turtle that won the Heretic's Ball sculpting contest just before Christmas last year. Feels good to be out from under the winged shadow.
I would like to thank everybody who has paid some money towards the Dragon over the last couple of years. You will never know how awed I felt as the deposits came in despite there being no real guarantees that it would ever end. You won't appreciate how those deposits kept me and my wife fed, or helped the business scrape clear of the overdraft limit each month. So thank you, thank you and again thank you. If I was mad to think I could make such a large dragon quickly, you people were more insane than me to believe I could do it even more than I did. But I guess we all get the last laugh, huh?
Well, not quite. It turns out that two years later, the Dragon costs twice as much as expected to buy in due to the size of the rubber molds involved and the usable life of them being a lot less than planned for, so in the end I won't actually make any profit on it at the special pre-order price. You can imagine what a wrench to the guts that was when Ian gave me the bad news. Neither of us wanted it to be the case, but there's only so much Ian can do to help me out, man's got to cover his costs and pay for his labor.
But again, amazingly, unbelievably, some of the people who had pre-ordered it, people who were fully paid up with that pre-order guaranteed price, no obligations, didn't need to do anything except pay the postage, have volunteered extra money towards the difference. Some have paid the actual full price. I am at a a loss for words. I have tears in my eyes typing this. All I can do is stammer my gratitude to them, and maybe give them a special paladin figure I'm sculpting to accompany their dragons to symbolize their heroic support of Heresy through this process and with these grand financial gestures. I pray that when they get their Dragon through the mail, it's everything they thought it would be, and in each of their eyes worth every penny they've stumped up for it.
Take that, Dragon. You didn't beat me. I had help from people who, really, in all honesty and without wanting to seem trite or patronizing in any way, I can't just refer to as customers any more. I think I have to now call them friends, too.