The Heart Has Wings: The Dragons in Artemisia's Dreaming
log begun by Charl on 3 5
The dragon holds a special place not just in Artemisia's heart, but in the very stories she tells herself about metaphysics and the eternal aspects of humanity.
Long before the Dreaming Void was opened to human exploration, and its inhabitants encountered, mythical dragons and all of the real-life animals that have ever been associated with them by the old cultures were held in high regard. Everything from the obvious--like snakes--to the obscure--like koi and some birds--are thought of as borderline sacred, kindred spirits to the humans who keep them.
One particular favorite, the bearded dragon, is often gifted a flying device to play with by its companion people. The spiny lizards use these to leap to the floor when they find themselves in inconveniently high spots, and when they do the wings on the device make them look like chubby dragons gliding above the tile. Owners have noticed, however, that they have an unsettling tendency to forego the wings at times and just belly-flop to the floor as is their natural wont.
The reverence people have for dragons and dragon-like animals may come from the age-old concept that every Artemisian is, at their very core, a dragon. The metaphysical idea has been around for so long that we casually refer to our dragon when we want to talk about our innermost self, the one that outside influences can barely touch, the place our signature and our creativity comes from. Those who believe in an afterlife say it is the dragon that persists. Many of the telepaths I worked with believed so deeply in the concept that they talked about their telepathy in terms of their dragon having sharper senses than non-telepaths'. They clearly hold that the low-level magic of their telepathy comes from their dragon just the same as their identity, emotions, and creativity do. It became apparent, as their psionic powers developed, that those also proceeded from somewhere deep in their psyche. As such, they can be affected by psychic injury, and are difficult to influence or control in the same way as the mythical dragon inside each of us. A mad psion could destroy the world. Nearly has, on more than one occasion.
Perhaps because of the high involvement of telepaths in the development of the Fleet, many of its concepts and archetypes have been expressed in draconic terms. And, to get to the point, it may be because of the deeply engrained draconic beliefs common to so much of the population that there is another phenomenon that has became clear to us. The void is inhabited, and a disproportionate number of the entities we have found there manifest as variations on dragons or dragon relatives. This log will record each species as we encounter them.
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