Construction Post: Other Tales 11/14
Nov. 14th, 2011 12:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexandraerin11/14/2011
12:30-1:00 - 500 words.
[Doing another dragon thing.]
A greater green dragon is not a different race than a common green dragon, nor are they separate species, as animals would be. They do not quite belong to differing orders of creation. A common dragon is simply the diminished descendant of a greater dragon.
The most commonly accepted theory among mortal dracologists is that the original dragons arrived within the sphere of the world as fully-formed immigrants from some other sphere or plane, and they were several magnitudes greater than the greatest living dragons of this age. Some accounts suggest there was a breeding pair of each color, or a larger colony. Some say that a single dragon or pair of dragons somehow gave rise to every color now extant, or that there was a single pair for the lustrous noble dragons and the irridescent ignoble ones.
However many of them there may have been, the first dragons were too great for the world to contain, even in its most primal state. Each successive generation born within it was somewhat lesser than its progenitors. The diminishing effect is small and incremental, although a certain point is crossed where a threshold is crossed and the newly hatched dragon's form can only contain a fraction of the majesty that should be its legacy. Some lines of dragonhood quickly bred their way down to smaller and more bestial forms, while others took advantage of their long lives to preserve as much of their original essence as possible. Thus, for every color of dragons on both sides of the divide, there are dragons ranked from least to greatest.
[]
Many a smart-alecky school child has asked how this can be when the Age of Titans preceded the Age of Dragons, but this is due to a mistaken assumption about the meaning of the term "titan". While that term is often used for the greatest and oldest of giants, it properly refers to any creature that inhabited the not-yet-diminished world of that first age: the giants, the dragons, and the things far less easily described.
Accounts differ as to how these various beings all came to be and which did so first and where the gods factored into all of this, of course, but they were all present early enough to make a credible claim to have been in the beginning.
Another mistake, of course, is thinking of "the beginning" as a singular point in time. There is nothing like a credible estimate of how long the Age of Titans lasted. From the creation of the sun until the departure of the giants, somewhere between three and fifteen thousand years passed. There is no recorded measurement of the presolar epoch, but it's believed to have been longer than that. The word "million" is sometimes suggested, if a little tentatively.
The Age of Dragons lasted as long as the food held out, which is estimated to be between two hundred and five hundred thousand years. In that time, the dragons' uncontested mastery of the world allowed them to breed with an explosive abandon the world had never before seen. Once the surface of the world and its upper oceans had been cleansed of the crawling chaos, the draconic world turned on itself. Great flocks of scaly avian dragons and schools of limbless swimming dragons tore each other apart.
12:30-1:00 - 500 words.
[Doing another dragon thing.]
A greater green dragon is not a different race than a common green dragon, nor are they separate species, as animals would be. They do not quite belong to differing orders of creation. A common dragon is simply the diminished descendant of a greater dragon.
The most commonly accepted theory among mortal dracologists is that the original dragons arrived within the sphere of the world as fully-formed immigrants from some other sphere or plane, and they were several magnitudes greater than the greatest living dragons of this age. Some accounts suggest there was a breeding pair of each color, or a larger colony. Some say that a single dragon or pair of dragons somehow gave rise to every color now extant, or that there was a single pair for the lustrous noble dragons and the irridescent ignoble ones.
However many of them there may have been, the first dragons were too great for the world to contain, even in its most primal state. Each successive generation born within it was somewhat lesser than its progenitors. The diminishing effect is small and incremental, although a certain point is crossed where a threshold is crossed and the newly hatched dragon's form can only contain a fraction of the majesty that should be its legacy. Some lines of dragonhood quickly bred their way down to smaller and more bestial forms, while others took advantage of their long lives to preserve as much of their original essence as possible. Thus, for every color of dragons on both sides of the divide, there are dragons ranked from least to greatest.
[]
Many a smart-alecky school child has asked how this can be when the Age of Titans preceded the Age of Dragons, but this is due to a mistaken assumption about the meaning of the term "titan". While that term is often used for the greatest and oldest of giants, it properly refers to any creature that inhabited the not-yet-diminished world of that first age: the giants, the dragons, and the things far less easily described.
Accounts differ as to how these various beings all came to be and which did so first and where the gods factored into all of this, of course, but they were all present early enough to make a credible claim to have been in the beginning.
Another mistake, of course, is thinking of "the beginning" as a singular point in time. There is nothing like a credible estimate of how long the Age of Titans lasted. From the creation of the sun until the departure of the giants, somewhere between three and fifteen thousand years passed. There is no recorded measurement of the presolar epoch, but it's believed to have been longer than that. The word "million" is sometimes suggested, if a little tentatively.
The Age of Dragons lasted as long as the food held out, which is estimated to be between two hundred and five hundred thousand years. In that time, the dragons' uncontested mastery of the world allowed them to breed with an explosive abandon the world had never before seen. Once the surface of the world and its upper oceans had been cleansed of the crawling chaos, the draconic world turned on itself. Great flocks of scaly avian dragons and schools of limbless swimming dragons tore each other apart.