Here There Be Dragons
From Sedes Draconis
Here There Be Dragons
Being an Account of the Origin of Dragons
And of the Earliest Glimmerings of the History of the World
One hundred and sixty light years from Earth is a star, and a planet orbiting, and on the planet live the last descendants of a species that once ruled a mighty stellar empire. A species that, but for this last, accidental outpost, was destroyed three hundred million years ago. There these last survivors nurture new life, hoping to bring forth intelligneces that that would not fall prey to the same faults that led to their own destruction. There, a hundred fifty light years from Old Terra, on a planet they named Sedes Draconis, live the last remnants of the Human race.
When humans found ways to span the vast interstellar distances it was the fulfillment of a dream that they had cherished for thousands of generations: to walk among the stars.
And two centuries later, shortly after the fall of the Neo-Papacy that brought Human space into its own, another of Humanity's ancient dreams was fulfilled: to meet and converse with an intelligence that was not theirself. To know they were not alone. The aliens called themselves the Churkh, and they controlled their own reach of space. A treaty was succesfully established and the two species co-existed peacefully as they explored the stars.
Barely a generation later, on an edge of known of space colonized almost exclusively by Terrans, another species made itself known. They came to be known as the Inimicae, and contact with the Inimicae was the fulfillment of not a dream, but a nightmare.
The Inimicae attacked without warning, and left several fringe colonies in ruins before the Terrans react. The Terrans quickly mustered a war fleet to protect themselves. Their fleet won some engagements and slowed the Inimicae, but failed to stop their destructive advance.
Ship's were captured relatively intact both ways, and both sides quickly adopted technologies of the other, to devestating effect. Also when some Inimicarum ships were captured the Terrans got their first sight of the marauders. They seemed to come from a low-gravity home, for they were delicate creatures, and they glittered from the silica and calcite they used in place of bone and keratin. The description of that first captain who saw them stuck in the minds of the Terrans for a long, long time:
"They're . . . beautiful. It's hard to reconcile such destructive fury, with such delicate beauty. . . . It's like being attacked by a horde of ravening butterflies."
The Terrans pleaded with the Churkh to help them, for they estimated the combined resources would be enough to turn the battle in their favor. But the Churkh refused to involve themselves in what they did not see as their problem.
As years of fighting passed with little victory and growing loss of life and territory, the Terran people grew angry and afraid. And though there was little they could do against the Inimicae, the Churkh were more accesible, and to many, an alien was an alien. After all, even if the Churkh weren't the ones attacking their people, neither were they providing the salvation that it was commonly believed to be within their power.
Xenophobic sentiment swept through the Terran worlds and frightened mobs and paramilitaries began killing Churkh, and destroying Churkh embassies and ships.
Unsuprisingly, the Churkh fought back. And soon the Terrans were facing war on two fronts.
With their attention and resources divided, the Terrans began losing ground more quickly. Soon the Inimicae had penetrated the Terran-held edge, and came into space held by the Churkh. The Inimicae attacked them too. Now all of known space was embroiled in a three-way, interstellar war.
The events directly concerning Sedes Draconis break off from the main course of human history near the beginning of the war. At this time there were still many vessels unequipped for warfare, who still performed their old role of exploration of the stars. One such ship, called Aquila, went charting an area of space of little interest, on the far edge of Terran space from the war. There it found a planet, circling a G0, that that did evoke their interest.
It was planet similar in many respects to Earth: a rocky world of similar size. An atmosphere, and at a range from its star that kept much of its water in liquid form. There were eventraces of oxygen in the atmosphere, suggesting that photosynthetic bacteria were already present.
It also had an iron core, not the double-portion iron core of Earth, but a significant one nonetheless, and so it spun and generated a magnetic field just as did Earth's.
And unlike the Earth's. Or at least something was unlike Earth. Resonating under the magnetic fields, was something else, something strange. The extra something confounded the Aquila's sensors and the ship's crew decided to descend into the upper bands of the fields to get better readings.
But as the ship passed into the bands, the distortion peaked rapidly. At that moment Aquila was rendered as if non-existent to the communications net. Its broadcast log cut off mid-word. Blinded and unheard, the Aquila lost control and was destroyed.
A second ship, Draco, the Dragon, was sent to after Aquila, in the hope that it had been only damaged and prevented from reporting by the energies surrounding the planet. The Dragon's crew took the precaution of setting in orbit a communication relay before descending, that they would need only be able to communicate with the satellite, and it would boost the signals to the rest of space.
The ship descended and found even that to be impossible. To even the satellite, just miles above it, Draco vanished, as thoroughly as Aquila before it.
But the Dragon had not been destroyed. It was crippled, never to fly again, but many of its sytems, and more of its crew survived the harsh descent to the planet's surface. The damaged life-support was sufficient in the almost-breathable air outside, and the ship's hydroponics could make good use of the bright sunlight, and rich organics of the planet's surface.
Though no signal could escape through the planet's atmosphere, the realy above continued to transmit the signals it recieved from the rest of the communications network, and the crew continued to receive those signals and the news of the outside. And they listened in helpless horror, and hopeless dread, as the internecine stellar war continued on its course.
The Churkh did not adapt well to the warfare and fell within two decades of their contact with the Inimicae. And after the military might of the Churkh had been crushed, the Inimicae, and some Terran factions, hunted down and destroyed all remnants of the Churkh with chilling rage and implacability.
For most Terrans, though by then they had been at war with the Churkh for twenty years, the memory of the friendship that came before, and lasted longer, was unforgotten. And they grieved for the misunderstandings and xenophobia that had helped bring about the genocide of their first and only friends.
But they also felt relief that one enemy had fallen, and that again they fought agianst only one foe. And also, in the fate of the Churkh, they saw their own fate if they faltered, and they redoubled their efforts against the invaders that had overturned their universe.
The war seemed to go on forever as generation after generation grew up in its shdaow. The Terran planetary settlements eventually proved too vulnerable to the Inimicarum weaponry, and soon all the planets of the Terran civiliaztion were abandoned, or else reduced to lifeless rock and dust.
The Terrans lived on great ships, huge, mobile, and heavily armed. The Inimicae, too, lost most of their settlements, and a hundred years into the war, the fighting spanned barely twenty star systems, instead of the hundreds it had spanned at its inception. But by this time the cultures of each combatant had been horribly twisted by the constant struggle into unrelenting wrath, and determination that the other would not survive this war.
One hundred and eighty-two years since the first contact with the Inimicae, one hundred and fifty-nine years since the annhilation of the Churkh, the war came down to a pitiful remenant of each species, fighting in a scorched wasteland of stars. Seeing the destruction of their enemy at hand, gambles were made. In that final battle between Terran and Inimicae, dying Terran hulk lashed out in its death throws at its tormentors and destroyed them as well.
Of the three mighty species that had learned to span the stars, none remained, except the descendants of the crew of a ship that had crashed on an unfathomable planet at the furthest edge of space ever explored by the Terrans. There they were witnesses to the destruction of their species, and of all others they had ever known. And from such a vantage they had watched the terrible distortions suffered by Terran culture and psyche in their war for survival.
And neither had the unintentional settlers remained unchanged.
With each passing generation, they found they could survive on less food, somehow adapting to the world that was not yet ready to support them. Somehow, their bodies learned to draw what they needed from those same energies that had cut them off from the rest of the universe.
As more and more of the equipment of their ship became inoperable due to the lack of parts and skilled technicians for repairs, and as it became increasingly evident that they could survive, and even thrive, without it, machine learning gave way to other pursuits.
They came to accept their place on this far world. Originally the crew had named their settlement Sedes Draconis, "the resting-place of the Dragon". But that word, sedes has many meanings, it can be translated not only as "resting-place", but also as "throne", or "abode". Later generations, to whom the ship of their ancestors lost signifigance, came to refer to the world itself as Sedes Draconis, which to them meant that it was the where Dragons dwelt. The concept of Dragons became their emblem, the central symbol in the culture of the people, in their thinking, and in their art.
In the seventh planet-born generation something remarkable happened. A child developed the ability to move things without touching them; apparently by manipulating the energy field by her thoughts and will alone. Furthermore she could teach several others to use this "magic"; and more with the ability showed up in each generation.
This began a new era. The need for food started to decrease even more rapidly as the manipulation of the energy field came into conscious power. In the tenth generation some children stopped needing food altogether; not only drawing enough energy to live, but also synthesizing the needed proteins and minerals inside their bodies without need for conscious thought.
Soon new applications began to be discovered. By the twelfth generation the Draconians could use magic for not only moving things and sustaining their bodies, but also to speak and hear at a distance; to change the temperature of object, even set them burning; even to see things far away.
In the sixteenth generation it was discovered that magic could be used to alter the genetic patterns of living things. It was not genetic engineering like any that had gone before, for these changes were worked directly from the mind of engineers, projected onto the world by will backed by great force.
With this discovery research into other applications slowed as the combined magic of the community was turned toward two projects of genetic engineering. The first they worked upon themselves. And eventually they became Dragons in truth. Great, superhuman creatures that could even propel themselves through the air with the help of concious control of the energies that infused their world.
The second they worked on the world around them: to speed the evolution of the native life. Eventually, to awake new intelligences; for they hoped they could redeem the tragedy they had seen by bringing forth many intelligences. And they hoped that, being many intelligent species from a single world, they would learn to be accustomed to the Otherness, and that if they too left for the stars and met strangers of their own, that those meetings would be happier than those that had passed before.
With unbelivable, almost insane, patience, for nearly three hundred million years the Dragons built the life of the world up layer by layer, drawing on what the remembered of Earth, and what was remembered in their own chromosomes, until they had brought Sedes through the stages that had taken Earth eight hundred million.
