Knaves of Knecrocarcerus

This was originally Quick Questers of Necrocarcerus, then I was retooling a bit, then blogger ate everything. Anyway, more people use knave, so here's a thing for that and John's Necrocarcerus setting.

Imagine dragon eggs

Imagine a yolky proto-dragon swimming about in its egg - what does it think? What does it want? What does it know?

Does it not have what every dragon wants - to be the absolute master of its universe, to own all that it knows exists? Is that why dragons are the way they are - not because they are foolish, but because they were too precocious, and remember being conscious in their little pre-worlds?

If so, then that first little peck outside must have not been their first assault on the world, but the world's first assault on them. Oh, I do not mean to say that they do not initiate it; that their snouts and talons do not break through the thin film separating baby dragon from the world at large; not even that their dissatisfaction with the gulped yolk - their gnawing wonder, Is this all there is? - is what propelled them outwards. All I mean is - what a horrid surprise.

Us mammals experience much the same trauma, but for us, it instills a fear of abandonment. We were within the panentheistic confines of the mother, thrown into a more or less atheistic world with few means of support. Every dragon in the egg is an autotheist, and the transition from that to atheism is a far more traumatic experience still. The whole ideas of self and world are at once effaced and created. Poor dragon! Do you not yet know that you can belch fire?

(Oh, some, the most precocious yet, do. They end up as fried eggs, sadly. It's the one limit on draconic evolution that we know of. If not for that, they'd end up far smarter than existing dragons, so smart, why, they'd probably be able to hide their own existence.)

Well, there's the little dragon whelp, full for the first time of terror and self-pity, not knowing there's fire to breathe, or a sky to fly through, or hoards more golden yet than one's yolk. That you do not possess the world means you do not press up against its limits, and you can ever experience the self pressing outward - the joy of becoming over the monotony of being. Take heart, little dragon! There's triumphs for you yet, princesses and tributes more than you can imagine!

Perhaps she grows up in a clutch of other eggs; perhaps she hatches alone. Perhaps she was in an egg with competitors against whom she struggled, and, as self-consciousness dimly came into view, gulped up. Were they not princesses, too? Yes, inheritors of a noble lineage, and she had eaten them up, before she was aware of anything else.

Some eggs, one must imagine, open up not from the initiative of their impatient captives, but, teeter-tottering from the ledges on rocky cliffs upon which their mothers have lain them, splatter upon the ground, opening the dead or dying young dragon to the wider world, not just the crust of the egg but the scaly skin as well, splayed out. And we must suppose that - especially as no-one inspects a viable dragon egg for this purpose, their being far too valuable - such finds are greatly valued by scholars, who peer in and see the tentative development of the draconic form. Indeed, it is due to this that whole ontologies have been dislodged from their heavens. It used to be that scholars, looking at the development of human embryos procured from natural or artificial miscarriage, hypothesized that the embryo ascended through the various steps on the chain of being - slime, fish, little mouselike mammal, then into the family of apes of which we form a part. It was supposed that, as dragons are another step above us, that in dragon eggs that were at just the right level of incomplete, that one might find a little man or woman, ready to progress into the face of a dragon. But none such have been found, and upon this was our great leap from the superstition of the the great chain of being to the truth of cladistics. And some people mourned, or still hold out the idea of little men in those dragon eggs, because it struck them as a more romantic notion, perhaps; or because they hoped that further progressions, perhaps in a further life after this one was lived in virtue, were possible. But the world is an unromantic place and we must not imagine that dragons are anything other than they are, a rather plain thing, a dangerous thing, but no more.

Stalactomancers of Tlön

Possible content warning for gross stuff.

Niðavellir

In 1937, Nazi sorcerers recruited into the Ahnenerbe from the Armenenschaft, Germanenorden, and Thule Gesselleschaft discovered another world, which they called Niðavellir after one of the worlds of Norse mythology. Their plans to use it - whether as a colonial frontier or source of occult wisdom - were cut short by ensuing events, and the parts of their research team that did not escape there were divided up by American and Soviet intelligence. Niðavellir became a secret front in the Cold War until both agencies, anticipating their liquidation, fled to it in 1979. It has been unknown to any major Earth government since then - although there have been rogue operations.