Fantasy Stream

17 November 2025

After a rant on the problems with computers and hardware failures, which I have deleted and which explains the missing posts, I went on to discuss the nature and creation of aperum, which in my created world are dragons, according to my created cosmology.

12 November 2012

With the establishment of the elements and their relations to each other, and with the first establishment of the world’s races & corruptions, I turned to some of the creatures, particularly the ‘monstrous’ creatures. Since I had previously posited the idea that evil did not create, only corrupt what already existed, I discovered I had a conceptual problem with my world’s most infamous monsters, the dragons, which I call “aperum,” a contraction of the words for ‘air’ and ‘fire’. Thus, in my cosmology, the aperum were corruptions of air creatures with elemental fire. However, this created a problem, since I was claiming that dragons were corruptions of existing air creatures, so what were these original creatures, corrupted by fire? Well, dragons, of course. So dragons were corrupted to create . . . dragons, tautology. The Derridean deconstructor in me came to my rescue: obviously, there had to be some air creature, dragon-like in nature, in existence from the beginning, to be take by Gar and corrupted into the evil aperum. In order for there to be different kinds, I decided that the base aperu was this primordial dragon-like creature corrupted by Gar with elemental fire, but to do this, Gar needed the help of a powerful spirit of fire among his followers to corrupt/create the mother of all evil aperum, Gwenatera, the Fire Queen. Since she was purely of fire, she would be red and her breath fire–fairly straightforward. The question then became, where do all the others come from?

For a time I paused. I wanted something similar to the colors of dragons I was familiar with, but it had to be consistent with my world cosmology. I wondered what would happen if the primeval fathers of the different colors had also been corrupted by Gar through the application of elemental fire and powerful spirits that followed him. Or perhaps Gwenatera masked her allegiance, mating with these multicolored fathers in turn, then killed them (in the way of the black widow spider), but this conception is problematic, for how could she mate with one, kill him, lay the clutch of eggs that would be his offspring, then move onto the next? I would think the survivors would become increasingly more suspicious of her, as their fellows disappeared, and they would refuse to answer her call.

I set it aside again, using the most common conception of dragons, their colors & corresponding breath, not returning to the problem until I was drafting Book 5 (Xythrax’s End). I knew that the plot required something beyond the struggle with the purgle, Xythrax, and I came up with the idea that the closer one came to the home of this purgle, the more disrupted the fabric of reality became, leading to what I called ‘elemental storms.’ This led me to the idea that each element must have creatures corresponding in some way to that element, and that the aperum also had to correspond directly to the elemental forces. I had a ‘eureka’ moment at that point, and penned the missing piece of notes. In it, I established that there were primordial dragon-like creatures that were, in essence, living ‘elements’, and the oldest of these, and the most crude was the black aperu, formed from elemental void. His opposite, a white aperu, elemental light made flesh and also unique, female, was loyal to the One. Third, the purple aperu, unique, from time itself (imagine what this dragon’s breath would do!), time made flesh. The mating of light and Void produces the fathers of the other elemental aperu: orange for earth, yellow for air, green for water, and the feminine red for fire, blue for ice. In the cosmology, these elemental creatures existed before the spirit children of the One. Gar (then named Elker), with the help of Guengle (spirit corrupted by ice, equal to Gar and Elos, the three firstborn spirits of the One), captured the primordial red and blue aperu, infusing them with followers; for Gar it was a fire spirit called Atala, that he tricked into becoming the red aperu. The spirit used by Guengle on the blue is, at present, unknown, but the results were the same: the first two corrupted aperu. These two seduced the orange, yellow, and green, along with their father, the black, all of them falling with Gar.

The One replied by taking precious metals, weaving them together with the other elements and creating the ‘metal aperum’, the gold, silver, copper, iron, and platinum (along with other metals that do not figure in our present tale); the more precious the metal, the fewer of this kind of aperum in existence, with only a single pair made from platinum, named Plati & Plata, the tragic tale of this pair recounted in Book 2. . . .

As always, to be continued. . . .