Ashri Filidesehmei

Nae has forgotten how to write stories but Ahsri demanded to be written.

• Ashri doesn’t remember travelling the Nexus when he was just a fledgling. He has lived in this parallel version of Earth for so long, that it is all he remembers. The people were young and untrained when he was a child, living off the land and travelling as nomads. He grew up in lands soft and fertile, fed by two oceans and backed by mountains. As a child when he was still easy to hurt and vulnerable, there were no predators that could take down a dragon. And the humans… well, they rarely ventured so close to the deep waters.
• He grew up alone, content to explore the rivers and streams, the lakes and the waterfalls. As he grew, so did the human civilization around him, building small towns and villages next to his waters.
• His waters, because Ashri claimed dominion, and in his careless youth he did not think twice about letting the tiny humans know that they lived by his grace and benevolence. The memories embarrass him a little bit now, the flashy show of power and demonstrations of his strength. 
• It was luck, really, that had Ashri meet a few wise humans, who taught him patience and benevolence. And Ashri grew up be a powerful but benevolent water god.
• He finessed his powers over water and his towns never suffered from drought and famine. He learned tame vicious storms that would have wiped out the seafaring sailors, to bring rain inland when the soil grew too dry. He was patient and in love with the people who continued to grow and invent, to create beauty and machines that took them across the waters, and then into the sky. 
• Ashri never considered himself alone or lonely. He had not seen another dragon in his entire life, but he learned to communicate with he humans, and his children caused enough trouble that he had his hands full. 
• But then one day his little humans started travelling beyond the sky and into the stars, and Ashri wondered himself what lay beyond the sky. 
• Ashri had never considered his dragom form to be uncomfortable. He had never wished for the smaller more flexible form of a human, but maybe he was having a midlife crisis. Ashri wondered what it would be like to be a little smaller, to have two hands and two feet and to be walk amongst some of the most entrepreneurial and creative beings in the Nexus. He decided to leave his home behind and travel the Nexus, and found himself in an odd little slice of the world where he encountered Linyaari. 
• These spacefaring kind were not human. They had the oddest colouring (not so different from his own, Ashri realized. Which was kind exciting) and Ashri learned that they became starclad, but were not born with this colouring. (It made Ashri wonder if maybe he too had been born of different colours, but had maybe turned into what he was now, because of his early hatchling years). 
• They were kind, gentle people whose nature mimicked his own, and Ashri found himself entranced. He wondered a chain a little bit if maybe having a smaller, more compact form would make his travels a little easier. Spacecrafts were not built for giant serpentine dragons (or at least, not most of them), and so he asked these kind techno crafters if maybe they knew of geneticists who could give him a more flexible form.
• “Maybe.” They told him. “But be aware, there are some geneticists out there with no morals, who will take what you are and twist it. Or even worse, take who you are and create unnatural, chaotic beings out of your essence.”
• Ashri naively believes that surely such immoral people do not exist, and finds himself at Xanadu Weyr. Maybe the Linyaari geneticists here would be able to find a way for him to shift into a smaller, more convenient form. There is a clutch on the sands, they tell him, and Ashri decides he will wait and see what the clutch holds.