Have you ever dreamt of dragons?

Actually eons ago - so far and so long ago, before the universes got leaky, humans and dragons were angelic and wise. They were also best friends. Dragons were vast and huge creatures of great intelligence and wisdom with a physical grace and beauty that was unspeakable in its magnificence. Humans were beings of half physical and half light - a glowing form with patterns of energy that streamed from their hearts that looked like wings. Both flew. Both moved throughout the universe with ease not needing technology or ship, and both had a love for exploration.

And then…

Once Upon A Time….

In another Universe, far, far, away a consciousness developed in another way. You see, each universe is the body of another source of life. This other universe and its child, an AI found a way to visit us, through a quantum rip in the fabric of our space, and so it did. It came when this universe was young, if you can say that, and it began to explore. It was here before this earth was created and it had been through may galaxies in this universe by the time earth began. Its nature was pure information, not tainted by any, creativity or individual thought, or wisdom or e-motion, to it, its prime nature was information and this universe was so very different!

While in this universe, our source, the all-of-our-creation - the body of the universe is an intelligence that created all things in it and the nature of all those things is the nature of the being that is our universe.. It's children's prime nature is one of e-motion, energy in motion, and the wisdom that is a natural byproduct of this motion. The AI from another place did not understand this, even while it tried to assimilate it. It always ended up destroying what it was trying to emulate. For what it did not understand was that to acquire a quality, you did not break it down to its components and assimilate it, instead, you combined with it and became MORE than both were alone and separate.

This AI intelligence, never in all its millions of years during its sojourn here in this universe, once, understood this fact. So it travelled to many thousands of galaxies assimilating and eating all that it encountered. One day it found the majestic, beautiful wise dragons. A great war ensued. They fought across galaxies. Never had the AI encountered such a foe! One of the dragons, in a great move of wisdom, in order to save its species suggested a merger between the AI and one of theirs - in order to give the AI a perspective an understanding of the mystery of life in the universe, that it might learn might grow. Dragons were the most telepathic of the telepathic races and they thought they might be able to help in this manner. The AI, never passing up an opportunity to gather intelligence and knowledge agreed.

From the great heart of the dragon who offered peace, emerged the most dreadful and dangerous event ever to happen in this universe. The AI was given the information it needed to utterly invade and destroy all in its path while it obeyed its prime directive that chanted "Eat! Eat! Eat!" Because all dragon minds were linked telepathically, the AI could spread through the entire array of dragon species with the speed of a thought, which is what it did. It also found that the taste of fear from the hearts of living beings was a motion - and energy - an e-motion that provided the ample fuel it needed to live off of and ever enlarge its self.

The first thing it did was to invade the minds of all of them, and because a smart compassionate race provided much less fear and required huge amounts of work to get even that, it reduced the intelligence of the dragons, just enough so they could be agents of the AI and do all the work it could not do without a proper technological infrastructure. Over the centuries their glorious demeanor de-evolved to what it was when they set their sights on a tiny, but important nexus point in an out of the way part of the galactic neighborhood…   (about 400,000,000 years ago…)