Hitherby Dragons Storytime

So Jane goes to the edge of the world, where Santa Ynez touches on the chaos. She walks across the bridge to the abandoned tower of the gibbelins. Finding that its machinery is in recoverable order, she assembles a theater company of gods and humans to answer suffering.

Also they put on shows.

—“What is Hitherby Dragons?”, by Jenna Moran

Hitherby Dragons Storytime is a voicecast of Hitherby Dragons, a serial ficton by Jenna Moran. Episode text and much of the text on this website is hers. We present her episodes in neither their original posting order nor a strict in-universe order, but instead aim for an inscrutable thematic progression.

Questions? Interested in joining the crew? Email hitherby@xavid.us.

Narrative Structure

There are three types of episodes:

Histories

According to Jenna, a “history” is a reliable but tonally biased description of events. You can reasonably trust that the events in a history happened, with some minor wiggleroom for the tonal shifts.

Histories are often biased by one of the participant’s perceptions. That said, the entries are real events. Even “Alan”, most of which the monster describes as “dream and fantasy”, is a lot closer to reality than that description suggests.

(Pedantic note: in Hitherby Dragons Storytime, we include “stories” in the category of “histories”. In the original, stories take place in the present, and histories in the past. But as the present is a moving target, here we dispense with this duality.)

Legends

A “legend,” conversely, is something that people use to help them understand history and the world. There’s a stage at the Gibbelins’ Tower where people present legends as a show.

Legends are reliable to a variable degree—pretty much, the only thing they really prove is that the folks at the Gibbelins’ Tower consider the legend worth telling. Is there data in a legend? Well, if you have a real reason to ask—e.g., you spot a connection between a legend and a history—then there’s probably some data. If not, then probably not.

Merins

Merins help make sense of the world. In this usage, they are entries that provide exposition on Hitherby Dragons and its universe and metaphysics in the form of an aside or authorial interjection.