Part 2: An Ontological Examination, aka Skip

I see you've discovered that, despite being author, I can't tell you what to do. Very well, I'll just have to live with that.

The Premise of Myth

Picture the ocean as a four-dimensional object. This is The Ocean. Every ocean in every world, in every universe is of The Ocean.

The Ocean is a Form, one of a group of objects that is here both the most essential and the fullest possible expression of itself. This Form, The Ocean, and all Forms exist across all worlds as oceans or what have you because the Forms are these four-dimensional objects, hereafter to be loosely referenced as tesseracts.

The Inner Sea of Paizo's Golarion is one face or Paradigm of The Ocean tesseract while Earth's very own Atlantic is but another Paradigm.

There can be countless Forms-The Mountains, The Forest, The City, The Village, ad nauseum if your world needs them. This guide however, is only interested in the Forms as they relate to dragons and Riders.

The Premise of Being

Consider the Paradigm of New York City. It's full of people. You would not find these people in the Paradigm of Paizo's Absalom. You would instead find humans, half-orcs, dwarves, etc. People are Paradigm-specific.

This campaign setting assumes that dragons are not. An urban dragon in the Paradigm of New York City is the same being of urban dragon in any Paradigm of The City. The red dragon in the Paradigm of Paizo's warm mountains is the same being of red dragon in the warm part of The Mountains. Dragons and their kind are not Paradigm-specific but Form-specific. They are not Forms, they are of the Forms. They are not Forms yet.

The Premise of Power

When a dragon, a Form-specific being, bonds with a humanoid as a Rider or familiar, a Paradigm-specific being, the two become a new being together as one. Each retains their old three-dimensional shapes and existences, but their bond adds a degree of freedom, a fourth dimension to their being. This fourth dimension is not so much perceived by dragon and Rider as it is acted upon. As a four-dimensional being, the dragon and Rider are tesseracts-they have become a Form themselves.

The Dragon And Rider is Form that exists within some environmental Form and Paradigm, say The Desert and the Sahara Desert. The dragon and Rider can't perceive their Formness, which means they exist entirely in whichever environmental Paradigm they're currently located, here the Sahara Desert.

The magic of the dragon and Rider, however, specifically teleportation, can tap into the Formness of The Dragon And Rider. Teleportation thus allows them to shift their Paradigm of existence from one environmental Paradigm and Form, the Sahara Desert of The Desert, to another Paradigm of the present Form, the Osirian Desert of Paizo's Golarion. This four-dimensional, tesseractile teleportation works three-dimensionally within the tesseract teleport as well, allowing the dragon and Rider to teleport from the middle of the Sahara Desert to the edge of the Osirian Desert if they so choose.

Mobility is power, especially mobility across worlds when your dominant society is a consumer society with destruction-loving members who actively wreck havoc on efforts by subordinates and equals toward productivism. Think mobility of self, of goods, of evils, of allies of enemies. Mobility is power but may be as simple and complicated as the power to escape and start anew.