12: Dragon’s Gold
“As we emerge from the examination of our shadow and light aspects, a moss, Dragon’s Gold grips onto our foundation and expands. This archetype asks us to allow our foundation to nurture us in a symbiotic relationship so we can grow through stillness.”
Do you allow time for stillness in your day-to-day life? How does stillness inform your choices?
Prompt: On this planet, silence is not a practice. It is not a belief system. It is not chosen.
It is imposed.
Every four hours, Stillness arrives.
No alarms signal it. No governing body announces it. The planet itself enforces it. Gravity thickens. Muscles lock. Machinery stalls. Wings suspend mid-beat. Speech collapses into breath. Even thoughts seem to slow under the weight of something ancient and atmospheric.
For sixteen minutes (4x4), nothing moves.
The inhabitants did not invent this rhythm. They evolved around it. A people bound to the rhythm of a planet.
Architecture is designed for collapse-into-pause. Transportation systems calculate routes in four-hour increments. Surgery, birth, harvest, negotiation—everything bends to the planetary pulse. Children learn to feel the approaching hush in their bones, like the tide pulling backward before it returns.
Every four days, the Stillness extends—an entire rotation of the planet held in suspended quiet. No one can resist it. No one has ever successfully moved through it. The oceans flatten. Winds rest. Even seismic activity lowers to a murmur.
It is not law. It is physics.
And every four years, when the great Stillness Day concludes, select groups depart the planet.
They are known as Intervals—beings trained to travel to distant solar systems, carrying with them the lived reality of a world that cannot escape pause. They do not preach Stillness as philosophy; they embody it as biology.
Their mission is twofold:
To share how a civilization organizes power, labor, intimacy, and conflict around stillness.
To observe how other worlds function without imposed quiet.
Write from the perspective of a young Interval preparing for their first interstellar journey.
As the next four-hour Stillness descends, you feel it coming—the thickening air, the slowing blood.
For the first time in your life, you wonder:
When you leave this planet, will the Stillness follow you?
