Dragons, it turns out, have always had a somewhat intangible relationship to the weave of spacetime.

In the mythology of old, they leapt oceans in a single bound, or delivered ultimatums to wildly disparate warring states in the course of an afternoon.

That they could traverse pathways unknown to humankind was taken as self-evident. Until we breached our world’s atmosphere, no-one had thought to ask how far those pathways could lead.

Even the dragons themselves were reticent to forge a path through the heavens; those who deigned to comment referred us to legends of notorious fools, stricken with such hubris that they soared into the dark between stars, never to be seen again.

But we offered steel, and aluminium, and polycarbonate helmets large enough even for dragons to brave the vacuum.

Then the hard part: convincing them that harnesses did not make them beasts of burden.

You can only imagine the contracts we had to agree, of shared authority and extortionate recompense. It didn’t take them long to realise they were critical to our dreams of exploration.

Now the first dragonships have reached orbit, vast chariots pulled by semi-mythological, trans-dimensional reptiles.

One by one, they slip into the spaces between atoms, our vessels twisting and winking out in their wake.