It's a dark time in the first novel. The protagonists have been forced to submit to the antagonists. The bad guys nearly kill Jak'edrac sel'Gury, the most important dragon character in the story. As the dragon recovers, he has a dream which is shared by his mate Jul'eweisa, Phil (the main charcter) and Tracy (his future wife).
However, it's not really a dream. This is a vision of the far future, when the humans are extremely old, but the dragons have aged little and are still adults in their prime(they live for millenia).
Far in the future, the four of them are exiled on a remote, terraformed tropical paradaise with little additional value. This world is actually a huge Earthlike moon of a Saturn-like gas giant distantly orbiting a binary star system; a white dwarf and a brilliant, superheated main sequence blue star that has burned away any hope of life on all its inner rocky planets. I have tried to make this world eerie yet alluring. The spindly palms are very high (though I can see I messed up on the perspective) and the dormant blown-out volcano caldera is low; the gravity is roughly 95% Earth standard, so trees and cumulonimbus clouds tower much higher than they do on our own world. (Also, elderly humans feel rather better, and dragons fly with considerably less effort.)Atmospheric pressure is identical.
This is actually a scene that will happen in the yet-to-be written final book of the five-novel sequence. This is a very pleasant vision, but what happens right afterward (in the fifth book) is anything BUT pleasant. And that is all I will say about THAT!
Is there a precedent for this style of foreshadowing?
Certainly. At risk of betraying my relatively geezerly age (by Elfwood demographic standards, that is ), I remember that scene in the original Christopher Reeve 'Superman' movie---the very first scene, actually, right after seeming hours of opening credits o_O. Marlon Brando's character, Jor-El, sentences three criminals led by General Zod (played by one of my all-time favorite 'bad guy' actors, Terence Stamp)to be exiled in the mirror-like Phantom Zone, away from Krypton which explodes just a few film minutes later. (I never understood why the amazingly advanced Kryptonians were such dunderheads when it came to planetary evacuation!) Anyhow, the three villains are cast away, and then the actual plot of the first 'Superman' film begins. General Zod and his sidekicks don't appear again until 'Superman II'.
Apologies for that rambling tangent; no matter how successful I become, I will always be a genre fan at heart . Anyhow, Jak'edrac's vision of something that happens four yet-unwritten novels later is similar to the foreshadowing used in the 'Superman' flicks.
Strangely, the elderly Phil bears more than a passing resemblance to <a href=' http://elfwood.lysator.liu.se/art/s/a/savien/savien.html'>Mark Cope</a>, Elftown's own Savien. o_O
Art, characters, story, novel, (c) Paul J. Doyle.
***MENTAL NOTE---Start using human figure references!***
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