Spirit Runner Chapter 79 – Chalyn
Synergy. A whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.
Having someone with whom you are so thoroughly and completely connected that you are, by every meaningful measure, one.
For someone who considers herself an unrepentant individualist, the idea of melding, of sharing my head with someone else, made me squeamish.
The Borg. Resistance is futile. I hated the Borg.
The chalyn evolution story was hard to write, at times. But it was the logical natural progression of the genetic mutations that fueled the Joining and the Awakening.
It helped to think of it more as the Vulcan mind-meld than the Borg. (Oh, yes I am a Star Trek fan.)
As I was drafting this chapter’s bonus material today, I went searching for links to some of the reading I’d done years ago about the dyad in Greek mythology and philosophy.
To my surprise, I discovered the Star Wars franchise has added its own force-bonded pair since then, Ren and Rey. The Dyad in the Force was introduced around 2019.
Huh.
Creative minds hear the same muses sometimes, I guess.
So this is where I throw in the disclaimer. I haven’t kept up with Star Wars in recent years. They started losing me when they started with prequels. The non-linear concept of telling the story of what happened before a story began, after you already know how the story ends, never made much sense to me.
But I digress. For the first few years of writing, I used dyad to describe Dara and Madelyn’s melding. Sometime around October 2018, I changed it to chalyn, a new term I coined. Mostly because dyad didn’t sound powerful or magical enough.
Chalyn, as the term for a fully melded pair of previously bonded mindgifted, is as unique to the Rootstock Saga vernacular as breclan or gwynwulf.
Dara and Madelyn are the first.
They won’t be the last.