Xephras

Most minds are small and chaotic - a stream of memories here, bits of information mixed with feelings there, like a ball of tangled yarn. Not this one.

This one is vast and complex like the sea, but made of all hard edges and glistening spires. Towers of knowledge, each one containing library of information or memory all interconnected by ramps and galleries. And all of it spun like a spider’s web around the center: a crystalline shard, so alien, and yet so fitting there. To gaze into its depth is to look at the face of the sun - it is blinding and burning, but yet it hints at so much more beneath the surface.

This is not a mind of a dragon. But what else could it be?

You raise your head from the book you were reading. Of course, it doesn’t matter in the slightest that your physical form is no longer looking at the text - the shadow will keep processing it. The body is irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. But you still have to keep up the illusion, for those with no understanding.
How you long to be back at the Observatory, to once again bury yourself in the currents of the Arcanist’s mind. To be free of this puppet theatre once and for all.
A Lightning dragon is setting up an energy collector. He is doing it wrong - the terrain is angled by 0.0084 degrees, and particle density is too high by 0.34% in the place he has chosen. The collector would operate at just 99.49% of its full efficiency. Such a waste. You frown for a millisecond before your memory obediently supplies you with the dragon’s name. Cero. One of yours, in theory. You can feel the strings connecting his mind to yours, see your shadow enveloping him. You tap into his thoughts - very lightly. Anything more would tear him apart. You plant a rudimentary suggestion, so basic and crude that a hint of distaste appears in your processes. It is, of course, immediately filtered out and squashed. Distaste is not a useful emotion to have.
You look back at the book, or at least pretend to look at it. Your shadow has absorbed 89.00672% of its contents already, yet for all the world it appears that you are still in the second chapter. Soon, you turn the pages only to satisfy any onlookers. Your mind splits into a few streams of thought, analyzing and cataloguing new information. Idle currents are redirected to observing the life of your clan - their erratic thoughts and emotions sending powerful ripples through the shadow. You sit there, at the heart of the web, and let the data flow into you.
When the dragon starts moving the lightning collector to another spot you let a touch of satisfaction linger for a full second.