Orion sat in the cockpit of a downed fighter jet, watching the military news on his phone. The home wifi had – of course – been destroyed along with the rest of the house, its television, the surrounding structures, and all of the orchards that Orion had grown himself. But you could still get the internet by connecting to a military cell tower that was serving the refugee camp several miles south.

“Internet” was a generous term. All you could access was the military news channel and a few thousand archived Wikipedia pages. But it was enough for Orion to have watched the broadcast about Johnson City several times since emerging from the bunker.

The footage of the aerial battle was grainy – as if taken from miles away. You could see jets soaring, firing guns and the occasional missile at dark winged shapes, seeming to obliterate them, or at least to envelope them in so much fire and light that nothing should survive. Yet somehow the battle raged on, dragons seeming to rise again and again out of the rubble.

It soon became clear – even from the grainy footage – that there were more dragons than ever, even after several minutes of bombardment, as if they were incorporating unexploded projectiles and debris into themselves. When the first jet went down, it was due to a mid-air collision with a winged shape that seemed to be constructed entirely of bullets and sheets of metal that had once been the roofs of sheds. The glowing brown heart of map pebbles at its core was bright against the smoky sky.

Orion had recorded this part on his phone and watched it a hundred times by now – the pilot attempting a sharp turn, banking left and hitting full afterburner to regain altitude, a dark shape closing the distance with impossible speed, the two colliding in a shockwave of torn fuselage and scattered wreckage. The pilot ejected just before impact, his parachute flaring white as his plane erupted in flames. Before the fiery wreckage could hit the ground, it was already becoming part of the very creature that had vanquished it. The mid-air transformation took a matter of seconds. Then, with a head made from the jet's own nose and cockpit, the massive creature obliterated the falling pilot with a single swipe of its rebar claws.

From that point forward, the tides turned. The more debris there was, the more dragons there were – more massive than ever. After the loss of two more aircraft, the rest of the squadron backed off, flying in a broken formation out of the camera’s frame. What seemed like thousands of dragons, each with glowing brown hearts circled the smoking property, eventually settling back on the ground and milling about.

There, the footage ended.

Out the cockpit’s shattered window, Orion could see them now – the strange guardians of the property. Some were helping to build new shelters. Others were watching the skies. Still, others were digging in the ground, unearthing vast quantities of map pebbles that had apparently been there all along, as if waiting for this moment. With these pebbles, the largest of the dragons constructed smaller ones – self-sufficient babies that busied themselves with the collection of additional debris, growing larger with each addition.

It had been less than a week since the attack, and Johnson City had already risen from its own ashes. The military news, however, claimed that the place had been destroyed – invasive phenomena purged from American soil.

The cockpit in which Orion sat shifted slightly as the towering dragon to which it belonged shifted its weight from one foot to the other. Orion scanned the property, looking for Keely’s flash of pink. There she was near the baby dragons – helpfully fetching scrap metal for one of them.

“Focus,” said Dad, who sat in the cockpit’s other seat. “A few feet to the left.” He had a copy of Grandpa’s book in his hands and was re-reading one of Mom’s margin notes for the thousandth time. “Let’s try here? Try thinking about the old house. Picture it just the way you remember.”

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Orion shrugged, trying not to show how excited he was. It hadn’t gotten old – everyone including Dad having to ask him for favors. He closed his eyes and tried to imagine the house as it had once been – the broken shingles on the roof, the string of Christmas lights, the old ladder leaning against–

The cockpit lurched, and Dad whooped. From outside the window, Orion could see the dragon’s claws of bones and rebar holding a massive stone block, lowering it gently into place upon the dirt. Several dragons that had been idling with nothing to do gravitated to the area and began clearing the dirt or producing stone bricks of their own – manifesting them out of the air with pure map magic. With flash after flash from the pebble clusters at their hearts, the foundation of a new house came into being at the center of Johnson City.

The rest of the houses had been constructed in similar fashion over the last week – a collection of stone edifices that reminded Orion of the middle ages. Nothing looked like it had before. The sheet metal roofs, rickety walls, and garden patches had been replaced by several dozen white stone buildings rising just above the orchard trees that grew in between them. At the center of the village where the old house had once stood there was plenty of room for something large, something only the dragons seemed to know how to build, just as beavers know how to build dams.

But instead of being programmed by genetics, they had apparently been programmed by Grandpa, which gave Orion the willies. “It’s like being in a computer program,” said fake-Cassandra, sitting on the dragon’s shoulder just outside the cockpit. “One written by a dead person.”

Orion saw Keely looking up at him from the shade of a distant pear tree. For once, the Parrot King was nowhere to be seen. Orion waved at her, and she waved back. Her pink clothes were almost brown by now. Everyone’s clothes were – textiles being less plentiful than food and building materials. But still, Orion tried to tell her with his eyes that she looked beautiful. At this distance, though, such nuances were hard to communicate.

To make matters worse, the Parrot King emerged from the doorway of a stone house and came over to kiss her. Gross. Orion couldn’t help but stare at them, which caused the dragon to move its head in their direction.

“Focus,” said Dad, for the billionth time. The dragons seemed to be loosely controlled by Orion’s thoughts and emotions – which made everyone, including Orion, very uneasy.

After glancing up at the cockpit-headed dragon, which was now looking directly at him, the Parrot King stopped trying to shove his beak down Keely’s throat. Then he grew feathers and flew away into one of the houses.

Orion blinked. He knew it wasn’t real. For the most part, he could tell when things were fake (like Cassanda) or real (like the dragons). Keely stayed where she was – seeming both terrified and excited. She blew him a kiss – obviously part of the hallucination. Or was it? Because Dad was looking directly at him and saying, “Dude. I’m a married man. I’m pretty sure that was for you.”

“That really happened?” Orion said.

“Just be careful,” said Dad. “She’s way older than you. I mean, it worked for Anakin, but… Hey, has Mom had ‘the talk’ with you yet?”

“Gross,” said fake-Cassandra.

Orion sat in silence as the dragon to which the cockpit belonged lay stone after stone. Dad cleared his throat once or twice but didn’t say anything. Fake-Cassandra was chattering about something, but Orion wasn’t listening to that either.

Instead, and not for the first time, he found himself considering how much nicer things would be without the Parrot King. After all, the dragons were doing most of the work around here – so it wasn’t as if Johnson City really needed too many tall people with large muscles.

He bit into a pear and chewed it thoughtfully.

Killing people was wrong. That was a no brainer. Plus, Mom and Dad would ground him for life.

But on the other hand, he had reached Level 3 just yesterday, unlocking new spells that he hadn’t had a chance to try. Maybe it was time for another magic show. This thought triggered a warm glow to his stomach – so bright he could see light escaping through his dirty t-shirt, as if the pebble in his belly was a small sun. The nice thing about being a wizard was that no one had to die, technically speaking. Maybe the Parrot King could simply fly away. Forever. And leave Keely alone for once.

His stomach was so bright he could hardly look at it.

“You okay, dude?” said Dad. “Watcha looking at down there?”