[Aradria the Stormweaver]

I dreamt of fire, above the endless sky.

I was that fire, living fire that pulled upon a thousand other sparks that belonged to me, fire that swelled from within, blossomed outward, became the storm.

I was Aradria, the Queen of the Sky, the Stormweaver, the Goddess of the Spine of the World, a firstborn, primordial embodiment of power and magic.

My breath was a torrent of molten fury, one that melted mountains, vaporized lakes and turned entire forests into blackened wastelands. With it, I carved my will onto the world and claimed all that lay below me.

My wings, as mighty as the storm around me, carried me across the expanse of the sky. Below me, all mortal beasts scurried from my firestorm, knew to fear me.

For countless winters, I reigned unchallenged.

Humans were but insignificant insects, scurrying beneath my shadow. They built their hives of wood and stone and made pathetic attempts to claim a sliver of the sky, to imbue their gold and implements with magic.

Once they put enough of their trinkets together, the gold cast a multitude of sparks onto the Underside of the world and I came to collect what was mine. I enjoyed the sound of their screams as they burned.

Such an arrangement worked well - I slept in my cavern, let the 2-legged insects multiply and then took all that they’ve imbued with magics for me, adding it to my hoard. I thought that things would be like this forever.

I was wrong.

While I slept above my hoard, the puny insects learned, adapted. The damned critters built spires of white stone, made magic-casting implements as big as I was! They struck at me with vile spells that blinded and sheared my head from within with unbearable pain. For a time, I was forced to retreat, to hide in my hoard, my anger simmering.

Then, the accursed insects tricked me with a false treasure that set my hoard alight right beneath me, forcing me to flee my own home, abandoning my kobolds. Deprived of much of my power, and filled with rage I struck at them wherever I could.

Then one night, as I slept in a mountain valley, one of their kind reached out to me.

The puny critter dream-walked to my side through the Underside and stood below me, unafraid. I tried to banish her from my dreams, but she was strong, refused to leave.

Unlike the others I've seen of her kind... she wasn’t mortal. She was an echo of the Abyss itself, her power anchored by a thousand stolen souls, a symphony of whispers.

She called herself the Avatar of Ishira, Giovashi.

Giovashi offered me a deal.

She was like me, was a collector of magic. She understood my desire for vengeance, knew that the white spires denied me my rightful spoils.

She offered me knowledge, one that would lead me to unguarded treasures, and unprotected humans, pointing out small, hidden hives amongst the forests and mountains that would be ripe for the taking.

She offered to become my eyes and ears in the world of humans.

Giovashi's agents, the girls she called her ‘Priestesses’ acted similarly to my kobolds, obeying her will. They sabotaged the spires of many hives, permitting me to feast on the humans therein, unopposed.

Our agreement was a pact, forged in fire and shadow, a dance of predators with a mutual hunger for power. She pointed and I struck. Each conquest magnified my hoard and added more ghosts to her Underside chains. I saw her for what she was, a clever insect that fed on the souls of other insects.

Her treachery, greed and ambition allowed me to prosper and for a time everything was good, until one night she came to me in my dreams and whispered of my next target… Skyisle its name.

Skyisle was just a small hive hidden in the mountains. Giovashi assured me it was poorly defended, its people easy prey and that one of the human buildings contained a lot of valuable trinkets for me to consume, new ones that didn’t exist there 13 winters ago when I tried to attack this hive and was repelled.

As I approached the valley within my storm, I peered beneath the physical and confirmed Giovashi's words. The entire hive was indeed glowing with magic that had not been there.

This time, the spire was conveniently damaged, disrupted by Giovashi’s kobolds from within.

As I examined the hive, I noted something that surprised me immensely. Something was different, odd. This wasn’t how human hives normally looked. An entire net of violet-orange tree roots spread out across the hive’s Underside like a gargantuan spider web, pulsing with power.

There was an impossible order to this web, as if a gargantuan, meticulous hand wrote a single repeating pattern into the Underside itself - Rewind.

Thankfully, whatever this was–it wasn’t finished. It was no threat to me. The sight of the magic trees all over the valley made me drool and I dove towards the centre of the formation, ready to feast.

Time around me slowed as I saw a tiny spark, a mote fly my way from one of the violet trees. It smelled like a shard of my kin, the heart of another, weaker dragon. I noted that the heart was somehow thrown my way by scrawny human spawn with silver hair. Was this a gift, an offering meant to pacify me? Hah, as if I would stop just because they offered me something like that.

I permitted the shard of the dragonheart to reach me, opened my maw to swallow it whole, to claim it as mine and then...

The shard suddenly folded into itself and all magic ceased to exist.

The Underside itself warped, twisted and popped like a bubble all around me.

I watched it all in slow motion, unable to do a damn thing about it as the magic-inversion bubble swatted me down.

I felt pain and despair unlike any other as the power of my hoard became torn from me and my wings stopped supporting me, the storm I cast onto the sky suddenly dissipating above me.

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I fell. My neck broke as I struck the jagged ground below. More pain. My mind swam in it as my body refused to move.

Magic had returned to my heart and I willed myself to heal, willed vengeance upon whomever had done this to me.

I saw something through the delirium of pain, focused on my enemy.

A thing approached me.

The Hollow Mother.

The squid from the Underside. She was inhabiting the body of a tiny, two-legged male insect spawn with silver hair, had somehow infested the puny creature from within.

A hundred silver-blue eyes across its body opened, peered at me and I knew fear, for I had been paralyzed, could not move a muscle, could not fight back.

A silver blue hand wreathed in void flames reached out to my flank weaving a spell I've never seen before, could not defend against. Magic within it multiplied five, then ten times, then a hundred times above the insect’s level and then I screamed as my soul shattered.

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I tore away from my nightmare of my death with a scream on my lips.

Everything felt wrong.

I was no longer the vast, unstoppable ruler of the sky.

My hoard was small too, consisting of some gold in a bag beneath me. My form was small, constricting and my fire was but a few sparks within me.

To my horror, the architect of my downfall, the Hollow Mother, was once again in front of me! The abomination that had done something to me.

It… somehow sealed me into this puny body, likely to steal my magic, to torture me, to make me into a servant!

Memories flickered through me like a wild river suddenly pouring into my head.

Kliss. Vows. Cessna. Skyisle. Dante. Slava. Delta.

With a snap, I fully woke up.

My chest was aching and my heart pounded, but not like that of a human. It beat like a deep drum, casting radiant magic spirals across the otherwise dark room, painting orange-red stardust onto everything around me.

A tremor ran through my body as I shook my head, trying to push away the dream of Aradria’s life. I still tasted the ashes of her hoard, felt her rage, her power, her hunger, the despair of her death and her all-encompassing fear of… the Astral Phantom, the boy sleeping in front of me.

I focused on my human memories. The dragon’s presence slowly receded from my head like a tide that left behind a sticky residue of unease and a lingering thirst for gold and fried flesh.

I squeezed my hands, fighting against the instinctive urge to claim everything within reach, to set fire to the enemy in front of me. I was Slava’s Knight, a protector, not a destroyer! This town was my hoard, this was my new home and Slava was my kobold, my…

I noted that it was still very dark out. Why was I dreaming of being Aradria? Why didn’t Slava pull me into the dream of Moscow?

I focused my eyes on Slava’s pale, drawn face. His forehead was drenched in sweat, eyes moving left and right rapidly beneath his eyelids, lips whispering foreign words. Was he once again trapped in his own soul, talking to the Astral beast he called Sasha?

Whatever was going on, I wasn’t going to idly lie there. I reached out across the thaumaturgical connection between us, poured power from my hoard into the invisible tether that linked us as dragon and kobold. I tore through the dark chill that clung to him like a heavy shroud, pushed beneath the surface of reality to the Underside.

My dragon eyes saw tendrils of the Hollow Mother, sealed within Slava’s hands, intermeshed with his soul.

Slava’s expression changed as he winced. His platinum hair fell across his forehead in unruly curls. I wanted to wake him up, to drown out the coldness that clung to him. I wanted to protect him against the silver threads, to tear apart the myriads of silver, shimmering worm-like fibers that inhabited his soul.

I leaned forward, pressing my forehead against his, hugging him tightly.

The warmth of the magic radiating from my heart felt intoxicating as more mana poured from my newly acquired gold into the thread that bound us.

Whatever the Astral infection was doing, it wasn’t going to take him from me. I anchored myself, anchored Slava to the physical with the pulse of my ever-burning dragon heart, reinforcing the bond between us with all of my will.

Slava stirred beneath my touch and then his eyes fluttered open, flickering from within with glowing, silver-blue rings.

A flicker of recognition flashed in his eyes, filled with the weight of his real years, unfitting that of a teenager. I saw the Soviet scientist that I had met in his dreams, the virologist who saw the world entirely through the lens of science and mathematics, a great mage who sought to understand the intricate machinery of life and death itself.

“Slava,” I whispered.

“Hey,” he murmured back.

“You were talking to… her?” I asked.

“Yes,” he answered simply, not denying it. “I was talking to Sasha.”

“You said that she was… quar-an-tined,” I said, stumbling over the odd word. “That… if I was close, held you, she would not be able to invade your dreams.”

“She is,” he shrugged. “But she’s changing. She’s not just a virus anymore. She’s becoming something… else, building a data network.”

“Meaning what?” I demanded. “Is she planning to break out? To create spells with mathematics?”

“She’s doing what I did first when I came to Novazem,” Slava said. “Investing in intelligence. Learning. I can obliterate her and that entire network with a single spell, but I am learning from her too, understanding the nature of the Astral.”

“I can see her… in your soul, like a colony of… minuscule worms weaving a web across your soul,” I whispered.

Slava pursed his lips.

“She might look scary,” he said. “Like... bacteria, but she’s not doing anything awful, just… running the same data simulation over and over.”

“To what end?” I asked.

“To learn?” Slava mulled.

“To learn what?” I pressed.

“As far as I can see, that network serves one purpose - a mathematical breakdown and reconstruction of reality as a simulation,” Slava said.

“What exactly are you hoping for, brother?” Delta suddenly addressed her twin, clearly awake too.

“That there is enough of me in her,” Slava answered. “That whatever this quest for understanding is, that it will occupy her forever. I’m hoping that the discovery of knowledge itself will keep her from doing harm to us.”

“Peachy,” Delta commented with a huff. Then she looked at me. “You look hella worried there.”

“I…” I gulped. “Slava didn’t activate lucid dreaming so I had a dream of being… Aradria.”

“Ah,” Delta nodded. “Learn anything of value?”

I scratched my cheek, going over the awful dream in my head. A thought stuck out in my memories like a tooth and I probed at it for a bit until I remembered more.

“Giovashi used the… Violets to sabotage the defense ward of Skyisle, disabled the spire of the Church of Equality!” I declared. “She did the same thing in Cessna and other cities… made sure that the anti-dragon countermeasures failed. She fed Aradria for ages, betrayed humanity.”

“She betrayed humanity when she and her Seditionist pals nuked Tricameron,” Delta commented. "Everything else was just her dancing on the ruins of my world."

“We’ll have to look into fixing the spire,” Slava said. “After we accelerate Leemy.”

“Accelerate Leemy?” I asked.

“The valley-wide hexagram is just one part of my plan,” Slava replied. “Accelerating Leemy is another. Right now, Leemy is having trouble interacting with us.”

“She’s a dryad, functioning like a tree,” Delta nodded. “As such her thought processes and conversational ability is waaaaay slower than people or animals. I normally have to slow my mind down to talk to her, otherwise she takes forever to make a single word. Such issue will persist until she gets strong enough to make herself a human-style Avatar.”

“I reckon we can make it happen earlier,” Slava said.

“How?” Delta inquired, turning to her brother. “Were you able to modify Chrysalis, accelerate it? From what I saw, she’s still pretty far from forming a physical avatar from the big tree in the center of town, since the one in the Alanian tower was too damaged by the magogenic fault.”

“I’m going to bring Leemy’s soul into my dreams, make her an Avatar there for us to interact with,” Slava said, which elicited a happy squeal from Delta.

“Yes, yes, yes,” she clapped. “You’ve no idea how happy this makes me!”