As the morning sun splashed the valley with hues of pink, gold and orange, I made myself a cup of tea and headed straight to my dad’s workshop. Once there, I grabbed a charcoal stick to sketch out the frame of the glider.

I was no flight engineer, but in my previous life I had used my savant syndrome afflicted mind to absorb a truly ungodly amount of knowledge. Thus, I simply pulled at the strings of my past, going over the long hours I spent at the Lenin State Library of the USSR, recalling everything I knew about plane and glider design.

I recalled the words of Sergei Ilyushin, the creator of the legendary Il-2 Sturmovik ground-attack aircraft, a workhorse of the Red Army during the Great Patriotic War. According to Ilyushin, the successful design lay in understanding the needs of the pilot, the human at the heart of the machine. “A good aircraft,” Ilyushin wrote, “is an extension of the pilot’s will, a tool that amplifies their courage and skill.”

From there, I recalled how Academic Lavrentiyev introduced me to Oleg Antonov, who showed me his glider designs one autumn evening.

“Aren’t they beautiful?” Antonov asked me as I admired his drawings. “If it wasn’t for that damn gliding instructor defecting to the West in thirty eight, I’d still have my Glider Factory!”

“They are,” I asserted, burning the man’s glider designs that never came to be into my mind. “Maybe in the future, when I become an Administrator, I can help build these lovely birds for you!”

“Forget about it, kid,” Antonov laughed. “You’re too damn bright for your own good. They’ll probably put you into atomics, make you work in one of the closed cities till you drop dead.”

I didn’t believe it back then as my mind was filled with stardust dreams, but Oleg Antonov’s words had become a prophecy, one that eventually shaped my future.

As my mind distantly lamented over the tragedy of my past life in which everything I had worked for turned to naught, my hands had done their job for me. I finished sketching out the design of the hang-glider, incorporating elements of Antonov’s and Ilyushin’s designs.

As Georgi walked into his workshop and woke up the Violets, I showed him the blueprint and described what I wanted.

“Hrm,” he said. “This will delay our Agromancy wand production, but I can certainly make it in a day or two.”

“Make it happen,” I nodded.

“This isn’t for Destiny to use, right? Your mom will have a fit if she sees her flying on a wooden glider,” dad said.

“No,” I replied. “Destiny and Great-Aunt Delta are staying in Skyisle to make wands. This is for Kliss. She’s going to fly it down the valley past the glacier to then walk to Agamemnon.”

“That doesn’t seem very safe,” Georgi pointed out.

“It’s part of her training,” I shrugged. “Archmage apprentice business and whatnot. Kliss is half-dragon so even if she falls from the sky she’ll be fine.”

“Very well,” dad nodded.

----------------------------------------

“How goes it, have you claimed all of Skyisle yet?” I asked Kliss when I met her later in the garden along with my sister.

Kliss grinned, her ruby-violet hair sparkling. “Getting there! I got around sixty of Leemy’s saplings, the big tree in the centre of town, many hexagrams in the Fox and Fiddle Pub, your parents’ cottage and workshop and every ward and hex-lantern I could find on my way. Plus I got a couple of Elks. It was fun chasing them down.”

I nodded. I’ve been watching her through the eyes of my Infoscopes, learning all sorts of interesting things.

“Blood elks?” Delta asked.

“Yep. There were a few stragglers at the edge of town. It took me a while to convince them that I was their new Queen,” Kliss said with a wide grin.

“Blood Elk kobolds, eh?” Delta rubbed her chin. “Sounds like someone’s having fun. Now I’m extra-jelly! Uh, Slava, what exactly prevents a dragon from claiming everything on the planet to gain limitless power? Why hasn’t Aradria claimed all of Novazem? Why didn’t she claim all humans?”

I turned to Kliss, waiting for her to answer.

“I… Aradria, didn’t want to claim all of Novazem,” Kliss answered. “Far too many non-magical or barely-magical things are untasty and bleh. Only things that glow super bright in the Astral are nice to collect and sleep on. Having too many kobolds is also draining, somehow… I think? It… makes me sleepy? I don’t think that those Blood Elks are proper kobolds exactly, they’re more like prey that I tagged, that I could potentially convert into kobolds over a long ass time… If they stay close to my hoard, which they probably won’t since my control over them is basically nothing.”

“Womp womp,” Delta frowned. “No Blood Elk kobolds then?”

“I could make it happen, I think. It’s just… long? I think. Yeah, that’s it! Time consuming effort. It requires a big sleep. A few hundred winters, maybe?”

“Centuries?” Delta asked.

“Numerous kobold generations,” Kliss nodded. “And they have to stay confined within my domain, near my hoard. Spreading my domain out past the cavern system made me feel... vulnerable? Unsafe? Like… anyone could just run off with my hoard? The hoard needs to stay together, in one place, right under me, otherwise its songs get weaker!”

“Songs?” Delta asked.

“The hoard sings,” Kliss nodded. “Like a chorus of a thousand voices. Every piece of gold, every kobold, every artifact beneath me. They all hum distinctive melodies, but they also sing together as one when I need them to… When I need to have a storm to shield me, I make them sing of rain and wind and lightning!” Her eyes momentarily lit up from within. “My hoard is very small and discordant now, colors and tunes all over, not exactly right.”

Delta looked at me quizzically, expecting further explanation.

“I think that the limitation of a dragon hoard isn’t simply time or the dragon’s personal perception of her dominion, it’s basic thermodynamics.” I rubbed my chin thoughtfully.

“Thermo-what-now?” Kliss squinted at me.

“Thermodynamics is a branch of physics that deals with heat, work, temperature, and their relation to energy, radiation, and physical properties of matter,” I said. “It’s a set of universal laws that governs the flow of energy in any system, from the smallest atom to the largest star. The way a dragon’s hoard functions, its ability to channel energy, its reliance on positively charged magic... it’s also likely governed by these laws.”

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

“Uhhh,” Kliss drawled.

“Imagine a campfire,” I began, gesturing with my hands as if conjuring flames from thin air. “You need kindling to start a fire, right? Wood, dead leaves, something that burns easily. That’s the initial source of energy.”

I pointed at the small ruby gemstones adorning Kliss’s hair. “Your hair gems are the kindling, the sparks. They’re constantly absorbing energy from the surrounding environment, from the Astral Ocean, and converting it into positively charged mana. The basis of your dragon magic.”

Kliss nodded.

“Now,” I continued, “if you want a bigger fire, more power, you need more fuel. More logs, more branches, something to sustain the flames. In the case of a dragon’s hoard, gold and artifacts act as that fuel.”

“The bigger the hoard, the bigger the fire, the more kobolds I can manage safely,” Kliss nodded.

“Indeed,” I said. “The problem is, energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transferred or transformed. That’s the first law of thermodynamics. When a dragon claims an object, a kobold, or even an entire forest, she’s not creating energy. She’s drawing it from elsewhere.”

“From the Astral?” Kliss asked.

“Isn’t Astral negatively charged or whatever?” Delta inquired.

“From the physical environment,” I said, gesturing to the vast expanse of blue sky above us. “From the fundamental fabric of reality. From the very forces that hold the universe together. From the furnace of stars.”

“Meaning what?” Delta pressed me.

“The Astral Ocean is mostly darkness, emptiness, vastness… infinity of all that was,” I said. “A dragon’s hoard is a focused point, a pinprick that bends the universe elsewhere in a completely different direction. Larger systems in Thermodynamics tend to have more entropy, more chaos, more disorder. They’re less efficient, harder to control, more prone to… catastrophic failures.”

“Catastrophic failures? Hang on… are dragons walking Chernobyl reactors?” Delta demanded. “Can dragons have a meltdown?”

“Dragons are indeed exceptionally dangerous,” I nodded. “They can eliminate life with incredible ease. A living dragon might not have a meltdown, but a dead one... might create a permanently contaminated area if not dealt with quickly.”

“I think that I see where this is going,” Delta commented. “Do try to remember it, miss dragon–if you pull too much magic from your stash, does it catch fire?”

“Yeah,” Kliss admitted after a few seconds of contemplative silence. “I think that if I pull too hard too much at once… then my gold will ignite and turn to white, empty, untasty sand.”

“Slava, why are you making Kliss claim things left and right?” Delta demanded.

“To study the nature of positively-charged magic and to develop the hoard-kobold-claim magical theory,” I said. “To understand how to manage dragon power better, in the same way humanity from Earth figured out how to manage electricity. Dragons are power plants, yes, but they’re self-managed, self-governing, innate power plants, which isn’t exactly optimal.”

Delta blinked at me.

"Kobolds act as fuses, sacrificial breakers. They likely protect the dragon’s hoard by burning out before the gold or artifacts do. Their souls are much less dense than solid gold or ancient crystalline magic tools, after all,” I pointed out.

“Oi! That doesn’t make me feel better,” Delta said. “Am I going to spontaneously combust?”

She gave me a look of ‘why the heck did you make Kliss claim my soul’?

“Well,” I said. “You aren’t a full kobold, just a fraction of one. Full kobolds take generations to create and their bodies most likely change from within and become densely covered in crystalline growths. Right?” I eyed Kliss.

“Yeah, I think that the tether between me and my recently-made kobolds will simply burn out, snap. The old, crystal-covered kobolds would indeed simply ignite and detonate turning to ashes,” Kliss nodded. “I don’t have any old kobolds tied to me though, so that’s not an issue.”

“Leemy is basically crystalline growths surrounded by wooden bark,” Delta said. “I get why my dryad was afraid of being your kobold, terrified of catching fire.”

“Leemy’s not going to catch fire,” I assured my sister. “The current claim of her by Kliss is far too small, at best the trees would lose a couple of crystals out of millions.”

“But in the future?”

“In the future… the Rewind hexagram will act as a supermassive breaker–one that will make sure that nothing and nobody permanently burns out,” I said. “Yes, Kliss could theoretically overdraw magic from the town, vaporize all of Skyisle, turn her kobolds and hoard into ashes, but in a flash everything, everyone here will be brought back to life, any damage will simply get… rewound.”

“What the… are you serious? Won’t that kill everyone? Won’t they all feel horrible pain?” Delta demanded, her silver-blue eyes wide at the implication of my words.

“Yes,” I said. “But such an event is in the distant future and would only be a last resort sort of action. It’s sacrifice without permanent sacrifice, loss without loss. Nobody would even remember dying because the pain would be rewound. Yes, I get it, it’s imperfect… but that’s life, that’s the best I can come up with, for now–a hoard that doesn’t completely burn away when its dragon is cornered.”

“Yay me,” Kliss commented dryly. “So… what happens when I make dragonfire?”

“Didn’t we learn this stuff already?” Delta asked, getting fidgety.

“Nah,” Kliss eyed me. “Slava got more stuff figured out, I can feel it.”

“You claim something,” I said. “Like that obelisk. You claimed the gold in it with your fists. You pulled positively-charged magic from your hoard, power that came not from the Astral Ocean… but from a place… opposite of it.”

“Uh? What's the opposite of the Astral Ocean?” Kliss asked.

“Syntropic Boundary,” I said.

The girls stared at me.

“Did you just come up with that?” Delta asked.

“I did,” I nodded. “It’s the scientific term I just assigned to what I’ve been observing in the magical currents,” I clarified. “The Astral Ocean is infinite, vast, ever-present and composed of negatively charged magic. It pulls at reality, makes magical imprints of everything, and acts as a medium through which spells are cast. Negatively-charged magic is an entropic, chaotic system. The opposite of the Astral Ocean must therefore be Syntropic, it must increase order.”

“Dragonfire is… increasing order?” Kliss commented.

“Positively-charged magic isn’t simply creating something,” I continued. “It’s also a force that rearranges, transforms existing matter. The very concept of ‘rearranging matter on an atomic level’ was something my people on Earth achieved a century ago with a device called a particle accelerator. Particle accelerators propelled charged particles, such as protons or electrons, to nearly the speed of light, colliding them together to create entirely new particles! It took us decades of hard work to understand the power locked within atoms, to unravel the secrets of the universe itself. Using that knowledge we eventually built atomic bombs, weapons that could reduce entire cities to ashes in the blink of an eye.”

“Like… dragonfire?”

“Worse in some ways, better in others,” I shrugged. “A thermonuclear explosion could vaporize a thousand Skyisles in a blink of an eye. A dragon’s fire is a much more focused ray that rewrites reality, pulling it much closer towards Syntropic Boundary. What dragonfire does is assign repeating order, the kind that’s forced into existence by crystalline microstructures that pull the surrounding universe closer and closer to Syntropy. A dragon claims a domain or an object and gradually or catastrophically reassigns it towards greater order. While this happens, the surrounding area experiences greater entropy, more decay to balance things out."

My companions simply stared at me.

“When you claimed that obelisk in the catacombs, you rearranged its crystalline structure, you devoured its magic and turned it into something new, something that would no longer obey Giovashi,” I said to Kliss.

“How is the world not covered in dead forests then?” Delta asked. “If dragonglass perpetually propagates death and decay then…”

“Novazem is about the size of Earth,” I shrugged. “I suspect that once dragonglass generates enough Death radiance, the crystalline particles simply melt right through the mundane terrain and eventually end up in the center of the planet, where gravity and pressure gradually compresses it into a singularity.”

“A singularity?” Kliss blinked.

“A very slowly growing Syntropic-matter black hole.” I nodded. “It is quite possible that Novazem is doomed, that eventually enough dragonglass will build up inside the core of the planet to destabilize it from within, which will potentially create catastrophic magical surge-storms on the surface decaying away reality. Or not. I honestly don’t know. This is pure speculation at this point on my part. It’s not like I can send an Infoscope into the center of the world or something… not yet, anyway.”