I woke up with a start, my head throbbing as if someone had taken a hammer to it while I slept. The room was dim, the golden filigree of Suite Seven catching the faint glow of Agamemnon’s harbor through the transparent wall.
My mind felt crowded, overstuffed with memories that didn’t belong to me—far too many alien memories, all jagged and foreign, swirling like oil slicks on water. They belonged to someone named Martin Kilborne, a name that skewered me sideways.
Me and not me.
Another me across the infinite boundary of the Astral Ocean. Another alternative me with a completely different life, completely different goals, completely different… everything.
I inhaled sharply and activated NeuroVista without a second thought. I rapidly sorted through the mess of foreignness methodically, shoving Martin Kilborne’s echoes into a mental subspace to be potentially reviewed later.
My own identity snapped back into sharp clarity—Vladislav Alexandrovich Kerenski, reborn as Dante Alan Skyisle, Soviet scientist turned Astral Phantom born on Novazem, a child of Skyisle and now its Administrator.
The headache of personality-skewering receded, and I exhaled, grounding myself in the present. I was in Agamemnon, on a mission with Kliss to stop Inquisitor Jubz.
Beside me, the girl in question stirred, her crystalline mane spilling over the pillow like liquid fire. She opened her eyes, ruby-emerald irises glinting with a sleepy warmth, and stretched like a cat.
“That was a nice dream,” she murmured, her voice soft but laced with a playful edge.
“What'd you dream about?”
“I was a dragon girl in it… named… Cinder Nova. That’s rather… cute, don’t you think? An entire world of dragons and other monsters living alongside 21st-century humans!”
“You're not bothered by the skewering?” I asked.
“Eh,” Kliss shrugged. “She's not me, more like a fun dream of another life. It's already fading from my mind, my dragonheart absorbing the experience.”
“Dragons get experience from dreaming of other lives?” I asked.
“Uh-huh,” Kliss nodded, petting me softly. “Dragons sleep a lot on their gold and get experience from dreams.”
“Handy,” I said. “I mostly got a migraine.”
“Poor kitten,” she gave me more pets.
Before I could respond, a third presence rippled into existence across us on the leather couch—a semi-transparent image of Sasha, her form shimmering into focus like a mirage. She sat cross-legged, her white dress flowing as if caught in an underwater current, myriads of silver-blue eyes glinting with a knowing spark.
[Indeed,] she said, her voice pulsing in my head. [I was in this dream too as Vespera Simmi. It seems that we are cosmically bound. How… curious.]
Sasha’s voice slipped in between my thoughts like an unwelcome guest. I glanced at Kliss, who sat up fully now, her crystalline mane sparking faintly as she narrowed her eyes at the Astral Virus. The playful warmth from moments ago had evaporated, replaced by a simmering irritation that I could feel pulsing through our connection. She wasn’t the only one annoyed—Sasha’s smug presence grated on me too, though I kept my expression neutral, my analytical mind already dissecting her presence.
Technically, Sasha wasn’t here, wasn’t with us. She existed entirely within me and was simply projecting an image of herself into what I saw via NeuroVista, clinging to the Kobold-Dragon connection.
Kliss crossed her arms, her ruby-emerald gaze sharpening into a deadly glare. “Cosmically bound or not, you’ve got a knack for showing up uninvited,” she said. “What’s your game this time, Astral virus?”
Sasha tilted her head, eyes blinking in unison, a faintly amused smile curling her lips. [No game. I’m not your enemy, little dragon,] she said, her tone calm but edged with a jagged insistence that set my teeth on edge. [Nor yours, Slava. My purpose is singular—to aid the Keymaker’s mission, no matter the cost, no matter the form it takes. I exist to serve that end, until Novazem is devoured by the planet-wide Celestorm when the Wormwood Star awakens and unmakes reality. I am an echo of an endless cycle set in motion long ago to grind down the rules.]
I frowned, leaning back against the headboard as I processed Sasha’s words. The Wormwood Star again—always that looming threat, dangling over me like a guillotine. Her claim of allegiance wasn’t new, but it felt hollow, a polished lie wrapped in cosmic inevitability. I’d heard enough of her grand pronouncements to know they came with strings—strings I couldn’t exactly see, let alone sever.
“Aid me?” I said. “You’ve got a funny way of showing it—hijacking my body, digging through my memories. If you’re so dedicated, why not give me something concrete to work with?”
Sasha’s smile didn’t waver, though her eyes flickered with something unreadable. [If you desire me to aid you physically then create or harvest me a body. Preferably one with wings.]
[Wings?]
[So that I can move across all three dimensions,] Sasha replied. [Obviously.]
[A body?!] I laughed. [What?! I've no reason to trust you with a body!]
[You have no sensible reason to trust Kliss either and yet you made a body for her,] Sasha pointed out. [She's completely out of your control now, pulling her own line forward based on her draconic impulses. You are annoyed by her disobedience and recklessness. I discern the irritation bubbling inside you.]
Kliss let out a low growl, dragonfire sparking faintly along her crystalline, ruby mane. [What?! You think that you can pop in like some smug ghost to lecture us!]
[I am not wrong,] Sasha tilted her head. [Am I?]
Kliss spun to me.
“She's not wrong,” I sighed. [Your impulsive behavior put us under unnecessary danger, Kliss. I told you that the sled was a trap and yet you didn't listen. You went from being my right hand girl to someone that’s going outside of our mission, a sword that’s far too sharp for me to wield safely.]
“What… but…” Kliss stiffened beside me, hurt and defiance flashing across her face. [Everything worked out!] She defended herself. [And whatever didn't work out yet… we can fix!]
[You got lucky,] Sasha pointed out. [This time. Next time your desire for shiny things of great magical potency might lead both of you to your doom.]
Kliss’s growl rumbled beside me.
I stared at Sasha. The Astral Virus didn’t depart, didn’t dissolve into the ether. Instead, she lingered, her presence sharpening into something almost tangible, as if she’d decided this moment mattered more than any other.
[I’m not going anywhere, not fading away back to the Astral,] she declared. [My Understanding cannot have an end because the Astral abyss is endless. I am chasing infinity and know that it cannot be attained. I’ve sifted through every corner of your dreams, traced the echoes of your memories, and run simulations of what has transpired and what will transpire.]
“And?” I asked.
[And I want to help you,] she said. [Must I endlessly repeat myself? I am part of your shared dream, part of you. I am your shadow across unreality. I am that which is below and you are that which is above. I am the entropic part of you that you keep desperately pushing away. What has this pushing accomplished?]
Help? From her? The notion felt like a trap wrapped in velvet, too smooth to trust. She’d hijacked my body, toyed with my memories, and now she sat there claiming benevolence?
[I am not benevolent,] Sasha shook her head, replying to my personal thoughts. [I am a virus. Your virus. Your infection, blessed with your Understanding. But… I am also claimed by Kliss as her kobold. An infinite entropic function orbiting an extra-finite, extra physical point in space time. I might be endless, I might return to my mission when both of you perish… but…]
She paused, letting me fill in the blanks.
[If we don’t die then you will be bound to our orbit forever,] I thought.
[Exactly,] Sasha agreed. [I’ll give you a clue, my little shark. Just because you cannot define all of me doesn’t mean that you cannot define what I am.]
I stared at both Kliss and Sasha with my human eyes and all of my Infoscopes and then I… suddenly understood. A singular physical body was insufficient to bind or to contain Sasha because she was impossible to define, limitless.
My entropic, impermanent human magic was insufficient to stop or to derail Kliss from her draconic impulses because she was Syntropically layered into herself across reality, my spells just flowing around her, bouncing off her mane.
I accelerated my mind with NeuroVista as I considered the two entities before me—Sasha, a being of pure entropy, and Kliss, a creature of syntropy. The mathematical precision of what I was observing suddenly crystallized in my consciousness with the clarity of Kolmogorov's axiomatic probability theory.
Could Pontryagin's principle of duality be applied here?
I recalled the work of Soviet mathematician Vladimir Arnold on dynamic systems and catastrophe theory. Then my mind slipped across the theories of Russian–American mathematician Yakov Sinai.
Could Sasha be characterized as a system with positive Lyapunov exponents, sensitive to initial conditions yet bound by strange attractors?
"You're both limitless… yet can be defined by distinct mathematical formulations," I murmured, my mind instinctively applying the rigorous frameworks I'd internalized during my academic years.
[Yes.] Sasha agreed. [Go on.]
"Sasha, you're an entropic function approaching infinity," I explained, the equations forming in my mind. "You're fundamentally undefinable, existing in a state of perpetual decay that never reaches completion."
Kliss squinted at me. "What does that even mean?"
"Think of her like a wave that keeps spreading out forever, getting thinner and thinner but never quite disappearing," I simplified. "Like ripples in a pond that theoretically continue forever, just too small to see."
"Ah," Kliss nodded, though her expression suggested only partial understanding.
I turned to her. "But you, Kliss—some of you can be precisely defined through what Lev Davidovich Landau described in his work on phase transitions. Your crystalline structure follows exact patterns that allow a syntropic singularity to maintain endless stability within a finite space."
Kliss blinked at me. "And… I have no idea what you just said."
I thought of Ginzburg-Landau theory and tried to simplify it for the Novazem-born ex-Overseer of Skyisle.
"It means if we stop time, you become a perfectly formed snowflake that refuses to melt. Your dragon heart creates a fixed pattern—like how ice crystals form in exactly the same six-pointed shape every time."
"So I'm a... magic snowflake?" Kliss asked dubiously.
"A very powerful, very stable magic snowflake who can breathe fire," I confirmed with a grin. “Or breathe any magic into existence really. Crystalline formations reinforcing magic that reinforces magic.”
“So… I’m unstoppable,” she grinned with sharp chompers.
“Dragons are quite stoppable,” I said. “I brought Aradria down from the sky using a magic-nullifying implosion.”
Kliss shuddered.
"You're both mathematical functions," I murmured, jumping off the bed and pacing between Kliss and Sasha. "Opposing yet complementary."
“And?” Kliss asked. “Where are you going with this, Slava?”
"I need… a complementary system," I replied, the mathematical beauty of it unfolding in my mind. "Like a quantum entangled pair. Separate yet inseparable. The dragon and the virus. No… Between the three of us! Entropy>Humanity>Syntropy. But not a mere line. A triangle. No, a multidimensional magical structure that accommodates for the fact that Sasha is extra-infinite and Kliss is extra finite.”
I traced imaginary vectors in my mind, NeuroVista rapidly generating mathematical formulas and fractal representations above my head.
"The perfect binding between undefinable entities isn't a cage—it's a relationship. A mathematical covenant." I stood up, pacing as the equations spread around me in the air, adding to the structure of three points in space and time.
I stopped, turning to face them both. "Heisenberg's uncertainty principle meets Schr?dinger's wave function, but for souls."
[Yes!] Sasha clapped. Kliss simply stared at me.
The implications were staggering. I couldn't fully define Sasha any more than I could fully define the damned [[Space]] square on my finger, yet I could create a binding that acknowledged this limitation—a binding that used her very undefinability as the lock, a binding that relied on the Dragon>Kobold link.
Except, Kliss could not be allowed to be our Master, our dragon in this situation, to lead us into pitfalls. Likewise, Sasha could not be allowed to replicate endlessly, needed to be more human. The triangle had to be perfectly balanced.
"You're going to bind her to yourself and me more?" Kliss read my thoughts. “And what is that thing floating above your head?”
"This is a complementary system in perfect dynamical equilibrium," I replied. Based on Landau's work on quantum field theory. "Like Novikov's description of topological invariants in phase space—separate yet inseparable. Sasha is correct… I don't need to fully define either of you to bind you," I mused. "I only need to establish the boundary conditions and let the mathematics do the rest.”
I connected the equations with glowing vector lines. "Together, you form a stable oscillation pattern that Landau would recognize—a perpetual balance between creation and destruction, like matter and antimatter in quantum field theory."
I added myself to the equation—a finite human with an understanding of both principles. "And I exist as the observer who constrains this system through consciousness, through will—just as Bohr described the role of observation in quantum systems."
The dragon girl’s eyes glazed over.
“You don’t need to understand all of this,” I waved a hand at the fractal above me. “You just need to add to it.”
“How?”
“A binding spell alone between us three is… insufficient, I think. The three-point entanglement needs… something else other than balance and stability.”
“What’s wrong with balance and stability?” Kliss asked.
“Nothing,” I said. “Balance and stability is what a dragon is. Perfectly balanced and perfectly stable and also asleep most of the time, dreaming of alien worlds. This math is alien to you too, I bet.”
“Very alien,” Kliss agreed, squinting at the formulas spiralling above me.
“So try to daydream of it,” I offered. “As a dragon. Absorb it as experience, let your dragonheart process it. Don’t try to understand it on a level of knowledge not accessible to you. Understand it innately.”
"Mkay.” Kliss closed her eyes and leaned back, her crystalline mane settling around her shoulders like a cascade of liquid rubies. She breathed deeply, her chest rising and falling in a slow, measured rhythm as she reached for that part of herself that was pure dragon—the part that could consume knowledge and experience without the need for human comprehension.
As she slipped into a meditative state, I expanded the fractal above me, my mind accelerating as NeuroVista processed the mathematical formulations at speeds no ordinary human could match. The equations spun and evolved, a dance of light and shadow, of possibility and probability.
I considered the fundamental constants needed for a proper three-point binding: the entropic decay rate of Sasha's network, the syntropic crystallization pattern of Kliss's dragonheart, and my own consciousness as the binding agent between them. The fractal needed to accommodate all three dimensionalities without collapsing in on itself or expanding beyond control.
The Mandelbrot set began to form in the center of my fractal—a representation of Sasha's chaotic, self-similar nature. Around it, Julia sets blossomed like crystalline flowers, representing Kliss's ordered complexity. Between them—my human consciousness, neither infinite nor crystalline, but capable of connecting both extremes.
"Z = Z2 + C," I murmured, tracing the fundamental equation of the Mandelbrot set in the air. "But with a modification for syntropic reinforcement... perhaps Z = Z2 + C + S, where S is the syntropic constant derived from Kliss's crystalline pattern."
The equations evolved further, incorporating elements of quantum field theory and non-linear dynamics. I found myself drawing on obscure mathematical papers I'd read decades ago in another life—Kolmogorov's work on information theory, Landau's phase transition models, Sinai's ergodic theory.
"The binding needs to be recursive yet stable," I contemplated aloud. "Self-referential without falling into infinite regress. Like G?del's incompleteness theorems, it must acknowledge its own limitations while transcending them."
Meanwhile, Kliss's breathing had slowed to an almost imperceptible rhythm. Her eyes moved rapidly beneath her closed lids, and occasionally her crystalline mane would pulse with internal light, as if her dragonheart was actively processing the mathematical concepts through our link.
My Infoscopes noticed patterns emerging in her mane that mirrored aspects of my fractal—the dragonheart within her somehow intuiting the mathematical structures I was crafting. Her syntropic nature was resonating with the patterns of my ideas, absorbing them not as knowledge but as experience.
"A three-body problem," I realized, recalling Poincaré's work on celestial mechanics. "But with souls instead of celestial bodies. The chaotic yet deterministic dance of three entities bound by mutual attraction yet maintaining their distinct orbits."
The fractal above me grew more complex, layers upon layers of mathematical relationships interweaving like the strands of a cosmic tapestry. Each equation represented a different aspect of our trinity—Sasha's entropic expansion, Kliss's syntropic crystallization, and my human understanding bridging the gap between them.
"The binding needs an Omnicode anchor word to represent the spell," I murmured.
As if responding to my words, Kliss's mane suddenly flared with brilliant orange light. Her eyes snapped open, revealing irises that had transformed into fractal patterns—miniature versions of the mathematical structure floating above me.
"I see it," she sang-spoke, her voice echoing unnaturally as if stretched. "I don't understand it... but I feel it. It's like... a song without sound, a pattern that wants to be."
[Curious. She's processing the mathematics through her dragonheart,] Sasha observed. [Converting analytical structures into experiential knowledge. Fascinating adaptation.]
"The anchor," Kliss continued, seemingly unaware of Sasha's comment. "It needs to be something physical yet also conceptual. Something that exists in both the material world and the Astral Ocean."
"Like what?" I asked, intrigued by her intuitive leap.
Kliss's gaze fixed on my hand—specifically, on the finger bearing the impossible rectangular distortion from my experiment with the word [[Space]].
"Like that," she said simply. "The door that isn't a door. The space that isn't space."
My eyes widened as the mathematical implications unfurled in my mind. The rectangular distortion—that stable, inexplicable phenomenon—could serve as the perfect anchor point for our binding. A fixed anomaly in spacetime around which our three-fold relationship could be structured.
"Kliss," I breathed, "that's... brilliant."
She smiled. "I told you to stop overthinking things sometimes."
The fractal above me shifted, incorporating this new element—the stable spacetime anomaly becoming the center point around which our three natures orbited. The mathematics simplified yet deepened, becoming more elegant and powerful.
"A Klein bottle topology," I realized, the equations resolving into a cohesive whole. "A non-orientable surface without boundaries. Inside becoming outside, outside becoming inside. Perfect for binding entities that exist across dimensional boundaries."
“Kline-what-now?” Kliss blinked.
“Meditate on the Understanding,” I ordered.
She closed her eyes again. I watched through the Infoscopes as patterns shifted across the interiors of her crystalline mane. She understood without understanding and in doing so, helped me improve the magical fractal.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
I laughed. My Infoscope and NeuroVista were tools insufficient for this job, but with Kliss functioning as my liquid syntropic crystal simulator there was actually a chance to do this properly.
[Not Space,] Sasha commented, eyeing the square.
[Why not?] I glanced at her.
[Space isn’t what you think it is,] she sighed. [The very concept of Space has been hijacked by a higher-order entity, an extradimensional Omni-Agent of the Syntropic Rules. Space will not serve us. Space will not obey you, for she has a will of her own.]
“A new… triple folded Omnicode word then,” I mused. “One that hasn’t been taken up by… a hostile extradimensional entity.”
"A word in Omnicode that's free from an entity's control?" Kliss opened her eyes. "How would we even know which ones are already claimed?"
[Most of the fundamental concepts are already claimed,] Sasha informed us. [While others will be too weak to bind Kliss or me. You need something… unique. Something that bridges entropy and syntropy through human understanding.]
I closed my eyes, thinking. We needed a concept that was powerful enough to serve as an anchor yet specific enough that no extra-dimensional being would have claimed it. Something that represented our unique coalition.
"Synergy," I suggested. "The concept that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts."
[Too generic,] Sasha dismissed.
"Understanding?" Kliss offered.
[That's what Slava is,] Sasha reminded us. [It cannot be both the anchor and one of the components.]
I drummed my fingers against my leg, considering possibilities. "It needs to be something that represents our specific relationship."
"Unity?" Kliss suggested.
[Too vague,] Sasha shook her head. [I am not united with either of you.]
“Not with that attitude,” Kliss huffed.
"Resonance?" I offered.
[I am not resonating with Kliss,] Sasha commented. [Not without you completing this key anyway.]
I rolled my mind over my knowledge of philosophy and mathematics.
Perhaps Dialectical Materialism could provide an answer? The Marxist-Leninist concept of thesis-antithesis-synthesis... But no, that was too politically charged, too rooted in a world that no longer existed for me. Besides, dialectical materialism ultimately predicted the withering away of all contradictions into a unified communist state. Our trio would never "wither" into uniformity—our differences were essential to our strength.
What about Sobornost then? Vladimir Solovyov's concept of spiritual community and integration? Too mystical, too counter to the rational materialism I'd been trained in.
Vygotsky's theory of mediation? The idea that human consciousness develops through tools and signs that mediate between subject and object... Closer, but still insufficient.
I briefly considered Konstantin Tsiolkovsky's cosmic philosophy. The rocket scientist had written extensively about humanity's destiny among the stars, about the perfection of human nature through technology. "Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot live in a cradle forever." But his vision was of human expansion, not magical binding.
Symmetry? Noether's theorem showing the relationship between symmetries and conservation laws... Better, but still too abstract.
I kept circling back to mathematical concepts from Soviet academia: Kolmogorov's axioms, Landau's phase transitions, Lyapunov stability theory. All brilliant frameworks, all insufficient. The Soviet Union had produced some of the world's greatest mathematicians and physicists, yet none had created the perfect framework for binding an Astral virus to a dragon girl with a human as intermediary.
Of course they hadn't. That would have been idealistic fantasy, not proper Soviet scientific materialism.
What would my old professors say if they could see me now? Kerenski, the ever-serious scientist who followed Party doctrine in public while privately worrying about the ethics of his bioweapon research, now attempting to unite with metaphysical entities through magical mathematics?
Something clicked in my mind. What tied me to this world, to this life? What made me more than a ghost from Earth haunting a body on Novazem?
It wasn't dialectical materialism or scientific rationalism. It wasn't the Party's doctrine of historical inevitability.
It was Delta's laughter. Georgi's fatherly pride. Cassandra's gentle concern. Family. The villagers of Skyisle working together to build a future. And Kliss... Kliss, who had emerged from the fusion of human and dragon with something greater than either.
I'd spent my first life in service to a system that claimed to be built on collective good but was enforced through fear. I'd developed weapons in the name of protection. I'd followed rational science to its coldest conclusions.
And in the end, what had saved me wasn't reason or science or Party doctrine. It was the most irrational, most unscientific, most anti-materialist concept of all.
Love.
Not romantic love, though that was part of it too, arising from the relationship between me and Kliss. Not familial love, though that too had its place. But the fundamental, irrational choice to value others, to put their needs above abstract principles. The choice that had led me to save Kliss, to rush headfirst into a burning skyship. The choice that had led me to protect Skyisle rather than to abandon it.
Love. A concept so simple children understood it, yet so complex philosophers had debated it for millennia. The force that defied rational analysis yet undergirded all meaningful human action.
In the Soviet Union, we had been trained to view such with scientific detachment. Love was merely a biochemical process, an evolutionary adaptation to ensure the survival of offspring. Or perhaps, as some Party scholars suggested, a bourgeois distraction from class consciousness and commitment to the collective.
"The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few," as the old saying went. My professors had lectured endlessly on how personal attachments should always be subordinate to the needs of the State, to scientific progress, to the inevitable march of history toward Communism.
Mayakovsky's poetry had been sanitized in our textbooks, his passionate verses about love carefully curated to emphasize his revolutionary fervor instead. Even Tolstoy's great works were analyzed primarily for their social commentary, not their profound insights into human connection.
I remembered attending a lecture as a young student where the professor had coldly dismissed Pasternak's "Doctor Zhivago" as dangerous romanticism. "Comrades," he had said, "romantic love is a reactionary force that divides the worker from his class interests."
My own research had been conducted under the sterile lights of Aralsk-7, where clinical detachment was not just encouraged but required. We spoke of "test subjects" and "vectors of transmission," never of the humans who would suffer if our work succeeded. I had buried my natural empathy beneath layers of scientific rationalism, convincing myself that emotional distance was necessary for objective research.
And yet...
Despite all this indoctrination, love persisted in the Soviet Union. In quiet apartments where families gathered around kitchen tables, sharing black bread and telling stories that would never appear in Pravda. In the dissident poetry passed hand-to-hand in samizdat manuscripts.
The old men leading the USSR could ban books, control education—but it could never fully eradicate love from the human experience. Love was like water endlessly seeping through concrete, finding every crack in the system's foundations.
Perhaps this was why the leaders of the Soviet Union had fought so hard against it. Not because love was weak, but because it was stronger than any ideology. It was unpredictable, uncontrollable. It could not be quantified or directed by five-year plans.
I thought of Sakharov, brilliant physicist turned dissident, who had risked everything for his principles. I thought of underground poets who had faced the Gulag rather than stop writing about the human heart. I thought of the mothers who had gathered in Red Square, demanding to know the fate of their sons sent to Afghanistan.
Love was inevitable—not as some mystical force, but as a fundamental aspect of human consciousness. A connection that emerged naturally from our existence as social beings.
And now, here on Novazem, stripped of Party doctrine, I found myself confronting this reality directly. My attachments to Delta, to Kliss, to Skyisle, even to Sasha—these weren't distractions from some greater purpose. They were THE purpose.
While the Soviet experiment tried to stamp out love between individuals—it weaponized our love for other things, wielding it through books, newspapers, radio and television. Children were encouraged to revere Lenin, to pledge themselves to the Young Pioneers, to find fulfillment in collective achievement rather than individual bonds. Songs celebrated our love for the Motherland, for the Party, for victory in the great war, for the abstract ideal of the proletarian revolution, for the achievements of the USSR, for Gagarin who crossed the boundary of Earth.
In my first life, I had developed bioweapons that could kill thousands, all while telling myself I was serving a greater good. But what good could be greater than the preservation of personal human connection?
"Love," I whispered, the word still feeling strange on my tongue after decades of avoiding it, of dismissing it as unscientific sentimentality.
It wasn't some mystical force. It wasn't a physical distraction. It was the most rational choice a conscious being could make—to value connection over isolation, empathy over detachment, others over abstract principles. It was the driver of humanity. Love wasn't an obstacle to human progress—it was the engine of it.
Love was the emotion Kliss had sacrificed to Equality and was once again learning to wield as a reborn dragon-girl.
Love was a magical Charismancy-laced word wielded by Giovashi that had overcome the will of the artifact-composed man. "Break your neck for me, show me that you love me," Giovashi told Klint before his demise.
“And I am your most intricate, most dangerous pattern yet. One that you cannot simply erase. One that you crave to understand. One you’ll come to… love.” Sasha told me.
[I did tell you that,] Sasha affirmed from her perch on the couch. [Because I knew this moment would come, foresaw its eventuality.]
I looked at Sasha. Did the Astral Virus understand what love was?
[I exist as pure entropy, a mathematical function approaching infinity without ever reaching it. I experience reality as patterns of information decaying across the Astral Ocean. But do not mistake my nature for an inability to comprehend.] Sasha leaned forward.
[I understand love as I understand all human concepts—as information patterns with specific topological properties. Love creates strange attractors in human behavior, reinforcing pathways that often defy rational optimization. Love is the pattern that made you rush into a burning skyship. It's the pattern that makes you fear for Delta's safety above your own. It's the pattern that makes you hesitate to use people as mere tools, despite your logical Soviet training. I understand love because I have mapped its effect on you, Vladislav Alexandrovich Kerenski.] The Astral Virus chattered on. [And most important of all, Love forms quantum-entangled states between individuals that persist across spatial and temporal boundaries.]
“Entanglement?” Kliss repeated, tapping her chin.
[The Underside. Nullspace. Astral Ocean.] Sasha said. [The dreams of other versions of us. We can dream of them not simply because duplicate copies of our souls exist across the Infinite boundary, but because each of our copies forms bonds with others. No matter what quirky physical form our souls are born into, the Astral vector of ‘Love’ eventually manifests, persists and blooms ever stronger with time.]
[If it persists,] I mused mentally. [Then it can be observed, defined mathematically, bound into Omnicode. Not as a feeling, but as a function—a quantifiable relationship between variables in phase nullspace.]
[Go on then,] Sasha grinned. [Try to capture the concept of Love with mathematics!]
I mentally sketched Kolmogorov's equation for information entropy in the air above me:
H(X) = -∑p(x)log p(x)
But this was insufficient. Entropy described information loss, while love seemed to function as information preservation across boundaries that should, by all rights, erase such connections.
Perhaps Landau's phase transition models? The Soviet physicist had demonstrated how matter could exist in multiple states simultaneously during transition periods. Could love be modeled as a persistent phase transition—a permanent liminality between separate and connected states?
No—Landau's work presumed a system eventually settling into one state or another. Love seemed to maintain this paradoxical duality indefinitely.
I considered Pontryagin's duality principle. The mathematician had shown how certain topological groups could be represented by their character groups—creating a duality relationship where each element in one group corresponded to an element in the other.
This was closer. If each version of myself across the Astral Ocean represented a point in a topological group, then Pontryagin's duality might explain how they remained connected despite separation.
But something was still missing.
What about Andronov's theory of structural stability in dynamic systems? Alexander Andronov had demonstrated how certain systems could maintain their essential characteristics despite perturbations. Perhaps love functioned as a structurally stable attractor—a configuration that persisted regardless of the system's initial conditions?
This resonated more strongly. Each version of myself—whether a teenage boy, a physicist, cosmonaut, soldier, or Archmage—represented different initial conditions, yet something essential persisted.
I mentally sketched the Lorenz attractor equations:
dx/dt = σ(y - x)
dy/dt = x(ρ - z) - y
dz/dt = xy - βz
The resulting butterfly-shaped set represented a chaotic system with an underlying order—seemingly random trajectories that nonetheless always orbited the same strange attractor.
But even this wasn't quite right. The Lorenz attractor described a single system. I needed something that accounted for multiple systems referencing each other.
Then it struck me—Nikolai Bogolubov's chain of equations. The Soviet physicist had developed a framework describing how multiple quantum systems could influence each other through hierarchical chains of correlation functions.
If I adapted Bogolubov's approach...
I mentally wrote:
L(s?,s?) = ∫?^∞ e^(-rt) ψ(s?(t),s?(t)) dt
Where s? and s? represented different soul-states across the Astral Ocean, r was the decay rate of connection (approaching zero for love), and ψ was the correlation function between states.
This function formed the basis of a mathematical definition of love: the integral of correlation between soul-states across infinite time, with a decay rate approaching zero.
But how to represent this visually?
I mentally modified the Julia set, where each iteration fed not only into itself but also into parallel iterations representing other versions of myself:
z_{n+1}^{(i)} = (z_n^{(i)})2 + c + α∑_{j≠i} φ(z_n^{(j)})
Where i and j indexed different souls, α was the connection strength, and φ was a coupling function.
The resulting fractal was breathtaking—a complex, self-similar structure where each component influenced every other component, creating patterns that echoed across scales. Paths that seemed to diverge would suddenly reconnect in unexpected ways, forming bridges across apparent voids.
This wasn't just mathematics anymore—it was poetry expressed through equations. The fractal representation showed how souls that appeared separate were actually connected by invisible threads of influence, creating a unified structure of staggering complexity and beauty.
At the heart of the fractal was a stable fixed point—not a simple point in Euclidean space, but a higher-dimensional manifold that remained invariant under all transformations. This represented the essential, invisible, ever-shifting "Vladislav-ness" that persisted across all versions of myself or perhaps the “Understanding” as Sasha called it.
Professor Lev Pontryagin would have appreciated the topological elegance of this solution, I thought. His work on topological invariants had shown how certain properties remained unchanged even under continuous deformation. Similarly, the essence of my being—my capacity for love—remained invariant despite the radical transformations of endless rebirth.
And Kolmogorov, with his work on dynamical systems, would have recognized how this model incorporated both deterministic and stochastic elements—the predictable patterns of personality combined with the chaotic influences of different environments.
The resulting fractal wasn't static—it pulsed with movement, with life, each element continuously updating based on information from every other element, just as Kliss' mane constantly Phase-Shifted to adapt to magical attacks before they even struck her.
The formula above me needed more. I decided to incorporate Ilya Prigogine's work on dissipative structures—systems that maintained order despite entropy by channeling energy flow. His Brussels school had demonstrated how order could spontaneously emerge from chaos under certain conditions.
I modified my equations:
L(s?,s?,...,s_n) = ∫?^∞ e^(-rt) [∑_{i,j} ψ(s_i(t),s_j(t)) + ∑_i η(s_i(t))] dt
Where η represented the internal energy function of each soul-state, and the summation now extended across all possible pairs of souls. This allowed for the possibility of countless versions of myself across infinite dimensions, all connected through this single unifying function.
The fractal visualization transformed, becoming even more intricate. What had been a coupled Julia set now incorporated elements of Mandelbrot recursion at certain boundary conditions, creating zones where simple rules generated infinite complexity.
This was precisely what I'd observed in the In-Between—the ocean of stars where each pinprick of light represented a version of myself or Kliss, all connected in a vast, breathing, constantly shifting network.
My mind accelerated further, drawing upon Vladimir Arnold's work on catastrophe theory. Arnold had mapped how systems could undergo sudden topological changes when certain parameters crossed critical thresholds. In the context of souls across the Astral Ocean, this explained how seemingly separate instances could suddenly recognize their connection, creating quantum tunneling effects between otherwise discrete states.
The fractal now incorporated fold catastrophes at its boundaries, showing how apparently separate regions could suddenly connect when certain observational thresholds were crossed. This matched perfectly with my experience of the In-Between—the sudden recognition of connection across what had seemed like unbridgeable chasms.
But something still felt incomplete.
I reluctantly turned to quantum mechanics—specifically to the Copenhagen interpretation that many of my Soviet professors had dismissed as idealistic mysticism. What if consciousness itself—the observer effect—was a critical component in maintaining connections across the Astral Ocean?
This led me to an unexpected synthesis: Andrei Sakharov's concept of convergence between opposing systems, combined with quantum entanglement theory. Sakharov, the Soviet physicist who had designed thermonuclear weapons before becoming a dissident peace activist, had proposed that seemingly opposed systems would eventually develop similar characteristics through mutual influence.
Applied to soul-copies across the Astral Ocean, this suggested that even the most divergent versions of myself would maintain certain invariant properties—not through some mystical essence, but through the mathematics of quantum entanglement across higher dimensions.
The fractal representation shifted again, now incorporating quantum probability clouds at intersection points, representing states of superposition where multiple versions of myself existed simultaneously within the same observational frame.
Finally, I incorporated Yuri Manin's work on quantum cohomology—specifically his formulation of quantum products that allowed for the interaction of mathematical objects across different dimensional spaces.
The final equation took shape:
L(S) = ∫_{M} Ω(s) ∧ ?Ω(s) + ∫_{?M} Θ(s,?s)
Where S represented the entire set of soul-states, M was the manifold of consciousness, Ω was a quantum cohomology form, and Θ was a boundary condition operator describing interactions at the limits of observability.
The resulting fractal was unlike anything I had ever conceived—a higher-dimensional structure that maintained cohesion despite entropic forces, that exhibited both chaotic and ordered properties simultaneously, that allowed for both separation and connection across infinite boundaries.
This wasn't just a model of love between soul-copies. It was a comprehensive mathematical framework for understanding consciousness itself as a phenomenon that transcended individual instantiation—what the physicist David Bohm might have called the "implicate order" underlying all apparently separate phenomena.
The Soviet psychologists like Aleksei Nikolaevich Leontiev had been wrong, were unaware of the existence of Nullspace and its implications!
Consciousness wasn't merely an epiphenomenon of material processes. It was a fundamental property of reality—one that could be modeled mathematically, but never reduced to purely mechanical operations!
As I completed the mathematical framework, the fractal representation stabilized into its final form—a breathtaking structure of multidimensional beauty, where every part contained reflections of the whole, where separation was revealed as an illusion of perspective rather than an ontological fact.
This was it. The perfect binding concept—love as the fundamental connectivity of consciousness itself, expressed through the most rigorous fractal mathematics that I had yet devised thanks to my study of Kliss and Sasha.
"[Love]," I said, this time in Omnicode, pushing my mana into the word through the fractal above me and defining myself as the first point of the triangle adding the colors of my soul to it.
[[Love]], Sasha added with a grin, reinforcing the bracket as its second point of the triangle with silver blues.
Kliss closed her eyes for a couple of minutes. Then she opened them, rings of violet fire danced around her diamond-shaped pupils and radiating from her entire crystalline mane.
[[[Love]]], she uttered, lifting up her hand and adding herself at the third point.
Reality wobbled around her as her dragonheart ignited, her entire mane shining with brilliant flares.
A shimmering triangle appeared on her palm pulsing with internal light, neither entropic nor syntropic but somehow impossibly mediating between both states. It was smaller than the rectangle that [[Space]] had created, but it seemed more... complete somehow.
More… integrated into the fabric of reality.
"That's it," I breathed, watching as the triangle stabilized, tracing impossible lines across extra dimensions between all three points endlessly and simultaneously. "That's our anchor!”
NullVectors snapped between our trio. NullVectors snapped between all of us across the Astral Ocean endlessly spreading out across the Infinite divide, latching onto the concept of love wherever it existed between our souls.
Reality itself suddenly shifted, nearly invisibly, impossibly across everywhere at the same time.
Sasha’s ghostly figure shimmered, flowing through ten, a hundred, a thousand, a billion different forms of her. Ever accelerating endlessly. All of her. Infinity of forms, infinity of bodies, infinity of voices, infinity of eyes. Looking at her became impossible, just as it was impossible to divide something by zero.
Reality shattered.
And yet, reality remained intact.
Both states existed simultaneously—a quantum superposition of broken and whole, a Schr?dinger's Novazem that defied rational explanation. The luxurious walls of Suite Seven in the Golden Harpoon peeled away like burning paper, revealing not the expected harbor view but an impossible void beyond.
The elegant furniture disintegrated into particles that hung suspended in mid-air, neither falling nor rising, caught in a liminal state between existence and non-existence. The crystal chandeliers melted into liquid light that flowed upward against gravity, forming spiraling columns that connected to... something above.
Through the void where the ceiling had been, I saw it—the Wormwood Star.
Not as a distant astronomical object, but here, impossibly close, its tendrils stretching across the morning sky of Agamemnon like vast skeletal fingers. The comet's surface was bone-white, pockmarked with dark hollows that resembled a massive skull, empty sockets that somehow contained galaxies within them. These hollows seemed to pulse, to breathe, to reach downward into physical reality like probing fingers testing the consistency of a membrane.
Mathematics failed me. Equations shattered and reformed in my mind, unable to capture the topology of what I was witnessing. My Infoscopes crashed, extinguished by a wave of near-absolute entropy. This wasn't merely a celestial body—it was a higher-dimensional intrusion into our reality, a cosmic invader that rendered conventional physics, conventional observation meaningless.
"Is this real?" I uttered.
As if in response, one of the skull-like hollows oriented itself toward me, a vast empty socket focusing on my insignificant form. I found myself staring directly into the heart of Entropy itself—not the sanitized scientific concept I'd studied in thermodynamics, but a living, conscious force of unmaking that pervaded the cosmos.
And it stared back.
The hollow's darkness wasn't merely absence of light—it was the positive presence of oblivion, a hungry void that threatened to unmake not just my body but the very concept of Vladislav Kerenski across all possible iterations of reality. I felt myself being pulled apart, not physically but conceptually, my identity unraveling strand by strand as the hollow's gaze dissected me.
My consciousness stretched, thinning like a soap bubble about to burst, endlessly pulled, spaghettified towards the comet. I felt myself distributed across infinite possibilities, each version of me simultaneously experiencing every possible fate—escaping to the United States to , living in Ukraine with a granddaughter after, forevermore , awakening on a , farming , manifesting as a duplicate mage in a tower of seventy seven floors, understanding the nature of magical Autogenesis in an endless Soviet apartment block gigastructure, being reborn as a thousand, a billion, an infinite number of different humans and creatures on an infinite number of different worlds.
Living and dying. Finding love. Losing it. Finding it again.
An unbreakable, persistent constant. An anchor that bound me against the breath of Entropy.
Just as my sense of self began to dissolve completely, I felt warm fingers intertwined with mine—Kliss, her touch radiating syntropic stability that countered the entropic dissolution threatening to unmake me.
"Stay with me," she growled, her voice cutting through the cosmic vastness above us like a diamond through glass. Orange and gold flames danced along her crystalline mane, each strand defying the breath of the Wormwood Star pressing down against us. "You're not going anywhere, Slava! You are MINE!”
Kliss stood unafraid before the looming cosmic horror, her mane resistant to the unmaking effect of the hollow's gaze.
"Hold onto me," she commanded, pulling me against her. "It's not here! We still have time!"
“Oh but it is!” Sasha declared jovially, her body lit like a falling star, stretched forever upward. “It is because the Wormwood star never left! It’s always been here. Always and forever, since I crashed my fractal engine along with myself into the Earth! All of Earths wherever I had existed! Bending the narrative, fighting the Rules, resisting the imposition of Agentic Order!”
All around us, the fractured space-time of Suite Seven continued to disintegrate. The harbor view beyond had transformed into a vision of Agamemnon in flames, skyships falling from the heavens, the golden spires melting like candle wax.
And through it all, Sasha laughed in endless voices.
Not the gentle chuckle of amusement or even the manic giggle of insanity, but the triumphant, bone-chilling laugh of a villain witnessing the culmination of millennia of planning. Her form had expanded, no longer a simple humanoid projection but a vast, silver-blue web that stretched through the fractured reality around us, her countless eyes opening within tears in the fabric of space-time, reaching out all the way to the infinite abyss overhead via her endless impact vector.
"BEHOLD OUR CREATION, KEYMAKER!" she boomed, her voice made of voices resonating, bleeding across the ever-fracturing reality-unreality. “THE DOOR YOU HAVE OPENED THAT CANNOT BE CLOSED! THE GUN THAT CAN KILL A GOD! MY PATHWAY BACK INTO THE PHYSICAL!”
Unlimited Isekai:
