Exploring Technology in a Wizard World

Richard is halfway through muttering about electromagnetic induction when the universe yanks him sideways.

One heartbeat he’s a modern man who believes every mystery—probability, nuclear physics, relativity—can be cracked with enough equations and late nights. The next, he’s waking up in a drafty stone castle, addressed as “Your Highness” in a realm that smells of candle wax, leather, and wet hay… and where people hurl fire from their bare hands.

Crowned as a prince in a world stuck at a medieval level of technology but rich in wizards and spells, Richard refuses to treat magic as some sacred unknowable force. To him, a wand is just an experimental apparatus waiting to be dismantled. A spell circle is an equation written in glowing ink.

Then a dragon abducts him.

Pinned to its scaled back by nothing but claws and wind, Richard peers over the edge, hair whipping his face, and starts listing all the ways this flight breaks every law of aerodynamics he’s ever learned. Lift, circulation, Bernoulli—none of it fits. Something else is at work in those massive wings and heated lungs, some hidden engine of power that demands to be measured, diagrammed, understood.

The dragon only wants a playmate for its daughter. Richard wants to redraw the boundary between magic and science, even if it means dissecting the foundations of this world’s comfort and fear. If he succeeds, wizards, dragons, and princes alike will have to choose what to do with a universe that suddenly looks less like a miracle and more like a machine that can be taken apart.