Cindervane Aloft

Motors choke in volcanic ash inside four minutes, so the colony on the crater rim scouts with motorless gliders thrown from ridges and dropped off masts. Building them is your job. Twelve sliders shape a single wing, from span and taper through sweep and washout to nose ballast and the length of the tail arm, and five layouts answer to them differently: a Scythe carries no tail at all, a Kiteback hangs its keel low and shrugs gusts off. Cover it in reedpaper while you are learning, in glasscloth once you can afford 540 cinders. One gauge matters more than the rest. Margin reads how far the lift sits behind the weight, and that single number sorts the wing into Wild, Skittish, Keen, Steady or Leaden. Then loose it, off the arm, off a winch line, or from the mast straight above a vent. Hot air breathes up out of the ground, gusts arrive in alternating pulses, and abrasion grows with the square of your airspeed, so flying slowly saves the covering and cooks the frame instead. Nine outcomes are reachable, from Clean Sail to Ash Worn. Each one comes back as a tracer replay, four graphs and a blunt debrief from Ossa Tarrenhall, who has one eye left and no patience; her suggested fix lands on the same forty step undo stack as your own edits. Ghost Trails draws four flights on one tracer so you can see which change bought what. Twenty four commissions close on a flight and never on a saved drawing. Twelve folios of theory, six sites, portrait, offline, no ads, nothing to buy.