Formation of Crystal Shells

I'm creating a campaign setting called the "Constellation Wyrm," which is a
huge pholgiston formation that is shaped like a dragon.  It is surrounded by
a enormous void where there is no pholgiston, and contains thousands of
crystal spheres.  Known space is somewhere off in the pholgiston in front of
the dragon's face.  There is a NPC on my main campagin world, Drav, that has
written a paper on how crystal spheres form.  It is posted below, and I
would like comments about how to improve it.  It explains everything I could
think off but why the pholgiston is flamable.  I haven't figured out how to
add that detail in, yet.  Let me know what you all think.

- Coyote

The Formation of Dravspace, an Example of Star System Formation, by the Sage
Arserpentinius, from the Sky City of Lomarish, in the skies of the Planet
Drav


Few know how crystal spheres are created, and many say that they always have
existed.  Others speculate that they are created when elemental and
spiritual fields begin to form and generate their respective forms of
energy.  I am a proponent of the later theory.

It is known that the planets and other celestial bodies within star systems
are generated by elemental vortices.  Examples of infant star systems where
these vortices are just beginning to open up and pour forth their matter or
energy have been found and explored.  A good example is the star system
named Dawnspace, that exists in one of the pholgiston channels of the Wyrm's
Breath.  Some of this system's vortices are still tiny, and do not spew
enough matter for it to remain and gather into one spot, and some spew it
too fast or too slowly.  Others are larger and are currently surrounded by
protoplanets, though no true planet will exist in Dawnspace for some time to
come.

Let us move on to Dravspace, and explore how it was formed.

The star in the center of this star system was the first celestial body to
form, as is often the case with most of the star systems in the
Constellation Wyrm.  Dravspace's sun formed around a massive vortex to the
positive energy plane, and because of this it is a bright bluish-white star
that puts out massive amounts of light and heat.  This enabled common forms
of life to form on planets much farther from the star than in other star
systems that have fire worlds as suns, and generates enough heat to keep the
entire stellar shell a constant, comfortable temperature.  Other stars often
form around vortices to the plane of fire or radiance.

Several billion years after Dravspace's sun formed the vortices that formed
the proto-planets opened up.

When the celestial bodies of Dravpace were first formed every planet in the
crystal shell was made up of a single raw elementary material, be it fire,
water, earth, air, or a quasi- or semi-element such as radiance or magma.
Later these pure elements started to mix with other elements and evolved
into the various planets as we know them today.

A good example of how this happened is as follows.  Little pieces of earth
would break off from a solid sphere of earth which had formed around a earth
vortex.  This was usually because the earth vortex was spewing out earth
matter so fast that the earth did not all settle into a ball, and some
pieces would escape the gravity of the proto-planet, or because the earth
wold push out of the vortex at the center of the solid sphere, compacting
the outer layers until the sphere exploded into many chunks and left a raw
vortex.  After the later cases, the proto-planet would start to form anew.

These free floating chunks of earth would become asteroids and the cores of
comets.  Some would crash into water worlds, and create islands, or be
caught in the atmosphere of air worlds and become floating islands.

Globes of air would also break off from air proto-worlds and be caught by an
earth world, creating its first, embryonic atmosphere.  Water globs would
break away in the same manner, or magma globes.

As the elements mixed and landed on other proto-worlds, spontaneous vortexes
to other elemental planes would begin to open up in these once pure pockets
of elemental substance around the new material.  Earth worlds started to see
volcanoes form on them as vortexes to the plane of fire opened, and
atmospheres started to form as vortexes to the plane of air opened up.
Oceans formed, and on other worlds, like worlds made of only water or air,
large islands of earth started to form.

As these elemental vortices opened and mixed their materials, spiritual
vortices also opened up, as well as positive and negative energy portals.
>From the invisible spiritual vortices and the positive and negative vortices
the energies of life and death flowed, and the energies of good, evil, law,
and chaos.  Instead of creating spherical globes of matter, these vortices
created flows similar to rivers and currents.

As these forces spread throughout Dravspace they mixed and melded with each
other, similar to the way the elemental materials had mixed, generating both
life and abominations such as undead.  They also created order or chaos
among the opening and closing of new vortices, in time resulting in stable
vortices that followed stable paths within the stellar sphere of Dravspace.
This allowed planets to form and remain stable, instead of disintegrating as
their vortices closed or growing to massively abnormal sizes and eating up
all the other planets.

Since this time, some vortices have closed and other new ones have opened,
but certain vortices have remained stable.  This is a perpetually ongoing
process.  Many speculate that the larger worlds still have vortices open in
their centers that spew new matter at a steady rate, though other star
systems exist where the planets are still growing and shrinking at chaotic
rates, and where they fling around the crystal sphere in random, chaotic
patterns.  It is obvious that the number of invisible chaos vortices far
outnumber the number of law vortices in these systems, and the energies of
chaos do not allow stable star systems with stable worlds in stable orbits
to form.

Many crystal spheres where chaos predominates over law exist in the Wyrm's
Breath, and it is believed that the forces of chaos are strong throughout
this region.  This makes it very dangerous to attempt to travel to and from
the Constellation Wyrm via the Dragon's breath, both because the trip is
long and because there are few safe crystal spheres to stop in and resupply
one's ship.

It is believed that the aether plane, also called the pholgiston, can only
exist at a certain distance from these conglomerations of elemental and
spiritual power, and the fields generated around them.  the aether exists
where these energies do not exist.  This is manifested physically as a
crystaline barrier, but it is really merely the absence of elemental and
spiritual power.

Spells that allow travel through the pholgiston must have a component to
them that allows elemental and spiritual energy to break away from the
fields that they were generated within.  To the observer this is not
noticable, in much the same way this component is not noticable when one
used magic ot enter the elemental or outer planes.  When one goes to the
planes of evil, for example, one must have magic that protects the good in
one's self, because there are no good enegies in these planes and no sources
for them to be generated from.  the magic one uses must isolate the good
energy field and enable it to be generated internally.

All these details are not important unless one is attempting to create new
spells, however.  What is important is that at a certain point around each
star system one runs into a barrier, that one must have specially designed
magic to penetrate.

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