It all began with a Hierogram.

Hierograms, those symbols of living tales and myths, of things divine closest to mortal reach. Runes of power and yet not, written echoes of the universe and somewhat else.

It was on the first day of Lost Azure when the captain ordered us to the making of one, thus commemorating the last season of the year. To be sure, we asked if we heard right, that it was not her wish for any runes inscribed by the engravers well-trained for the task, but us, who were not crafters of runes, but permanent residents of the slave cabin in the waist – the ship’s darkest, most cramped place, that not even her centuries of immortal office had afforded the captain a reason to set foot in, much less to order a service. We were told aye, because we were the azure orphans, that we must make her a hierogram of the crooked-circle constellation. No further instructions were ever given us.

Upon the boatswain’s word, the azures, those with more ready wit, marked the captain’s true intention and cruelty. But in the end most of us resigned to our fate. What else could we do but what a slave does best upon given a concise order?

I did not know then what a hierogram was, nor could my illiterate eyes differ one from the ordinary letters. Still, that it is a sacred thing is a common knowledge, being celebrated creations of the greatest of artisan hands. And an azure, to put blandly, is anything but. To claim any merits in relation to our species is passing folly. Even here on this airship, if there was a clear hierarchy to speak of, then us azures should be placed just below the common bondslaves, and a little above the ship cats. And even to say that those adorable but temperamental creatures were well-loved and never wanting in foods, there could be little doubt as to none in the right mind would order them, or us, to a task honorable for the best of artisans.

In short, an azure by nature can’t make a hierogram. As simple as that. And it would be no sillier, say, to bid a mute spin a yarn, or an invalid heave the capstan.

Well, my guess proved the next day.

On the morning’s eight bells, every azure onboard was called to the waist. Ere the ringing echoes were spent, each of us had slid with great alacrity from the nine mastheads, having no mind to allow those awaiting us further cause for ire. And we nine assembled quite neatly in a line before the group of officers. A peculiar sight, for it was nine heads of one hue of azure – the hair color from which we derived our name, and the surest mark of our people.

Lex, the second mate, had come in person, and the boatswains flanked her, the guards at a ready with ropes of both hempen and leather varieties.

The solemnity of their conduct attracted the interest of no few deckhands, who set their eyes on us even as their hands busied with the unceasing tasks of the sky-faring life. The officers’ presence prevented a crowd, but none was unaware of this assembly; curiosity drew in alike maidservants, guards, an assortment of untold varieties of idlers, carpenters, sailmakers, engravers... and, I saw by the tell-tale horns, even a wyverness. So in a way we were in the spotlight as the true exotic pets indeed we are, kept for our labors but scorn for our nature - so mayhap the felines have it better than us after all.

Presently, one of ours was told to step forth, for it was she who had been first selected to produce the hierogram. But the one day allowed had passed and, unsurprisingly, she had no result for show. Not even one stroke of it. No one had expected her to. Nor could she afford bafflement when the guards seized her, stripped her tunic, and fastened her arms and legs to the mizzen’s shroud. The mate sauntered close, taking her time, relishing it, with the leather rope trailing from her hands. At the snapping flick she tested upon the planks, the poor victim twitched, and did not stop trembling.

The azure’s cry pierced the thin, cloudless sky at the first lash. Neither cries nor strikes ceased for a long time. Lex, a cruel taskmistress at heart, lavished upon the reddening flesh, crossing open wounds with still harsher lashes, the victim’s begging only hastened her arm.

It would’ve been a small mercy had one of the boatswain performed the flogging, as even they could grow tired, their toned arms could ache. The likes of Lex could not. She was one of the morning stars, her places by the captain’s side, her pleasure and reason to be in serving her captain, and she spared nothing to punish a failed service towards her liege. So it was that as the sun gained its zenith, the crying had only grown faint with the azure’s consciousness, not the slack of the whip-hand. And mayhap that for league upon league in this vast, empty, open sky, to all points of the compass, many altitudes below and aloft, the azure’s hoarse voice could chillingly be heard, as an early warning even for our feared vessel.

The rest of us grew weary of looking and listening. But look and listen, we must. Attentively, dispassionately, we kept our watch, backs straightened and all eyes strained. Such things were so not out of sympathy or compassion or love for the berth mate, for azures know no such pity, but because we were ordered here for this specific purpose: to mark our end should in turn we fail the task. And we marked it well.

By the end of it, when the shadow had shifted from the upright axis, the mate tossed the whip aside. And the guards took the battered victim away, for she could not walk properly, nor breathe. I wonder if she was still alive. Wondered, and could not look from her bloodied, naked flesh. Almost I was entranced by the ravaged body until it disappeared belowdecks, for there was no doubt every single one of us would in the following days equally suffer.

“That girl yonder,” the second mate started me from it; she had not spoken once during the flogging, nor even drawn a labored breath. “Set her to it next,” she said, her long finger pointed, too slender for so harsh a hand, too beautiful for so cruel a mistress. At its appointed end I stood dumbly.

“Aye, ma’am,” the boatswain said, giving me a look of pity, “Star, second watch - I’ll find her replacement for the day.”

So it was that the boatswain thrust into me an inkstone and a quill. I could not even read, much less write. Yet it would’ve mattered little even if I could. I knew. All of them knew, and gave me the same look of pity. Almost all, the deckhands and the idlers who had stole looks from the side, and even some of the officers, but not the azures. Azures do not pity. They stared at the coiled lash with intense fright, but as for me they held no interest, not even a hope that I would succeed and spare them their doom. Azures don’t hope either.

All dispersed, back to their task, except for me.

In a way, when I was spared the day’s work, it was only to take what bodily comfort and respite I could before the morrow’s suffering. And so I spent it in wander, lugging a grim reminder of my fate in the writing utensils around the deck.

I walked aimlessly, among the willing crew hands, the busy decks. Lost, because I had been given a task with no possible direction. Lost, because at that moment in time, I and my peril might well be singular, and sympathy seemed impossible to afford an azure. But of these things, I was scant aware. I only walked, bewildered by dread and anxiousness for what to come. And careless steps, or habit, brought me to the one person who was waiting for me.

She sat on a stool almost too small for an adult, in the shelter of a capstan from the sail-filling wind. Her small, delicate fingers worked a roll of oakum, picking, squeezing. Golden hair in part abandonly tied to the crude belt of her worn tunic, yet the long, smooth tresses reached still the planks where she sat. And her face, though blemished and bronzed by the relentless sun, shone still unmistakenly hints of gentile blood, of skin and features once pampered in silken hands and polite parlors. Yet when she looked up, she saw in me an equal, for we were indeed so, almost. She was no azure, but a human slave of the name Thea -- a noblewoman whose name and privileges the debt bondage had taken some years ago.

“I heard.” She said. “Come, and make yourself comfortable.” I had doubt any onboard was unaware of the flogging and the cause of it. Quite a stir it was, after all. But only when I had obliged her invitation, which she had extended as though to a fellow gentlewoman passing by her well-furnished pavilion, and not an uneven place on a pile of cables, that I thought it was in her that I might find a way out of this predicament. I had never been quick of mind, even by an azure’s standards.

“Tell me you know how to deliver the captain’s request,” I said.

She gave me a look of raised eyebrows, like that of one who has been asked to caulk a clump of cloud.

“You think of me too highly for comfort, Star,” she said.

“I have to look for hope somewhere, preferably in the best of places.”

She looked sidelong at me, not annoyed but troubled, and of a surety was not flattered. She knew what she was. And what she was could only be described as extraordinary.

It is no easy thing being transplanted from polite society to the demanding environment of an open-air vessel, much less to fill the humiliating role of a slave. But her being here was the evidence of one who had overcome all that, and survived. And, for all that too, Thea was a fragile creature. Even now as we sat with our back to the capstan, the mild heat and chance wild breezes flushed her. And her current constitution was still a marked improvement from her early days onboard. The slaves did not like her then, for what she was, for how she looked, and for her inability to perform her share of harsh labor. But what is wanting in the body is offset aplenty in the mind and, perhaps in greater part, the heart. In the end it did not take overlong for the fellow slaves to come to love her. She did all the lighter works, and some, yet grudged not when asked for more. And often she cooked us meals far too extravagant for our lot, when given needful ingredients by the free sailors, which she made purchase by the cost of a tale, a song, or sometimes but a smile. In all a remarkable slave, that even I could observe such things was the greatest testament to the measure of her qualities.

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And it was in one of these last wealths of the mind that I sought now my succor. For she possessed the kind and quantity of knowledge unexpected in a sailor, much less a bondslave. Many a night our shared watch had been indulged in her lore and tales, hidden truths and entertaining falsehoods from all the corners of the sky. There had been remarks of her likely being the daughter of a house of scholars, though she denied it, claiming knowledge of that sort was but a natural thing among her kind.

Presently she had quit the oakum roll and was twisting instead the much finer threads of her forelocks. Her brows knit, and someone who did not know her well might have thought she was working her memory, searching in her hoard of stories for a cure for my trouble. But I knew better, it was only a feint, a way to limit expectations. In fact, if she so wished, any pieces of trivial knowledge, even the exact measures of some cargo stashed deep in the hold, that she had seen but once, could be conjured in an instant. Such is the extent of her intellect.

“Well,” her little play done, she began, “a hierogram, at its essence, is just a very portent rune, is it not?”

“Aye. But even suppose that I had what it took to engrave a rune, it didn’t follow that I could create an entirely new one. Certainly not for something so, so very vague as a constellation.”

“You have to start somewhere. Even approaching blindly a matter is still better than not approaching it at all.” She frowned, this time in earnest.

I knew she was truly worried for my sake. For years we had been watchmates, and more than that, close friends. If there was a reason for this friendship, I could not think of, for there were others in our watch, and compared to her I was perfectly unremarkable in all aspects. But many such things have occurred for little more reason than fate’s design, I suppose.

“To be sure,” she said after a while, “I think there’s more than a bit of sense in the captain’s rationale, and not just for sport as you think. Now, don’t look at me like that. It is true, one never hears an azure scratch any rune, much less a holy rune. But it is your stars. That too is true. And just as your people don’t know runes, no one really knows your people all that well, unless they be immortal, and writing runes is not their business.”

“Azures don’t know much about anything, Thea. What we know of ourselves, we were told. And even if there are some wise azures out there, as silly as it may sound, they are not here, and I am not one. All my life I’ve only known this ship’s decks, how am I to create something proper people could not?”

“First, you stop that with the proper people talk. It’s quite tiring to hear the stupid word all over and over again, and I’m fair tired of telling you that. Second, the captain thinks the azures can make one, I’m sure, or she wouldn’t have wasted her time ordering you.”

“Well, I told you my thought: it’s been some dull weeks, and now it’s Lost Azure – no hope for winged beasts while it lasts – the mates have needs for sport, even if the captain herself does not.”

“Do you want to know how to make a hierogram or not?” Thea said, peeved, and threw a handful of loose fibers at me, which scattered in the wind, leaving only two or three landing on my nose. I sneezed, then nodded.

With that, the human slave began to arrange some thick strands on the planks between us, so that the winds bothered them not, and, “As I said, hierograms are runes, and runes are arrangements of strokes to create a symbol, like this one.” She had made a rectangle with a diagonal line dividing it in half. “’Tis the rune of seals and tightness. You put it on a cask and send it overboard, and if there’s power behind the rune engraved, then it would hit the quay undamaged. But if it is someone with no expertise like me? Poof, everything would be everywhere.” With a tap on the plank, she crumbled the rectangle. “But everyone knows runes like this one, even if they can’t engrave them properly – all peoples in this sky know them, though some more so than the others. Now hierograms are different, often they are guarded secrets, and often they serve no everyday use, like this hierogram of Lost Azure the captain wants.”

“Do you know?” I cut her off. It didn’t annoy her so much as bewildered.

“Know what?”

“A hierogram of Lost Azure. I know they are sacred, and are guarded, and are rare. But I think if someone does know of a secret, it would be you. Does not one of your stories and histories tell of a Lost Azure’s rune? It’s not like we have that many major constellations in the heavens.”

“The thing is,” she sighed, “even if you don’t grossly overestimate me, it’s not how hierogram crafting works. The universal runes are... universals, obviously, and all across the skies, be it in the northern empire or the pagan empire or the barbarous states, they work pretty much the same. They are water-carrying buckets and fire-keeping lamps. They are defined only by the rules of mother earth and father sky. But a hierogram has a personal touch. Whoever has crafted one, it is theirs alone, unless at great pains it is taught to a suitable learner. And it is said that a skilled engraver can discern a hierogram’s crafter by reading its patterns of power. That is to say, even if I know of one existing hierogram of Lost Azure, it would not be of use to you or the captain, for she has need of one made by an azure – one that belongs to her crew.”

“So I have to make one myself.”

“Aye.”

“How?”

Thea smiled wryly. “I can’t tell you, partly because there’s no one way to do it. Alright, alright, I know what I told you. But I only know the very basics of it. That is, well, you must understand the subject to internalize its essence, and by understand I mean studying it perhaps for weeks or even months. Then it simply comes to you. There are theories, but no reliable procedures, it has taken some engravers great luck to even make one after so long a study, only to craft something inadequate in the end.”

“And I am to do it in a day.”

“A half-day and some.”

I sat back, leaning on the capstan. “Well, I give up.”

Not looking, yet I know Thea was giving me a look of pity, pretty sure of it.

“I admit,” she said, “now that it’s been said out loud, it does seem impossible.”

I shrugged.

“Well,” she put a finger to her lips, “How about a cake tomorrow, how about it? I was told there were some strawberries preserved fresh in the hold, those that someone in the galley was willing to part ways with.”

I gave her a wry smile, “Make it tonight. I don’t think I will have much appetite tomorrow.”

So she promised. And that rendered me somewhat of a comfort. Enough that I fell in a doze by her side as time drew closer to my flogging. But, after a time, when I woke to Thea’s soft singing, and the sun was still glaring in the sky, something knotted my stomach, and I rose, looking around restlessly, picturing the somewhat comedic image of the second mate and her lash hungrily eyeing me from out of sight.

“Did I wake you?” Thea looked over.

I shook my head, “I think I will have another walk.”

Again I wandered the deck, with no more purpose than before, if less worried. It is what it is. There are things I can’t ever change as an azure. And it is my people’s wont to know no desire, keep no hope, for we benefit not from such thoughts. But live, we do, if just barely. Enough so that the fear of death and pains do not bear too harshly upon us. An azure does not long for a better life, and so she is happy in her squalid condition.

Habit carried me to the starboard driver mast. At the masthead, I descried a small figure hanging from the rigging, her head not of an azure hue. She was my replacement for the day, whoever that was.

Without thinking I climbed aloft, and before I could even remember to think up a reason for it, I had made the whole length of it. My replacement looked at me askance, but I did not bother her and settled someway off, resting on the royal spar with an arm around the mast.

For almost every day in my life since I was found I had sat there, two hours in the morning, two in the afternoon, commanding a view of the Daybright, one of the most feared ships in the skies. Hundreds of women populated the deck as I looked. And indeed all the crew were female, as it had been since the vessel’s maiden voyage, and that was a long, long time ago.

Issued from the quarterdeck, between the spanker masts, the captain’s citadel loomed over all with the vigilance of a watchful despot; though at times, when the heaven is clear as this day, so does its rose-tinted roof gently glinted like a benevolent goddess, and its curved ends faint smiles and peppy lashes. Beneath this seat of power, ornated with the runes of earth and sky was the Hall of Wreaths, house to the alares of the Anemone cohort, wyvernesses and knights, where they dined and frolicked. And deeper yet belowdecks, locked and closely guarded, be the captain’s hoard, where only a handful in the open skies had seen with naked eyes.

Then upon my head, seldom visited and scarcely populated: the gondola that nested under the gas-filled envelope, which floated high over the masts, bearing all the vessel’s weight. There the Priests hermetically dwelled, and there they drove the ship with their Art wind, while keeping to their sacred vows.

Lastly, another thing peculiar to this ship, and in all the most telltale sign of the Daybright and her mistress: the intricately carven figurehead of ivory beneath the bowsprit - a realistically and frighteningly rendered draconic visage, being the symbol of our captain.

Of all, the nine masts, the enormous hull, a crew of thousands, the Daybright was among the largest floating vessels in the skies. Few rivaled her in splendor, and none the uniqueness of her choice crew.

With an encompassing view of all this greatness, that I took for an everyday sight, and where a stranger would find much awe and intimidation, I took peace and comfort in its familiar unchanging setting. No desire. No ambition. No anguish. No despair. No nothing.

Better still, if I could have done without the floggings such as to come tomorrow.

It is, of course, unwonted of an azure to ponder such things that lie beyond her labors, her meals and her rest. And so it did not occupy me for long. But as the sky shifted hue, something seized my attention, and did not let go, for it was heading straight for me.

It was a sudden movement below, that I only descried upon the shroud’s sway. Climbing the rigging, one knot at a time, without the finesse of a seasoned deckhand, nonetheless slithering nimbly like a serpent, was a wyverness. A wyverness indeed, with horns that glimmered in the failing daylight, a tapering tail that rippled as she ascended. But no wings, for when pledgeless they are not unlike humans, except for said apparatus.

In a panic, I tightened my grip on the rope, bracing as though she was a coming gale. And no more doubt, she was coming for me, straight for the spar upon which I perched.

I held my breath.