Mount Aurora was the highest peak of Caeli’s Spine, a mountain range that stretched all the way from the Boiling Sea in the west to the uninhabitable glaciers of the Frozen Plains in the east.
As Andromeda began her descent, a smell of ashes and scorched rock found its way into Leera’s nostrils. The smoke was thickening with every passing moment. Soon, the bow was no longer visible from the stern, and the mast disappeared like a spindle into the whirling yarn of smoke.
Leera coughed and buried her face in the sleeve of her tunic. Her eyes were tearing up, and a strange feeling was stirring in the pit of her stomach – one that she couldn’t quite place. The smell and vision-hampering whiteness reminded her of some blurry event from a distant past – she was choking, dragging herself over a hardwood floor, fires everywhere, Aelar’s hand pulled her up. It felt like certain doom awaited her if she looked at the memory too long. She shook her head.
Bryne was standing on the bow with a cloth over his mouth. The wind was blasting through his hair and, in a way, it looked like his head was on fire and that it was the source of all the smoke. And maybe it was – Leera certainly wouldn’t put it past the man.
A mountainside suddenly shot out from the mist on Andromeda’s starboard. Leera gasped and tripped over her own feet. She landed on her butt. An arm’s length to the right and the ship would’ve been splinters and toothpicks.
Trembling, she glanced over at Quick. The old man had attained a look of rocky resolve, and the usually round and soft features of his face were now competing with the mountain in firmness. She noticed that he only had one hand on the rudder; the other was, unsurprisingly, clutching a teacup.
Leera closed her eyes and rolled to her back. Her nerves couldn’t handle the stress of looking at the mountainside rushing by. Silently, she prayed that the old man knew what he was doing.
----------------------------------------
Gradually, the air became easier to breathe, and soon Andromeda came to a halt. Leera opened her eyes and sat up on the deck. She looked at Cloudrest for the first time.
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Massive spires of marble sprouted from the mountainside, but they were all scorched and in ruins. The streets that connected the spires were carved from the solid rock of the mountain and looked like huge balconies from the side. There had once been parks, open air theaters, and artificial lakes on these terraces, but all the trees were now black husks, and the water was a mucky soot-soup.
“What happened here?” Leera whispered.
“To me, it looks like a dragon turned the place into its personal merry-go-round,” Bryne said.
“A dragon?”
Dragons were the stuff of fairytales. There hadn’t been dragons in the world for thousands of years. At least that’s what Leera had always been told.
“This was no dragon, Master Teller,” Quick said and steered Andromeda onto one of the terraces. “This… this is the work of men.”
The ship landed with a splash in one of the black lakes. Without the smoke, the views would’ve been breathtaking from up here, Leera thought. Right now, it was like looking into a swirling cloud.
This terrace appeared to have once been a sanatorium park. Overturned basins littered the scorched lawns, and the lake had served as a public pool. Tables for open-air massages, with their covers still flapping in the wind, lined the mosaic road of the promenade that ran along the very edge of the cliff. A row of blackened skeletal trees had once provided the place with soothing shadow.
Something hung from the trees. Leera blinked, trying to make sense of what the strange twisted objects had been before they turned into coal. Maybe they were some kind of–she stopped herself. One of them had a face – burnt, glaring, eyeless, and skinless – but a face nonetheless. There were dozens upon dozens of corpses slowly swaying from the trees. She turned away in horror.
“W-what are we doing here?”
“If you could just stay here, that would be best,” Quick said and got off the boat. “I need to… make sure of something.”
The old man grabbed his cane and limped away, clearly undaunted by all the bodies dangling above him. Within a few moments, he had been swallowed by the smoke. Leera looked at Bryne, who hadn’t been smiling for an unusually long time now. She found herself liking him a lot better without that stupid smirk.
“What?” he said.
“Who would do this?”
Bryne shrugged. “Someone went through a lot of trouble to make it look like fire folk.”
“What makes you think it wasn’t?”
“Well, for one, we’re quite far away from Ignis.” Bryne heaved himself off the boat. “And, two, we’re on a mountain – a fire-bender wouldn’t even be able to get up here… much less an entire army of them. And I guess the same thing goes for the water folk, so that leaves two options…”
“Two?”
“Yep,” he said and strolled over to the first tree, pulled out a blade, and started scaling the trunk. “Stay on the boat.”