“Now!” Alyus called. “Throw them, now!”
The bow of the Featherflight hovered over the river, and the stern floated above the forest behind. The gondola floated perfectly above the flowing water.
Alyus and Brealtod threw grappling hooks. They were large, heavy tools, with rusting iron heads and sharp spikes.
Pirin hoisted a third hook with his one good arm. He aimed for an especially thick and sturdy-looking tree. The hook wound around one of its branches, but the branch snapped off. Pirin pulled the hook back and threw it again, and this time, it wound around the tree’s main trunk. It wasn’t going anywhere until they unwound it, and that meant the airship wasn’t going to budge, either—no matter how hard the wind blew into its sails.
Pirin exhaled with relief, then stepped back from the open side window of the gondola. Quickly, they all snuffed the candles. Without movement, the containment runes wouldn’t activate, and flame could be deadly. Liftgas was incredibly flammable.
There were only two pails aboard the airship. They lowered them on a rope, filled them with water from the river, and hoisted it back up towards the main hull. Pirin’s task was carrying the bucket up to the crew quarters above and feeding the water into the ballast tank. One bucket at a time.
A hundred, maybe two hundred buckets later, the ballast tank was full, and the airship hovered dangerously close to the trees. But that also meant that moving Gray to the cargo hold would be much easier.
Brealtod lowered the cargo elevator with a large capstan, until it crushed a pine tree’s tip beneath its weight.
Climbing into Gray’s saddle, Pirin whispered, “Once we get over there, you can sleep tight.”
She jumped off the back platform of the gondola. They hopped from treetop to treetop, navigating back towards the stern. She was still careful with her injured wing and leg.
Pirin ran his hand through her feathers. He took a breath, and a faint, invisible wind tugged at his soul. He tried to latch onto the feeling. There was magic at work A memory surfaced.
A vague, blurry memory passed through his mind. He had been kneeling before Gray on a swaying wooden deck, winding a bandage around her leg. A lantern swayed. Ropes creaked, boards groaned, and waves sloshed. Salty sea spray and gnatsnapper blood tinged the air. Gray chirped nervously. He had known how to help…and he had helped.
That was why Gray was so loyal. He’d helped her before, somehow.
He blinked, and the memory was gone. He tried to latch onto the invisible wind and call it back, but the memory was gone.
A chunk of him was missing, just like Hir Venias had warned him of.
Pirin shook his head, clearing his mind and focussing. Gray bounded up onto the stern cargo platform in one final leap. She stumbled when she landed, but then chirped and lowered herself down.
Pirin slid off the saddle. “We’ll make it more comfortable for you soon, alright?” He leaned closer, Maybe there’d be some semblance of understanding in her eyes.
Nothing, of course. He offered a faint smile, then grabbed onto a crate to keep himself steady as Brealtod began to raise the cargo elevator up again. Once the platform was tucked safely into the belly of the airship, Pirin leapt across to the wooden lattice platform.
“I’d say it’s high time we ate something,” said Alyus, climbing down the ladder into the cargo hold. “Then we’ll sleep. We’re hooked down and not going anywhere, but I’ll keep the first watch anyway.”
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Pirin took one of the bunks in the crew quarters above the gondola. It was a hard, stiff bed, but it was better than sleeping out in the woods alone. Brealtod cast a wary look at him, and so did Alyus. But there was nothing more Pirin could do to convince them that they weren’t under a spell. Either they would believe him, or they wouldn’t.
He pulled the thin blankets over himself and rolled over. The airship shuddered with each gust of wind, straining against the grappling hooks. It rocked almost like a seafaring ship, but the wind was louder, and everything felt a touch more fragile.
He relaxed as best as he could, laying still in the cot and staring up at the ceiling. He controlled his breathing, processing the last bits of Essence from the manabulbs. With it all processed, he’d have a little more power to at least draw on. It wouldn’t change the knotted Essence channels.
Still, cycling Essence was necessary for all techniques. As long as he didn’t try to actually use a technique, it would hopefully not rebel on him.
But now wasn’t the time for that. Time to sleep.
And, after a few minutes of steady breathing, he did.
His sleep, however, was far from peaceful. He dreamt of an island far away, wreathed in fog and battered by frigid storms. He dreamt of a small village along its shore—nearly abandoned, and forgotten by anyone but those who lived on it.
He’d forgotten those places too, it seemed. He shouldn’t have. He knew he shouldn’t have, and even though it was just a dream, it made his heart sink.
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What if Alyus was right? What if he just ended up ruining himself with this quest?
No. He’d find a way.
His dreams shifted. He saw a tall elf in a white cloak, with flowing auburn hair. He smiled kindly at Pirin.
Again, the vision rippled and shifted. He saw a woman, a blonde-haired sprite wielding a spear. The weapon spun around her, forming a silver cage. She cut through hordes of shadowy enemies, on a quest that couldn’t be interrupted for anything.
Pirin should have known her as well. But his mind decided otherwise.
She turned and looked…directly at him.
Pirin woke up with a start, clutching the hilt of his sword. He pulled it an inch from its sheath.
By now, the only light in the crew quarters came from below—the hole between the crew quarters and the gondola. It had a magenta hue, so it was still moonslight. But there was also a hint of orange sunrise. Pirin held the sword towards the light. Sirdian swords were often named, but he would have to dig a little. He peeled the leather wrapping off the hilt, unscrewed the wooden blocks from either side of the tang, and examined the plain steel.
In rigid letters, the word Nynhar was written, followed by a blacksmith’s signature.
He sucked in a short breath. It had belonged to someone before him, he was sure of it. But he wanted to remember more than just a feeling.
A pang of grief tried to grip him, but he stomped it down. Mourning could come later. Solutions came now.
He tried pushing Essence up to his mind. The Essence obeyed his will, fueled by a breathing technique. It passed in channels around his skull, forming an invisible net around his head.
He hoped that maybe, with the stimulation of the Essence, it would help his mind recover. For a few minutes, he held the Essence in place. He couldn’t feel any sort of change—and certainly, none of the memories he’d damaged.
But, the longer he held his Essence in place, he noticed a hole. It wasn’t a physical hole, but a gap in his Essence system. Right around his left temple, the Essence channels were torn and shredded, not just weak or bunched up. Lingering damage from his revival, perhaps.
That…that needed to be patched. Then, he could worry about regaining what he lost.
He put his sword back together and dropped it back into the sheath. There was a long journey to Tallas-Brannul, but he knew how he’d be spending it.
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For the next two weeks, they followed the Senflow river south. It wasn’t perfect. Some days, the wind allowed no progress at all, and some days, it blew them off course and out of the river’s sight—no matter how much they angled the sails or adjusted the rudders and elevators.
But whatever the wind did to them, an airship was still faster than flying on birdback. They didn’t have to pause every two hours, and airships didn’t need food.
Every night, they moored the airship on trees while they slept. There weren’t enough of them to man the ship while flying through the night. When they passed beyond the forests and to the Fieldband of Aerdia, a vast plain filled with nothing but hummock-dotted prairies, they climbed down to the surface and moored the Featherflight to the prairie with large, iron stakes and rope.
Pirin helped Gray build a nest in the cargo hold with whatever twigs and branches they could scavenge. She was careful with her wing and leg, but as far as Pirin could tell, they were healing nicely.
His own arm finished healing within the first week. He let it out of the sling by the start of the second week, and it felt back to normal by the end of the week.
But he made no progress on patching the hole in his Essence channels. He wasn’t even sure how to go about starting such a task, and no matter what he tried—constantly cycling his Essence through his mind and using it to shield his head, or trying to push it out to the upper layer of his skin—it didn’t work.
It was causing a slight memory leak.
His test was simple. One day, he’d make himself memorize a set of ten numbers. All throughout the day, he’d recite them and commit them to memory. The next morning, he could only recall eight or nine, and a vague feeling of the rest.
That wouldn’t do. How was he supposed to get to the library and remember everything he learned?
“Today,” he vowed to the empty air, “I’ll solve this.” He sat on the rear platform of the gondola, watching the hillocks roll past below like a giant grassy ocean. He let his legs dangle off the edge of the wood, then he folded his hands together and began to breathe deeply.
He needed to approach the problem from a different angle. He’d been thrashing around in the dark, hoping something worked, but without knowing what was causing this slight memory leak, he couldn’t fix himself.
He shut his eyes and imagined his body, and the pathways of Essence that rolled around it. The icy blue Essence flowed poorly, barely squeezing through the knotted passageways or barely trickling through the bulges with enough pressure to keep moving. He let his mind travel down his core, then trickle out through his body as well.
But his failing memory wasn’t a fault of his Embercore—for once. His consciousness floated back up to his head, and this time, it swirled through the Essence pathways around his mind.
And that was when he noticed: no Essence was travelling through his mind, none at all. He found the point of the arcane wound, the hole punctured in the network of Essence channels. His mind had instinctively shut itself off from Essence when Hir Venias had brought him back.
Then he needed to open his mind back up and get Essence flowing through it again. That was the first step.
He concentrated on the pathways surrounding his mind and urged his Essence to alter its channels—to take the ones not being used.
He breathed faster and heavier, and it felt as if he was trying to cram a sword into a dagger’s sheath.
The Essence slowly began to trickle through, washing through the arcane blockage and smashing it into tiny little pieces. Essence flowed back into his mind, and he felt instantly more aware, like’d just woken up from a long sleep. He rubbed his eyes.
To reattach the Essence pathways would be a little more difficult, and he didn’t know exactly how. But, now that Essence was flowing back through his mind, the torn and broken channels wanted to expand. They reached out for each other, pulsing with Essence. If he could just guide them, he could form a patch…
So, cycling, then. But he had to do it with purpose and intent. He had plenty of purified energy from the manabulbs to work with.
Pushing more and more Essence into each of the little channels each time, he drew them closer together and spread them out into a broader sheet. The back of his neck felt itchy and warm.
After three hours of careful breathing and concentration, the channels started to connect, forming back into the mesh they should have been, then weaving and knotting together like a fabric. After another hour, he was confident that they had been reattached. It wasn’t perfect, but it would do the trick.
Pirin let his breathing pattern fall apart and his shoulders slump. He opened his eyes, and for a moment, he thought he could finally relax.
But as soon as he heard footsteps behind him, he knew his chance to relax had passed. Alyus said, “We’re at the rivertown, elfy. Get yourself ready.”