Nothing makes sense from up here, Luscin sees plenty of landmarks, but has no idea where she is. She should have studied maps, like the fancy cartography maps Terius keeps in his office. She knows true-north, and is flying southernly, the Fuarial Ocean is somewhere to the east. If she can manage to find it, she can get her bearings. She rotates her direction of fall to dead east. Not the most efficient route to Thuma which is to the west. If she can find the shoreline, she can follow it to the first port city and crash there.

It takes less than thirty minutes to spot the coastline and only a few more minutes to spot a city. The buildings are all massive square constructions. Many have huge bases and tapper to blunt points, making them pyramids she realizes. Panic sets in as she realizes she’s flying over North Cenoka. She turns her clock to 11 and shoots upwards, not wanting to be seen.

When the air becomes too cold to bear and she experiences difficulty breathing she levels out and begins a slow descent as she drives forward. She’s made herself about as aerodynamic as possible and is falling forward at near maximum free fall speed, cruising around 175 miles an hour. While idly watching the ground scroll past she attempts to use her store of thermal energy to keep warm, the flowing air relentlessly strips away everything she tries, layers would help trap air, something for next time. After an hour she sees what has to be the massive Rocky Waste ahead. Somewhere in those tens of thousands of square miles is Mammatus.

She decides to put her experiment on slowing down to a practical test. She throws her clock hands from nine back to three. The wind buffeting her decreases rapidly, until for just a moment she is stationary before she begins falling headfirst the other way. Feet first was by far more comfortable. Flying headfirst is the same as hanging upside down, our circulatory systems are not built for that.

Perfect, with no momentum she drops all pressure, and her direction of fall adjusts towards the ground. As she picks up speed, she shifts her direction back to parallel with the ground. Now she just needs to get close to the ground while falling slow enough to not break anything on impact.

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She experiments with her slowing down technique while bleeding off altitude until she sees a large port city ahead. That should be Gateland, the northernmost city of South Cenoka.

Luscin sees an empty pasture and circles it until she is moving at a safe speed with a distance less than 20 yards to the ground. She drops, sticking the landing like she’s done this before, while absorbing the accumulated kinetic energy from her drop. Since she was already holding a sizable amount of kinetic, she should lighten her load. After checking the ground for animal dens, and finding none, she releases half of her hold into the ground with a thump.

A two-hour walk brings her to the city gate. She looks for a cheap place to eat and sleep and calls it a day. She’s already wasted a day and two nights learning to fly and managed to put herself hundreds of miles further away than when she started. She needs to clear her head and figure this out or Master Adara will be waiting for her in Thuma.

Luscin starts the moment the sun clears the horizon to the west. She washes up as best she can, noting that her leg is no longer bothering her. She pays the innkeeper to launder yesterday’s clothes and vows to pick up two more outfits, and some sort of jumpsuit before leaving Gateland.

Luscin spent all of the next day in a library pouring over maps and reading books on navigating by speed and direction. Navigating on the ground by landmark is simple, she was born with that knowledge. Navigating in the air, or at sea requires time keeping and knowing your speed. Two things she doesn’t know how to solve at this time. That leaves learning to read the ground. Luscin decides her best course is to trace back the larger towns and cities she passed through on her way to Mammatus when she was following Teum.

She supplied up for another five days at most and planned to sleep outdoors the rest of the trip if the weather held. The winter jumpsuit she purchased brought some odd looks when she wore it out of the inn the next morning.

After stopping on the outskirts of the City of Brust, she overshot Twoyal and Liama and had to backtrack adding two days unnecessarily. She was able to reach Thuma after seven days of flying by day and resting each night.