Chapter Two

Golden Hope

No one on the stranded vessel could say with certainty what time it was now, or how much time had passed since their unintended entry into the sky rift, or quite honestly whether time and space even existed in this black void. But it felt to Elias that maybe ten minutes had gone by before his unassisted eyes could confirm what the captain saw through his telescope: that the golden star approaching them was, in fact, a golden ship.

“It can’t be,” Bertrand said under his breath, then followed up, “It must be.”

Elias asked the obvious: “What must be?”

“That there is a Valshynarian ship.”

Elias had heard of the Valshynar, though not from a book nor any firsthand encounters. He had learned of their existence in the way most folk hear of a distant land or its people. He knew their reputation preceded them, but he couldn’t recall the details. Something to do with golden ships, perhaps, or sky rifts.

Bertrand could clearly see the puzzled expression on his companion’s face. “The Valshynar are the only people who can navigate sky rifts,” he explained. “Some even say they made the infernal things. Others say they came from them. No one really knows, save the Valshynar themselves, I imagine.”

“No one knows where they came from?” Elias’s furrowed brow unfurrowed as his puzzled expression morphed into a slightly incredulous one.

“It’s a big, wide world, Elias,” Bertrand said.

And so it was—bigger and wider and, as Elias had discovered today, deeper than even the imaginative young traveler had ever imagined. The Valshynar were truly mysterious. They didn’t need coin tricks to prove it so.

As he watched their enigmatic ship approach, Elias could start to make out details. The hull of the vessel seemed more metallic than wooden, shimmering softly in the ship’s dazzling aura. But more than its materials or the ornate oil lamps whose speckled lights gave it the appearance of a floating cityscape, the absence of any sort of balloon was what caught Elias’s attention. How could that be? Did the ship simply tread this impossible place like water? Was it held afloat by magic? Or was he just ignorant of the Valshynar and their myriad technological marvels? He assumed it was likely the latter.

Captain Fairweather, meanwhile, possessed the sudden appearance of a man preparing for important guests, ordering his crew to button up their shirts, to stow away the pile of netting that kept tripping people, Elias on more than one occasion. Third Mate Lowman brought up three more oil lamps from below deck before bringing back down a broken one.

The golden ship grew in both size and beauty as it completed its gracefully smooth approach, aligning itself beside them, revealing an intricacy that was only observable upon closer inspection. The texture of the hull reminded Elias of the scales on a fish.

The men and women of the Valshynarian vessel were probably the least remarkable feature on board, in so much as they were simply people. Albeit people dressed more fashionably than your typical sailor, with well-fitted garments free of the weeks-old stains and lived-in wrinkles Elias was accustomed to. Their beards were trimmed, their hair tied in neat ponytails. Their green waistcoats were adorned with a golden trim that matched their ship. They were certainly more uniform in appearance than the human driftwood that had collected upon The Sleeping Sparrow. Indeed, they looked like they existed for a purpose.

That purpose evidently included them boarding the merchant ship over a slender metal bridge carefully extended between the two vessels. Captain Fairweather waited for them with both arms folded behind his back.

“Welcome,” he said with a single nod and a cleared throat.

Five Valshynarians came aboard before a tall woman finally received the captain’s greeting. “You need our help,” she said as if it were a standard hello.

“We do,” Captain Fairweather admitted just as casually. “I’m a proud man, but I am not a stupid one, generally speaking. We require your assistance.” He peered back into the abyss behind them. “We most definitely require your assistance.”

She nodded, and Elias could not quite tell whether she was agreeing to help or just that they desperately needed it.

“Captain Fairweather,” the captain introduced himself, acting as if he had forgotten his manners.

The woman who appeared to be in charge smirked and kept her name and rank to herself. Instead, she continued inspecting their ship and the people on it.

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Elias was surprised when she paused on him. They were of roughly equal height, and so he had a particularly close view of her stoic features, her aquiline nose, her eyes. They were green like his, as green as emeralds. Greener than eyes should be.

“What’s your name?” she asked the unassuming passenger.

“Elias,” he said. “Elias Fisher.”

“Elias Fisher,” she repeated, and suddenly all eyes gravitated toward the awkward teenager who, until now, had mostly been ignored by The Sleeping Sparrow’s preoccupied crew. “Are you a crew member of this merchant ship, Mr. Fisher?”

“No, ma’am. A passenger. I paid for my passage.” Elias sounded proud of the fact.

“Passage from where?”

“Sapphire’s Reach. Small town. You wouldn’t know it.”

“Try me.”

“Acreton.”

She stopped as if searching for it on some internal map of hers, then followed up with, “And where are you headed now?”

“Same as everyone else on board,” he said. “Sailor’s Rise, ma’am.” He did not mention that it would be his first visit to the city, or to any city of note for that matter, but he probably didn’t have to. Like Bertrand said, people wear certain qualities.

“You expect to make your mark in the city of opportunity, is that it?”

“That’s right.”

“Sailor’s Rise has a Lowtown, you know. It’s full of ambitious out-of-towners who flew for the summit only to find themselves tumbling down, down, down into the city’s ever-growing shadow.”

“I have a plan,” Elias said a little too cockily.

“And what exactly is this plan, boy?”

“Perseverance, ma’am.”

“Perseverance?”

Elias’s gaze retreated to his worn leather boots, which appeared even more threadbare than usual next to her impeccable ones. “I never knew my pa,” he said as images of his father flashed into memory, though he wondered if they truly were memories rather than mere constructs created by that wild imagination of his.

“He died when I was young,” Elias continued. “He was a sailor, the seafaring kind, until one day he didn’t sail home. We might have been destitute after that, but my mother… she found work wherever she could, not taking no for an answer. She wanted stability for her family, and so she built it—one pebble at a time. That stability was my stepping stone, and I intend to use it. Perseverance, ma’am. That’s my plan.”

If nothing else, the Valshynarian woman seemed genuinely entertained by the boy’s answer. “That is quite the story, Elias Fisher.” She lingered on each syllable of his full name.

Elias, meanwhile, did not reveal that it was a story whose telling he practiced each evening as anxious thoughts skipped through his mind like a flat stone upon water, refusing to sink. He did not reveal that he had been waiting for the moment someone would question his ambition, his audacity. He was no man of means, after all, but he could be a man with a worthy tale. Elias still believed in the power of stories.

As for the familiar faces now squinting at him distrustfully—as if Elias had been wearing a mask this entire trip, only to remove it now—he couldn’t say what they thought of him or his carefully rehearsed speech.

One by one, the quizzical looks peeled away from Elias as the Valshynarian woman returned her attention to Captain Fairweather. She gestured toward her visibly superior vessel and said, “We’ll position our ship ahead of yours. Maintain a close distance.”

The captain didn’t ask how long this all might take, nor did he even confirm where it was she was taking them. There was no choice to be made—only a single path to salvation. They would follow it blindly.

All except for one man, apparently. He was a tall, muscular bloke who had used his size to intimidate fellow crew members on more than one occasion that Elias had observed over the past few days. He tried to do so again now, approaching the Valshynarian woman against the very clear wishes of his scowling captain. “Why should we trust you?” the big man asked her.

“It’s not my concern whether or not you trust me,” she said.

“Back off, Leon,” the captain interjected. “That’s an order.”

But rather than backing off, Leon inched forward—and learned a hard lesson.

The Valshynarian woman grabbed him by the collar of his disheveled shirt, then lifted a man twice her weight a foot off the deck. The reaction from the merchant ship’s crew was immediate. Despite everything they had just witnessed, this proved to be the most unbelievable.

Leon clawed at the balled fist holding him midair, trying to free himself from her iron grip. She threw him ten feet forward and into a pile of netting—a merciful landing place, all considering.

Leon did not make another move, in part because Captain Fairweather had his men restrain the insubordinate imbecile, who it was safe to assume would not have a job aboard The Sleeping Sparrow for much longer—if they ever made it out of here. That now seemed less likely.

“My deepest apologies,” the captain pleaded with the Valshynar. “Please don’t abandon us because of one fool, who I assure you will face… consequences.”

But the woman said nothing more as she departed ahead of her crew.

Only her footsteps made any sound, rattling their skinny metal bridge as her silent followers trailed closely behind in a single file. The bridge folded into itself in their wake before disappearing into the golden ship. Elias couldn’t see who was operating the mechanism, assuming someone had.

Despite the incident, the Valshynarian vessel veered ahead of The Sleeping Sparrow as promised before eventually changing course. The merchant ship followed obediently, though without guiding landmarks or shifting headwinds, their change in direction felt at once directionless.

Elias had never much liked putting his faith in people, especially people with cause for retaliation.

This arrangement continued for some time, though time was still a mystery here, and more so with each passing minute. Until suddenly and absent any warning, the Valshynarian ship vanished without a trace. Certainly, there was nowhere it could have turned to hide. It had simply disappeared as if the vessel had never been there in the first place.

Whispers of confusion permeated The Sleeping Sparrow, including Bertrand’s as he looked to Elias for answers his acquaintance was ill-prepared to answer. “What in heaven or hell just happened?”

Elias shrugged, still staring at the empty space that had been occupied by their would-be saviors mere seconds ago. “I was going to ask you that,” he said.

“Do you think they’ve abandoned us?” Bertrand asked.

For reasons he couldn’t yet understand, Elias squeezed the one valuable coin in his vest pocket, a single relic that Captain Fairweather had refunded him that very morning. “No,” he replied, though he couldn’t say what made him so certain.

And then came a flash of white so blinding that it stung Elias’s eyes and overwhelmed his vision, until he couldn’t help but wonder, once again, if he had lost his sight.