Adeena was awoken from her nap by an insistent knocking on the door of her tiny cabin. She groaned and rolled over. It came again.

“Go away!” she growled. She’d been having a lovely dream about a merfolk lady she’d known back in Crowncourt, and was none to amused to have been wrenched from it.

“Captain Yassin!?” came the voice of one of her new recruits, the gnome… what was her name? Helga Himmelfahrt? Susi Semmelhaft? Why did gnomes have such stupid names? “I’m sorry to bother you-”

“Go away!” she shouted, rolling onto her back.

“But Captain!” wailed the gnome. “There is a situation!”

Heidi Hammerschmidt, that was it. Some artificer, of all things, from Althaea. Why she had signed up with them, Adeena had no idea. But she had good ‘grades’ in her ‘physical education classes,’ which seemed to mean she knew the basics of fighting, and one could never have too many spellslingers – even weird ones who used magi-tek contraptions to channel magic – so Adeena hadn’t seen any reason to deny her.

“Whatever it is, it can wait!” said Adeena, pulling her pillow over her face.

“But Captain! First-Lieutenant Clawdia-”

Adeena groaned and sat up, fumbling for her glasses before wedging them on her nose as she stood, waiting a heartsbeat for the familiar, chilly feeling of the glamour to reach her toes before moving to the door.

“What has that insufferable woman done now?” said Adeena, wrenching the door open and looking down at the three foot gnome.

Heidi was dressed in brown coveralls, smelt sharply of motor-oil, and had grease smeared on her amber skinned face. Behind her, Adeena could see some kind of half-disassembled device of inscrutable purpose on the small communal table, one of them leaking some kind of acid that was slowly scoring the wood.

“She’s out on the bowsprit –that’s the bit on the front, I asked– and Captain Bloodmoon is very angry, and we’re about to hit the Seatstorm!” said Heidi. “The Captain –not you, ma’am, the other one– says that if First Lieutenant Clawdia doesn’t come in, she’ll be knocked off or electrocuted. And I tried to tell her to come in, but she wouldn’t listen to me, and Mr. Xavier is, um, a little bit tipsy, and I didn’t know what to do-”

There were two remaining veteran members of her crew – the ones who hadn’t retired, left for more successful companies, or been killed.

The first was Xavier, her right hand for over a seven hundred cycles. He was an excellent fighter, a good drill sergeant, and generally, so long as he wasn’t indulging in his various vices too heavily, an all around competent and reliable first officer. He was also a trusted friend and confidant, the last real one she had left.

And then… then there was Clawdia. Or, as she insisted on being called, ‘Marquess-Sorceress-First Lieutenant Clawdia Bobblewhisk the Third.’ She was an excellent sorceress, almost without peer in the Shattered Sea, really, but also a royal (did a Marquess count royal?) pain in her arse.

Clawdia was a grimalkin, the least fey of all the fey creatures who made Ruvera home. Least fey, in that they were at least somewhat compatible with mortal societies and didn’t try to randomly eat children or stab people for no reason, but still pretty fey. Standing at around three and a half-feet tall, they looked like upright, talking house-cats – and usually acted like them. Clawdia had been with the company even longer, and had Adeena been human would have turned her red hair grey all by herself.

“Get back here, you stupid woman!” shouted Adeena as in the distance thunder rumbled.

“Mmm, we don’t want to,” yawned Clawdia, who was lounging on the end of the slip of wood suspended at the fore of the craft out over the void and looking directly down at the scrubby grassland of the borderlands below.

“That’s an order!”

“Is the Captain Adeena Yassin’s request, mmm, related to our duties as part of the company?” said Clawdia, lazily flicking her tail and pawing at the air.

“Well,” admitted Adeena. “No, not strictly speaking-”

“Then we don’t have to,” said Clawdia smugly. “Not in our contract.”

“You’ll fall, and then I’ll be down a damn sorceress!” said Adeena. “Get back here!”

“Grimalkin have excellent balance,” replied Clawdia with a yawn, licking one of her large, furry white paws and cleaning behind her left ear. The ship lurched as it hit a pocket of turbulence, and Clawdia’s body moved alarmingly, but failed to phase her. “We always land on our feet.”

“And will you ‘land on your feet’ after you’re struck by lightning?” said Adeena. “Or will you be very dead long before you hit the ground?”

“We cast a lightning ward,” said Clawdia, rolling over, closing her eyes, and stretching.

“Um, sorry, but First Lieutenant-” began Heidi.

“Marquess-Sorceress-First Lieutenant!” corrected Clawdia.

“Ah, yes, um, Marquess-Sorceress-First Lieutenant,” said Heidi. “You, um, do know that the voltage difference between a conjured bolt of lightning, and the real thing is, um, very big? Right?”

Clawdia yawned widely. “Of course we do.”

“Oh, well, um… then don’t you want to come back?” said Heidi.

There was a beat of silence.

“Get back here!” shouted Adeena.

“Mmm… no,” said Clawdia.

Adeena let out a deep, gravelly growl and pinched the bridge of her nose. “OK, fine. How about I buy you a fish when we get to the Seat?”

Clawdia rolled over and opened a yellow eye. “Two fish,” she said immediately.

“Fine, two fish, if you come back here and you don’t go back there, or anywhere else precarious, for the rest of this trip,” said Adeena, who had known the Grimalkin long enough to be specific in her wording. “Agreed?”

Fey creatures were, by virtue of their nature, bound by their word – physically unable to willingly break a promise made. Of course, they were as adept as demons in using words in weasley ways, so you had to be careful: many a wanderer in the Feywild had been ‘invited for dinner’ to find themselves on the menu. Grimalkin didn’t do that kind of thing – unless you were a mouse, but they weren’t above abusing the wording of their promises in a whole host of petty and annoying ways.

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“Deal,” said Clawdia, rolling back over and standing. Adeena held her breath as the cat-like woman strolled nonchalantly back along the round and slippery piece of wood. Thankfully, she made it, and the small sorceress hopped down. “You see, we have excellent-”

Adeena grabbed her by the ear, eliciting an outraged howl.

“You ever do that again, and I will shave you. You hear me you stupid, ridiculous, irritating moggie?” said Adeena.

“Let us go!” yowled Clawdia. “Let us go!”

“No,” said Adeena, leaning in close so that her small nose was half an inch from Clawdia’s wet, black one. “I’ll do worse: I’ll bathe you.”

Adeena let go, and Clawdia hissed at her, and then raced off in the direction of their cabin.

“Thank-you, Private Hammerschmidt,” said Adeena.

“Ma’am!” said Heidi, saluting and moving off, leaving Adeena to massage her temples.

“Much appreciated, Captain Yassin,” said the goblin in command of the Skyship, Captain Julvera Bloodmoon, coming up behind her. Yet another small woman, albeit one with green skin, silver hair that showed her age, bat-like pointed ears, and large red eyes. “Seeing a passenger plummet to their death wasn’t high on my agenda when I woke up. And the paperwork…”

“A lot of that?” asked Adeena lightly. Beyond greetings and showing her Writ of Passage she hadn’t had much to do with the short green woman, or the rest of her crew apart from the mess’s chef and bartender. They were pretty busy, and their quarters were in the rear section of the ship, separated from the passengers at the fore by the cargo hold full of post and cargo.

“A fair bit,” said Bloodmoon. “Less than when I was in the Sky-Legion.”

“This was your ship?” asked Adeena.

“The Brightspark?” said Bloodmoon. “Oh no, she was retired from the military… must be three hundred cycles ago? I’ve only had her about sixty. A bit of a step down from my old ship. Beauty she was – the Skyrender – Interceptor Class, fast and sleek, fifty cannons and a crew of two hundred. But I’ve got great-grandkids now and this posting came up, so I applied for it and the dragons saw fit to reward my service with something a bit cushier. A few trips a cycle, the rest with the family – not quite retirement, but that never interested me anyway.”

It was always a bit strange talking to one of the Imperium’s true believers. People who willing submitted to the tyrannical lizards, who really believed in the Imperium, who liked being servants. The very idea was an anathema to Adeena. She was certain now, given Bloodmoon’s age and that she’d been in the Sky Legion, that they’d definitely fought on different sides during the Razing of Chace.

A thousand sky-ships, volley after volley, a never-ending rumble of cannon-blasts-

She should bid her good day, Adeena knew. Turn around and go back to her cabin. Drop it. But Adeena had never been very good at listening to her better angels. And she wanted to hear it from the woman, hear how she slept, how she played with her great-grandchildren after committing such wanton butchery. Adeena’s hands weren’t clean, she’d been a monster hunter and a sellsword back when Crowncourt had been the largest city in the world and the Shattered Sea nothing but a treacherous backwater no one with any sense wanted to live in, but she’d never killed someone who’d surrendered.

“So you grew up in the Imperium?” asked Adeena.

“Aye,” said Bloodmoon. “Ma was one of the first to take the Promise; I was born in Everhearth a few dozen cycles after the Calamity.”

Around six hundred. Adeena hadn’t known that goblins could even live that long, let alone still be so spritely.

“Straight into the Legion?” asked Adeena.

Bloodmoon shook her head and laughed. “I’d be on an Admiralty pension if I had,” she said. “No, I was a farmhand after basic education, painted in my downtime. Although I studied mathematics during the nights – something to do, and the dragons encourage it. Always be learning, they say. Put me into the navigator programme when I signed up, fast tracked to officer when I showed a bit of flair.”

“So it’s all you’ve ever known?” said Adeena. “Don’t you want more? To live by your own rules? To be free?”

Bloodmoon’s entire body language shifted, from open to stiff and closed. “More? Free?” she said with derision. “Being a slave for the orcs? Hunted for sport by the wood elves? Dying at less than a hundred from malnutrition or exposure? Before the Imperium, that’s all there was for my people. Under the dragons I get food, housing, education, health-care, respect.”

“Sure,” said Adeena. “But you’re still a servant-”

“My Ma came to the dragons as an illiterate slave, and what did they do?” said Bloodmoon, speaking over her. “They burnt her captors to cinders and shattered her chains. They healed her, fed her, put clothes on her back, educated her, gave her a warm home and more opportunity than she could have ever dreamed of. She died in comfort and dignity at six hundred and fifty seven cycles as a renown botanist, surrounded by family and bouquets of orchids named after her. And what did they ask? Loyalty, and to contribute what she could while she could – nothing more. I am proud to serve the Imperium, to serve the dragons: as far as I see it the whole world would be better off with their guidance. Don’t pity me, outlander, for I pity you.”

“And Chace?” asked Adeena with a sneer. “Did Chace benefit from their ‘wise guidance?’”

Bloodmoon flinched, but refused to look away. “The Chacians and the rest of the idealistic fools who followed them sealed their fate when they murdered Mithrezenthixia,” she said. “They brought that on themselves.”

“All one and a half million of them?” asked Adeena bitterly. “The children? The old? The sick? They burnt all the same.”

Bloodmoon looked away. “I don’t have time to debate history – I have to prepare the ship for the Seatstorm. I suggest you get below decks shortly, Captain.” She moved to leave, before pausing. “And if I were you, I wouldn’t say such things at the Seat of the Stars; you didn’t break any law, but Dragonsworn have been known to kill for less.”

Adeena sighed and drew out her half-smoked cigar as the goblin woman stomped off. That had been intemperate of her. She was used to speaking her mind, but the Imperium wasn’t one the Free Cities of the Shattered Sea. If you said something that annoyed or angered someone with a bit of power there, they’d probably try and stab you, or else drive you out of the port and that would be that. But here? Go ‘too far’ and the dragons would either throw her in a labour camp for a few epic-cycles, or else incinerate her, their preferred method of execution, and if they tried that… well, then they’d become interested.

And things dragons were interested in were rarely seen outside whatever dark laboratory they ended up in ever again. She couldn’t afford to be quite so cavalier with her personal safety, not on this trip.

She relit her cigar with a match and looked ahead at the oncoming storm. The black and grey clouds rumbled and roiled, flashing with lightning, some twenty thousand feet above the scrubby grassland around the Wardline. Here and there, Imperial forts jutted from the flats like jagged fangs of obsidian, and she spotted a few low-flying airships patrolling the wastes, ever vigilant for any monsters that strayed in from the Wyrdlands that lay beyond the horizon.

Up above the dark clouds she spotted the snow-capped tip of the Seat itself, which despite the immense heat of the late Setting remained unmelted. The Seat of the Stars, the true heart of the Imperium, the place where most dragons dwelled. It was a giant volcano that they had raised to the skies after the Calamity, some seven hundred and eighty Cycles ago – a fall back, or so it was said, in case the Wardline hadn’t stopped the oncoming Wyrd, which had travelled overland.

But the Wardline had stopped the Wyrd, dead in its tracks, and now the Imperium dominated the last corner of the continent not twisted by the dimension-shattering wave into a kaleidoscope of shifting planes and myriad monsters that prowled the now dead cities and towns of the Old World. Even most of the Shattered Sea’s many city states weren’t beyond their grasp: being forced to pay mark-ups on rice that were nothing but disguised tithes, racking up trade deficits that cities would never be able to balance, making demands that couldn’t be refused…

The Seat was a colossal floating testament to how stupid she and the rest of the would-be rebels had been to ever think they could defeat the dread wyrms. It hadn’t mattered that they’d had an Avatar on their side: the incarnation of the Shamash the Sun God had barely managed to slay a few dragons before the mortal shell had burnt to a crisp by the channeled divinity. Adeena should have broken contract the minute she’d seen that, taken her company and as many civilians as they could fit in her ships’ holds and run. But no, she’d stayed and fought and risked it all for the chance at a better tomorrow, and her people had died in their droves.

Adeena sighed and ran a hand through her long red hair. It didn’t show on her unlined face, but she was getting old. Xavier had told to her about how it was for his people: that once you started approaching your second epic cycle you began to feel differently. How the vast wealth of experience narrowed the imagination; how the fire of youth began to dim; and how you got grumpy, complacent, and comfortable with the way of things. She wasn’t an elf, and she had more fire than most, but it seemed to hold true for her as well. And with what had happened at Chace, that had only sped things up…

The wind began to pick up as the Brightspark approached the ever churning tempest that was the byproduct of the immense magic used to sustain the flying citadel. Sails were furled, lightning-catchers extended, and as the Long Night fell from the east like the blade of a black guillotine Adeena stubbed out her cigar and headed below.