As the captain watched clouds blazing orange from the setting sun, he thought no sight in the world could compare to the sheer majesty of the twisting behemoths of vapor. He leaned back into his chair, congratulating himself on finding another lead for their job: island hunting. It had been his dream job since childhood. Sailing the skies, seeking fortune and prosperity amongst the clouds, was, for him, a dream come to reality. Of course, such ruminations could not go uninterrupted. His atlas officer, responsible for all tasks relating to the atlas shard, spoke up, “I’m sensing a stealthed atlas field in the cloud bank at 7 o’clock.”

The captain stood from his chair and groaned. “I don’t suppose they would just be passing through, now would they?”

The atlas officer only smiled wearily, “I know better than to disturb you for any passing ship. Their heading has been fixed on us for the past half minute.” He said this sparing a mere momentary glance back towards his captain. Typically, maintaining the atlas field, the field that kept them aloft, took a pittance of concentration. However, doing so while tracking a stealthed field took his focus in its entirety.

The captain rang the bell by his side. As the annoyance from his broken repose was pushed out by the adrenaline of the nearly certain battle approaching, he grinned. This ship was as-of-yet combat untested. He would finally see if blowing all of his hard-earned savings and going into debt was worth it. “Ok people, This is the day we have prepared for! To the lot of you who complained during all the ‘pointless drills,’ this is the time to prove yourselves competent. Battlestations!” The deck burst into activity, the noise of the crew suddenly drowned out by the sputtering of the engines starting up. “Ok Rol, I want everything you can give me about them. Weight, speed, the works.”

The officer gave a little twitch. He was fresh out of university, top of his class, yet lacking in any sort of practical experience. He took a deep breath, seemingly pushing uncertainties out of his conscious mind. “I think they’re somewhere between sixty and a hundred twenty tons if the field’s spread is anything to go by. Speed is maybe thirty pels, they should breach cloud cover any second.”

“Bad. They outmass us threefold at the least and we have no maneuverability till engines reach operating temps.”

“Wait. The field split? Seems like a part of the shard was jettisoned forwards?”

“Nah kid, that’s just what stealthed fleets look like when they break formation. How even’s the split?”

“Um it’s a one-eight split, sir. The smaller piece is accelerating… quite drastically.”

The captain began pacing. While not wholly unexpected or even unlikely, that news lay heavy in the captain’s mind. such a fleet of ‘scout and juggernaut’ posed serious threat to them. They would be dead in the sky for a few dozen more seconds, and even after gaining propulsion, they may not be able to escape the smaller scouting ship. If they were crippled enough for the larger ship to engage unimpeded, they would be dead for sure. For now, they could only stand their ground and hope to stall enough to achieve full engine power intact. He slammed the wheel to the right and yelled over the rattling engines’ warmup cycles, “All cannons to port, let’s blow these wastes of atlas out of the sky! Leave our primary for now. Save it for the naut.’”

The crew sprang into action again, footsteps sometimes cutting through engine noise as the last few still resting belowdecks finally emerged. They strained to push the cannons along the rails in the deck to the assigned firing locations. Three satisfying clunks sounded as the three starboard cannons were fixed alongside the port ones. Now the entire crew was out and in position: two for each of the six cannons, three manning the engines and two on designated lookout points. The second atlas officer stood alongside the captain and Rol on the raised aft deck. She pointed towards one of the towering clouds.

“Right there,” she said with a gesture from her off hand. With her able to focus on scouting the enemy, Rol would be able to use his full concentration on manipulating every last smidgen of power from their ship’s shard.

The captain held a golden spyglass with azure engravings of pure atlas up to his eye. That small amount of atlas made it worth a small fortune, perhaps even a small ship’s worth, but he wouldn’t sell it for the world. It was the last thing he had to remember his father with, given to him when he was ten, before his father’s fleet went missing in the biggest recorded overstorm of the century.

With a squint of concentration, the atlas on it glowed and allowed him to see the outline of the ship through clouds. When it finally broke through the mist, he nodded in confirmation. As expected, it was a thin ship with barely any firepower, geared entirely towards speed. It’s forty foot length sported only two small cannons and a harpoon gun. While having no obvious markers of pirate allegiance, the patched hull and overcrowded deck belied their nature.

“Ready.”

Spheres four inches across were slotted into the cannons. They glowed ominously, primed to explode on the first impact after being shot.

“Aim.”

The crew turned the adjustment wheels on the side of the cannons, slowly bringing them to bear on the smaller ship. The engravings upon the cannons began glowing green, gradually brightening. Lor suddenly snapped her gaze to an area slightly above and to the left of the first ship. “Juggernaut’s core unstealthed, field’s getting chaotic”

It was too late to hesitate. Once charged, the cannons would continuously drain power until shot. “Fire.”

Several things happened at once, nearly too fast to register. A peal like thunder resounded through the air from the cannons. Six spots of light, each trailed by a parabolic cloud of smoke, began arcing towards the smaller ship. The clanking of the engines died down and turned into the quiet, confident rumble of engaged engines. The captain slammed down on the throttle, hoping to gain an advantageous lead with the scout soon to be out of the picture. The boiling clouds in the wake of the scout burst and spat out a much larger ship. Before anyone aboard could inspect it closely, it shot out a wave of blue light towards the scout ship. The scout ship remained unaffected, but as the falling orbs of light passed through the wave, their glow dimmed. When they made impact with the scout, rather than exploding gloriously, they dully impacted the deck, causing no real damage besides chipped paint.

“What? How can pirates have atlas pulse capabilities? And with such absurd speed?” Rol stood in shocked silence for a moment. Atlas pulses could be preformed by discharging an overloaded the atlas field, causing a pulse that disempowered any materials outside of rival atlas fields. He theoretically could do one, true, but he would require many minutes of perfect concentration to do so. There were no more than five seconds between Lor’s notification and the pulse.

“Ah kid, it just comes from years of familiarity with the ship and a nontrivial disregard for safety measures. This’ll be a bit tougher than I was expecting.”

“Capt’n, what do we do?” asked a crewmember from below. A few of the older ones had worried expressions. No normal pirate operation had such competent atlas officers.

“The only thing we can: We fight.” He stared at the speedometer. Ten, twenty, thirty, forty pels and still increasing. It would not be enough to escape. He pitched back, starting the most rapid ascent he could. The scout did the same, the two bidding for the advantages altitude provided. “Cannons five and six to front.” The crew began struggling to push the cannons against the acceleration and slope.

As the scout spiraled with them, they heard blasts from behind. The captain swiveled back to see, observing the juggernaut for the first time. It was surprisingly short for its weight, only ninety feet or so. The deck was covered with a dozen regular cannons and three gargantuan ones. It was these three that had fired the shots towards them. The captain traced out the parabolas and began to maneuver his ship. If he was any slower, or had a ship any less agile, they would have been hit. However, by slamming the wheel to the side and rolling desperately to the left, he was able to just barely fit between two of the ascending shells.

The move was not without consequence, however. It allowed the scout ship to catch up, rising into view over the starboard railing. One of the cannons, in the process of moving, slid back, nearly knocking one of the crew overboard. “Port, ready another volley! Aim fifteen degrees right, as far up as they’ll go.” He bet on the scout ship trying to get on top of them. Ships with meager firepower like theirs often attempted to get above enemies to simply drop cannonballs onto them. It was effective, easy and devastating, but most importantly for him, predictable.

“If you value your life, hang on and fire on my command!” The crew clung to convenient bars on the sides of the cannons and engines. The atlas officers beside him hooked their fingers into the machinery beside them. As the captain, he had long since strapped into his swivel chair.

The ship rolled, the deck nearly vertical, the cannons facing back over the deck towards what once was starboard. “Fire!” The second volley shot itself towards the scouting ship that had generously aligned itself according to the captain’s predictions. Unfortunately, when precariously hanging off the side of a cannon, pressing buttons with precise timing was a bit tricky, so only two cannonballs ended up hitting. One uselessly struck the underside of the ship, adding another gaping hole that needed to be repaired, but not impacting structural integrity or functionality, sans the hammocks of some unfortunate pirates, in the slightest. The other bore a bit more fruit, striking the prow and throwing two cannon operators and part of their cannon overboard. Cheers sounded from below. The captain smiled. First hit was his. Hopefully the next ones would be his as well.

He accelerated from the lull in velocity, rendering the Juggernaut’s second volley useless. Peeling away from the scout ship, the captain was confronted with a view of a now much closer juggernaut. Fancy maneuvers ate up time and the distance advantage he once held. Now in range of their normal cannons, the pirate ship opened fire. The continuous bursts and trailing smoke left a chaotic picture, one the captain scoffed at. With only five cannons able to target them due to the pirate’s lack of mobile cannons, the asynchronous spread was not nearly dense enough to pose a threat with such distance. They were dodged with a twist to the left here and a quick ascent there.

Now that the juggernaut was to their port side, they could fire on it. “Ready the cannons, fire on three,” said the captain before counting down. The target was too big to miss, and their field had not yet recovered enough to pulse. Plumes of fire erupted on the juggernaut’s massive hull, blossoming with crimson fury. When the smoke cleared, the holes were not nearly as big as the captain had hoped.

An exclamation of “Wow. Dense hull.” was heard from Lor.

“Again!” yelled the captain, launching off another round a dozen seconds after the first. More holes appeared, but the juggernaut was extremely well armored, a trait not shared by the captain’s ship which got hit by it’s first cannonball. It was a solid hit, right next to the prow. Splinters of wood showered everyone on deck. One of the crew manning the lone prow cannon screamed when a particularly large splinter embedded itself in his arm. He collapsed and was dragged belowdecks by his cannonmate.

The chaotic spiraling dance that ships with broadside cannons were wont to fall into was interrupted with the entry of the scouting ship. Its crew had turned it back around and were preparing to intercept them on their next pass.

The captain decided to take a risky gamble. As long as the scout ship remained in the sky, they could not win. It would make fleeing impossible and hinder any tactic they used to try to hurt the much more formidable juggernaut. The scout ship’s cannon on their far side was dysfunctional. If they passed there, the only way they could be attacked was with the harpoon gun. Typically, this would be bad, rooting them in place. However, it would also keep the scout ship still and in perfect range of their main weapon. “Prepare the main weapon.”

He swung the ship to the right to pass on the far side of the scout ship. Four crewmembers broke off from their cannon stations and began fiddling with an array of dials and gauges on the floor. Rol grimaced in concentration as their atlas field started intensifying. Sparks of blue could be seen out of the corner of the captain’s eyes. He began laughing with glee. What a glorious theater to test the atlas ray, first generation, the installment that had single handedly wiped out his savings and an entire regiment of freeport members if the rumors were to be believed. Behind them, the juggernaut continued spewing out cannonballs, but their danger faded marginally with their increasing distance.

“Keep it primed at full charge! When we turn, hold on and watch the show!”

They raced past the scout ship. Suddenly, a loud thud could be heard, slightly shaking the ship. They had taken the bait. The harpoon’s rope grew taut, causing the deck to lurch sideways. The ship was yanked counterclockwise. Rather than resisting the pull, the captain added to the spin. He raised his fist to the sky dramatically, casting a shadow across the machinery beside him. The scouting ship came into view over the tip of the prow, its crew stumbling back from the inertia of halting a slightly larger ship. The captain slammed his fist onto the button with an incoherent shout of excitement.

A ray of blue raced out from the prow of their ship, traveling the hundred meter gap between them in fractions of a second. It ripped through the hull, occasionally flashing orange as parts within the ship burst and melted under the ray. At such a close range, there was no dodging, no missing, no spreading of damage. Just a pure, undiluted, stream of destruction. It was over in a second. The crew stared in silence through a rough hole several feet in diameter through the enemy ship. With a loud crack, the front half broke out and began plummeting towards the clouds below.

The back half of the ship, the one hosting the atlas shard, began rapidly rising into the air. “Get away! Their field’s collapsing!” Lor screamed from beside him. The captain put the ship into full reverse, straining the propellers. However, they did not shoot backwards as he had intended. Instead, they pitched forwards and started being pulled downwards. They were still tethered to the front half of the bisected ship. “Pry us off, lads!” A few scrambled to the rope, hacking at it with knives drawn from shoulder sheathes.

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“It’s metal-woven! We won’t get through it in time!” one yelled. The captain was startled and could feel sweat begin to form on his forehead. Metal-woven rope was ludicrously expensive, not something he’d consider in run-of-the-mill pirates’ price range. A taunting blast of horns sounded out from the juggernaut. The captain glanced despairingly from the sparking wreck rising above them to the salvo of shells racing towards them, several on a collision course. There was only one course of action he could take now, and it would be costly. Decisively strengthening his resolve, he gave the wheel a deft twist and stopped the reversing engines.

The ship sank into the path of a shell. “Down! Brace!” The shell impacted and a burst of flames swept over the deck. Splinters of wood flew through the air, barely in front of the curtain of smoke and flames that swept out from the impact site. Screams sounded from within the cloud, one cutting off, another fading into the distance. When the smoke cleared, the captain stared at the damages. A large chunk of the port side had been ripped off, an entire cannon missing. Beyond that, the surrounding wood was scorched black.

As the ship lurched backwards, the tether having been attached to the missing part of the hull, the crew looked around before bursting into a cacophony as their shock faded.

“Ahk! My arm! What happened to my arm?”

“Help me close his wounds! Get me some bandages!”

“Where’s Orm? He was right where the shell hit!”

“He’s dead! He’s actually dead!”

The captain closed his eyes. This wasn’t the first time he had lost crew, nor would it be the last, he expected. That didn’t make the loss any less painful, though. He felt like a failure, making a choice knowing death would come of it. Sure, the alternative was the death of them all, but any trade regarding lives of allies disgusted him. In his mind, a pyrrhic victory was no better than an early loss. Now he would have to live with the death of two more on his hands: one just a corpse on his deck, the other given the dishonor of falling beneath the clouds.

The last remnants of the scout ship detonated before them. Even with their ship just barely out of range, the captain felt no victory. Lor and Rol winced slightly at the shockwave from the exploding atlas, but stayed silent, the solemn air around the helm bearing down on them.

When he reopened his eyes, he locked his gaze onto the juggernaut far to their left as it started to flee. He felt grief. He felt anger. He desired vengeance. Without the scout ship, they stood no chance. He pushed the ship forwards, through the sparkling remnants of the detonation, past ash that spiraled into the dusk below. The captain stood, facing the remnants of the crew. Their number was diminished, many convalescing in the rooms below, but that in no way weakened their fighting spirit.

“They were Orm and Morgan, Two of our comrades who will never again see the rising of the sun. The life of a skyfarer is one of danger, of walking the edge of death. Today, they were pushed off that edge and will forever remain amongst the clouds. The pirates ahead, parasites unto this world, have taken them from us. Will we let them get away with this theft?”

A resounding cry of denial burst up from the crowd, tears were shed and fists were tightened.

“We will hunt them down and make them accompany our old comrades to the eternal sky. We will honor our friends in the dying flames of their lives.”

As the captain gestured grandiosely towards the crew, they cheered and beat their fists against the railings.

“For Morgan!”

“For my brother!”

“Down those pirates!”

The captain spoke up again, his voice rising over the din, “We fight now not for wealth, not for glory, but for our friends so that they do not go alone! You know what to do. Do them proud.” With that, he strained the engines to their limits. The speedometer resumed its steady turn: forty, fifty, fifty five and finally sixty pels. They blazed through the sky, the smoke behind them stretching into the distance until it merged with the clouds behind them. The sun set further, turning what had been columns of orange into towering pillars glowing pale red.

They swiftly closed the gap between them and the juggernaut. Four men crowded around the sole forwards positioned cannon. As quickly as they could, they loaded, charged and fired it. Again and again.

Miss.

Miss.

Hit.

Miss.

Hit.

Hit.

Hit.

Even as fire blossomed and smoke flew from the deck of their enemies, they stood in silence. Not a single jeer could be heard as they watched the embodiment of the smoldering anger in their hearts manifest atop their prey’s deck.

“Fire the ray again.” Rol merely nodded and began charging their field again. Again, as their field fell back to normal, a ray of blue pierced through the air from the prow of their ship and struck the hull of the juggernaut. Unlike last time, it merely scored a deep gash across the ship. It wasn’t focused on a single spot for the entire time, so it was unable to burn through the ship. It was, however, enough to irreparably damage a set of engines.

The already slower ship was slowed even further. They pulled alongside it in a manner of seconds and began firing with the four cannons still attached to port. Unbalanced from the ray, the enemy crew did not react to the continuous stream of shells slamming against their hull. By the time they returned fire, it was too late. The vast majority of the juggernaut’s cannons were now useless, and the entire side was riddled with holes. Each of their return shots missed, none even coming close as the captain simply accelerated around them. The desperate pulse the juggernaut gave off was far too late as all the damage had already been done.

As they were rounding to make another pass, Lor spoke up. “More fields below, three, same size. 11, 4 and 7 o’clock.” The captain immediately was gripped by fear. In his state of fervor, it didn’t even occur to him that the horn call from earlier was a cry for help. The sound of foghorns mimicking those from before sounded out from around them, cementing his fear. Ships shot up from the clouds below, traveling nigh vertically at close to fifty pels. They were each as massive as the juggernaut, the patchwork of their hulls being the only way to tell them apart.

As they were surrounded, the captain thought frantically. Fortunately, the original juggernaut’s threat was near negligible, its artillery and starboard cannons utterly destroyed from their earlier bombardment and its mobility functionally gone. That didn’t make their current position any better, though. They were still stuck in the middle of three ships with superior firepower with their main weapon still stabilizing. The sounds of their first cannon shots cut the captain’s panicking short. Their only chance was to loose them in the cloud cover below.

“Rol, we’re going to cut the field,” he shouted so the crew could hear and prepare.

“Excuse me, what?”

“We can’t slip past, not with cover fire from all three, we need cloud cover.”

“That’s not getting cover, it’s suicide”

“This ship is new. It should be able to reestablish field before we hit the understorm.”

“Should? I’m betting my life on should?”

“Rol. Now.” Lor, at least, agreed with the captain’s assessment.

Without a sound, the field surrounding them and keeping the ship aloft vanished. Everyone on board felt their stomachs rise as they began to plummet. After a few seconds, the captain signaled Rol to reactivate the field. Unlike the startup from the dock which had been nearly silent, a high pitched whine could be heard as the field began to establish itself to slow the ship back to a gentle drift. Rol’s face was strained as he focused his hardest on maintaining field stability. Everyone was shoved into the deck with the violent deceleration before they stopped, just barely above the clouds. The captain quickly lowered the ship beneath the mists, activating the engines after changing heading to try to throw off pursuit.

“They’re heading to intercept still.”

“Crud. What’s with these people? They’ve got someone pulse capable and those ships all seem to have someone close to as competent as you.”

“I am not doing that again. My life was just flashing before my eyes there. Do you have any idea how hard it is to focus that hard while in freefall?”

Loud thundering echoed down from above. Glowing orbs were visible as they descended through the clouds in a wide spread around them. While being obscured by the clouds, the pirates only had a vague directional sense of where they were. However, with just one unlucky shot, they would be able to hone in on their location. The captain sent a prayer to the only deity he believed in as he wracked his brains once more for a solution. The last vestiges of red faded to black. The clouds, now without light, boiled around them.

As they raced through the clouds, the captain got a brief glimpse of the moon through a gap in the clouds. An idea came to him. It wasn’t good, but it was the only chance they had left. Slipping by the ships was an impossibility without getting blasted to smithereens. The only way they could escape their encirclement was to blast through a ship to make an opening. The only way to do that was to destroy a ship in a single pass before others could come to reinforce. The only way to do such a thing would be to use the main weapon in a decidedly risky way.

“Rol, you said last week that you practiced pulsing back at the university.”

“I did say that. But that was in a controlled environment with no time limit or distractions. I couldn’t even control the time of the pulse.”

“How long did it take you to overload the field?”

“It took me… about two and a half minutes.”

“That’ll have to good enough. Overload the field. When you pulse, send it through the ray. It should be back up a few dozen seconds from now.”

“Insanity,” mumbled Lor from beside him.

“I was an atlas officer before I got injured. I have some understanding of how this works. A pulse is just discharging an overloaded field all at once. The weapon is just discharging an energized field. Practically the same thing.”

“What? No! Even if I could pulse, there’s no guarantee we come out intact.”

“Look, in three minutes they collapse on us. We’ll be dead for sure then. I’d take maybe dead over definitely dead any day.”

“Fine.” He sat and began directing more energy into the field, slowly increasing its intensity.

“How long till you’ll be ready?”

“Between two minutes and two minutes thirty. Won’t be able to control when. Don’t disturb me, I need absolute focus.”

The captain began making loops, trying to stall the collapse for as long as possible. The hail of metal continued around them, some passing no more than twenty feet from the ship. A minute and a half passed. “Ok Lor, it’s time. Point me towards the farthest ship, as exact as possible.”

He pointed his ship along her indicated direction and began to accelerate once again. A few seconds later, he broke out from the floor of clouds. Immediately, the rain of ordinance became much more accurate. With the ability to see the trajectories now, the captain managed to continue dodging. He could feel the growing field around them. As it began to loose stability, right around Rol’s two minute mark, he pointed the ship directly towards their target and accelerated while letting out another prayer.

With them now unable to deviate from their path lest they miss the essential pulse, the rain around them turned deadly. A cannonball clipped one of their stabilizer wings, blasting the entire tip off and jamming a control surface. Another landed on the side of the hull, shaking the entire ship. As they neared the target, it launched a massive barrage at them. The captain closed his eyes in the face of imminent death.

Suddenly, fifteen seconds away from collision with the ship and a mere one from the wave of ordinance, it happened. From the wave of the ship came a spear, not a ray, of light. It lanced through the air, spreading a wake of blue behind it. The approaching cannonballs were caught by the edge of the wake and harmlessly thudded against the deck. They embedded themselves into the deck, the entire crew let out a breath when they stayed inert and didn’t explode. In the time it had taken for the crew to exhale, the pulse reached the ship.

As the pulse reached the ship, there was no fire, no hole, no gash. Only a light to rival the noonday sun and a wave of pressure even the most atlas-deaf of the crew could feel. When the light cleared, it revealed not a ship but a cloud of debris. Most were blasted away from the impact site, away from the captain’s ship, yet a few still raced towards them with incredible speed. As the glow of false day faded back to night, Rol collapsed, seemingly in time with their ship. The captain tried to begin ascent to no avail. Despite only gradually descending, the inexorable fall was far more scary than the planned freefall earlier.

“Lor, what’s wrong with the ship? Why’s it falling?” The captain asked Lor who had taken control of the field when Rol collapsed.

“The shard. Your idiocy caused a piece to vaporize. Not enough atlas to maintain field.”

The solution was an easy one, yet it hurt his heart more than anything else that had happened this day. He held up the spyglass. “Is this enough?” Lor nodded and he sighed, be it in relief or disappointment he did not know. “I’m sorry, father,” he whispered under his breath. As he handed over the spyglass, the last few memories of the man that had inspired him to take to the skies flashed through his mind once again.

Lor mentally ripped the atlas engravings off the spyglass, crushing it into a ball of gold and broken glass in the process. She briefly opened the shard chamber to toss the scraps in. As the door closed, a puff of dust from pulverized atlas escaped and spiraled into the night sky. The glowing helix of blue reaching towards the sky was beautiful. The captain stared at it, trying to drown out his screaming conscience in the glimmer of the escaping light.

The ship regained lift and he steered it towards the mass of clouds to the left. The ship shuddered and bucked for control as it turned, but he barely paid any attention to it. Before entering the cloud, he spared one last glance at the scene of destruction behind him. When the ship entered the cloud, he finally lowered the speed and allowed himself to sleep.

He woke up in his chair with a start, startling the few crew that had remained outside for the night. It was past dawn, the sun had long since risen and was reflecting off the flat plane of clouds beneath them. Today was the clearest he had ever seen the skies. There were no colossal towers, no oppressive sheets, no floating wisps, just the flat plane of the understorm a thousand feet down. He was glad the pirates hadn’t revisited in the day. He had seen them retreat after they destroyed that ship, needing to tow the crippled juggernaut behind them.

He looked around, staring at the endless white expanse below him. He spotted a speck in the distance, marring the otherwise monochromatic skyscape. On autopilot, he turned to investigate it. The ship limped its way forwards after the engines sputtered to a start.

His glacial pace caused an hour to pass before he could properly identify the object: An island. A small one, one with a small grove of trees resting atop it and vines reaching towards the clouds below on the sides. His brief flash of triumph was quickly tinted with the losses he had suffered. With a melancholic smile, he contemplated what the island would sell for. Surely there was enough to pay for repairs and generous reparations for the relatives of those that died. He suspected that there was more than enough to pay off his debt and to give hefty bonuses to the crew.

He would trade it to return his lost crewmates or his spyglass in an instant, but such was impossible. Such was the life and loss of one who sailed the skies. He would move forwards, discover more, lose more, live more. He would do them proud and leave their memories to drift peacefully through the clouds, like any skyfarer would want. Like he would want.