I know every street of the undercity by heart. I can tell where I am without looking, just by the particular shade of darkness. Down in Bottlestreet where my apartment is, there’s an enormous greenhouse overhead on the higher layers of the city, this massive dome of blue glass. When the sun is on its way up it shines right through and that greenhouse becomes a lens that turns the entire neighborhood a vivid azure color, the silhouettes of the plants growing inside becoming huge magnified leaf-shadows that cover the walls and rooftops.
Like an underwater garden.
I like Bottlestreet. I like Hairpin less– its a mean neighborhood named for the sharp, almost jagged turns in the streets. There, the sky is dark. A dripping, damp kind of dark, just warm enough to feel uncomfortably humid. Water rains down with the consistency of human sweet. It’s coming from the vents and pipes above.
But by the time I get to Compass Square, blue sky starts to show through. It’s a good day up there. The clouds are piled high. They resemble fortresses of bubbled, organic matter, like the foam at the edges of waves. They look like a pillowfort you could sleep away forever in.
I’m looking up and I’m seeing this from between the buildings with long strings of laundry stretched out between the second floors. I watch as ships drift and the flocks of terns and seagulls that nest on their rigging chase after, gliding with the agility of feather-white kites. In my pocket a little radio is crackling with music, piano keys dancing through bright and chirpy librettos.
The red archway over the little stairs leading down to the basement is covered in hanging wooden talismans, carved with runes. The old lady who runs the place is crazy for mystics, mediums, and wannabe psychics. But she likes me, so, she must have some small reserve of good taste. I skip down the stairs and swing through the door.
“Cyrus.” The old lady says, like remembering my name is a gift.
And she hands me the letter.
It is a small, cream-white envelope. Someone has taken the time to press a signet seal into the wax holding the letter shut, a bee with octagonal wings. It doesn’t fool me. This isn’t a noble letter. It’s– at most– a merchant house. Someone with the money to hire me, a courier, but not to commission their own ship.
“What’s the commission?” Is the only question I ask as I examine the address. It’s bound for Cir-Ruma, three islands and three weeks to the west. It’s in the same archipelago as me, so there’s no need to waste time on a big ship traveling the deep cloudsea. I can travel the whole way on my skimmer.
Old Lady Paa, the merchant guild envoy, reclined in her chair and smoked. She has a thin cigarette that hangs from the corner of her lips and wags about, dripping bits of ash when she speaks. She’d been smoking so long that her whole face was crooked from holding the cigarette in place. The Old Lady used to be some famous spy; she had played her cards well enough that she was retired, rich, and just keeping herself busy with a cushy post from the guild.
I wanted to be as rich as Old Lady Paa before I was as old. That was the goal.
“Three dull.” She put three three beautiful stones on the counter. Each one was faceted like a diamond, but with strangely-shaped, asymmetrical sides. The color was a pearly mix of rainbows reflected on a cloud-white surface. It looked natural because it was. They were sky pearls; you found them in the cores of sky-beasts. “With a fourth if you get it done in twenty days.”
“They’re gonna lose all their money making bets like that.” I say, and Paa rolls her eyes, smoke coming out of her nose like a dragon. I sweep the pearls into my satchel bag and turn.
But, I take a second longer to look at the letter. Something about it feels warm in my hand. Vaguely ominous, but–
They didn’t pay me to ask questions.
I drop the letter down into the satchel’s side pouch and make my way out into the light.
The ship is clean now, and it sparkles in the noonday sun. All the brass on its railings, on the covers for the portholes, on the cannons that jut from its hull– all of that catches the light and turns to gold, with the sail billowing overhead, a dorsal fin of cloud-white.
I want a ship like that.
I want a lot of things– and courier work pays me enough aether to start fighting for them.
— — —
I duck back into my room, uptop of a tavern, to make something out of my payment.
Stripping off my clothes I slumped into the bathtub and held up my hand. “Reinforcement.”
A little screen opens next to my fingers, created by threads of milky cloud-aether flowing together and forming a window of rippling blue water-aether.
Spirit Reinforcement
Aether-Well
2 Charges
Lesser Slots
- [Empty] - [Empty] - [Empty] - [Dull] - [Dull] - [Dull] - [Dull] -
2% Imprint Chance
0% Mutation Chance
Engram
- [Empty] -
Encoded Skill:
Augments:
Empty
Augments:
Empty
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One by one, I slot the sky pearls by pressing them into the space between my eyes. There’s a warm electric feeling, like my muscles are out of my control, that passes in a flash. When the wave of heat rolls past the wind feels cold and my body feels fresher than spring rain– one pearl is as good as a night’s sleep and a day full of meals.
Then I take out my engram. Purchased from a magewright, it’s a little cube of deep red crystal with brass caps on each corner. A rune is written one the face that I press to my forehead.
It sinks in and I feel an entirely different buzz. This one’s mental; my worries and my doubts pour away and for just a second it seems like all the answers in the universe are in my grasp. Even when it fades, the feeling of concentrated clarity remains.
“Reinforcement.”
Spirit Reinforcement
Aetherwell
2 Charges
Lesser Slots
- [Dull] - [Dull] - [Dull] - [Dull] - [Dull] - [Dull] - [Dull] -
12% Imprint Chance
1% Mutation Chance
Engram
- [Dull Navigator’s Stone] -
Encoded Skill: Navigation. Gain Aetherwell charges when you attune to a new island. Gain a perfect sense of direction towards any island you’ve attuned to.
Augments:
Empty
Augments:
Empty
The engram provided a skill– and Navigation in particular was considered essential for a courier.
Engrams could be found in caves and ruins, left behind by forgotten civilizations, but this one was new. It had been made by a chemist working with raw aether to create an artificial gem. The engram was the core of reinforcements, the schematic.
The sky pearls were more like fuel. It took more of them to slot yourself up every time. Every reinforcement gave you more life and more strength, but every reinforcement also increased the cost of the next.
And you only ever had a small chance of actually getting the engram’s skill.
If you had bad luck, maybe you reinforced dozens of times without ever getting a real skill. If you had good luck, well…
If you had good luck, you were born rich, and you could afford better sky pearls. Which gave better chances at imprinting a skill. And if you had that kind of luck, every level, you’d be getting stronger faster than the people who could only afford to risk reinforcing with shoddy pearls and getting nothing.
I had reinforced six times now. If I got to ten without a skill, my prospects would be effectively zero.
That was because your first core skills were always, always focused on getting more aether. Aether charges were a small increase to your odds of imprinting– meaning you didn’t need overpriced pearls to get more skills, and you could make your own way.
The best way to get more aether was to hunt skybeasts and be there when they died. When their heart was pierced they’d bleed aether for a few seconds, fresh and raw, like glowing blood pouring out of the wound.
But that road was for idiots.
My brother had worked as a monster-hunter for precisely one voyage. He never even saw a proper skybeast– just a bad storm that sent him tumbling out of the rigging and into the deep blue. They didn’t even send a letter to tell me what had happened– I found out from his drinking buddies. Deaths were an expected part of every voyage.
The little aether I had was from hunting juveniles who made it into the city somehow, usually hidden in a ship’s cargo hold where they’d crawled in for the warmth and free food.
But.
All of this was rambling. I’m stalling, because I’m afraid of what happens when I pull the trigger.
Another level.
Another chance at a skill.
But a much better chance of being farther out from my dreams than ever.
“Reinforce.”
The dim little tavern room lights up. My skin is turned translucent, the shade and tone of candle wax, by the light that spills out of my bones and organs. There are tiny runes down there, imprinting themselves into me. Little letters of magic searing themselves into me. It’s not that it doesn’t hurt. Most people scream the first time they reinforce– but you learn to associate it with the feeling of getting stronger, feeling stronger than you ever have in your life.
And soon enough you’re so fixated on getting stronger you barely notice the pain.
For a minute I just let it all wash over me and when its done, my skin isn’t glowing anymore, but it is leaking. Fat droplets of slimy black tar are squeezing up through my pores, overflowing, and beginning to drip down my chest.
I turn on the tap and splash cold water over myself, splashing off the filth. It’s just all the toxins I’ve absorbed since I reinforced last. The food down here is basically slow poison. People who don’t reinforce, whether because they can’t afford it or they’ve got some religious objection– they sicken and die, in the end.
But I’m still stalling. I don’t want to check. I don’t want to let the hope of the moment die.
I know that I didn’t get the skill. I’m sure of it.
“Show me.” I say eventually, the tap still running down between my toes, splashing against the metal grate of the shower. A spider is struggling down there, eight legs all scrabbling on the porcelain as the water flow tries to wash it down the drain.
Cyrus Leech
Human
Aether Distribution:
Cloud Arcadian: 2.7æ/m
Cloud Infernal: 1.4æ/m
Summer Hyperborean 1.0
Technologia (3) || Reinforcement (7) || Arcana (1)
Runeworks:
Levitation Charm (Crude) - Reduces vessel’s weight to nothing. Costs aether per minute.
Durability Charm (Crude) - Protects a vessel from minor physical harms, water, and heat. Costs aether per day.
Lightning Cast (Crude-Damaged) - Uses a vessel to project a beam of electric power. Costs aether per use.
Encoded Skills:
Navigation (Lv 1) - Gain 3.0 Aetherwell charges when you attune to a new island. Gain a perfect sense of direction towards any island you’ve attuned to.
Spell Record:
Wind-Caller (0.34) - Summons a gust of wind. Limited control over the direction and force is possible. Stronger in open sky, further from the influence of islands.
I pause for a moment–
Dead frozen–
And I hammer my fist against the wall, biting back a scream. The water roars down the drain, and I reach out to catch the spider, letting it scramble aboard my finger and carrying it to the edge of the tub.
Yes. Yes yes yes.
The feeling is better than the rush of reinforcing. I lean back, eyes closed, red hair pasted to my face by sweat. Thank the pantheon.
I have a skill. I can start accumulating aether, start picking up more engrams with an actual chance of absorbing them.
Days of worry shed from me like snakeskin. Stresses I didn’t even notice weighing down on me lifts. I splash more water on my face and grin, rolling out of the tub to towel off, grab my things, shuffle into my clothes.
My skimmer is waiting in the corner, folded up. The magic inside sparks a little as I run my hand over the brass and wood of the wings.
I have a delivery to get to–
And right now, my luck feels invulnerable.