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My groggy confusion woke Mica up inside my jacket, and he squawked and struggled to pop his head out.

Granarrik chirruped, his sides heaving against me. At first, I panicked a little, since there was no movement at my back, but a few moments later, I heard the voice of my mentor.

“Awake in there, Saras?” He was maybe a dozen feet away.

“Yeah! Yeah,” I called back.

My hands hurt, I felt achy all over, and incredibly gross. I helped Mica out into the open, then cleaned myself up. The scour cantrip hides many sins in the sky.

After a few minutes to make myself presentable, I climbed out from the tent of wings and rope we’d made over Gran and looked at the sky.

The dark clouds were gone, but there was a distant wall of clouds seething off to one side, making everything seem just a little dimmer than normal. For the most part, the sky was clear, with everything fading into haze, but as I moved up, a swarm of little fliers alerted to my presence and flew out from the huge corpse.

They were vaguely triangle shaped, flat with two wings and a weird pointy wing-head thing in between them, with a beard of tendrils on both sides that was longest at the bottom. Two big bulbous eyes stuck out from the middle of each flat side, round black pupils darting every which way. They also made faint little drumming sounds, ‘dnt dnt dnt’, as they flitted back and forth.

Mica cawed angrily at them for startling him, and flew back to my shoulder for petting.

Sky squid. Named after some pre-breaking fish thing with tentacles. Harmless little scavengers a foot to two feet long, including the trailing tendrils.

Also important to note that the tendrils were not tentacles. They were smooth and tapered, with a little bit of a wider sticky spot at the end. Tentacles have sucker cups.

“Sky squid, huh. This must be a feast to them,” I said.

“Yeah,” Conrin agreed. “They’ll come back whenever we stop moving. Might catch some to eat later, since we left all that goose meat behind.”

“…yeah.” That sucked, abandoning the meat and our stove and pot. “How long was I out?”

He pulled a brass pocket watch out of a pouch and checked it, before putting it away. “Five hours twenty-two. Not too long. I woke up about forty minutes ago.” He watched me climb over the gnathotis and take up a spot a few feet away. “Any burns?”

I shook my head. “No. You?

“Don’t think so,” he replied. “But there’s a big burned spot on the other side of the beast here. Looks like most of the lightning hit there. We got lucky.”

I nodded. “Well, let’s get Granarrik untied and check him over. Then maybe we can figure out where we’re at.”

Together, we untied the ropes. Three of them we had to splice back together, because they’d crossed the other side and been burned in two by lightning strikes. But soon enough, Gran was free to stretch his wings.

We actually pulled his saddle off, and searched through his feathers for any wounds. I used the scour spell a few more times to clean him up. I don’t want my big boy getting mites or red fluff. Or worse, drill-flies.

There’s not a lot of diseases in the sky, but the ones that are there are pretty unpleasant. Gran’s feathers are big and hard enough to block most things, but it’s still a good idea to check. For the rest of us, there’s a reason why we wear all covering flying leathers.

We didn’t find any open wounds, but there were some raw spots where rope and harness had chafed, and he was moving a little stiffly. Granarrik took his time, holding onto the corpse with his feet and slowly stretching his wings out, flapping every so often.

Meanwhile, Conrin and I pulled out target compasses to try and figure out our position. We only had two, which is generally enough for us. A target compass is a brass needle set in a gyroscope cage that can spin freely in any direction or orientation to point at a beacon. The gyroscopic cage is attached to a hollow tube, and once the arrow is pointing at your beacon, you line it up with the length of tube like a scope, so you can better see the direction it’s pointing.

Our two compasses point at beacons at home, Wygriff Hold, and the capital, Randerport. So long as we don’t get too far away from our usual hunting areas, we can get an idea of where we are based on the angle between them.

If we’ve been blown too far away, though, our estimates can get wildly off. You really need three compasses and a naval aerolabe to precisely measure the angles for precision navigation.

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Still, the one compass always points home, so we can always follow that, if needed.

Blown off course by storm winds for four or five hours definitely puts us outside of the usual group of uninhabited sky islands we hunt around, but I think I’ve got a pretty good idea of where we’re at.

We’ve got a navbook for the kingdom, which covers a lot of the sky in a big bubble. Conrin and I poured over its pages, and both came to an agreement on our position, at least within five hundred miles or so.

Like I said, you really need an aerolabe for precision.

I think, and I admit I’m not completely sure, but I think, so long as we fly across three major wind currents, we might be able to hit the Grand Easterly that flies by Wygriff Hold. The same one that gave me a canon, once upon a time.

It’s not a super great chance. We might be so far off my guess that we hit the wrong wind streams. Also, wind currents follow mana flows for the most part, and I can sense that, but there’s a lot of things that can disrupt them.

Stormwhales, for instance.

But our luck had held so far. We weren’t dead, despite the stormwhale. And I do have a pretty good sense of the flow of magic around me. Hard not to, really, with the sheer power the element of air has here. Even Conrin, as unmagical a dwarf as you can imagine, has an innate sense that tells him how close he is to the center of a wind stream.

That, plus our best guess about where we were, puts us about four hundred to a thousand miles out from the Broken Curve, the curved surface of a vast sphere which is where sky islands are found. Further in, we’d be running into lots of rocks. But out here, there’s not much of anything. We’re above the expanded curve of the original planet that was broken.

We have to go down below the Curve, and catch a sinking northerly until were in the magma rock zone. Then any of three potential westerlies, back out, and then we’ll should be able to find a good east wind. We’ll check the compasses multiple times along the route, which will help narrow down our position.

If we were being blown east, I’d give up trying to make it home and just aim for one of the big lands, and that’s still a possibility once we get out of this westerly. But I really think we can make it home.

And after some discussion, Conrin agrees with me.

“But first,” he said, “let’s get rid of some weight.”

Technically, we’re sitting on a ton of food. Practically, we’re sitting on a pile of potential compost. Even Granarrik didn’t like gnathotis meat, though Mica thought it was okay.

To start, we started stripping flesh off the corpse. Since our activity was scaring the sky squid, we used bits of the meat and baited some hooks on long lengths of line, and tossed it out to the squid, quickly hooking seven of them, which we hauled in and killed for later.

We made it up to them, though, by flinging literally hundreds of pounds of nasty flesh into the sky for them to swarm, and over the course of an hour or so we got rid of probably three quarters of the weight of the big beast, leaving it as a nasty looking but far lighter skeleton, but with the wings and some of the wing muscles remaining.

When Gran started pecking at the thing, Conrin and I hacked off about half of one of the ribs and let Gran swallow it whole. He wasn’t going to starve anytime soon, even with us throwing away the meat.

Water was going to be a concern, though, but we’d worry about that later.

I had to stop and prepare another series of scour cantrips to keep things from getting too gross, cleaning up Conrin, myself, and removing most of the scraps of flesh from the bones. I do have my spellbook in my pack, just for referencing, but honestly I can prepare everything from memory without it. It’s not that hard.

Another two hours was spent breaking off the rock dross from the load of ore. Given that part of our hunting expeditions does involve prospecting for potential finds, we did have a set of basic mining tools in our gear.

I know it seems weird to carry picks and chisels around in the sky, but it’s necessary.

Mining in free fall is such a pain in the ass, though. Every swing pushes you back, sapping strength from your strikes. We had to use tethers and wedge ourselves into the rib cage to get anything done, and of course the rib cage itself got in the way. A twenty to thirty minute task on land ended up being four times as long in the sky.

Ultimately, though, we managed to break off most of the rock, and keep most of the ore. By volume, the rock was more than half, but by weight, given the density of ore, it was probably around forty percent of it that we pushed into the sky.

With no immediate rush, we had the time to prepare the mass for travel. For the first leg of the journey, we wanted it as streamlined as possible, so we bound the wings down and covered gaps with an oilcloth tarp. Wish we’d had more of them, but even on a mount Granarrik’s size, you can’t have everything you want.

Lastly, of course, we had a meal of already kinda stale corn pone and reheated, leftover gravy.

One of the big problems in free fall is that there’s no up or down orientation. Without the weight of gravity, hot air doesn’t rise up, it just expands in all directions. That also suffocates the fire. To address that problem, we have one last bit of gear.

The pipe-stove.

Really just a fat tin and bronze cylinder with a bit of clockwork in one end, and a single firestone in the other. We still had it because it’s largely useless on land, so it’s only used in the sky. A wind up spring in the base turns a tiny fan that blows air up the pipe. At the end, there’s a little bronze container for a firestone, and on top of that is a receptacle that holds a quart iron flask with a wide mouth, basically a very small cast iron pot.

With the little fan whirling away, a steady, if small, breeze blows the heat from the firestone around the flask, and out into the sky so you don’t burn yourself. Of course, you don’t want to point it at anything flammable, and it’s both kind of slow and kind of cumbersome, but it’s the only reliable way to heat anything up in the sky.

I’ve heard stories from my Father of how long it took them to invent solutions to these problems back in the day.

Reheated gravy isn’t great. Stale corn pone isn’t great. Both are better than gnathotis meat. But they’re only going to get worse, so we ate it first and saved the squids for later.

With Granarrik saddled up and the tow line reattached, we did some test pulls to see how well our setup worked. It took a few adjustments. With one broken wing strapped tight, and the unbroken wing taking up more volume, the gnathotis didn’t want to pull straight, so we had to find the balance point.

And so, just over ten hours from the time the storm hit us, we were finally ready to pull.

I prepared a series of might spells, cast the first onto Granarrik, and our journey began.