Lyrua shuddered as an icy wind pierced her cloak like a lance through paper. A cliff face, rough and gnarled like old wood, met them just off the ramp, shrouded by shifting mist. The ship rolled against the dock on agitated waves, a flooded path just off the ramp telling of the coming tide. High up the cliff, a stony outcrop along the island’s peak supported an entire forest above the sea.
Lander was waiting for them, under the skeleton of a creature as large as the Underbolge embedded in the stone, its petrified ribs reaching out like fingers. He waved to them, nodding towards a path that meandered out of the fog and wrapped around the cliffs. The rocky footpath was narrow enough to put an apprehensive knot in her stomach just from looking at it.
Lyrua shielded her eyes from the wind to regard her friend perched on a tall rock. “Ove, it will be easier for you to stay close to Athen. Take his hand and keep him close.”
Ove’s feathers whipped in the wind, forcing her to wait for a lull before gliding down.
“I will not allow you to be blown away again,” Athen told her, taking her hand firmly.
“Delibera and most of her crew have gone topside already.” Kraesten said, striding up behind them. “Please, allow me to escort you to the top.” He offered his arm with a wink. “… My Lady.”
Lander shoved the spellbreaker towards the path. “I’ll drown you in your own blood if you do that again,” he warned. “Get moving.”
Kraesten spun his arms for balance. Finding his footing, he regarded Lander warily. “Don’t get your crystal scuffed, my Iron friend, I’m only being polite.” He scurried away from Lander as he swung an arm at him.
Walking carefully against the wind behind Ove, Lyrua followed Athen’s gaze along the petrified skeleton in the rocks above. She tried to imagine the sort of beast that could have left a skeleton with ribs as long as a mast. An ancient whale?
The path never widened as they travelled up, but it was periodically interrupted by flat outcrops reinforced with wooden landings. They looked firm enough to moor a ship, but even this high they were stained and blistered with water damage. Astonishingly, there were more piers casting them in shadow from above.
The roiling sea below had encouraged messes of diminutive vandrakes to roam high up the cliffs. They slacked about in mounds, sharing the warmth of the sun. Some skittered out of their path as they approached, flapping their frills. The larger ones brandished forked tongues and panted icy breath that frosted the path. They beat their feckless wings, better for swimming than flying, aggressively against their backs.
The drakes did not heed Lander’s intimidating form, scurrying around his feet carelessly like cats, so he moved as gingerly as Athen playing peek-a-bird to avoid stepping on them. Ove bullied her way past the vandrakes with Athen, knocking them away with her wing if they came too close. They crowded a pace away from her, spitting until the ground cracked with white ice beneath her talons. They turned their spit and hissing breath to Lyrua after Ove had passed and she poured her mana into the ice to thaw it, but the slick stones still tested her balance and earned her a few bold nips to her heels.
Beyond the vandrake roost the path continued, clutching the edge of the cliff like a constricting serpent until the highest of the suspended piers was below them. A breeze, cozy after the chill of the vandrakes’ breath, carried the gentle scent of pine. The path turned to run through the stone at a steep angle and Athen let his fingertips brush against the walls on each side as they climbed the irregular steps of cracked stone.
The steps widened before the path abruptly let them out into a welcoming forest of corkscrew conifers. Thick trunks curled upward, tapering into thin branches that sprang tenderly in the wind. Vines spilled from within the coiled trunks, decorating the trees with blossoms not unlike Fourstaile’s hair. Deep-green needles defended every branch, and sturdy pinesprings rolled with each brush of the wind. Athen snatched some up to play with, and showed her how to compress them enthusiastically.
The bizarre trees were unlike anything near Manataklos, and Lyrua was so captivated that she did not even notice when they crossed the threshold into Flow. Having no walls, the town was built right into the woods, interwoven with the trees. The houses were pinewood, spaced haphazardly throughout the forest in rough clumps divided by packed earth roads.
A diverse crowd engrossed in work churned near a denser collection of buildings Lyrua assumed was the centre of town. Delibera’s brilliant horns made her a beacon in the throng. The towering woman hauled a triple-barreled spellbolt cannon on her shoulder like a mere pillow. Folk all but dived out of her path as she ambled forward, unburdened by the considerable four-foot cannon.
The Insight stopped to speak with Lander, a shrug to readjust her load the only tell that she felt its weight. “The Legendarisk hasn’t yet left the southern port. Why not make yourself useful and haul some cannons?” She was off before Lander thought of a response. Her crew stomped after her, four to a cannon.
He watched her back listlessly. “Pa will be steamed if we show up without helping.” He shrugged, and pushed his way towards the centre of town, dwarfing the Faunafolk who comprised the majority of the population.
“I was not aware that the captain of the Legendarisk was your father,” Lyrua said, hustling to keep up with his long pace. Ove and Athen pattered quickly after them.
“He’s not just the captain.” Lander turned to look down without stopping. “He’s the entire warship!” Pride stretched across his face. Athen ran up to her, and though he remained silent, his face was bubbling over with excitement.
Lyrua pulled her blouse up as the stench of smoke and sulphur assaulted her nose. They were nearing a rounded structure that billowed with smoke through two large holes on each side, framed by an iron wall even Lander could not see over. Athen copied her, pulling up his tunic, as they crossed beneath the steel-rimmed arch into the spellsmith’s yard.
***
Lander peered over the crowds of sailors collecting spellbolt cannons and carting them off under the guide of a massive Iron. All except Delibera’s crew headed south. The Iron wore his body expansions tightly like armour, as Lander did, but unlike Lander he included a bull-head helm that gave him the fierce image of a minotaur. The man’s smithy was built in a sheltering dome of ancient bone overgrown with thick curly moss like the down on Ove’s head.
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Lyrua and Athen both gaped at the bony overhang and the sharp teeth that protruded from it. “What is that?” Her voice was quiet as a short hiss of steam.
“The skull of the Old Lindworm,” Lander said, “entombed here since an age before time. Some say the island was once larger, but it fell, and what remains is all that he could hold together.”
“He has more than thirty teeth!” Athen declared, his pointing finger tracing a line through the air. “I counted them all.”
“More than that,” Lander chuckled, worming through the pockets of work-absorbed folk. “Half his head is buried, and most of his teeth are gone.”
“Lander!” the Iron called out in a hammering tone. “I’ve barely finished forging your father’s cannons. Old man getting impatient on me?”
“Coincidence, Boffel,” Lander said. “He doesn’t even know I’m here, but if they’re ready we might as well start hauling.”
Boffel tossed his head back and laughed, rattling the chains on his helm that imitated fur. “Impatience must have run in the veins of ore your iron was wrought from. Go aside and wait your turn.” He jabbed the horns of his helm towards an open space to the north.
Boffel returned to processing orders, using his expansion metal to pull racks of spellbolt cannons forward from behind the kiln, while his wife Gulerod hurried to fasten mounting brackets to each one.
A basket of woven pine needles wiggling in the sand near the kiln caught Lander’s eye, so he walked over to it for a better look. It cradled four Iron eggs, clinking happily against each other. At the sound of his approach they swivelled around, displacing their plates to make room for their oculus as they looked up at him. Silent and motionless, they watched him cautiously.
“Hello young ones,” Lander offered. “Have you chosen names?”
Amongst the flurry of high-pitched whistling he made out four sounds that he thought were words. “Tinvalve! Whisker! Krolle! Melder!”
“Decisive ones aren’t you?” He kneeled beside them. “Just like your parents, and strong names all.” The four eggs spun appreciatively at the compliments. “If I had eggs, I thought of suggesting Lillebarn or Castlarn. Bit of homage to old grandpa Castillarn. I chose Lander for myself.”
Athen and Lyrua approached behind him for a look. “Are those Irons?” Athen cooed.
The babies’s little oculuses shot towards Athen. Their plates tilted to expose the glow of violet crystals and air rushed into their shells. They sealed shut with adorable clicks to burn the air and then parted again to let out puffs of steam.
They puffed steam aggressively until a pocket of mist formed around them. Lander peered over his shoulder at Athen and Lyrua, watching with smiles on their faces as though taking amusement from the little ones’s dismay. “You’re making them nervous,” he said, waving them back.
“I have never seen Iron eggs before,” Athen explained, trying to look even while Lander guided him back. “They are much sweeter than I imagined.”
“Yes they are, and the only thing more wary of flesh-folk is their parents, so mind your proximity.”
Athen crossed his arms to affirm his displeasure, and Lander watched his mother fight her urge to smother him with comfort. Gulerod was watching them furtively as she worked with long steel stools to snap iron frames to the weapons. She had an odd machine off at the edge of the yard, under a hole right through the bone wall. A massive steel warhorn in shape, but even Lander did not know what all the holes in it were for, only that she used it to engrave and embed the jewels for the cannons.
“Like the rune-etcher?” Boffel leaned sternly against the cold kiln, finally free of work.
“An interesting tool, somewhat beyond me, though,” Lander replied.
“Aye. Even I couldn’t tell you how she mimics a Spellrector’s blessing with that thing.” He smirked as his wife, but his helm cast a beastly grimace over the expression. He pushed off the kiln and strode across the yard to where cannons were stacked six high. “Come on then, you can’t lug two dozen of these things down to Wolfram, but you can carry at least two yourself.” He looked over Lander’s company. “These folk with you?”
“An escort job, simple enough,” Lander said. “I was coming to ask if my Pa had come around to get his cannons yet, but you answered that. It won’t do to ask him for passage without doing a bit to help first.”
“Fair, but these folk don’t look like they can carry much more than their own meat. Not to offend.” He stopped his gaze on Kraesten, and he tried to whisper, but the deep vibration of his chest made his words clear. “Especially not that silken.”
Spinning around, Lander fired a steaming glare at Kraesten from across the yard. “Are you still here?” he growled. Kraesten lounged idly against the only tooth in Old Lindworm’s bottom jaw that came above ground as if he were part of their group. Just far enough away for Lander to forget he was creeping about.
“It was the Legendarisk that hired me,” the spellbreaker said cheerfully. “Glad to have you along... Lander.”
He growled, wondering what the man would know with his true name. “I gave you no name because I’ve got no trust for strangers who wander alone in the woods.”
“Just as well.” Kraesten’s arrogant chuckle filled Lander with an urge to throw him off the island. The silken leaned off the wall. “My false name is much better than yours. ‘Never trust an Iron,’ they say in Silkia. ‘They covet our divinity.’”
“You silken always claim divinity because you live in the sky, but we are the ones forged by servants of Machina.”
“Where do you think the Queen of our hive gets her Everlasting Life?” the spellbreaker retorted. “A blessing from the Goddess herself.”
“A curse if you ask me. Eternity is only a blessing when spent in humble servitude.”
The spellbreaker laughed in response, but Lander turned his back. The isolated silken people were eager to boast, but it was a tired talk for any Iron.
He waved Ove over. “Think you can hold all these?”
She waddled across the yard, and Boffel watched her dubiously as she examined the cannons closely. “I can’t lift them.” she said.
“Of course you can’t.” Boffel hoisted one easily onto his shoulder. “These are heavier than you are, raven.”
“Yes, by about ten times.” Ove untied her cloak and swung it over the cannon. She let it just begin to settle before flicking it back, and the cannon was gone. “You said two dozen?”
Boffel yanked his helm away to gawk through unobstructed eyes. “What?”
Landed nodded approvingly. “Go ahead and get them all, Ove, Pa can mount them himself.”
“What manner of spell is that?” The spellsmith tossed his helm aside and set the cannon down in the sand. His attention was completely taken by Ove vanishing the cannons from all four racks.
“Shadow Pocket,” Ove clacked. “I had to ripen mana for three days with out sleep to cast it, so don’t get excited,” she added, seeing desire in his eyes.
Desire dulled to disappointment, and Boffel’s voice came in a slow rumble of his chest. “Aye, I know of enchantments. Still, an Iron can dream. Business would be a mite quick with one of those.”
“How much are you owed?” Lander looked at Ove, and she narrowed her eyes at him.
“Wolfram paid in advance again, so go ahead and take those to him.”
Lander nodded. “Thank you Boffel. Archangels judge you kindly.” He waved to the spellsmith.
“Archangels judge you kindly.” Boffel replied. His wife nodded behind him with the basket of eggs in her arms, all chittering shyly.