“There is our target,” Blue shouted from the helm.

It was evening and there was perhaps an hour left before the cover of night took hold on the Great Basin.

Blue had finally found a wyrm that was both near enough and travelling in the right speed and direction. It was towards the port side of the skiff, on the horizon. As the metal leviathans were far faster than the sailboat, it made no sense to follow a leviathan’s trail; they had to cut one off if they were ever to have hope of touching one.

Phee was stretching her legs on the main deck, limbering up by bouncing between them. She then moved to stretch her back, shoulders and arms, touching her toes and raising her elbows to put her hands behind her back. Her movements were precise and confident; it was evident that she had done it many times before.

In the meantime, Elwin was inspecting Phee’s rapier. He held it up, studying the various enchantments on every piece of it. He decided that had been made expertly; There was no space wasted, and it had functionally overlapping enchantments that complemented the weaknesses of each individual enchantment. The result was a weapon far stronger than the sum of its parts.

“By my estimations, we should expect to cross paths with the leviathan in a little over three minutes.” Blue declared, steady as ever at the helm.

The hot desert wind filled tore at the sails and scratched at their exposed skin as the small wooden boat drifted along the scorching, shimmering sands.

“Phee, I know it might be a bit late to be asking you this, but what exactly is your plan?” Elwin shouted over the howling wind.

“Huh?” The young Bloodstone asked in a confused reaction. “I’m going to stick my sword into it and hope for the best. What did you think I was planning to do?”

“Oh… I mean, that makes sense, I was just wondering what you would use to cut a piece of it off. That whole thing is made of metal, right? Your rapier is more of a stabbing weapon.” Elwin replied, pointing at the wyrm that was growing larger in their vision.

“I’ll find a way… I have these scissors, but, damn, it would be really useful to have Sophia here right now.”

Phee held up a pair of golden scissors. As Elwin might expect, they were covered in enchantments… ones in arrangements he had never seen before. His eyes grew wide in surprise. He didn’t even know how to begin decoding what function the enchantments served, save for common sense.

“Where did you get that?!” Elwin exclaimed in utter disbelief. His face was as if he had seen a great treasure or wonder of the world.

Phee pursed her lips beneath her mask before she responded, seemingly reluctant to say. “I did travel with the Masquerade… let’s say that some of the rumours about them are true.”

“Don’t tell me… your robes are really made out of Unbreakable Thread?” Elwin asked, referring to the iridescent, rainbow threads that he had spotted lining the inside of her clothes.

“Two minutes” Blue exclaimed over their conversation.

“Oh, so you noticed,” Phee said with a chuckle. “The observational skills of Ellenian enchanters truly are something else.”

As they drew closer to the wyrm, Elwin dared watch it approach. With the difference in their speeds, they were essentially waiting for it to bear down on them. A giant, terrifying force of nature. Its head was reminiscent of dragons Elwin had seen in story books, though it lacked legs or wings of any kind. From how its head flew through the air, Elwin could see it was slowly spinning; that was what decided how it turned and changed direction.

“Here it comes,” Phee muttered to herself under her breath.

The wyrm disappeared a few hundred meters behind them with the distant hiss of sand being suddenly compressed as one might hear in throwing a sandbag to the floor.

Then, came a low rumbling sound. Elwin leaned over the carved wooden handrails of the boat to look at the desert below the floating ship. The sand beneath them, all around them, was vibrating and shifting like it was in a great sieve.

The rumbling and hissing of shuffling sand grew to a crescendo followed by an explosion of sand over the dune to the port side. The great, ceaseless roar of a billion grains of sand scraping against living metal filled the air from only 30 meters away. Streams of sand flew through the air and fell to the deck, coating it in piles.

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

Blue adjusted their bearing, heading towards the wyrm’s body leaving the land below from a rapidly-growing mound of gouged-up sand from deep beneath the desert. The leviathan itself was like a never-ending stream of living metal.

Phee gulped. She was reminded of the feeling one would get seeing a train exiting a dark tunnel mouth, being unable to comprehend its true length. Her rational mind simply held onto the belief the creature’s length had to eventually end.

Well, I’ve leapt onto a moving train before. This can’t be that much more difficult.

“Here we go!” Elwin exclaimed.

Phee scrambled to the side of the skiff, finding her way atop the handrail.

The skiff ran up the side of the gigantic sand dune being created by the wyrm, using it as a ramp to align their vectors.

Phee drew her rapier and watched the wyrm’s body as they rapidly approached. Through the geyser of sand being thrown into the air, she had noticed that the wyrm’s body had dark bands at regular intervals. She aimed to strike her sword into one of those bands, into what she assumed to be softer, younger scales.

Just then, despite all the noise, Elwin thought he heard a whisper from Blue. He turned to glance at her for just a moment. She was holding a certain small book. It seemed familiar, but he couldn’t place where exactly he had seen it before.

He turned back to look at Phee just as they drew alongside the unfathomably large creature and saw that the sand before her had been cleared away by a sudden gust of wind. The perfect moment!

The girl leapt, rapier in hand.

To Elwin, the instant seemed to drag out into eternity.

Although Elwin wasn’t sure if he had seen it with his own eyes, there was the unmistakable shthunk! of metal sinking deep into something heavy.

Phee disappeared from sight, becoming a part of the blur that was the leviathan’s body.

And then, Blue and Elwin were already flying down the sand dune. Elwin’s eyes searched desperately for his friend.

“I made it!” exclaimed the voice of Phee, coming through the communications line she shared with Blue. The girl sounded equal parts surprised and elated.

“Great! Be quick! Cut a piece of it off!”

Based on Blue’s prior calculations, Phee would only have 18 or so seconds before the wyrm struck land again.

Elwin waited nervously, watching the wyrm arc through the air. Blue chased it with her hand on the rudder.

“Come on, Phee…” Elwin muttered anxiously.

Up high in the sky, Phee held on for dear life. Her right hand clasped the hilt of her rapier, buried deep into a discoloured patch on the wyrm’s body.

She had thought that her arm would surely be yanked from its socket, but somehow she had made it aboard the monster without major injury.

The surface of the leviathan was scaled like a snake, tessellated with teardrop-shaped plates of metal. Her left hand held her pair of golden scissors, frantically trying to snip an edge off the scale that her rapier was stuck into.

Weightlessness was gradually taking over Phee’s body. She was nearly halfway out of time.

“Ten seconds,” Blue warned.

“Come on… come on you stupid thing!” Phee muttered, struggling to cut through the thick scales with her small pair of scissors. The wind rushing by certainly did not help her motor control.

The wyrm began to return to earth, and Phee was pulled around the

“Five, four…” blue began counting down.

“Yes! I cut- damnit!! It’s gone.” Phee blurted out in distress.

“Get out of there!” Elwin screamed.

“Shit!!” Phee exclaimed.

Elwin watched as a dark speck flew from the Wyrm’s body, peeling off in a flattening arc, like a bird recovering from a dive.

The noises of rushing wind and Phee panting could be heard through Blue’s bracelet speaker.

Up in the sky, Phee managed to turn her hair-raising fall into a glide; her enchanted acrobat’s clothes were stretched out like a flying fox’s skin. Seeing the skiff rapidly approaching beneath her, she landed atop a nearby sand dune and pulled back her hood and mask, catching her breath with her hands on her knees.

Blue brought the skiff in a wide circle around the Bloodstone. Elwin folded the sails to bring them to a halt.

Phee skidded partially down the sand dune towards her friends, leaping to the vessel’s rope ladder which hung from the deck.

Elwin helped her up, the evening sun glittered off of beads of sweat on the girl’s brow.

Phee collapsed onto the deck in an exhausted heap.

“Did you get it?” Elwin asked tentatively.

Phee wordlessly shook her head, still recovering. “No. I managed to cut a piece of it off, but the wind snatched it away before I could grab it.”

“Oh…” Elwin managed to say. He was at a loss for words. All of that effort and nothing to show for it.

Phee leaned back on her wrists, still catching her breath. She noticed Blue, standing on the upper deck. The cyborg was strangely quiet.

“Blue?” Phee asked.

Elwin turned to look at his elven friend. Blue was flipping through the book he had seen earlier. His memory struck him. Rhaspalaka had been holding something similar when he had attacked Kari and himself on the forest path outside of Ellenia’s east gate.

“Hey, isn’t that-?”

“Hush, child,” Blue shushed him. “I am thinking.”

Phee cocked her head in confusion with narrowed eyebrows. She had never seen Blue so deep in thought before.

“I think I have solved it:

Return to me that which was stolen

From limbless hands; from the giants of these sands

The titan’s sliver, the sand-snakes scale

Justice be wrought by my words golden!”

Blue’s poem hung in the air, fading to silence.

The rustling of sand and fabric were the only sounds on the deck of the boat.

“Is… something meant to happen?” Phee asked in confusion.

Elwin opened his mouth to reply, and at that exact moment, a silver shard exploded out of the side of the sand dune behind Blue. She caught it in her right hand without even flinching or turning her head. Her left hand closed the book that had been resting open.

Blue smiled.

No, Elwin wouldn’t just call it a smile. For the first time, he saw the ancient elf wearing a triumphant grin.

“Now this… This is a power that could be worth keeping secret at all costs.” She said.