image [https://i.imgur.com/6tarwXk.png]

Summer was surrendering to autumn. Trees were turning to fire. Wheat and corn lay heavy on the stalk. Flocks of birds passed daily over Volthorn’s army as they flew southwest, fleeing colder climes to the north and east.

Although Queen Adara had failed to negotiate an official armistice, Volthorn had secured a temporary settlement with Calamar’s front-line commander, General Grimbold. Volthorn allowed the ten thousand soldiers in Calamar’s flanking division to recross the river and join the remnants of their main army. In exchange, Grimbold agreed to retreat to Meradov immediately, without attempting any more battles or raids that season.

In making the arrangement, Volthorn gave up the possibility of hammering the remnants of Calamar’s retreating army. But he also avoided the risk of facing a defeat of his own. Despite his victory, Calamar could still field almost as many battle-ready troops as he could. Many of his battalions had suffered heavy losses, plus he had several thousand prisoners to guard. It was a good thing the Penandre garrison would be arriving in another day or so to reinforce his position.

Another reason was that harvest was near. Between the ongoing haeber shortage and the demands of war, many Elandrian provinces were on the brink of famine. Keeping his conscript farmers another month to score another victory would only mean they’d starve the next spring.

So it was that five days after his victory—which his troops were beginning to call “the Battle of Rainswept Heights”—Volthorn stood watching his last units of seasonal troops march away, disbanded until the next spring. Around six thousand professional full-time soldiers would remain at arms during the winter, encamped in the Arnon Plains.

“Commander Skarr,” an aide said, interrupting Volthorn’s thoughts. “Intelligence report. We’ve received an unusual message from a contact in Calamar.”

“Unusual?” Volthorn said.

“Peculiar,” the aide clarified. “The contact received an anonymous message, written on a note left outside his residence in Imperium. We are puzzled as to its meaning. Here’s a transcription.”

The aide handed Volthorn a piece of parchment, covered in tidy lines of text:

Report to your comrades in yonder land:

Evil stirs in the shadows of the night.

News I bear that you must heed.

Danger from the past returns.

History threatens to repeat.

An avir’s life is in peril:

Ruin, fire, and flames.

To the skies, beware.

Volthorn read the poem several times. “Most obscure,” he said. “What do you make of it?”

“We have no idea,” the aide said. “The author’s identity is unknown, although they are probably associated with Elandrian sympathizers in Imperium. Presumably they wrote in cryptic language so that if the note was discovered, it wouldn’t incriminate the recipient or the sender. But we’re worried it’s some kind of hoax or red herring: counterintelligence meant to lead us onto a false trail.”

“If so, it could do a better job of explaining what that trail is,” Volthorn quipped. “Let me read it again.”

He explored each line carefully. The first: Report to your comrades in yonder land. Straightforward. Evil stirs in the shadows of the night. Demons? But they always stalked the night. What else could it be referencing? Some sort of enemy operation?

Danger from the past returns. History threatens to repeat. An avir’s life is in peril. Those lines seemed to refer to King Everborn’s assassination, warning that Adara was in similar danger. But who would know enough to write that? Scarcely two dozen souls in Elandria knew the truth about how King Everborn had died. Who in Calamar would know? Those who had ordered the assassination, of course. But why would they send a message like this, or how would they know who to send it through?

Danger from the past returns. There was only one obvious candidate for what that danger was: Rendhart. And the penultimate line seemed to confirm it: Ruin, fire, and flames.

But what did the final line mean? To the skies, beware. Was this referring to a griffin attack? To some omen in the skies, like a red sunrise?

“Any idea what it means?” the officer asked.

“I believe it’s a warning that Queen Adara is in danger,” Volthorn said. “But the exact danger, or what we must do to prevent it, still eludes me.” He frowned, thinking. “Inform my staff that my brothers and I will be leaving within the hour. With the campaign season over, and now with this strange portent of danger, I think it’s time I returned to the capital.”

* * * * *

Once again, Durrin couldn’t sleep.

This time, he had plenty of things to blame it on: the cramped deck of the cloud frigate, the snoring of Bjorn next to him, the knowledge that they were several thousand feet above the ground, held aloft by some stunt of aeronautical engineering that he still didn’t fully understand.

But he knew the real reason he couldn’t sleep. Questions. A hundred thousand questions.

Questions . . . and the shadows of the night.

Durrin rose quietly to his feet, careful not to disturb the sleeping figures around him. He stepped gingerly across the deck, his way barely lit by the faint red light of the Far Moon. As always when the cloud frigate was free floating, he could feel no wind. The cloud frigate flowed at the same pace as the air around it, like a piece of driftwood in a river’s current.

Durrin made his way to the prow. There he found Twigly on watch, perched atop the ship’s massive ballista. Her long, bushy tail waved in the air behind her, making tiny corrections to keep her perfectly balanced.

Durrin still wasn’t sure what to make of Twigly. The snippen was the only member of the crew who spoke fluent Lurrian. Every time he, Salidar, and Yorid conversed among themselves, he got the feeling she was listening in with her large ears. And he could never tell when she was joking and when she was being impudent.

“Couldn’t catch any dreams, Rendhart?” the snippen asked as he approached. “Or got caught by nightmares?”

Durrin stood at the prow, grabbing a rigging line for support. He had been having nightmares recently: terrible nightmares, of fangs and horns and unending darkness.

But Twigly didn’t need to know that. Durrin shrugged. “Questions, mostly.”

“Ah.” Twigly nodded sagely. “Terrible things, questions. They ruin your appetite, especially when the questions relate to the origin of your supper.”

Casting about for small talk to get his mind off his nightmares, Durrin gestured to the darkness in front of them. “What are you watching for?”

“Mountains, mainly,” Twigly said. “Terrible things, mountains. Come up on you unawares in the darkness, like a lynx in a field of daisies. We also watch our altimeter.”

Twigly pointed to a device stowed under the ballista. Durrin could faintly see a glass tube, illuminated by a small ball of lumen moss. “It shows us our altitude,” Twigly explained.

“And it’s accurate?”

“Mostly,” said Twigly. “Though pressure front fluctuations mean you have to account for the weather patterns, else you can have a high margin of error. Good grief, I sound like my cousin.” She shook her head as if to clear herself of the thought. “Where was I? Lynxes. No. Mountains. Right. And we watch for other cloudships. Griffins. Wyverns.”

“Do wyverns pose a danger?”

“Not if you’re not unlucky. Typically, they’re intimidated by our size. Though if you get too close to their nest, they could get defensive and puncture a hole in your balloon.”

Twigly patted the ballista beneath her. “Which is one of the reasons we carry these. Wyverns—and dragons.”

Durrin snorted. “Dragons are a myth.”

“Ah, so you say.” Twigly smiled that cocky smile of hers again. “But on the day you’re proven wrong, would you rather be caught with a giant ballista, or without one?”

Durrin stared at her, trying to figure out how serious she was. He shook his head and gave up. “Okay. Next question. You’re not really an ensign, are you. You’re the captain.”

Twigly winked at him. “Whatever gave you that idea?”

“I may not understand Hakiru,” Durrin said. “But I can tell who’s giving orders and who’s receiving them.”

“Astute.” Twigly twirled, bowing with a flourish. “Indeed, I am! Captain Twigly the Barbaric, at your doorstep.”

Durrin raised his eyebrow. “The . . . Barbaric?”

“But of course!” Twigly drew a knife from her belt and spun it in her paw. She stuck the knife between her teeth and talked through it. “Awen’t I da most barbaric snippen you’ve ewer seen?”

Durrin thought about it. “Well . . . you’re not wrong,” he said. “Why did you pretend otherwise?”

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

Twigly waved a paw. “I just wanted to pull His Excellency’s leg.”

“But don’t Hakiru cloudships always have to be captained by a griffin?”

Twigly balanced the dagger on one paw. “Traditionally, yes.” The dagger slipped, almost plummeting into the darkness before Twigly snatched it at the last moment. “But I have ways of being . . . persuasive.”

“You bribed someone, didn’t you.”

“Nonsense.” Twigly tucked the dagger into her vest. “I just made myself so annoying that no one was willing to take on the task of ordering me around. I became captain by default.”

Durrin raised his eyebrow. Twigly raised hers in return.

Durrin gave up and changed the subject again. “Twigly—”

“That’s Captain Twigly, to you,” the snippen said. “The Barbaric.”

Durrin paused for a moment, then continued with his original wording. “Twigly, you’re not even Hakiru. How did you come to join this crew in the first place?”

“The full tale would take half a fortnight,” said Twigly. “It involves a lost treasure, seventeen buckets of lard, my great-great-granduncle’s belt buckle, and a giant talking penguin. The short version is that I grew up in a rather crowded burrow in Imperium, then after a short and glorious career failing ninety-three different apprenticeships, found myself a member of this crew.”

Durrin debated taking the bait and asking about the belt buckle and the giant talking . . . whatever Twigly had said. But his mind was still working through deeper questions, and he didn’t feel like listening to a long anecdote.

They fell silent for a minute, each staring out into the night. The ropes around them creaked and groaned in a low, constant chorus.

What was he going to do once they captured Queen Everborn? Could he bring himself to carry out Salidar’s orders?

What would Salidar do if he refused?

In the distance, a faint, shimmering light slowly drew nearer. It was like a river of effervescence in the sky, wavering back and forth, its intensity waxing and waning from minute to minute. The phenomenon was called a leyline current—one of many that cut across the sky, linking Zenitha’s various leyline beacons into one worldwide network of terramantic energy. Durrin stared at it in awe. It was still high above the ship, but closer than he had ever seen one before.

A young lad climbed down the rigging and hopped down next to Twigly. Durrin knew the lad was named Line, but the language barrier had gotten in the way of knowing any more. So he was caught off guard when Twigly and Line exchanged greetings not in Hakiru, but in a language called Mitrian.

“Wait,” Durrin said, switching to the language as well. “You both know Mitrian?”

Line looked at him in surprise.

Twigly nodded. “Aye. We had a Mitrian cook join the crew last year. Terrible chef. His shepherd’s pie tasted more like roasted applesauce. But he liked to teach his language to anyone willing to learn—which turned out to be only Line and me. We speak it between us to keep up on it.”

“What happened to the Mitrian?”

Twigly scowled darkly. “He burned one too many breakfasts. We made him walk the plank.”

Horrified, Durrin glanced over the side of the rail at the ground thousands of feet below them.

“Don’t worry!” Line hastily added. “We were grounded at the time. He only fell maybe eight feet. Sprained an ankle but was otherwise fine.”

Twigly eyed Durrin curiously. “And how do you know Mitrian?”

“I traveled to Mitria often on missions for Lord Salidar,” Durrin said. I was quite fond of their shepherd’s pie, actually. He turned back to Line. “I couldn’t help but notice on this voyage how fearless you are with heights.”

Line looked away. “It comes with the occupation,” he said modestly.

“Everyone else wears a safety rope when they climb up to check the balloon,” Durrin said. “But you don’t.”

Twigly nudged the lad. “Tell’m, Line! He won’t bite. Probably.”

Line kept his eyes down. “I was raised by griffins,” he said just above a whisper.

Twigly elbowed him again. “You gotta tell him more than that.”

“It was at the edge of the world,” Line added, starting to warm up to the topic. “Go north, to the Hakiru lands beyond the northern seas, and you eventually reach the great sinkholes. Keep going, and the sinkholes give way to massive canyons. Eventually the terrain becomes a broken mess, an endless series of bottomless gorges.”

Line grew more animated, his eyes shining. “Even farther north, and land and air invert, until the only solid ground are the skystacks: tall pillars piercing the boundless sky. I was raised there by a tribe of griffins, in a landscape where an endless fall was never more than a few feet away.”

Durrin stared at the lad in wonder. He’d heard tall tales of the edge of the world, but had never met an eyewitness. “And your parents?”

Line shrugged. “I never knew them. They disappeared when I was an infant. The griffins raised me until I was twelve or so, then a ship found me and took me farther south. I’ve been hopping between various Hakiru vessels ever since.”

Durrin leaned forward. This was his first chance to talk to a native-born Hakiru—besides Bjorn, whose Lurrian was spotty on a good day. “Line, what are things like up north? In Hakirum?”

Line looked out at the sea of clouds, as if his eye could pierce the thousands of intervening miles. “You would consider it marvelous. We live in balloons much like this one, but bigger, with dozens linked together to form villages and towns, all floating in the air. Most Hakiru sail east and west with the seasons, following great herds of elk and bison that turn the ground dark with their numbers. Some travel south across the sea to the Lurrian continent to trade. Others—” he glanced at Twigly. “—get creative.”

Durrin wet his lips, then asked the question most weighing on his mind. “What do the Hakiru believe in? Do you believe in demons and angels, like we do here?”

Line lifted his eyes higher. “We worship the star gods.” He pointed to a bright red star near the horizon. “See that? That is Ky’kiaymon, god of pyromancy. And just to the left of the Far Moon, you see that bright blue one? That’s Ullyna’ve, goddess of aquamancy. The others are out of sight behind the balloon, but there’s five in all—one for each branch of mancery.”

image [https://i.imgur.com/ksyFIrq.jpeg]

More than one god? Durrin shook his head. “How do you worship them?”

“There are shrines throughout the north—floating shrines, though they are anchored in place—for each of the gods. There, priests burn incense and perform rites to keep us connected to each god, and to maintain the delicate balance of the world.”

“And what of angels and demons? And the fate of our souls?”

An arc of light flashed across the sky. Line pointed at it. “You see that shooting star? We believe that a star falls to Zenitha whenever a person is born. That star dwells within us, giving us life and strength. When we die and pass away, the star within us lingers on, dormant and unseen. If its light is truly spent, then a nightwalker—”

“What you and I would call a ‘demon,’” Twigly interposed, “though the Hakiru see it as a neutral spirit, not an evil one.”

Line nodded. “Then a nightwalker takes it to its final end in the Void. But if a spark of life remains, then a daywalker—”

“An ‘angel,’ to us,” added Twigly.

“—takes it up into the sky, reignites it with the fires of the Sun, and restores it to its place in the night sky. There the star remains until one day it will fall to Zenitha again, to enliven another soul.”

Durrin looked out at the sea of stars above them. “So for the Hakiru, the soul doesn’t exist past death?”

“No, not in the way you think about it in Calamar,” said Line. “To us, the star is just the energy that fuels our existence—like the candle in a lantern—but not our existence in and of itself. We pass away forever when we die.”

Durrin pondered the young man’s words, comparing them to the different beliefs he was already familiar with. The Knights Vigilant and the Dawn Wardens said your fate was determined solely by whether you died in the daytime or nighttime. The Luminant Order taught that though the time of your death had an impact, more important was the life you lived previously, affecting whether or not the angels would be willing to claim you. The Hakiru said that death was the end of consciousness.

“If we cease to exist when we die,” Durrin asked, “Then do our choices in this life matter?”

“Of course they still matter,” said Line. “Because the star gods are constantly watching. We must obey their laws or risk throwing the world out of balance.”

“What kinds of laws?”

Line shrugged again. “The usual, I guess. No murder. No turning your back on those in need. No cutting a cloudship’s anchor lines. No wanton waste of prime vapor. No stealing.”

“No stealing?” Durrin glanced at Twigly. “But aren’t you guys thieves?”

“We’re pirates,” Twigly corrected proudly. “What we take, we take by fighting. It’s war, not thievery.”

Durrin raised his eyebrow skeptically. “And . . . that makes a difference?”

“All the difference in the world,” Twigly said. “When you have five gods, it’s natural to have a little warfare now and then—as long as you consecrate some of your loot to the god whose banner you won it under.”

Line gestured to a long strip of fabric hanging from the spar of the prow. “Right now, we sail a red banner, the banner of the pyromantic god,” he explained. “That’s because you’re on board. If this mission turns a profit, we’ll lay aside a tithe to give to the priests of Ky’kiaymon the next time we visit his shrine.” He shot a glare at Twigly. “When we eventually get there.”

Twigly held up her hands unapologetically. “Don’t blame me for taking advantage of a zero interest rate. Any star deity worth his salt would have closed that loophole eons ago.”

Durrin turned to the flamboyantly dressed snippen. “I take it you’ve held to your Lurrian beliefs?”

The snippen sighed, turning more serious than he’d ever seen her before. “I don’t know, Rendhart. I don’t know. In all respects, the Hakiru are my people now. But how can I abandon my belief in the Sky Father? These sky gods—how can I know they are real? Yet, if I can’t believe in them, why can I believe in the Sky Father? And so I sit on the mooring line, undecided.”

Durrin realized he faced the same dilemma. All his life, he had believed the teachings of the Knights Vigilant, without ever giving them much thought. But ever since his conversations with Halorn, he had been confronted with a new reality, one warning him that his crimes had doomed his soul. He couldn’t decide which one was true—or how to even tell.

Durrin stared out into the night, pondering everything Twigly and Line had told him. Truth—who could know it? The idea of five star gods instead of one Sky Father seemed ludicrous, but was it just his upbringing that made him feel that way? What did the Hakiru think of people who believed in the Sky Father, or in angels and demons that could carry away your soul after death? What evidence was there one way or the other? How could you know the truth about things that went unseen?

And Halorn—how did he know so much, especially things that he should not know?

Twigly hopped down and wet a lumen globe, casting light over a chart laid out at the foot of the ballista. She studied its features, then hopped back up to the ballista and peered out over the dark landscape. The sky was beginning to brighten in the far east, heralding the dawn.

“We’re getting close,” Twigly said. “If I’m not mistaken, we just passed Lake Silverhorn to our right. That puts us about a hundred miles out from Saven.”

“We can cover that in a day, can’t we?” Durrin asked.

Twigly shook her head. “Not with the current winds. We’ll have to turn south soon, which will require churning.” They had had to “churn” a few times already on their voyage: two swifters on the crew would turn a set of pedals, powering the two propellers mounted off the starboard and port sides. It allowed them to make progress against the wind, or when the wind died.

“So what’s our timetable?”

Twigly studied the chart. “If we churn all day today, that will bring us about two-thirds of the way. I think we’ll need to stop and rest and re-outfit the vessel tonight, then attack tomorrow night.”

“So we’ll need a conspicuous place to camp.” Durrin knelt to examine the pirates’ map. It was a truly high-quality specimen of cartography, showing individual valleys in the hills between them and Saven. He studied it, noting the locations of roads and towns.

“What’s this?” Durrin asked, pointing to an unusual icon in an isolated stretch of hills.

Twigly squinted at the writing. “The Hakiru word means a shrine or sanctuary. Probably belongs to the Luminant Order or the Dawn Wardens, I would guess.”

Interesting. When serving as Salidar’s agent in Elandria, Durrin had studied its geography extensively, becoming familiar with many of its strongholds and cities. But he had never seen this shrine on any map.

Halorn’s words from the alleyway played in his mind. The scroll is kept by the Luminant Order with utmost secrecy. It is not in the palace at Saven. Only a handful of people know where it is.

Could it . . .?

Durrin pointed to a valley just one ridge over from the mysterious shrine. “Let’s camp here.”

“Why there?”

“This shrine is a secret sanctuary,” Durrin said, “which means not many people come and go. The whole area around it is uninhabited. It’s the best place for us to camp without word getting to Saven of our presence.”

Twigly shrugged. “Sounds good to me.”

Durrin stared out into the slowly brightening pre-dawn sky. The discovery of this secret sanctuary had reignited his passion for Kymar’s scroll, which had been somewhat chilled ever since Halorn’s news.

But now he found that passion struggling for space amid the torrent of thoughts from his conversation with Line.

What was the state of his soul? What would happen to him when he died?

And if he truly was doomed—was there anything he could do to change that?

Twigly chuckled. “You are indeed haunted by questions, Rendhart. Even in the dark, I can see them scurrying over your thoughts, like a swarm of ants over a dropped piece of lemon cheesecake.”

“Lemon . . . cheesecake?”

Twigly winked in the darkness. “It’s a delicacy in Solapharia. You should try it sometime. Maybe after you sample laughter.”