“What happened?”
“Tough cookie,” Evalyn said, groaning as Kestrel Manor staff attempted to help her walk, only to be shooed away with a grunt and a wave. “Details later if you want them, where’s Oswald?”
Iris looked around the front lobby but couldn’t find the bearded man. Sparse guests fluttered in and out through the same doors Evalyn had just entered, stealing guilty glances at the injured women and the staff clambering to her side.
“He’s overseeing late breakfast, ma’am,” a lanky servant said, her hair impossibly tamed as though sculpted into a low ponytail. “Shall I inform him?”
“Yeah, thank you. Tell him to call the doctor. He can take care of the rest.”
The staffer nodded, leaving in her wake Iris tending to a groaning Evalyn.
“Are you okay?” Iris asked as Evalyn’s good arm found the armrest of a nearby lounge chair.
“Yep,” Evalyn said as she sank into the cushion, groaning as she did so.
“You’re hurt.”
“Yep.”
“That’s not supposed to happen.”
“Well,” Evalyn chuffed, raising her eyebrows. “I’m only human.”
“How did it happen?”
“I was tailing someone,” she said, lowering her voice, “they’d broken a suspect out of custody, so I went to catch them.”
“Witch? Wizard?”
Evalyn nodded. “Tried to grab them,” she explained, moving her arms like tendrils in a fashion only Iris would relate to, “but nothing was working. Moved in for a capture, got blown out of the damn sky so fast I could barely break my fall.”
“Is it broken?”
Her mother shook her head. “Dislocated. The armour took most of the shock, but it was a hard landing. My jaw feels funny, and…I might’ve had a concussion.”
“But you’re okay?”
Evalyn nodded, pressing her lips together. “I’m okay.”
Iris nodded, unable to help but stare at her toes. She grabbed the ends of her jacket and frowned, mulling over the idea in her head.
“Can we…call a truce?”
“Truce?” Evalyn said, apparently clueless.
“We were enemies, but I don’t think that’s fair now.”
“…enemies? Darling, what made you think we were enemies?”
Iris felt her face turning red. She pulled on her jacket and turned away, a defiant squeak escaping and reverberating through her throat. “We were fighting.”
“Iris, that doesn’t make us enemies. What do you—”
The sentence throttled, choked by what sounded like Evalyn’s tongue. Iris turned back, peering through one half-open eye. She saw her mother, stunned in her seat, staggered and dumbstruck.
“What’s wrong? Mum?”
Evalyn struggled to respond. Her throat bobbed up and down, mouth half open like a fish’s. “Mum?”
Her mother slowly stood to her feet, regaining her height over her. She stepped back on reaction, only for her head to fall into Evalyn’s palm. The arm wrapped around her scalp and pulled her closer, resting her cheek against Evalyn’s chest.
And for a moment, Iris couldn’t help but share the same immobilising astonishment that ensnared her mother. She stood there, hands at her side and fingers wrapped around the hem of her jacket, all tension now gone from them.
Then, slowly, she spoke with a tattered voice.
“Iris? Listen to me.”
“What?”
“Just because you have a fight with someone, it doesn’t mean they’re your enemy.”
“But I thought—”
“We’re a special case, but families who grow up together fight all the time,” she said, gripping Iris’s head as though her shoulder was in pain. Yet she paid it no attention. “So if I ever shout at you, if I ever get angry at Elly…and I mean properly angry, even though I’m…I’m usually wrong. Even if that happens, know that I still love both of you. I’ll never be your enemy, okay?”
“O-okay,” Iris managed to say as she sank deeper into Evalyn’s gabardine coat. The sensation against her chin almost distracted her from her confusion.
“Life isn’t just friends and enemies and fighting, okay? Things like this happen all the time. So…please promise you’ll remember.”
“Okay…,” Iris managed.
She felt Evalyn kiss her scalp, and her lips stayed as her hand began to stroke her hair. That same warmth she’d taken for granted, and its return made Iris realise just how badly she’d been missing it. Her own arms crawled upwards until they found their place, tightly around Evalyn’s waist.
“Don’t think like that, okay? Don’t turn into someone like that.”
“Okay.”
“I’m sorry, Iris.”
“About our argument?”
Evalyn shook her head. “I’m still against it…no. I’m sorry about other things.”
“Like what?”
“For…for not sending you to school more, letting you have a regular life. Being a hypocrite.”
“But I’m not angry about that.”
“I know, darling, but you really ought to be.”
Iris didn’t quite understand it; the slight trembling in her guardian’s hand or where the sudden outburst had come from. She only knew it mirrored what the invisible Witch had said the day before, and she only knew something shelved in the back of her mind wanted to take the suggestion, and blame Evalyn for all she’d felt since the day Excala changed forever.
“Ma’am?” a familiar voice called, announcing their entrance.
Iris turned away from her moment in Evalyn’s coat to see Oswald arrive in the front lobby in a manner more hurried than his customary beau ideal walk.
“Ma’am, the doctor informed me he’s unable to make a home visit right now.”
“Right,” Evalyn said, feigning composure in a way only Iris was privy to. “Hospital visit it is then.”
“That…won’t be possible either, ma’am.”
“Why not? I can take a taxi if needs be.”
“No ma’am, it’s nothing to do with transport. The city is…occupied.”
“…like a toilet stall?”
“Like the beginnings of a coup, ma’am.”
On the same steps the 42nd had once guarded in the city’s last crisis, they found themselves the next aggressors. Bearing weapons of dented, black metal, they stood in defiance. Peaceful, relative to what they were truly capable of.
Outside Parliament stood a wall of armoured pawns, the cavalry behind them delivered in the form of two H.O.A. units. Lumbering things, not yet a scratch on their finished surfaces but promising a world of hurt to anyone who dared ruin it.
A picture speaks a thousand words; if Elvera had been holding a camera, she’d have spoken a million for the history books with the single flash.
Police units had arrived earlier, taking the 42nd’s slow but relentless march through the city to their advantage, scrambling their own banged-up units to cover high-value targets; vital infrastructure, schools, and parliament.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Head-to-head the two boxes of caged death were, painted in shades of navy only barely different from one another while one human pilot stared into the eyes of another equally human pilot, neither able to really see who they were seeing.
“Things are progressing fast,” Elvera muttered under her breath for fear of drawing Fault’s ire.
“To an outsider, it might look that way,” Fault explained anyway, having fully regained her composure after a full eight hours. “But the water’s only just tipping over the edge now. Recent events gave them an excuse to blow their top.”
‘Them,’ was a rather nebulous term, but considering the long-standing malaise about the whole of the Sidosian government, a nebulous ‘them’ was about the best way to describe it.
A nebulous enemy: the will of a people rather than the machinations of any singular group or ideology. That was what Trysha had alluded to. That was ultimately what Fault faced.
“This was their plan wasn’t it?” Elvera sighed. “Geverde halfway crippled, so shoot the medic.”
“Two birds with one stone,” Fault conceded through gritted teeth. “Don’t restart the old civil war, start up a new one that’ll ruin the country for sure.”
Watch the world burn. A nebulous goal, the margin for error so astronomically wide it was almost impossible to fail. That, compared to its flip side—to prevent them from reaching that goal—even a fool could pick out the harder of the two.
Between the two sides, lined up on the steps to Parliament stood the stability of the nation, Geverde’s only ally, and the town square outside of Sidos station.
The headlines filed in one after another, the reporter’s practised, measured voice dampening the reality of the situation. Elliot, over ten years out from the civil war, found his initial disbelief slowly replaced by a piecing together of old memories. Dark clouds, blaring sirens, dots of red in a sea of grey angles. All of a sudden, the scene depicted over the radio no longer sounded so alien, and the town square outside Sidos station gradually became nothing more than a distant reality.
The situation wasn’t going to alter the day’s schedule; a meeting was due in two minutes, and all that was changing was the tension in the room.
Up again by a few notches, to the point even the Geverdians in the room would have no choice but to straighten their posture and keep at a high alert. Worst case scenario, the Sidosians would begin to bicker between themselves, or worse.
“What happens, happens,” Elliot said, pretending it was a wiser proverb than it had any right to be as he stood out of his bed and headed for the briefing room. His joints were slipping underneath him, a combination of the heat and the hours of sleep he’d lost in favour of progress, the results of which were tucked under his arm.
He kept a brisk pace, furrowing his eyebrows and sharpening his gaze like his brow was the corner edge of a grindstone. Walk fast and look bothered, quickest way to get from A to B.
Rounding the corner to the briefing room, he found the door opened, soft chatter emanating from the gap.
“We’re all adults here, Elliot,” he said, his own words soothing nothing but a nervous urge to speak. His right foot failed to move, so he tried with his left until he came to the door.
A final sigh, and a hope that it’d all be over soon. He cursed Elvera under his breath: not only was he right about the Sidosian pilots, but she had been correct. Giving him something to do other than worry about Iris had probably been best for everyone. That was before things started to spiral out of control.
Elliot stepped inside, maintaining his don’t-have-the-time look while he weaved through several rows of desks and chairs, keeping eye contact with nothing but the wall until he sat down. Stares seared the back of his scalp, but he paid them no heed as the lights dropped and the projector shone an image over the blank wall.
The briefing opened with wearisome formalities as the holes in the back of his skull gaped wider and wider. Soon, it was his turn to speak.
Elliot stood, taking a rushed survey of the room as he did so. Walking up to the front, the projector dimmed, and the corkboard was wheeled out with the assistance of a junior analyst. Elliot bowed his head in thanks, a gesture the analyst brushed off without a second glance.
He turned to the room, the scowls less obvious than he had expected, but still there, nonetheless. Mixed in were ill-intentioned smirks and lopsided eyebrows, waiting to see what happened next.
“Morning,” he said, ending in a croak. “This plan, I’ve been told, will be in effect come tomorrow. By today, all necessary personnel will be transported off-site along with their aircraft. Now,” he continued, bringing their attention to the corkboard. “Here’s the known flyway that this spy plane is moving along. Although two flights don’t constitute a sample size, the similarities cannot be considered coincidence.”
His finger traced the two sets of laced strings across the Sidosian mountains.
“We could assume that the aircraft uses Aether to power, at the very least, its invisibility magic, however, due to its inconsistency, likely does not use a consistent source. We know that Sidosian wands can conduct small Aether pulls although we do not know how. It can be assumed that this aircraft has taken a middle-ground between the two.”
At the behest of his hand, an analyst on the far side of the room slid a photograph into the projector and ignited the lamp. The photo shone across the corkboard map, giving the simple topographic lines shadow, shape and texture.
“What you’re seeing right now is the known areas of Higher Order territory—the most common areas where Higher Order Spirits have been seen residing—marked out in red.”
He let the room figure out for themselves, that the red areas lined up with the periods of invisibility, and that when the aircraft flew between two zones, it would appear once again.
“Higher Order Spirits pull more Aether similarly to how a low-pressure system creates wind. More Spirits are attracted to the area, more Aether pulls, creating a domino effect.”
To any Aetherologist, to any White Devil, it was common sense. Simply by there being Spirits, atmospheric Aether was never wholly equal. Like an eagle riding thermals, the aircraft had stuck to a path defined by Higher Order Spirit territories. Being over the Northern Chain Ridge, there was wealth to choose from.
“Emissaries have been deployed to every Higher Order Spirit zone. Eight of the thirteen marked Spirits have agreed to lessen their Aether presence in the event of a scramble. After today’s briefing, every pilot in this room will be stationed on military and civilian airstrips along this flight path, Geverdians, especially those with camo capabilities towards the mountains, Sidosians towards the plains.”
He motioned for the projector to be extinguished and the house lights to be turned back on. Returning to the corkboard, he continued his explanation.
“Once the Spirits lessen their presence across the board, the aircraft will likely panic and break course over the mountains. Here, the Geverdians will force a dogfight or surrender, the invisible fighters pursuing further into foreign territory if needed. If a retreat attempt is made over the country, Sidosians will pursue with the intention of either forcing a surrender or down the fighter outright.”
Elliot finally fell silent, little of their outward appearance had changed. “Any questions?”
No hands rose. Elliot nodded his head.
“So—”
“Over here.”
The usual suspect. Curled hair, weed-like stubble. Elliot reluctantly gave way for the pilot to speak.
“Yes, question.”
“Sorry if I’m making assumptions here, Sir,” he said, injecting the honorific with a healthy dose of unneeded spite. “I want to cut to the chase here and say that, on behalf of my pilots, I’m finding it hard to trust you all.”
The room snapped, and Elliot felt his eyebrow twitch in response to the forced cordiality. It was a fistfight the Squadron Leader wanted. Elliot would indulge him if only he asked nicely.
“Is this relevant, Squadron Leader?”
“Yes Sir. My men share my concerns, and we have a right to be heard. It’s only right, Senior Captain.”
The pilot leaned forward in his chair, his Sidosian comrades turning their attention to the front in a sceptic chorus.
“You all gave us the problem with photos we weren’t allowed to see, with magic and troops we never agreed to work with, with Lieutenant-Generals in our high command,” he continued as the Excalan analysts’ faces soured like off milk. “Then, they hand to us, on a silver platter, the solution to boot. In a nice…complete package.”
Sentence after sentence of sensational assumption. But the sensational was a tantalising drug to the eyes of the frustrated.
“Isn’t that a little suspicious?” the pilot suggested. “What’s saying that you, sir, a defector of our Air Force, have the best interest of us at heart.”
Emerging from his quiet scheming, the self-appointed ringleader was out to sic half the force on Elliot, with the other half watching on for his response. For many of whom, the title of defector was but a rumour, yet to be proven. Elliot preferred if it had remained that way.
“What’s saying I have your best intentions at heart, you ask?”
The crowd was silent, wanting eyes eager for an answer. Elliot scowled, some straw of tissue holding the two halves of his breaks together finally snapping.
The fatigue, the stares, the unwanted orders and the uncomfortable mattress in a room that brought back to life a period in his time he'd entirely moved on from. It was sickening, especially when he had better things to worry about.
“To be completely honest, I have no intentions at heart. I don’t give a damn about if a spy plane flies over this rotted country or not. I’m here because there were people willing to give you bastards an out, and you screwed it up.”
The analysts hid behind their clipboards, and pilots, friend and foe sat in utter shock. The smug Flight Lieutenant was no longer smiling; Elliot had taken up all the real estate in that department.
He wanted to tear the Squadron Leader’s throat out.
“You’re all pretty young, elite, best in your class. Am I right? You were ‘that guy’ in the academy and you’re stuck with some old crones who couldn’t finish the war. ‘If only I’d been ready by then,’ while your superiors are pissy over the fact that someone else made peace before they could get their fill.”
Elliot stepped forward, discarding the contents of his hand as he approached the Squadron Leader.
“I will pour one out over every grave in this country if I have to. I got no reservations about that. What happened to every single person we couldn’t save is a tragedy.”
He placed his hands on the Squadron Leader’s deck, leaning over the man’s face as he scowled back.
“But I didn’t have that fire in me, and that let me see a different way out. I’m not a God; no one can bring your family back, but by God will I tell your sister over and over again, that what we fought for meant I don’t have to pour one out over any more graves than I have to.”
Elliot grabbed the Squadron Leader by his collar, hauling the man out of his seat and bringing their faces centimetres away from each other. The room erupted, Sidosian pilots flying out of their chairs to make a grab at Elliot while Geverdian ones put themselves in the way. The surrounding encirclement jostled for power, and Elliot made sure he was heard by all of them.
“But I have stakes in the game now: people close to me doing the work to clean up what your hot shots and salty crones couldn’t put behind them. And by God, you won’t be there to pour one out over their graves while you tell them how wrong you were. I’ll make sure, personally, that no one can find your damn headstone. You got that? Where’s my ‘yes sir’?”
The Squadron Leader, stubborn, kept his mouth shut.
“Where’s my ‘yes sir’?!” Elliot shouted into his ear.
“Yes sir,” the Squadron Leader hissed. Elliot shoved the man back into his chair, kicking the desk for good measure before he turned to the frozen cabal of soldiers, frozen mid-outrage.
“We all lose people. You all were unfortunate enough to be born a few years too early. I can only feel sorry for you. If you think putting a hole into my back is going to bring back your lost ones then be my guest. See how that works out for you. But right now, all I care about is shooting this damn plane out of the sky, so I never have to see any of you ever again. Because it's not about you anymore. The world keeps turning, and there are new people to save now and new enemies to put in the dirt. Hate me all you want; say I don’t know what I’m talking about. You know I’m right.”