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Just over a week was the actual travel time but it felt like thirty days. Dorath was small for a duskland but large for a day- or cloudland. The enchanted ores keeping it afloat had been fading for centuries. It and its sister island, Carath, had petitioned and hired some of the greatest arcanists in Talvali to shore up their air and earth crystals to hold them at their current position. Centuries ago, they had traded their aide in the Revolution of the Commons for client state status and positions in the lea of Kellendar, proper. The once-failing lightlands had been part of the parliamentary republic ever since. But it was also entirely different from any other province of Kellendar.The Dorathan Spice Guild split power in the state with two orders of knights, the priestly Anondaile Order, and the nature priests known as the Followers of the Silver Chalice. It had to follow the fundamental charter of rights established by Kellendar but its enforcement was sporadic at best. It was probably why the slavers felt safe in going over Dorath air space in their efforts.That and the magics used to stabilize its flight also resulted in the sporadic fractures and fusing of earth crystals in its north. Dorath was so old, no one remembered or documented where it had originally been from. Periodic tragedies in the history of the world had demolished tales, records, memories, and whole nations in the eleven thousand years since The Fall. And Dorath was a small place, both in geography and importance.It went unknown by most and by those who did know of it, it tended to be ignored.The Astinato had reached Dorath's northern edge the previous day and, now, was slowly skimming its northwestern edge looking for the arch of skulls Adam, Eris, and Irri had fought under.Irri spent her time above decks while the rest of the passengers stayed in their cramped bunks, below. She liked the wind that pierced the air shell around the ship's deck and ruffled her black fur. Whorls of less-dark black, like a midnight blue, covered her pelt except where feathers grew in rings around her wrists, ankles, and neck. Her raven's head, while many times larger than the actual animal's skull, moved gracefully as her sharp, black eyes scanned the horizon. The talons on her feet allowed her to grip the deck and railing, firmly, as she pretended to pay attention to where they were going. In reality, she was keeping an eye on Lassiter and the Astinato's crew.

Eris was watchful, true, and Adam had her back but the whimsy had a dim view of all raiders ... even the majority who were not involved in slavery.Her creator, the arcanist Gremwalde of Stonehurst, had been a good man. He had taken great care to cause her no pain and make certain she was well-fed, clothed, and cared-for. Created to serve as a scribe and negotiator, Irri had been taught reading and writing in a dozen languages as well as detailed understanding of spells and incantations. While her knowledge was second to none, and more advanced than most, she had never learned how to channel the energies of the vast field known as the arcana majiere. She knew how to apply those energies, how to shape them into specific effects, but the mental discipline to open her soul to the vast world around her was beyond her.It was because of that that she had been forced to kill Gremwalde.He was a kind master but he was her owner, nonetheless. And while she was grateful for the sliver of his soul that gave her life and animation, she had resented her captivity even more. Besides, in her experience the cruelest and harshest of slave-owners were the soft-spoken and genteel. Their tortures were far more intimate and long-lasting.She shuddered to think of it.Raiders were too similar in her mind. While the term was generic and, as commonly applied, meant any ship crewmember who specialized in exploration and extraction of resources, the scavenging nature of their trade seemed far too similar in tone to that of a slave-owner. After all, what was a slave other than a tool to extract something needed by the slave-owner? She had more in common with a raider's ship than an actual raider. She was under no illusions. She was born a tool and would always remain a tool in the minds of everyone who saw her.Everyone but Eris.Eris hadn't even known her when she came upon the slavers who were taking Irri, in chains, to their ship. The tahvic had even gotten herself captured so she could get close enough to reassure Irri that help had arrived. In that dark hold, surrounded by shadows and disease and fear, Irri stayed sane merely because of Eris.It was a debt she could never repay, so she would spend the rest of her days trying.For the present, while onboard a raider vessel like the Astinato, it was a given that Irri would have to remain vigilant. She would protect Eris with her life, if need be. In a world of monsters, Eris was the first she'd met who treated her with pure respect and love.The northeastern edge of Dorath was rough and beautiful. What had been a full mountain range had been sheared free long ago. Mountains rose from the hills and plains of the island's interior higher and higher until, abruptly, they would drop off in cascades of impossible heights. Some were as smooth as glass while many more were ragged, vertical shafts as if some impossibly giant animal had clawed deep furrows into the very flesh of the earth.There were few signs of life at the edge, given the gusts that rolled in from the edge of the protective air bubble that not only kept Dorath aloft but moving ever eastward in its path behind Kellendar. Other gusts actually arose from beneath the island. For this reason, birds rarely came out this far. Few were the winged creatures that would dare fly beyond the boundaries of their island. The few that would had to overcome not only sporadic gusts from below but also pierce the Break:  the wall of furious wind that surrounded each island:  it's fury in direct proportion to its size. The Break that surrounded Dorath actually surrounded Kellendar, proper. It had the larger air crystals' protection as it followed the larger continent.The Astinato flew beyond the edge of Dorath, on the side of Kellendar's Break but not so foolishly close as to risk being caught in fluctuating winds. It was some fifty miles out, roughly, and they were flying within one mile of Dorath.Once they had some close to their target, the ship had decelerated. Able to travel over two hundred miles in a day, they now slowed to a fraction of that speed. All crew not manning the above-deck or below-deck sails, kept an eye out at the landscape, searching for the promised steps of stone skulls and their accompanying arch.Adam and Eris took shifts looking and traded with Irri. However, when her shift ended, the whimsy simply moved out of sight of whomever was relieving her, and continued to keep watch. She needed rest as much as any mortal being, artificially created or not, but had learned to do with two or three naps during the day instead of one, long sleep. It had been important given the piles and piles of manuscripts she had to copy back in her

enslaved days.She looked up as Adam came to relieve her. She smiled and bowed, ruffling her black, vestigial wings."Spellsword," she addressed him, showing deference to his vocation.He smiled in response. "Please, Irri; you don't have to be so formal." In the cold air, whipping through the air barrier that held and protected the ship, his breath streamed like smoke from his nostrils."All mortals deserve recognition," she replied, dutifully. "And your vocation is a revered one." She thought back on Gremwalde and his comments about those who invoked the arcana majiere for what he called "prurient and brutal urges" and shrugged. "My former master would have disapproved," she continued, "but I suspect he never felt the need to defend himself in any overt manner." She bowed to Adam and turned to go. "You are a great man, sir," she said. "I cannot fail to recognize that."With that, she went off, planning to nap for a short while before quietly returning to watch the shoreline from one of her many hidden positions.Adam watched her go and shook his head. She was so meek and flighty yet possessed of a deeper current of ... something. Something dark, he thought. Maybe. He wasn't quite sure what it was. But whatever it was, it held power; he could feel that. Irri was a strange person. Perhaps it had something to do with her heritage; with how she had been constructed from bits and pieces stitched together by arcane power. He wasn't sure, but Adam suspected no one made in such a way could ever be entirely "normal" in a sense he understood.He turned to look out at Dorath. The black cliffs slid by, lit by the setting sun off the starboard bow. Leaning against the railing, the sunlight on his back, he felt a gust of wind blow up and across his chest. It ruffled his loose shirt and, briefly, inspired an urge to leap. His muscles actually flexed t the feeling. It would only take a second. He could see it, feel it inside: leaping over the edge, spreading his wings, and flying towards the peaks.But jumping over the railing: that would mean risking the Deep Blue.He'd done it a few times, of course: most recently when chasing the ship that had taken Eris.

But it was not something he relished. Whatever transformation the storm dragons had visited upon him had cured him of any fear of heights. Dragonkin, he knew, were some of the most powerful fliers in the world. Gryphons could match them as could pegasai but few would want to. He knew that some dragonkin, in some countries of Talvali, faced rituals of adulthood by having to fly out beyond the edge of their native island and brave the Break. Some, it was said, even flew to other islands under their own power. That was an achievement he didn't know if he envied. It would be exhausting, at least. Flying in skies open to the wild and shadow-shrouded planet beneath was unnerving. And it was more than the legends that put the infernal hells in the caverns and black oceans on the surface, far below. There was something fundamental to the whole experience of not having any ground, floating or otherwise, beneath you save for a world that no one had ever conquered. It was like walking on a glass bridge over a place never explored even by the bravest of scouts.A glint of something metallic caught his eye. It had only been for a moment, high on a twisted, sharp cliff-top. He squinted and tried to make out what had momentarily reflected the light of the setting sun.Several twisted trees clung to a ridge near the top but there was no sign of a structure. For a moment he wondered if the ship the slavers had been waiting for at their rendezvous had come and were, now, searching the high mountains with search parties.Could it have been a glint off of someone's armor? Or perhaps a drawn weapon? He didn't have a spyglass and he doubted that even the eagle eyes of Captain Lassiter could have made out any details. Either way, though, he didn't see the arch. He didn't see any sign of the cleft between two sundered mountains and the vast stair leading down from that height to the Dorath edge. Even if there was anyone there, it wasn't the place he and the others had been.It wasn't the place he'd seen his father. It wasn't the place where he'd stared into the patches of darkness in emd;ess pits of angry, disapproving eyes. It wasn't where he'd seen that damn monster rise out of shadow like a..."What did you see?"Adam jumped, flame burning the back of his throat and nostrils. He stared at Kaia who, to her credit, stood her ground and crossed her arms."What the--!" He tried to calm himself, quickly, pushing back on the fire he'd nearly vomited into the young woman's face."You looked like you saw something," she said. She was hiding a bit of a smile, rather badly, and gestured towards the towering peaks. "But I'm guessing you weren't really looking at the mountains."His calming breaths turned, momentarily, into a growl. Then, forcing that down, he nodded. "Yeah. Lost in my thoughts.""It's okay," she said. "My brother does it all the time. Sometimes I think Neiro is talking to him." She glanced at the mountains. "Where do you think they all went?""They? They, who?""The other half of the mountains, of course," Kaia answered.He nodded, grasping her question. It was a huge range and, having seen it from the other side, it was clear that at one point they had been thicker. Either a truly massive storm had pulled over a hundred miles of land through into the skies over Talvali, bisecting the mountain range down a span of its middle or, at some point, they crumbled and fell off.Stones sometimes fell from the skies in the wake of a dragon storm. The bigger the storm, the more islands brought through, the more likely some would crumble. Often, debris would rain for days in the case of the smaller islands. Some would crack in two or three large chunks with no embedded air crystals to support them and plummet. It was rare but some of those impacts could destroy whole continents. If Dorath, long ago, lost its mountains that meant that somewhere below lay the crumbled remains of the necropolis."You think your brother is chasing phantoms?""No," she admitted, "Kelmore has defended me against ghosts, before." She looked thoughtful. "The difference, this time, is that he's choosing this path. Honestly, it's why I'm following him. In all our lives, he's never been one to seek anything but a safe life for me."Her taking the word 'phantom' for Adam meaning a literal undead spirit didn't surprise him. Often, although language had

translated when the storm dragon's breath had made him dragonkin, colloquialisms didn't quite work. "Chasing ghosts" was something that meant a very different sort of thing back home. It was something Eris would have understood but Kaia didn't really grasp."So, I heard your people were actually called 'Maranthi' or something. Only non-dragonkin call you guys 'dragonkin'."He shrugged. "Why deny the obvious?" he asked. It was actually a sore point. Following his transformation, he had no others of his kind to tell him who or what he was. The others simply called him "dragonkin". He took to it, himself, which outed him as a newcomer when he finally met others of his adopted race."I've heard that you like to give people the impression that you're related to dragons even though you're not; it makes you seem more ... threatening."Again, Adam shrugged.Kaia, figuring that she had gotten all she would out of him on the subject, turned back to lean on the railing. Both of them cast their eyes to the towering mountains. Adam watched the shadows of evening quickly dim and stretch towards night. Above and far to the north, he thought he saw a small lightland, beyond the interstitial cloud layers. He wondered, briefly, if it could have been the Twin Ruins:  the name that the natives dubbed the remains of his home city.The storm that day had been about average size. Eight small pieces of his home world had come through. The only unusual part was that one of the thirteen-mile-wide chunks had been pulled directly out of a modern metropolis. Quite a few of the rest had merely been chunks of ocean:  their watery contents spilling out into the sky with the storm dragons converting quite a bit of the element into water crystals.He couldn't be sure, but he thought he remembered there being a similar philosophy back home:  about ancient philosophers believing the world had been comprised of four elements:  earth, air, fire, and water. But that could have been a converted memory. Besides, here there were five ... possibly six. The fifth was "spirit", the essence of being ... an object or being's raw nature. The sixth was hypothetical and one he'd talked to arcanists or other spellswords about. In theory all five could combine to form the element of "storm":  not just a combination, though ... a chaotic representation of reality in

its most pure and uncontrollable form.He didn't think that was a part of the legends back home. But it could have been. He just couldn't be sure.His father had been a storm.The darkness brewing within him had been around in every memory Adam had of him. And, like a storm, he could only be avoided. It had taken incredible strength for them to run away from him:  he, his brother, and mom. Even when she gathered them up in the middle of the night, he remembered being terrified that his father would find out.He did, of course, but only when he got back from his business trip. And although he pleaded and begged and threatened, mom proved to be the stronger.Even years later, when cancer did what it seemed nothing else could, it was still hard to believe the storm had passed.Was that what he had seen? His father had been dead for a long time when the storms came. Even though Adam knew that, here, there were such things as ghosts and echoes and zombies and wraiths, back home there was just the grave.Eternal.Cold.Rotting.At least that's what he believed.And even if there were, shouldn't that spirit have moved on to heaven or hell or wherever evil bastards went? If his father's ghost had somehow survived, brought into being by this world, Adam swore he'd find out what law of magic, what quirk of Talvali, had made it possible and rip it out of reality, itself.If mom couldn't come back, his father sure as hell didn't deserve to.He watched the shadows consume the mountains as the sun set behind him. In the darkness he saw no sign of the arch or the stair.Eris came up to relieve him. He thought he spotted Irri towards the forecastle but it was probably a trick of the firelight coming from the

dozens of torches lit along the ship. Kaia had left for dinner an hour before but he wasn't hungry. He hugged Eris, briefly, and said nothing as he headed down below for some sleep.Eris had roused Kelmore to join her on the night watch. The Astinato slowed to a crawl. Captain Lassiter had suggested they stop each night lest they risk flying past the landmark in the darkness but Kelmore insisted otherwise. Rather, they slowed themselves and lit fires on the deck, using bronze mirrors to reflect the orange illumination upon the cliffs. Of course this meant they had to get closer to the rocks and two navigators took the helm to make sure they didn't crash. Due to the tremors along its northeastern edge, Dorath had no lighthouses built along this span of mountains."So, tell me what you saw," the derroni asked.Eris looked up at him, curious. "I've already told you:  several times."He nodded, sagely. "But this time we're actually looking at the cliffs. Now, we're actually here. Tell me, again, what you saw that night when Adam came to free you."Her chocolate brown fur bristled at her shoulders. Pulling herself up to her full height, she poked him in the stomach and looked up into his eyes. "Adam came to free us but I was already loose. I know I told you that!"For a moment, the aloof and reluctant home to a spark of the divine, looked pained ... contrite. Firelight caught his eyes and sparkled, just a bit, like distant stars. He turned his gaze to the mountain silhouettes as swaths of dim firelight was reflected over their surfaces. The Astinato had risen to a height equal to its highest peaks since they knew the arch had to lie on a high elevation. During the night, with the dim light their only source of illumination before the moons rose, it was their best bet."You told the tale, yes," Kelmore said. "But I would like to hear it with new ears."Eris wasn't sure what he meant by that but something about his voice calmed her.And, so, she told the tale again.She had actually undone the chains before they had even reached the mountains. The fur on her

wrists had been easy to bunch up when the slavers had clasped her for the overland journey to meet their sister ship. By dusk, the first day, she had gotten one hand free. By morning, she'd gotten both hands out of their bindings. She managed to pop a hinge on each manacle loose so she could put them back on in a way that made them look locked. Then, each night, she would try to reassure the others that, soon, they would be able to free themselves.But the others hadn't been fighters. Half were drunkards who had been taken by the slavers after they stumbled from bars, late at night. Two others were former slaves--Irri included--who had achieved emancipation upon arriving in Kellendar.Eris had known that Adam was following them. She'd seen his attacks upon the ship but also saw him go down. She had hoped he was still alive ... still following them. But she didn't know for sure.Every night, she kept reassuring the others. And every night, she worked in secret, as best she could, to free others. But it wasn't easy. Her small claws weren't as fine as a thaylene's and she had no real tools. She also knew that if they reached the sister ship to the Amberglass, they would be lost. She had resolved, then, upon the completion of their torturous climb up the skull-embossed stairs, that she would fight back that night. She could wait no longer.She had developed a plan, spread it amongst the others, and prepared to break as many of them out as possible to rush the guards.That was when she'd seen the shadow, above. That was when Adam made his appearance.Quickly, she altered the plan and passed word as quickly as she could to the other captives. It hadn't been soon enough. As Adam came crashing down, everything blew up in their collective faces.Kelmore looked confused by her turn of phrase but let it pass.When she got to the part about the river of light flowing from the open mouths and eye sockets of the stone skulls, he nodded and prodded her for more information."And you sure the light was golden; that it flowed out into space and did not stop at the edge of where the stairs had broken off?""Yes and yes," she confirmed. There was something softer about his voice, now. It had the tone of someone well-read and interested in her story. In previous conversations, he'd mostly avoided getting to know them and, instead, had simple, brusque exchanges when asking what they had seen. He was almost ... reverent."I believe," he said at last, "that the island of Dorath--the entire thing of it--was once a part of a much larger land:  perhaps a dayland." He nodded to himself. "It may, indeed, be the only part remaining of lost Alamar and, later, was just mistaken for an overly-large lightland, descending to its doom.""Do you think Carath was the same?"He pursed his lips, in thought. "Maybe; just possibly. But if the necropolis were on Carath, it would be known." He paused, pondering. "Rather, since the river of light formed the phantom of stairs and those led off to the west, I suspect that that's where what is left of Alamar may now lie."Eris nodded. It was as plausible as anything else in this mixed-up, magical world."But why did the skulls light up? I mean the slavers certainly hadn't expected it, and I got the impression they'd been using the arch of skulls as a landmark for a long time.""Eh? You do? You never mentioned that, before."She shrugged. "Well, it's obvious, isn't it?"He frowned, confused. "Enlighten me."She never got a chance.A translucent, dark tentacle shot up and over the railing and wrapped itself around Kelmore. Another quickly followed, barely missing Eris as she ducked and rolled back across the deck. It, and a third, gripped the port railing. They tugged and, even as she called out that they were under attack, the whole airship rocked and tipped. Kelmore was dragged overboard and soon, everyone was screaming.