At the dawn of day all hands were roused on deck. There we saw not a crack of light, for all were buried in darkness, one that veiled even the moon and the stars.
Clouds.
Clouds, for Lost Azure had passed some days before. And thicker they were than any should have been this time of the year. The day before only terse and distant trails of mist could be seen far off, now, layer upon layer of gloom enwrapped us in a thicket so unnatural.
A fortnight since that day the captain obtained the strange orb from Absalomi, for as long the priests had worked unceasingly to maintain the Daybright’s top speed. Judging from the solemn alares assembled on deck, it was not difficult to guess the day’s task. And I was right. The chief mate soon gave a brief command for the preparation of a major hunt. That one we long suspected. All hands were ordered to their designated stations, all sails reefed.
Among the ranks of the Anemones, I marked Litzia and her customary mystique, snuggling close to her armed knight. I recalled what the wyverness had told me the other day, how her rider was not yet used to flight. Today was like to be their first time heading into battle together. No time would be afforded them to steel their resolve and mind, nor would the captain permit refusal of duty.
But who am I to get anxious for the sake of these luminous warriors under the Dragon’s wings? I was but a slave, and my own worries, though trifling in the grand scheme of things, were enough for me.
Even so, when it began, I lingered on deck. An unwonted curiosity compelled me that I wished to see what was to transpire with my own eyes. There were not a few who shared my sentiments, though the officers would not be pleased if we stayed long. Still, they should have it in them to allow for some moments delayed. So magnificent is such a sight, it commanded in the women of authority no less than in us a childish wonder and yearning for beauty not so often seen in the open sky. So that thoughts and fear of punishment did vanish as we looked on – the taking-off of the Anemones.
Our alares shifted as a million dandelions stirred in the first spring breeze. Each of the pairs turned to face each other: wyvern and knight, lightly dressed creatures of beastly features and ordinary humans. What was to transpire would be the manifestation of a sacred bond between individuals, deeper than friendships or filial affections, severer than aught earthly obligations or fealty. For they were the rulers of the sky, the only humans and wyverns to roam unaided in the azure. For alone, they are like us in the flesh, the same blood courses our veins, and ever the body is confined to these floating shelters, but together only they might become the extraordinary light. The mortal flame reaches into divine grace, held in the lanterns of a tried bond, carrying wishes to beings of the great light they now play a part. And that joy and privileges, ever they are granted.
One by one, their hands connected. Where the gale raged all about, quietly the rite commenced. The strange light descended on them, the hidden art imbued them. Into the knights’ veins it poured, and by the bond of two grew an aura far brighter than the greatest Priest’s decades worth of epiphanies. Their arms and armors radiated in sparks and glamor of light, as the wyvernesses’ marks of nobility – horns and tails – grew to bestialise and banish their human shells. The outburst of nigh hundred pairs’ transformations in unison shone like a beacon of war declared. And when one by one the light subsided, now the wyverness had returned to their true primal forms: serpentine creatures of great membrane wings, their reach from tail to thorny head as long as three women were tall. In the new forms, there retained aspects of their pledgeless state, namely the horns, tail, and hues, but also the pride, the gait, the individuality of each.
As soon, the knights leaped on their back as the wyverns erected, snouts lifting skywards. Fierce shrieks penetrated the clouds, and small storms shook the deck as they took flight and filled the heavens. Red, brown, blue, white, golden, silver—many colored and varied shaped the steeds, gleaming and richly armed the riders, they wheeled and they glided. A sight at once festive and intimidating, for so great a host of alares is only ever mustered for war.
No more sightseeing now, I rushed to the companionway and down the gundeck. There lay my role during the hunt. It was a low ceiling level beneath the waist. Lined up against the plank walls were reinforced gunports, and before each a wheeled rune-cannon. Here together with another sailor was my station – at one of the guns to starboard.
Enaid, my cannon-mate, had already pulled up the lid. We heaved and pushed the muzzle through the port. As my partner was stronger and of a greater frame than mine, the turning and adjusting of the cannon would be hers, while mine would be the aiming and working of the runes of power engraved on its metallic frame.
We waited.
Time passed. Hushed chatters alone punctured the tension in the air. At the time, shafts of daylights still cracked through the dense cloud formation. Through the portholes, I could see our alares circling about the ship, even as eager hounds awaiting the devastating signal. Those who had been sent forth to scout returned at intervals, but for an hour seemed to bring no sightings.
But when it came, it came with a most ominous warning. Gradually, all things grew dark. Sunlight dwindled until there was almost none. An eclipse. I poked my head out the hole; the sun, if it was still there, had been swallowed by the dark clouds or some celestial being beyond.
Presently, a rider shot across the sky at an alarming speed. We did not hear her land, so she must have gone straight to the officers. And then our course shifted.
We first saw its silhouette imprinted beyond the clouds, illuminated by storm lights. A fish-like creature, but almost oval in shape, with only a short tail to its rear and a protruded muzzle at its front. Not fins but gnarly appendages grew all over its body. Fire came in its wake. The thunder and lightning we had heard and seen was its doing, being cracked from each tentacle of destruction.
Fright plagued our minds as we gazed upon the nightmarish creature. The dark hide impressed on the clouded sky as it floated closer. Eyes, two on our side, protruded from its flat flank. Those rolling orbs were trained on us.
“Isn’t it much too large?” some said. It was. The whole thing could easily be as enormous as our vessel. And the Daybright was among the largest to ever take to the sky.
“A leviathan.” Someone whispered. The phrase was hardly audible amidst the rushing footfalls overhead, but every sailor had heard it clearly, internalized it, cringed at it, even before it was uttered. The sailors’ boogeyman. Everyone knows of them: great beasts that roamed the sky, heard only in fragmented tales, for few had ever lived to tell in full an encounter with them.
Our trance was lasting, until out of nowhere broken by a sharp shout: “Fire, all hands! Fire!”
An even contest.
The Daybright, seat of power of the Last of the Dragons, against a leviathan. Such beasts who existed even before mankind took to the sky, so told the ancient stories in sailors’ bastardized oral tales. They were the storm, the eruption, and the earthquake of unbound heavens – embodied destruction of feeble mortals causes, and perhaps not rarely, of hapless immortals. No one knows how many still roam the open sky in this age, for few ships ever survived such encounters, and fewer of these beasts are ever reported slain even in myths and legends of old. All creatures by instinct flee from their sight, yet we came in force and violence. At this moment, even Aurora’s crew harbored doubt. We would fight in bitter despair and terror, though our captain was mighty indeed.
Desperately, we played our part. Runes of storm and thunder glowed under my hands that laid upon the cannon’s steel, drawing the power imbued in the runes into physical force, which upon reaching its critical mass expulsed itself from the steel-bound muzzle. Roaring through the sky, it joined with hundreds of others of its kind. A show of force and aura, a flashing tempest of human will. The Daybright’s starboard flared ceaselessly. Each thundering volley battered the gigantic beast and brought tremors to its dark hide. We did not stop – we dared not to. As though for but one slacking moment, the beast would be upon us.
Such was our fear, yet the alares were ones in greater and more immediate danger. They braved the enemy’s proximity and entrusted their lives to sleight of flight. The beast’s appendages whipped at its assailants. And at each snap of those beastly arms, forked flames and thunder roared across the sky. In among those bolt-cracking tentacles, they dodged and dove and plunged to all its sides, finding the smallest cracks in its armor of hide. As we looked on, they were but little flies buzzing about its enormous size. Yet great was their onslaught. Each carried arms to strike from afar: engraved runestaves launching ghastly beams of light at their enemy. Augmented by their ancient pledges, their might exceeded that of our cannons, each equaled a siege machine on land.
But chief in the Anamone’s firepower were those gifted with exceptional sorcerous might. They who carved runes of power directly into thin air, drawing upon powers beneath the fabric of reality. Such formidable few, numbered no more than a handful, wielded smouldering little suns within their palms, and heaven parted at their bidding, so that each strike carved chunks of flesh and hide off the beast, each one louder than the greatest thunder the monster could crack.
And still, desperate was our fight. The contest dragged on, but no conclusion came in sight. For how many wounds we inflicted upon the enemy, it soared on still, throwing tentacles every which way. At times, it struck one of ours, sending them smoking back to the ship. But not all were so fortunate to survive such strikes. From time to time, one pair would be struck true by an explosion, and we would never see them again, their fate unknown to us sailors. Whether the victims were timely saved by their comrades, or sent straight to the Underland where their remains would forever dwell, us gunners could not know. Our concentration wholly trained on the trajectory between our muzzle and the mass of mythical flesh. We dared not think. The worst of fates be upon us.
Amidst the shout-filled gundeck and the cannon booms that drummed in our bones, here and there disasters broke loose. Barked orders reached the pitch of panic. A grievous mistake caught a nervous gunner and her partner in a terrible explosion. The sound of an injured alares crashing on deck sent chilling dread from above. Chaos slackened our volleys, consuming us at hastening pace. The smell of fire and burned wood reached our nostrils.
Then someone cried, “It turns this way!”
The ugly nose steered for the ship. Having its fill of picking the Anemone off the sky perhaps, it now came for the larger enemy. I could feel the change in the Art wind, we were steering to port. But no use fleeing its path now, ere long we were cruising within tentacle reach. Those ugly things flung out, smashing against the Daybright’s hull, shaking the vessel and sending every soul in the gundeck stumbling. The hard corner of something grazed my head, doubling my vision. I must gasp for air, must regain my footing. Yet my spinning head refused to cooperate. Ringing pain within echoed on and on, throbbing. I limped, clinging to my assigned cannon. My partner, or someone close by, pulled me to my feet. This time I successfully retained my balance. A glance revealed many sailors struggling desperately back to their cannon. And yet before we could launch another volley, the second quake sent splinters raining outside the gunports.
The clamor aloft was now reaching a state of hysteria: again and again the beast in its primal rage struck us. One smashed a gunport two cannons to my right to pieces, pulverized a section of the wall and sent the gun crashing the opposite side. Three killed on the spot. The gundeck was in utter chaos. I crawled once more to my cannon. We would be killed, be killed, for certain. I know that. Even I, an azure, would meet my second true death should we be sunk. Even if just for another moment, by putting in my pitiful effort, I must cling onto this life. So I crawled. The cannon. I placed my hands on it. I could not find Enaid. I steered it myself. The weight of the chunk of steel and wood burned the limits of my muscles as I shifted it in pain. It drained all my remaining strength. Another shot, if just one more…
Elsewhere, a single cannon was still roaring. And it had been roaring even before I could reach mine.
My aching head turned. I saw a desperate sailor whose name I would never learn hung over the glowing runes. Her partner was in an even worse condition than I. An undiluted rage painted her face also, consuming her being. Survival, hatred, and a desire to do something, anything, to save herself, to save everyone else. I knew well this desire. It is fear above all that humans and azures feel in concord.
The blast of my cannon hit squarely the primal beast at close range, slightly angled, but seeing it up close, how pathetic was the damage it dealt, little more than one teardrop to quench a fire.
Our uselessness was plain. Not for a million blasts would the beast budge from our only shelter in this boundless sky to all directions. The shots sparse, dull, amidst the constant destruction being wreaken all around us. The sorcerous strikes of the alares so close at hand lent a new terror to the situation. Even as I looked on, when one hit the beast, a devastating light split the dark hide open. With only five hundred paces or so between us, the ruined flesh of our enemy was fully revealed. Dark blood oozed from its numerous wounds and severed tentacles like corrupted waterfalls. Smoke rose from its now darkened eye. And yet rage seemed to fill its attacks with lasting vigor.
A series of groaning and creaking sounds came from overhead, and then the ship shook violently. With one final violent shiver, we listed perilously to starboard. A moment later a mast fell past our portholes, fluttering, burning, sails followed right after, dragging the rigging and breaking a large chunk of the gunwale in its wake.
The desperate sailor’s cannon flared on. And so was mine, but admittedly less fervently. Still, a strong will is contagious. The other guns began to boom again along with us. Enaid was on her feet once more, grunting with a bloody split head at an unmanned gunport. Again our volleys came alive at almost full strength. Whether our effort had brought our comrades elsewhere some courage, I did not know. The mayhem below and aloft sounded mostly unaltered.
“The beast turned!”
Turning away this time. Slowly, laboriously. There was a significant change in the Anemone’s formation also. Our riders no more surrounded it from all sides, but crowded upon its back, where mayhap a flaw in its thick hide had been revealed. No longer in search of a weakness, they invoked their destructive art with a purpose, concentrating on the side unseen by us.
I thought then that it was the light at the end of the tunnel. Survival in sight. And it was not an unwarranted hope. The leviathan let out a deafening roar – its death rattle. The thing was in grave pain, hopefully one caused by some lethal wound. Some sailors had stopped working their cannons. It felt as though our greatest contribution possible at this point was simply to fix our eyes on what was to transpire, and pray our hardest to the Gods to bless our alares.
But it was not for an endless half hour later that the Anemone’s effort seemed to come close to fruition. Most of the beast’s terrible appendages had dropped to its side. It moved now at a crawl. The sky had become covered in smoke many shades darker than the storm clouds we sailed within. The smell of burnt flesh assaulted my nose and fatigued head. But a little more.
The leviathan abruptly came to life. Tentacles swung once more – testament to a millennia old will. They came for where the Anemones were concentrated, who at once scattered, yet not all timely did. Where it struck, a large patch of the sky exploded blindingly. An uncounted many fell like flaming leaves from a scorched evergreen. Our alares had abandoned all effort to maintain their assaults, all who could still fly plunged for their comrades. I saw many knights separated from their wyverns, who were forced back to their human form. Many fell, many caught but lay lifelessly in the arms of their saviors.
And too I heard many cries as the Anemones fled to the ship. Wails of pain and terror for their slain sisters.
The beast trudged away. Smoking. Bleeding.
Among the flock of wyverns heading our way, I searched. I was not too familiar with all our wyvernesses’ shapes and features, but I thought I saw one I recognized. Or at least my eyes were drawn to her. She carried her knight still who lay unmoving on her black back. When the two were almost directly over the deck, suddenly her wings vanished, and in a second she was once again in Litzia’s human form. Momentum carried the two past my vision, then ended with a heavy crash overhead.
At the dawn of day all hands were roused on deck. There we saw not a crack of light, for all were buried in darkness, one that veiled even the moon and the stars.
Clouds.
Clouds, for Lost Azure had passed some days before. And thicker they were than any should have been this time of the year. The day before only terse and distant trails of mist could be seen far off, now, layer upon layer of gloom enwrapped us in a thicket so unnatural.
A fortnight since that day the captain obtained the strange orb from Absalomi, for as long the priests had worked unceasingly to maintain the Daybright’s top speed. Judging from the solemn alares assembled on deck, it was not difficult to guess the day’s task. And I was right. The chief mate soon gave a brief command for the preparation of a major hunt. That one we long suspected. All hands were ordered to their designated stations, all sails reefed.
Among the ranks of the Anemones, I marked Litzia and her customary mystique, snuggling close to her armed knight. I recalled what the wyverness had told me the other day, how her rider was not yet used to flight. Today was like to be their first time heading into battle together. No time would be afforded them to steel their resolve and mind, nor would the captain permit refusal of duty.
But who am I to get anxious for the sake of these luminous warriors under the Dragon’s wings? I was but a slave, and my own worries, though trifling in the grand scheme of things, were enough for me.
Even so, when it began, I lingered on deck. An unwonted curiosity compelled me that I wished to see what was to transpire with my own eyes. There were not a few who shared my sentiments, though the officers would not be pleased if we stayed long. Still, they should have it in them to allow for some moments delayed. So magnificent is such a sight, it commanded in the women of authority no less than in us a childish wonder and yearning for beauty not so often seen in the open sky. So that thoughts and fear of punishment did vanish as we looked on – the taking-off of the Anemones.
Our alares shifted as a million dandelions stirred in the first spring breeze. Each of the pairs turned to face each other: wyvern and knight, lightly dressed creatures of beastly features and ordinary humans. What was to transpire would be the manifestation of a sacred bond between individuals, deeper than friendships or filial affections, severer than aught earthly obligations or fealty. For they were the rulers of the sky, the only humans and wyverns to roam unaided in the azure. For alone, they are like us in the flesh, the same blood courses our veins, and ever the body is confined to these floating shelters, but together only they might become the extraordinary light. The mortal flame reaches into divine grace, held in the lanterns of a tried bond, carrying wishes to beings of the great light they now play a part. And that joy and privileges, ever they are granted.
One by one, their hands connected. Where the gale raged all about, quietly the rite commenced. The strange light descended on them, the hidden art imbued them. Into the knights’ veins it poured, and by the bond of two grew an aura far brighter than the greatest Priest’s decades worth of epiphanies. Their arms and armors radiated in sparks and glamor of light, as the wyvernesses’ marks of nobility – horns and tails – grew to bestialise and banish their human shells. The outburst of nigh hundred pairs’ transformations in unison shone like a beacon of war declared. And when one by one the light subsided, now the wyverness had returned to their true primal forms: serpentine creatures of great membrane wings, their reach from tail to thorny head as long as three women were tall. In the new forms, there retained aspects of their pledgeless state, namely the horns, tail, and hues, but also the pride, the gait, the individuality of each.
As soon, the knights leaped on their back as the wyverns erected, snouts lifting skywards. Fierce shrieks penetrated the clouds, and small storms shook the deck as they took flight and filled the heavens. Red, brown, blue, white, golden, silver—many colored and varied shaped the steeds, gleaming and richly armed the riders, they wheeled and they glided. A sight at once festive and intimidating, for so great a host of alares is only ever mustered for war.
No more sightseeing now, I rushed to the companionway and down the gundeck. There lay my role during the hunt. It was a low ceiling level beneath the waist. Lined up against the plank walls were reinforced gunports, and before each a wheeled rune-cannon. Here together with another sailor was my station – at one of the guns to starboard.
Enaid, my cannon-mate, had already pulled up the lid. We heaved and pushed the muzzle through the port. As my partner was stronger and of a greater frame than mine, the turning and adjusting of the cannon would be hers, while mine would be the aiming and working of the runes of power engraved on its metallic frame.
We waited.
Time passed. Hushed chatters alone punctured the tension in the air. At the time, shafts of daylights still cracked through the dense cloud formation. Through the portholes, I could see our alares circling about the ship, even as eager hounds awaiting the devastating signal. Those who had been sent forth to scout returned at intervals, but for an hour seemed to bring no sightings.
But when it came, it came with a most ominous warning. Gradually, all things grew dark. Sunlight dwindled until there was almost none. An eclipse. I poked my head out the hole; the sun, if it was still there, had been swallowed by the dark clouds or some celestial being beyond.
Presently, a rider shot across the sky at an alarming speed. We did not hear her land, so she must have gone straight to the officers. And then our course shifted.
We first saw its silhouette imprinted beyond the clouds, illuminated by storm lights. A fish-like creature, but almost oval in shape, with only a short tail to its rear and a protruded muzzle at its front. Not fins but gnarly appendages grew all over its body. Fire came in its wake. The thunder and lightning we had heard and seen was its doing, being cracked from each tentacle of destruction.
Fright plagued our minds as we gazed upon the nightmarish creature. The dark hide impressed on the clouded sky as it floated closer. Eyes, two on our side, protruded from its flat flank. Those rolling orbs were trained on us.
“Isn’t it much too large?” some said. It was. The whole thing could easily be as enormous as our vessel. And the Daybright was among the largest to ever take to the sky.
“A leviathan.” Someone whispered. The phrase was hardly audible amidst the rushing footfalls overhead, but every sailor had heard it clearly, internalized it, cringed at it, even before it was uttered. The sailors’ boogeyman. Everyone knows of them: great beasts that roamed the sky, heard only in fragmented tales, for few had ever lived to tell in full an encounter with them.
Our trance was lasting, until out of nowhere broken by a sharp shout: “Fire, all hands! Fire!”
An even contest.
The Daybright, seat of power of the Last of the Dragons, against a leviathan. Such beasts who existed even before mankind took to the sky, so told the ancient stories in sailors’ bastardized oral tales. They were the storm, the eruption, and the earthquake of unbound heavens – embodied destruction of feeble mortals causes, and perhaps not rarely, of hapless immortals. No one knows how many still roam the open sky in this age, for few ships ever survived such encounters, and fewer of these beasts are ever reported slain even in myths and legends of old. All creatures by instinct flee from their sight, yet we came in force and violence. At this moment, even Aurora’s crew harbored doubt. We would fight in bitter despair and terror, though our captain was mighty indeed.
Desperately, we played our part. Runes of storm and thunder glowed under my hands that laid upon the cannon’s steel, drawing the power imbued in the runes into physical force, which upon reaching its critical mass expulsed itself from the steel-bound muzzle. Roaring through the sky, it joined with hundreds of others of its kind. A show of force and aura, a flashing tempest of human will. The Daybright’s starboard flared ceaselessly. Each thundering volley battered the gigantic beast and brought tremors to its dark hide. We did not stop – we dared not to. As though for but one slacking moment, the beast would be upon us.
Such was our fear, yet the alares were ones in greater and more immediate danger. They braved the enemy’s proximity and entrusted their lives to sleight of flight. The beast’s appendages whipped at its assailants. And at each snap of those beastly arms, forked flames and thunder roared across the sky. In among those bolt-cracking tentacles, they dodged and dove and plunged to all its sides, finding the smallest cracks in its armor of hide. As we looked on, they were but little flies buzzing about its enormous size. Yet great was their onslaught. Each carried arms to strike from afar: engraved runestaves launching ghastly beams of light at their enemy. Augmented by their ancient pledges, their might exceeded that of our cannons, each equaled a siege machine on land.
But chief in the Anamone’s firepower were those gifted with exceptional sorcerous might. They who carved runes of power directly into thin air, drawing upon powers beneath the fabric of reality. Such formidable few, numbered no more than a handful, wielded smouldering little suns within their palms, and heaven parted at their bidding, so that each strike carved chunks of flesh and hide off the beast, each one louder than the greatest thunder the monster could crack.
And still, desperate was our fight. The contest dragged on, but no conclusion came in sight. For how many wounds we inflicted upon the enemy, it soared on still, throwing tentacles every which way. At times, it struck one of ours, sending them smoking back to the ship. But not all were so fortunate to survive such strikes. From time to time, one pair would be struck true by an explosion, and we would never see them again, their fate unknown to us sailors. Whether the victims were timely saved by their comrades, or sent straight to the Underland where their remains would forever dwell, us gunners could not know. Our concentration wholly trained on the trajectory between our muzzle and the mass of mythical flesh. We dared not think. The worst of fates be upon us.
Amidst the shout-filled gundeck and the cannon booms that drummed in our bones, here and there disasters broke loose. Barked orders reached the pitch of panic. A grievous mistake caught a nervous gunner and her partner in a terrible explosion. The sound of an injured alares crashing on deck sent chilling dread from above. Chaos slackened our volleys, consuming us at hastening pace. The smell of fire and burned wood reached our nostrils.
Then someone cried, “It turns this way!”
The ugly nose steered for the ship. Having its fill of picking the Anemone off the sky perhaps, it now came for the larger enemy. I could feel the change in the Art wind, we were steering to port. But no use fleeing its path now, ere long we were cruising within tentacle reach. Those ugly things flung out, smashing against the Daybright’s hull, shaking the vessel and sending every soul in the gundeck stumbling. The hard corner of something grazed my head, doubling my vision. I must gasp for air, must regain my footing. Yet my spinning head refused to cooperate. Ringing pain within echoed on and on, throbbing. I limped, clinging to my assigned cannon. My partner, or someone close by, pulled me to my feet. This time I successfully retained my balance. A glance revealed many sailors struggling desperately back to their cannon. And yet before we could launch another volley, the second quake sent splinters raining outside the gunports.
The clamor aloft was now reaching a state of hysteria: again and again the beast in its primal rage struck us. One smashed a gunport two cannons to my right to pieces, pulverized a section of the wall and sent the gun crashing the opposite side. Three killed on the spot. The gundeck was in utter chaos. I crawled once more to my cannon. We would be killed, be killed, for certain. I know that. Even I, an azure, would meet my second true death should we be sunk. Even if just for another moment, by putting in my pitiful effort, I must cling onto this life. So I crawled. The cannon. I placed my hands on it. I could not find Enaid. I steered it myself. The weight of the chunk of steel and wood burned the limits of my muscles as I shifted it in pain. It drained all my remaining strength. Another shot, if just one more…
Elsewhere, a single cannon was still roaring. And it had been roaring even before I could reach mine.
My aching head turned. I saw a desperate sailor whose name I would never learn hung over the glowing runes. Her partner was in an even worse condition than I. An undiluted rage painted her face also, consuming her being. Survival, hatred, and a desire to do something, anything, to save herself, to save everyone else. I knew well this desire. It is fear above all that humans and azures feel in concord.
The blast of my cannon hit squarely the primal beast at close range, slightly angled, but seeing it up close, how pathetic was the damage it dealt, little more than one teardrop to quench a fire.
Our uselessness was plain. Not for a million blasts would the beast budge from our only shelter in this boundless sky to all directions. The shots sparse, dull, amidst the constant destruction being wreaken all around us. The sorcerous strikes of the alares so close at hand lent a new terror to the situation. Even as I looked on, when one hit the beast, a devastating light split the dark hide open. With only five hundred paces or so between us, the ruined flesh of our enemy was fully revealed. Dark blood oozed from its numerous wounds and severed tentacles like corrupted waterfalls. Smoke rose from its now darkened eye. And yet rage seemed to fill its attacks with lasting vigor.
A series of groaning and creaking sounds came from overhead, and then the ship shook violently. With one final violent shiver, we listed perilously to starboard. A moment later a mast fell past our portholes, fluttering, burning, sails followed right after, dragging the rigging and breaking a large chunk of the gunwale in its wake.
The desperate sailor’s cannon flared on. And so was mine, but admittedly less fervently. Still, a strong will is contagious. The other guns began to boom again along with us. Enaid was on her feet once more, grunting with a bloody split head at an unmanned gunport. Again our volleys came alive at almost full strength. Whether our effort had brought our comrades elsewhere some courage, I did not know. The mayhem below and aloft sounded mostly unaltered.
“The beast turned!”
Turning away this time. Slowly, laboriously. There was a significant change in the Anemone’s formation also. Our riders no more surrounded it from all sides, but crowded upon its back, where mayhap a flaw in its thick hide had been revealed. No longer in search of a weakness, they invoked their destructive art with a purpose, concentrating on the side unseen by us.
I thought then that it was the light at the end of the tunnel. Survival in sight. And it was not an unwarranted hope. The leviathan let out a deafening roar – its death rattle. The thing was in grave pain, hopefully one caused by some lethal wound. Some sailors had stopped working their cannons. It felt as though our greatest contribution possible at this point was simply to fix our eyes on what was to transpire, and pray our hardest to the Gods to bless our alares.
But it was not for an endless half hour later that the Anemone’s effort seemed to come close to fruition. Most of the beast’s terrible appendages had dropped to its side. It moved now at a crawl. The sky had become covered in smoke many shades darker than the storm clouds we sailed within. The smell of burnt flesh assaulted my nose and fatigued head. But a little more.
The leviathan abruptly came to life. Tentacles swung once more – testament to a millennia old will. They came for where the Anemones were concentrated, who at once scattered, yet not all timely did. Where it struck, a large patch of the sky exploded blindingly. An uncounted many fell like flaming leaves from a scorched evergreen. Our alares had abandoned all effort to maintain their assaults, all who could still fly plunged for their comrades. I saw many knights separated from their wyverns, who were forced back to their human form. Many fell, many caught but lay lifelessly in the arms of their saviors.
And too I heard many cries as the Anemones fled to the ship. Wails of pain and terror for their slain sisters.
The beast trudged away. Smoking. Bleeding.
Among the flock of wyverns heading our way, I searched. I was not too familiar with all our wyvernesses’ shapes and features, but I thought I saw one I recognized. Or at least my eyes were drawn to her. She carried her knight still who lay unmoving on her black back. When the two were almost directly over the deck, suddenly her wings vanished, and in a second she was once again in Litzia’s human form. Momentum carried the two past my vision, then ended with a heavy crash overhead.
