CHAPTER 56: RAINY ARRIVAL
The residents of the village of Valemont were unaccustomed to spectacle. Nestled in a verdant valley among rolling hills, the remote community was a paradise for some as much as it was an exile for others, but even its detractors could concede it possessed a certain, simple beauty. The key word in that description was, as it had always been, simple.
Indeed, exciting was at least a week’s ride eastward from the humble village. That was, until the day—almost a decade ago now—when the self-sufficient folk of Valemont looked up and saw an airship bursting forth from the sky like a whale crashing out of the ocean.
Children grew up hearing about the inexplicable event secondhand, while teenagers traded on their fuzzy memories of it. A few locals even denied it had ever happened, claiming the village’s collective memory was but a collective delusion, the outcome of a rumor so oft repeated they had forgotten the true origin of the wild tale, that Oliver’s boy had imbibed one too many, just like his father, and overreacted at the sight of a large bird. A proposed festival was canceled over the controversy.
The village mostly moved on.
And then, on a rainy morning nearly ten years after the first supposed sighting, a second airship emerged not from the clouds—but from the very sky below them.
Neighbors yelled, pointed, and gasped as doors rattled open, sheep bleated their concern, and roosters crowed its arrival. As for Oliver’s boy, now a father of four (though no less fond of the bottle), he flew through and hollered across the village with his arms out like a seagull, in perhaps the proudest moment of his contained life, “I told you, Agatha, I told you!”
* * *
Elias felt a raindrop strike and roll down his cheek as black brightened to gray. As the world pieced itself back together out from the shadow of nothing. High above the village of Valemont, another kind of celebration erupted.
Iric was first to slap his back, but he was not the last. Elias wasn’t sure whether all was forgiven, but they were too happy to care, too alive to worry about the faded prospect of a slow death.
“Nice work,” Briley said as Gabby sprinted for the bulwark and bent herself over the barricade so quickly they worried she might tip over it. Iric ran after her.
The rain was coming down hard, but any weather was better than no weather.
Even after Elias had successfully ascended, the process of navigating a sky rift was not exactly instantaneous. He had never done it before, and he was anything but well rested. Alas, there had been no time for napping.
He had immediately felt the difference, even as he failed his first few attempts. During his fruitless trials as an awakened collector, the distance had been so great that there had been nothing for him to even grasp onto, no sense of possibility, however slim. He might as well have been a human trying to sprout wings.
But after stumbling back to the deck weakened yet stronger, he could finally feel something. It gave him hope. It gave them all hope.
It took Elias another hour. The first half of that he spent trying to grab onto a metaphorical rope swinging back and forth around his fingers. He swore. He sighed. He asked for water. When at last he got a grip on it, he held on tight and instructed Briley to turn left. He focused on the faint green line leading them to salvation, afraid to blink more than his body required. He had no idea how long this would take, but it did not matter, so long as he held on.
And now, now no one minded the rain. Elias looked up and let it wash over his face.
“Proud of yourself?” Briley asked.
“I’m proud of us, Briley.” He returned his heavenward gaze to her amused one. “Can I show you something?”
She invited him to lead the way. They headed back into the great cabin as Iric kept Gabby company, sightseeing the hilly topography and river paths forming the foreign land far below The Sapphire Spirit. Elias doublechecked that the door was closed behind them.
He walked over to the room’s solitary writing desk, opened its single drawer, and retrieved a scroll buried in the back. He unrolled the scroll carefully upon their long dining table, sliding a candle out of the way, treating paper as preciously as treasure.
Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
Briley joined him with both hands on her hips. “I saw this earlier,” she mentioned. “What the hell is it? Actually, I have a theory now.”
“This,” Elias said, “is integral to our new business model.”
“Did you draw this map or steal it?” she inquired.
“I drew it.”
“Were you supposed to?”
“Jalander need never know,” he said. “Nor does anyone else for that matter, aside from the most trusted members of this crew.”
Briley’s body language suggested she was not opposed to the idea, though she added the obvious disclaimer: “I already know how Bertrand will react.”
“Maybe he’ll surprise us for once.” Elias put his finger on a dot near Sailor’s Rise, then followed its line-drawn path to another mark by the border between Belrania and Azir. “The Great Continent is more connected than it seems on the surface. The world is smaller for someone with my skill set. Every dot you see here is a sky rift, every line a shortcut. Hell, I didn’t even have time to trace them all.”
“I see where you’re going,” Briley said, “but this seems… unsafe. You’re trying to keep your sight or whatever secret, right?”
“We’ll be careful,” he assured her. “We won’t overdo it. We won’t draw attention to ourselves. We’ll just be a little faster than the competition when it matters most. We need this, Briley. The game is rigged—you know that. We don’t have their capital nor their connections, but now we have this, tucked in our back pocket for when we need an edge. It’s a pretty sharp one.”
Briley was suppressing a growing smile. “Like I said, it’s not me you need to convince.”
“One thing at a time.” Elias was about to roll the scroll back up when Briley stopped him.
“One second. Show me the path we took.” Her brow was suddenly furrowed. “The one you just guided us through.”
With his index finger, Elias traced the first line he had drawn on the scroll—the one needed to make this voyage.
Briley was staring at the second dot where his finger stopped, the sky rift they would have exited at the other end. She looked closer, examining the space on the map around it. “Were there any others? Other sky rifts in this area.” With her own finger, she drew a circle an inch inward from the eastern coast of the Great Continent.
“It’s possible,” he said. “I didn’t have time to copy them all down. I focused on the paths I thought we might use. What is it?”
“Explain to me something about sky rifts. Is each one a single road that can only be traversed back and forth”—she motioned back and forth with the tip of her finger, still pressed against the scroll—“or can you enter any sky rift and exit out whichever you choose?”
Elias had read enough on this subject that he answered confidently, “It’s the latter in theory, but rarely in practice. The Void Sea may seem outside of space, but distance exists there too. I can see pathways to the future I wish for—the invisible exit of my choosing—but my vision is limited. An ascendant collector can see farther than an awakened one, and a transcendent collector can see farther still, but no one can see everything.” He was not sure about the divine, assuming such a person even existed, though that mystery felt more academic than practical. “Basically, some sky rifts are closer together and thus easier to navigate between.”
“And what about the ones we just passed through?” Briley wondered. “How close together were they?”
Their heads turned toward the map in unison.
“It was a bit of a leap,” Elias admitted, “but not as far apart as some. Distance in the Void Sea mirrors distance in the physical world in terms of relative length, as opposed to absolute length. Imagine you shrank down the Great Continent and erased all the details. That’s what we flew through.” He did not know what this said about the nature of the Void Sea itself—nor did the many Valshynarian scholars who had puzzled endlessly over its existence since the dawn of air travel—aside from one basic but important fact: its unseeable structure was not random.
“Interesting,” Briley said. “And what would happen if you weren’t able to see far enough to follow your chosen path?”
“But I did follow it. We made it out.”
She marched over to the door and beckoned him to follow. With each step toward her, Elias felt his heart bounce and come a little looser, knowing it would soon snap from its tethers and sink into the acid depths of his stomach. For he already felt the truth then but, for once in his life, did not wish to see it laid out before him.
They walked up the bow, and Briley scrutinized the landscape below for a long, contemplative minute, saying nothing until she could be sure. “We’re not where you think we are.”
Elias tried to read the landscape too, though its scripture was unfamiliar to him. “What do you mean?”
The downpour persisted, drenching them as they spoke.
“You took us out of a different sky rift,” she said, “not the one you intended.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” he protested.
“What did you wish for? When you were trying to get us out of there. It took you a while before anything appeared.”
“To get to the Broken Isles, what else?”
“Is it possible your wish changed, however slightly? That just maybe—after thirty minutes of unrewarded effort—you cared more about getting us out of there alive? I wouldn’t blame you if it did. We both saw the look on Gabby’s face, and I’m certainly grateful to see daylight.”
Elias knew she was right. He had known it before he quite understood the truth, writhing inside him like a shameful secret, though of course there was nothing shameful in putting the survival of his friends before business. No, that was not the source of his shame. Rather, he was ashamed that he hadn’t been powerful enough, that he could not see as far as they had needed him to see.
“Fuck.” He buried his face in both hands and then, looking up from the skyline of his fingers, asked, “Where the hell are we, then?”
“The good news is that we’re closer to the Broken Isles than we would have been without your… shortcut,” she said. “The bad is that we’re still going to be a couple of hours late. I’m sorry, Elias.”
He immediately turned from her and yelled across the deck, “Gabby, can we overpower the engine one last time?”
Their young mechanic confirmed as much as she bolted for the engine room, as if there were still a race to be won.
“It’s just a couple of hours,” Elias said, more to himself than anyone else.
Briley said nothing in response, for there was nothing more to say. Some shooting stars needed to burn themselves out.