《Knights, Witches, and Fighter Jets》


 Chapter 1: Circus Act

    "Ladies and gentlemen, feast your eyes on the marvelous, the stupendous, the world-famous FLYING MAN!"

    The audience gasped when the lights focused on Quinn''s little corner of the stadium, revealing Seth strapped to a giant wing constructed of wood and cloth. Quinn pulled the lever in his hand. In an underground chamber across the stadium, a weight dropped down a manhole into the city sewers. The cable attached to the apex of Seth''s craft snapped taught and yanked him away. He flew.

    At first he flew at an angle upward, the wings catching the air and inflating slightly. Quinn covered his eyes against the light and peered at his brother strapped to the craft. Seth released the cable perfectly, and then was moving without any force pulling him. Nose down, don''t lose too much speed Quinn thought. Sure enough, Seth shifted his weight and pointed the nose below the horizon. He was no longer flying so much as falling slowly.

    Seth banked over the crowd, casting a predatory shadow across the citizens below. Then he did a nose dive. His face pointed at the ground, he began to pick up incredible speed, enough speed to break a person apart. Ladies screamed. Quinn grinned.

    Seth shifted his weight masterfully, barely missing the ground and entered into a vertical climb and then a full loop. He went upside down, seemed to defy gravity at the peak, facing the stars in the clear night sky. The audience was dead silent. He kept going, his head travelling backwards and upside-down in a gentle curve. He pitched up and the great kite wings caught the air, slowing him down before his legs impacted the ground.

    Quinn made a sound he didn''t know he could make. It was somewhere between laughter and cheering, but either it was so outrageous he was certain he had never made such a sound before. IT WORKED. He ran onto into the center of the stadium with an army of crazed men behind him. The men in the crowd were also pouring over the barrier and dropping into the field, sprinting towards Seth. They all sized Seth and raised him high over their heads, cheering and singing. Even Quinn found himself being carried upward.

    "Brother!" he cried. "Brother it worked!"

    "For the first time in history," the showman proclaimed, "Man has flown upside down! Never before has this act been performed. History has been made, and you are all witness!"

    Quinn finally freed himself from the mob and escaped backstage. It was much darker, lit only by flickering lamps at the top of small wooden towers. Gantries, ropes, props and cages were scattered haphazardly. Men and even a few women walked around mostly in their smallclothes, some of them hastily preparing their costumes for the next act.

    Quinn lingered until the giant wooden wing had been returned by the circus staff. He inspected it, carefully tracing every rope and piece of cloth under the lamplight, looking for damage. The rigging held fast as he tugged at it. Sailors knots ending in a loop and a spiral around itself, slathered in dry glue.

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    When Seth arrived, he said: "Quinn, guess what?"

    "Yeah?"

    "The ladies are going to lining up for us tonight! Haha!"

    "For you maybe," Quinn said. "You were the one everyone saw risking your neck up on that thing. How was it? Was it easier to control tonight?"

    Seth shook his head. "I''m afraid not. It required all my strength to control it. The nose tends to want to sink."

    "Still, there is something fundamental that needs to change." He stepped back from the oversized kite, looking it over up and down. "We would never be able to fasten a ship''s propeller onto this thing, let alone an engine of some sort, and still remain in control."

    Seth sat down on a bench by a spool of rope and took a flask out of his jacket. "For now, we should celebrate, yeah?" He took a swig and handed it to Quinn. "So what were you planning now?"

    "If we are going to go further than we already have, I think we will need more resources. Academic resources, specifically. I still think we should quit the circus. Maybe try and enroll at the University up in Hightown? I hear it''s the only school in the world that trains commoners like us." Quinn sipped from the flask. It tasted like vanilla and oak.

    "We don''t have auras," Seth said.

    "We can lease them from the bank" Quinn said.

    "That would cost a fortune every month. What we earn performing for these guys in an entire year, a hundred times over, every single month, just to lease the smallest aura the banks offer." Seth snatched the flask from Quinn and drank deeply.

    "We can go to one of the Heritors."

    For a moment it looked like Seth was going to lose control and spit the whiskey out. "You can''t be serious."

    "That Blue Wolf woman in the north is building an army." Quinn said. "At least that''s what those priests are saying. Armies need information. Scouting. This technology could be perfect. We find a way to meet with her. Demonstrate the potential of a flying machine for scouting. Enemy army movements, supply line locations. It could completely change warfare as we know it. And if she refuses, we can simply go to her rivals in the Theocracy."

    "How will they see through the fog?" Seth asked. "What do these flying machines do in a blizzard?"

    "It''s almost summer anyways. There are often clear days in summer. It just takes one clear day to get critical information on the entire enemy army. It could be enough of a difference to win."

    Seth nodded. "I like the idea. Military men are real risk takers, gambling with their lives. And girls want more than words, they want real sacrifices. Speaking of girls," Seth said as he handed Quinn the flask again. "Finish this, there isn''t much left. Let''s head into town and try to pick up girlfriends, yeah?"

    "I have to work on the design." Quinn said.

    "Suit yourself," Seth said as he turned and walked away.

    Quinn hoisted the kite off the ground and began to walk back to the workshop. As he was making his first step he realized the lamplight was casting a shadow.

    A human shadow.

    He looked up. A female figure stood above him on the wooden scaffolding of the backstage. She was just a silhouette against the light behind her. But the silhouette was not total darkness. Her eyes were glowing purple, and her face was scarred by glowing teal fractures radiating away from those purple eyes. She rotated slightly and he saw her face reflecting the light. She had a knowing smirk on a youthful faced framed by dark blue hair.

    "Excuse me, can I help you?" He asked, loud enough for her to hear. But she did not reply. She turned away and vanished into the darkness beyond the lamps.

    Who was that? he wondered. And those eyes. An oculomancer, he realized. Quinn frowned. How did she get backstage? The boss didn''t have any oculomancers on staff. Why was that woman here? And how much had she heard?

 Chapter 2: Morning Mist

    As the lock filled and the river boat rose higher, Kiera saw for the first time the Imperial capital city of Grael Nydia. The city was built on top of ethersteel stilts over a lake at the bottom of an enormous sink-hole. The large opening of the sink-hole was large enough to shine sunlight on the palace in the center of the city, but most of the city was lit by artificial lights, lamps and ethermancy lights of various colors. The city was crisscrossed by countless canals in a carefully-planned pattern of squares.

    Kiera had seen paintings of the city before. An impractical city, to be sure. Not exactly the perfect place to build a capital city. However, the city was entrenched in thousands of years of history. The ancient Varelion clan had built the foundations of the city in this natural formation because of it''s beauty and because of it''s proximity to Spire Nydia. She had plans to see the Spire, after her errand in the city was complete.

    The gates to the lock opened slowly and the ethermancers below decks created power in the engines. The river boat lurched forward over the dark water. Kiera lined up near the loading platform. The people who saw her immediately moved aside, making way for her to reach the edge of the platform. She was the first one off the ship after it docked.

    A knight waited for her at the end of the walkway. He had short military-style hair in the color she instantly recognized as belonging to the Imperial family, somewhere between light brown and salmon. His armor reflected the lights the ship.

    "Heritor Kiera," he said as he bowed to her slightly.

    She ran forward, forgetting herself for a moment. "Sir Zachary!" she cried as she leapt up into his embrace. "Thank you for coming to fetch me, I have never been to the capital before. I would have been completely lost."

    "Did you come alone?" He asked.

    "I did." She said. "I did not wish to burden Father''s servants with my business."

    "You could have hired a local guide."

    "Then I would have to hire an oculomancer to vet them, and besides," she said, giggling. "Why bother when I can summon the sworn knight of the Empress to protect me?"

    "You are lazy and spoiled," He said. "I tried to warn Sullivan against spoiling his daughters."

    "I do have business though," She said. "And I wish to be done with it right away. Can you show me the way to the bank?"

    "Also impatient," Zachary added.

    He led her through the city along ornately paved roads. Long, narrow craft zipped along far below it the lake, disappearing into gaps between the stilts, sometimes directly under buildings. They passed cute little cafes with people dining on little chairs overlooking the water, towering glass gardens reinforced with glowing ethersteel, and finally grand estates for the city''s nobility. They arrived at a section of the city built on rock near the center. The Imperial palace loomed overhead, tall and imposing vertical lines and artificial blue-green light. Shadows.

    "Here," Zachary said as they arrived at a set of gently ascending steps with an ancient stone building at the top. There was a pair of stiff guards at the summit of the steps, their rifles held across their chests. "I will wait for you until you return."

    Both guards bowed as she passed, saying nothing. She entered into a stately foyer filled with golden light. The rugs on the floor were blue and silver. A dozen dark blue banners were featured prominently in the space, reaching from the ceiling almost to the floor.

    "Heritor-Princess Kiera of House Blaine, daughter of King Sullivan of Cloudsea!" The herald at the door announced.

    A well-dressed man waited for her in the center of the chamber. "Princess Kiera, welcome to Grael Nydia. I hope that your flight was not too exciting."

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    "Not exciting, Chairman Fredrick." Keira said. "But beautiful. I did manage to see the blue sky, and the fog far below. The world looks so different from the sky."

    "And for how long can we enjoy your company Kiera?" Fredrick asked. "Will you be returning to Cloudsea?"

    "I hope to meet the Empress after my business here is done," She replied. "I am afraid she will not allow me to leave her side once I meet her, however. Who knows? In a year I might find myself on the front lines of some terrible battlefield."

    "If that is the case, I am sure you will be caring for the wounded soldiers. If you do remain in the city, send for me. I shall take you to the best cafes."

    "I would be pleased to dine with you Chairman, if your schedule allows it."

    "Here, Heritor Kiera, this room." They arrived at an alcove furnished with two lavish chairs, mostly hidden behind soft white drapes. "I am afraid I am a poor host, but I am a very busy man. An oculomancer will be here shortly to help you with your business."

    "Go in peace, Chairman," She said.

    When the oculomancer arrived she took one look at Kiera and then here face betrayed... horror? She quickly mastered her reaction and said, "Yes, Heritor Keira. My name is Lissa, certified by Spire Nydia to provide banking services for Heritors. What business do you have with us?"

    "I have an aura." Kiera said.

    "Yes, it is common for Heritors to have auras." The woman replied.

    "I am seventh in line to the royal throne of Cloudsea." Kiera said. "My Father never gave me an aura. And also, my aura seems to be quite large, even for a Heritor."

    "That cannot be true." The oculomancer said.

    "Do not try my patience," Kiera snapped. "You are an oculomancer, you can see when a person speaks truth. You have careful records of which Heritors have auras and how much sien is stored in those auras. The Empress is said to be at the thirty-eighth harmonic, and my aura has that much sien twice over!"

    "I''m sorry Heritor, I did not intend to imply that you were lying. Why are you here? What do you want me to do about your aura?"

    "I want to deposit my aura in the bank," Kiera said. "And I want to donate any proceeds from leasing the aura... to a charity of my choice."

    "That is not possible," the oculomancer said.

    "Why not?"

    "Your aura cannot be removed."

    "Again, why not?"

    "Any attempt to remove that aura," she said, shuttering, "will instantly kill the person who would otherwise receive it."

    Kiera was astonished. "Does this happen often?"

    "This is the first time I have ever seen such a thing," the oculomancer said. "There is a message written on your aura as well. That is more common, for example when the aura comes with restrictions."

    "Well, what does it say?"

    "It says something like, ''By order of Fiona of the Morning Mist, this aura is not to be removed from the individual. Limit interactions with the individual. Contact Fiona through emergency channels if the aura has changed size.''"

    "That is," Kiera said, "complete nonsense. Fiona of the Morning Mist?"

    She had heard the term "morning mist" before, however the natural phenomenon had not occurred anywhere in the world in over a thousand years, not since the climate changed and the fog started. With a name like that, it must have been a person that lived a thousand years ago, before the war.

    "Wait," Kiera said. "Is there somebody in your order named Fiona of the Morning Mist right now?"

    "Yes, Heritor."

    "Can I speak with her?"

    "That might be possible, I can send a message through standard channels and she might contact you. However, Fiona has very important duties that occupy her time, I cannot promise that your request will even reach her."

    "It can''t be helped. And there is nothing you can do about my aura?"

    "Nothing," the oculomancer said.

    Kiera stood up and promptly left the alcove. The guards bowed to her once again as she left the building.

    "Well?" Zachary asked.

    "Somebody named ''Fiona of the Morning Mist'' gave me this aura." Kiera said. "The oculomancers refused to remove it."

    Sir Zachary stopped dead. He looked horrified. "Fiona gave you an aura?" He asked.

    "You know her?"

    "Of course I know that name," he said. "I met her once when I was a child. She is the right hand of the Elder Saint, an ancient witch from the time of the Charlatan King. She is Vjiskaldi, her tribe was almost exterminated during the war. And..." he added, "I will never forget that blue hair of hers."

    He said nothing for a long time as they walked toward the palace.

    "Do you remember your Heritor oaths?" he finally asked.

    "Of course," Kiera replied.

    "That woman, Fiona. Her role is to enforce those rules. It''s rare, but sometimes she is forced to kill Heritors. She also enforces the final oath for everyone else, not just Heritors."

    "We and our descendants shall craft no machine in the likeness of a bird," Kiera recited.

    "Yeah. Young men, idiots that think they can invent the flying machine, will eventually get a surprise visit from that woman."

    "That makes a lot of sense," Kiera said. But what does that have to do with me? Why would she give me an aura?

 Chapter 3: The Dicers Guild

    A thousand feet high, facing each other, the cliff faces created a winding chasm between them, vanishing into unseen darkness. Between the two great bluffs, countless bridges, ledges and dwellings, some of them tens of thousands of years old. The bridges were so dense and so chaotic that they blocked the view. Up and up and up they went, all they way to Hightown, and the University Fjord.

    The trek through the bridges and gantries of White Chasm was a long one, and Quinn''s knees hurt halfway up. Seth stayed behind. All around was evidence of civilization, ancient civilization, buildings carved into the sheer face of the cliffs, buildings that were thousands, maybe tens of thousands of years old. The sky above was filled with stars. The fog had retreated for the night.

    One step at a time, he traversed the great bridges spanning the chasm, following the King''s Knight. His breath felt weak when he crested the cliffs and entered into the University Fjord that night. The air was thin and cold. Yet he walked, bravely forward, along the highway to the Royal Palace of the Clan Aden, ancient rulers of White Chasm and the nation of Lin. Spire Lin dominated the background, it''s great glass gardens and artificial sunlight illuminating the horizon. One of humanity''s few sources of fresh food.

    He passed through the University Fjord, with it''s great grasslands, tiny copses of trees, and flower patches, illuminated only by the cool light of the Sister World. The Palace of the Spine, built into the rock itself, stood as a dark silhouette in the west. Quinn walked a long road toward the Spine, before the Knight escorted him through a cave and into the palace.

    Quinn passed into the Royal Chambers, lined on both sides with black, gold, and bright red banners depicting a red swan, the sigil of the Aden clan. The Hanging Throne was elevated, high in the air, the genius architect designed the building in such a way as to allow the throne to hang over the audience room. The far wall was made of glass, giving the effect that the throne was flying high in the sky. There was a smaller, lower hanging throne to either side of the King.

    King Edwin sat on the throne, clad in bright red robes with ornate black and silver filigree. He had the signature raven-black hair of the Aden clan. Sitting in one of the lower thrones was a teenage girl with the same hair. The third throne was empty.

    The King spoke.

    "Citizen Quinn, brother of Seth the Flying Man. I once saw your brother fly and I must say I was deeply impressed, though I am also deeply concerned for his safety," the King said. "Thank you for answering my summons. I have heard that you wish to speak to a Heritor, that you are searching for an aura," he asked.

    "You have heard correctly, my King. I wish to create a new military device," Quinn said. "A machine capable of flying. For that, I will need an aura. I promise, a short lease of an aura to me and my brother would be a very good investment."

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    "Brother!" the girl said. "Brother it is forbidden!"

    The King waved his hand to silence the girl. The King nodded. "Quinn, I am a Heritor. My oaths forbid me from continuing this conversation. There is another heritor in the Palace however. Speak to him if you please, but do not speak of flying machines. Guards, please escort this gentleman away from my presence."

    "Yes, my King," Quinn said with a bow, and left with the guards at his sides. In the foyer outside the throne room, a tall, elderly bald man in dark robes waited for them.

    "I will escort master Quinn from here," the man said. The guards, surprisingly, released Quinn and shuffled back into the King''s chambers.

    "Where are we going?" Quinn asked, as they passed down into a dark corridor that seemed to lead below the palace.

    "To the dungeons," the bald man said.

    Quinn froze. "Why are we going to the dungeons?"

    "Have faith," the man said. "Have courage, the dungeons are not used as dungeons anymore. The King cannot help you, but the one who waits ahead has a high probability of being able to help you, I think. Though they do not, and cannot, know it. I am a priest of the Lawgiver, and I give you my blessing." The man pointed down a dark hallway, light at the end by flickering candle light.

    At the end of the hallway, in a chamber constructed entirely by cut stones, a young man with wearing priest robes sat at a table with papers in front of him. He had shaggy green hair. Green hair. He had something in his hand, something like a sphere cut with strange angles all over, and numbers pressed into the faces. He tossed that little sphere, and it bounced.

    Quinn realized as the thing stopped that the number fourteen was written on the upper face of the thing. It was a dice, he realized, a dice with many more faces than normal. The young man at the desk dragged his finger down the paper in front of him, and stopped at the number fourteen.

    "Grant the individual one request on the condition that they do not share their reasons," the man said. "Then execute item 20-B on the same list. Burn both the dice and the list after." The man looked suspiciously at the dice. "Do you have a request?"

    "I need a pair of auras, for me and my brother," Quinn said. "So we can enroll at the University of White Chasm."

    "Done," the man said. "I will give you a note that you can give to the bank to lease two auras for a year. That''s the best I can do."

    "And what about tuition and rent at the University?" Quinn asked.

    "It costs a thousand times less for tuition than it does to lease an aura for a month," the man replied. "Figure it out for yourself."

    The man handed Quinn a pair of notes. They were signed with the man''s signature. Quinn stuffed them into his jacket. "Who are you?" he asked.

    "Heritor Maxius the Younger of Great House Renna," the man replied. "You are not to speak of what you have seen here. I have no idea what you are up to, or why I was sent here to give you an aura, but know that there may be many others exactly like you in other cities right now. I can''t be sure."

    "Other cities?" Quinn asked.

    "Yes. My group is called the Dicer''s Guild. We use random chance to hide our intentions from the oculomancers. As I mentioned, don''t talk to anyone about this. Try to avoid the oculomancers if you can."

    Maybe, Quinn thought. Maybe the Heritors have been commanded to not create flying machines, for some reason? Quinn held the two priceless pieces of paper in his hands. It seemed so strange, wrong even. Other people, in other cities. Maybe he wasn''t lucky, maybe it wasn''t a coincidence. If what this man said was true, then perhaps Quinn was just seeing a small part of something much larger.

 Chapter 4: Subjugate the Etherborne

    Sir Zachary sat in the chair next to Empress Sasha. She had the window seat, and was eagerly looking out the window at the clear sky outside. Structures on the wings began to groan and move. The wings changed shape, transforming into an array of horizontal planes. The engines roared. Suddenly the runway at the top of the Spire rushed past them in a perfect blur below. The wheels struck the runway and the reverse thrust began, causing Sasha to lurch forward in her seat.

    "Welcome to Spire Nydia" the captain announced in a calm voice over the loudspeaker. Zachary thought that she sounded like an older woman. "Weather is clear, elevation twenty-two thousand feet. Please wait for an ethermancer to provide environmental shielding before leaving the aircraft."

    "That was the shortest flight I have ever been on!" Kiera said from behind. She poked her head around the chair near Sasha. Her long blonde hair draped across Zachary''s armchair. Kiera''s eyes looked the same color as the sky.

    "The flight to Spire Lin is a few minutes shorter," Lucia said.

    After collecting their luggage the quartet moved down to the ground level where transport cars awaited them. Sasha''s car was long and sleek and ornate inside, with beverages hidden away under the armchairs. Kiera sipped on a cherry wine as they drove. She looked nervous.

    As the transport moved across the airport, Zachary watched in fascination as the oculomancers on the runway ran about in a frenzy. "Stop!" Kiera cried, and the car screeched to a halt. Sasha looked uneasy at the disturbance.

    "Yes Heritor Kiera?" The driver asked. Zachary looked out the window of the car.

    The oculomancers on the runway were busying themselves laying out cables. "What are they doing?" Kiera asked.

    "Oh," the driver said, like the pilot of the airplane she was an older woman. "Heritor Keira, those women are preparing for the arrival of one of the etherborne. The craft they fly require cables to stop in the distance of these short runways, unless they use the ferryway, which is very slow."

    "Is it Fiona?" Kiera asked.

    "I believe so," the driver said.

    "I wish to see the landing," Kiera said. "Empress Sasha, is this agreeable?"

    Sasha nodded then reached for the latch on the door.

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    "I cannot let you leave until environmental shielding is provided," the driver said.

    "We are all Heritors," Sasha said. "We have our own auras, thank you."

    "I don''t," Kiera said. "I mean, I can''t use mine."

    "I will shield everyone myself," Sasha said. "It''s my ether, nobody else claim any."

    Zachary climbed out first, over the women, and led them one at a time by the hand out of the car. The three women walked off the road and stood at the edge of the fence marking the airport. They all looked east towards the direction of the flashing light on the horizon. Their hair seemed to flow with the wind. Kiera with long blond hair, Empress Sasha with salmon-brown, and Lucia with the jet black hair common to the Aden clan.

    Zachary steeled himself. He heard something. Something familiar.

    It was a low hiss at first, then it became the sound of a campfire mixed with the sound of a roaring river. A sleek, angular, black shape came closer and closer.

    Kiera gasped. "That thing," she said, "looks like a predator."

    "It''s a fighter," Sasha said. "The witches use those things to fly around. They are old military equipment from the war with the Charlatan King, over a thousand years ago."

    "My family remembers very little from that time," Kiera said.

    The fighter smashed into the runway, catching a cable and screeching to a halt. The wind passed over the road where Zachary was standing. It felt cold.

    The quartet shuffled back into the safety of their car. The diver resumed her course, taking them to the airlock on the north side of the Spire.

    The interior of the Spire at this level was a vast inverted pyramid, with glowing teal constructs hanging from the solid, transparent teal runway embedded into the ceiling far above. The oculomancers led Sasha through winding corridors to the the inverse apex of the room, where a figure in silver robes sat on a throne.

    Her face was shrouded by a silver hood, though Zachary could see the faint teal glow of oculomancer scars on her shadowed cheeks. "Heritor Kiera," the woman said in a voice devoid of emotion. "Thank you for answering my summons. Why are these other Heritors here?"

    Empress Sasha bowed slightly, then began to speak. "If I may, Elder Saint," she began, "as Heritor of the Varelion clan, and Empress of Nydia, I..."

    "I care not what petty title you have given yourself Heritor Alyesha." The Elder Saint snapped.

    Sasha reeled back at first, then steadied herself. "I wish, to request aid in my war against the Theocracy of the Lawgiver, Great Elder Saint. It is in the best interest of humanity, if I should be successful in my quest. Pease..."

    "I will subjugate the Etherborne," the Elder Saint said, her face still shrouded by the silvery hood. "I will subjugate the Etherborne, and you will aid me, or you will not. You can quarrel with the other Heritors if you wish. It is not forbidden to you. Remember your oaths."

    "I think you would be wasting your time trying to negotiate with this creature," Zachary said to Sasha.

    She nodded, then bowed to the Elder Saint. "I am sorry," she said. "I have overstepped."

    The Elder Saint said nothing, her head did not even move.

    "Your father made similar requests to that creature," Zachary whispered to the Empress. "Back the she responded the same way. ''I subjugate the etherborne.''"

    An oculomancer with long blue hair entered the chamber.

    Mother Summer, Zachary thought.

 Chapter 5: Apprentice

    "Are you Fiona?" Kiera asked.

    "Yes," Fiona replied.

    "I must decide if I am going to kill you now, Heritor Kiera." The Elder Saint said.

    Kiera whimpered. "Have I, violated my oaths?" She asked.

    "You have not," Fiona said. "I have reached a conclusion on my experiment."

    The Elder Saint perked up slightly, though did not reveal her face beyond her slightly glowing cheekbones. "And?" she asked.

    "Heritor Kiera, what is your highest ideal?" Fiona asked.

    Kiera was speechless. "I, um... don''t know. Please, great Elder..."

    "You do know," the Elder Saint said. "As oculomancers we will be able to tell if you are lying. Speak truthfully to me."

    Her voice was the coldest, most emotionless voice Kiera had ever heard before.

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    "I wish to care for others." Kiera said. "I, want my aura to be used for good, to be donated to charity."

    "See?" Fiona said. "Harmless, as I said. We should take away her aura and begin training her. She might prove useful, there might even be a path for her, to help us."

    The Elder Saint stood. When she did, all of the Heritors bowed. Even Fiona bowed.

    "Take her as an apprentice then." The Elder Saint said. "Do as you please Fiona. You have not failed me before, not in a thousand years. I will not kill her today."

    Fiona led Kiera and the others out of the chamber. "So you live," Fiona said. "That is surprising. I expected that she would kill you."

    "Mother summer!" Sasha said. "I thought she was going to kill all of us. Please, Sir Zachary, remind me in the future to never be in the same room as that, that thing!"

    "Do not speak ill of her," Fiona said. "She saved the world, we owe her a great deal."

    Kiera trembled, "what, what is she?"

    "She is a witch," Fiona said. "And so am I. And so are you."

    "Me?" Kiera asked.

    "You are an etherborne, born with great magical powers. It''s rare. Usually we kill etherborne immediately. However, your were working as a nurse at a hospital taking care of people, and you were also a Heritor. I was able to make a case that you should not be killed when you started to manifest your powers. And I am surprised, but she also agreed to allow me to continue with this experiment."

    "Thank you," Kiera said, trembling. "But, why? Why do the witches need to be killed?"

    "Questions are more important than answers, my apprentice. You will come to realize that, in time. I promise."

 Chapter 6: Seven Witches Cafe

    The University in the Fjord was less of a building and more of a small city, surrounded on all sides by grasslands. At the higher elevation the location received more direct sunlight in the summer. The University was at least a thousand years old, and many of the buildings appeared at least that old. Built with magic and reinforced with ethersteel, the buildings were oversized and ostentatious. The bank near the center was suspended high in the air by enormous glowing chains connected to a pair of intersecting arches. The administration building was by far the tallest, a narrow cylinder with an ancient tree growing at the very top, it''s branches spreading out far enough that the entire building resembled a tree.

    Not all buildings were large or ostentatious. The Seven Witches Cafe was ancient but also quaint. Quinn entered through the bright red door and asked the hostess about Seth. Quinn''s brother was waiting for him on the second floor of the cafe, in a small alcove painted with images of birds, one side open to the air. Seth was people watching. He had a steaming latte on his table.

    "Everything is ready," Quinn said. "We should head to the bank."

    "Look at this place," Seth said. "I asked the girls up front about this building. They are very proud to work here, you know. They said this cafe is famous."

    "I have heard of this place before," Quinn said.

    "They say that it was in this very cafe, in this very alcove where we are sitting, where the Elder Saint and six other witches came up with the plan to kill the Charlatan King and save the world. Over there, on the wall."

    The wall was decorated with seven full-sized paintings of witches. They had dark robes and pointed hats, with the exception of the witch in the very center of the seven, who was wearing a silvery robe with a hood that hid her eyes.

    "Renna the Scientist," Seth said, pointing to the first image. "Lin the Historian. Fiona of the Morning Mist. The Elder Saint. Nydia the Midwife. Sophia the Engineer. Diana, Guardian of the Sea. I think I got them all right. The girls up front insisted that all those witches are still alive, except Renna. Renna didn''t survive the war. Everyone knows that the Elder Saint is real and that she controls the oculomancers. What if she controls the banks and the Heritors too? What if this is a trap?"

    Stolen story; please report.

    "The way I see it," Quinn said, "is that what we see is biased. There could be lots of people exactly like us in other cities with the same goal. I think that there must be someone out there that really dislikes the oculomancers and has recruited some Heritors to help. Those Heritors are being kept in the dark. King Edwin and that Maxius fellow must be part of that group. That''s why it was so easy to get an audience with the King."

    "Yeah, and what happens when the oculomancers find out that we are using one of those free auras?" Seth asked. "Everything has a price. We will be forced to pay for this someday."

    Quinn handed Seth one of the notes. "This is yours," he said. "Do whatever you want with it. Tear it up, throw it in the fire, I don''t care." Quinn pointed out the window towards the Spire. It was just barely visible between two towering clouds. It was glowing slightly from the countless sunlamps in the glass gardens that spiraled up the Spire. "How long can humanity go on like this?" he asked. "How long are we going to fight each other over scraps for the amusement of the Heritors? How long are we going to stay in this total, deliberate stagnation? Maybe this is a trap, and maybe there really is a conspiracy between the oculomancers and the Heritors to prevent the invention of flying machines. Maybe we are in over our heads and maybe you are right, maybe we will end up paying for this. But, I feel like this is a chance that I must take.

    "Maybe someday I can get a job as an aqua engineer, or a sunlamp operator, or an engineer on a merchant ship. But they don''t let you keep your aura. When the shift is over, the bankers are right there, waiting to take it away. The only people who get to use auras are Heritors, soldiers, and very, very rich people. I''m never again going to be holding a document in my hands, for the rest of my life, that gives me an aura to use however I want. And if we succeed, if we can really invent the flying machine, we could change the world."

    "A chance you must take," Seth said. "That''s something I can understand. Alright, I''ll join you then. No hesitation. This University is going to remember our names forever."

 Chapter 7: Auras

    The bank was only accessible by riding on a gondola. Quinn admired the engineering. The cars rotated around a bull wheel as people shuffled in. Quinn and Seth barely had enough time to sit down inside the little car before the door closed and locked itself. And then they went up, the ground slowly shrinking away below them. "I wonder what it would look like to fly," Quinn said. "How fast would the world vanish below?"

    There were guards at the top armed with rifles in front of the broad glass doors. The people walking in and out of the bank were well-dressed and generally older. In fact Quinn didn''t see anyone who looked young.

    Inside the bank an oculomancer confronted them immediately. "Come with me," she said. She led them through the lobby to a long hallway. There were rugs on the floor, paintings on the walls, golden sconces for light, and the wood was varnished and polished to a shine. It looks like money, Quinn thought.

    The oculomancer stopped at one door and brought them inside. Quinn thought that the room must be her office, because she sat down behind the desk and started shuffling through some papers. "I am certified by Spire Lin to provide banking services to citizens who are interacting with Heritors. Please let me see your documents."

    She looked over the two documents that Maxius had given them, and then checked her ledgers. "This is highly unusual Citizen Quinn," she said. "You have a travel restriction placed on you."

    "I don''t know anything about that," Quinn said. "Do you know why?"

    "I do not," she said. "Some oculomancer from the Spire probably wants to make sure that you stay in the city. These things happen sometimes to young people. It''s generally not safe to leave the city until summer. You could end up starving to death in the snow."

    She flipped to the end of her ledger and read something. Then looked at the two documents again. "So, just travel, no banking restrictions. So I can get you the auras presently. Stay here, I am going to go get a Maiden. Oh, before I do that, I have a question. Do you intend to cause harm to the Maiden when she arrives?"

    "What?" Quinn asked.

    "I will be able to tell if you are lying," the oculomancer said. "It''s a standard question, please answer it."

    "Of course I do not intend to cause her harm, I have no idea who she even is."

    "I''m not going to hurt any girls, heh," Seth said.

    "You are telling the truth, that''s good. Right, I will be right back."

    <hr>

    "Please send this letter to the Empress Sasha," Kiera said, handing the envelope to the woman in the post office. She wasn''t an oculomancer. It''s probably not important enough of a job to make oculomancers do it.

    "Are you finished?" Fiona asked.

    "I just don''t want my friends to worry about me."

    "Come with me then," Fiona said. "I have already summoned an Aura Maiden from the bank in Grael Nydia to come recover the sien in your aura. She should be landing soon."

    Fiona led Kiera through the interior of the Spire. It was mostly natural stone caverns in most places, dark rock marbled with glowing blue and green ethersteel. In some places there were funny little cone-shaped rock formations hanging from the roof. Other places of the Spire had buildings carved out of the stone, and some stone chambers were large enough to contain buildings that were not integrated into the cave at all. They arrived at one such building in a chamber that was so large that it contained an entire promenade filled with shops and restaurants. Women walked around on the street in fashionable clothing and sipped cherry wine at the "outdoor" tables. Kiera counted that maybe one in ten of the women were oculomancers.

    Strangely enough, Kiera counted a few men darting about as well.

    "Why are there men in the Spire?" she asked.

    "Most of them are thralls," Fiona said. "The Charlatan King created thousands of thralls that he tasked with cleaning. After he died his thralls just, kept on cleaning. All this time, over a thousand years, and they still dart about cleaning toilets and doing dishes."

    A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

    "They, are forced to do that work?"

    "Not quite. Imagine you write with your right hand. Then one day, you find out that you cannot do that anymore. Writing with your left hand is easy though, so you start doing that instead, and you don''t think about it. That is what has happened to thralls, they have been given a specific skill and focus and they sort of just, gravitate towards doing that. A thrall is a witch that has been compelled with such a focus. This compulsion is permanent, and generally causes the thrall to lose most or all emotions. Nobody alive today is powerful enough to create thralls, so the ones left over after the war were kept around. However, it''s obviously very unethical. Reyndell Marunavi, the man you call the Charlatan King, was very cruel and created thousands of them. He even turned his own children into thralls."

    "That''s terrible." Kiera said. She looked out at the men going about their business. They seemed to be bussing tables.

    "Have you ever heard of the Purifier or the Bloodraker?"

    "I''ve heard of the Bloodraker before," Kiera said. "My grandma always told me that she would leave me outside for the Bloodraker if I didn''t eat my vegetables. It was some sort of monster, right? From the fairy tales?"

    "The Bloodraker was Reyndell''s daughter Annatiki Marunavi. He turned her into a thrall. He used her to hunt down and murder other witches. That was her focus. The easiest way to kill a witch is to kill them after you know they will manifest powers, but just before they do manifest powers. I have no idea where the scary stories come from. By the way, our Maiden is about to walk around that corner."

    "How do you know?" Kiera asked.

    "I can see her aura," Fiona said. "Her aura is this size of a small country so she is kind of easy to keep track of."

    <hr>

    Quinn found the Maiden to be deeply disturbing. Her face looked completely blank and she just stared off into space. "I store sien." she said in a monotone voice.

    "You are now going to administer sien to this man," the oculomancer said, pointing to Quinn. "You will administer exactly enough sien required to construct an aura of the first harmonic. You will shape this sien into a standard spherical aura and bind it to him. You will mark the aura with this pattern." She held up a piece of paper to the Maiden with a complex pattern printed with various colors of ink.

    The woman walked up to Quinn and placed her hand on his chest. Then he immediately felt... something. The room around him felt different, like he as floating in a liquid, or if he suddenly gained the ability to experience the air around him in a new way. He felt like he could reach out, and do... something to it.

    "Don''t do that," the oculomancer snapped. "All the ether in the building is already claimed. Wait until you get off the gondola before trying to do that again, please."

    The process was repeated for Seth, though the pattern on the paper was different. These two pieces of paper were filed away with the original documents. "All travel restrictions placed on you are gone. Your aura is locked to you. Attempting to transfer your aura to another person will instantly kill you, kindly avoid doing that," the oculomancer said. "So that''s it, you are free to go."

    "Are you going to take us back out?" Quinn asked.

    "You remember how to get out?" She asked. Quinn nodded. "I can see your aura no matter where you go. Show yourself out. Good day."

    <hr>

    "So why do we need her?" Kiera asked as the Aura Maiden walked towards them. Another oculoancer walked with her.

    "I''m not actually powerful enough to take your aura from you," Fiona said. "Or, more specifically, you are quite a bit stronger than me, so I actually cannot take an aura from you. You would need to transfer it to me, and there is no way I am waiting around for you to practice how to do that."

    The oculomancer looked uneasy. "This," she said, pointing to Kiera, "creature? Are you sure you want to remove that aura?"

    "Yes," Fiona said. "I have been given total freedom with this one."

    "I don''t think an aura like this has ever been removed from one of them. How do we know she won''t just kill both of us after we remove it?"

    "Just ask her, obviously," Fiona said.

    "Do you intend to cause harm to us if I remove your aura?" the oculomancer asked.

    "Of course not! I would never want to harm anyone ever," Kiera said.

    "Do you intend to steal the sien from this Aura Maiden if we remove your aura?"

    "I don''t know what that means, but no. I do not intend to do that."

    "See?" Fiona said. "Just do as I have asked."

    "There is enough sien in her aura to reach the eighty-first harmonic. The sien is organized into a standard spherical aura. You are now going to blank out and remove all sien from this individual," the oculomancer said, pointing at Kiera. "You are to store this sien."

    "I store sien," the Maiden said. Her voice made Kiera shiver.

    The Maiden placed her hand on Kiera''s chest. "Hey!" Kiera said.

    "Relax," Fiona said.

    After a few moments Kiera suddenly felt an enormous weight crushing down on her from all directions, like she had swam down into very deep water. She fell to one knee and gasped. "Fiona?" she asked. "What is happening to me?"

    "You are probably feeling ether for the first time," Fiona said. "You will get used to it after a few days. Just sleep on it. Oh, and do not reach out and try to claim it."

    Kiera was struggling not to fall on her face. This is going to be a very long, strange few days.

 Chapter 8: Blue Skies and Murder

    Kiera was given a fancy hotel room in Spire Nydia as a temporary measure as an apartment was prepared for her in another Spire. It was more luxurious even than her own father''s estate, and her father was the King of Cloudsea. She rose from her massive, frilly bed at first light and watched the sun rise from the half-hexagon turret window that seemed suspended in the open sky. The sky was the color of fire, the fog rolling in from the horizon looked like a wave of blood.

    The door to her chamber opened. She gasped, and wearing only a thin shift, she tried to cover herself. It was Fiona.

    "Don''t bother," Fiona said. "I can see you naked anytime I would want." She tapped her finger against her eyes.

    "Really?" Kiera asked.

    "When you get your eyes you will know for yourself. Anyways, get dressed. We fly as soon as the fog rolls in." She threw a sack on Kiera''s bed. "It''s traditional to wear this when flying."

    Kiera opened the sack and rifled through the clothes. "Um, are you going to give me some privacy?"

    There was a light shirt, a dark blue-grey jacket, a matching pair of shorts that showed off much too much of Kiera''s legs for her to be comfortable, and a matching wide-brimmed hat, tall and pointy. A witches costume. The materials were very fine, and even the smallclothes were comfortable and perfectly fitted. Fiona was waiting for her outside.

    "These fit perfectly!" Kiera said.

    "Yeah, we made a profile of your body and gave it to a tailor." Fiona said.

    "That is, somewhat uncomfortable to think about."

    "You will get used to it. Maybe it will take a few decades or centuries, but oculomancers are all women. It''s really not a big deal."

    Fiona led Kiera up to the upper surface of the Spire and stopped at the airlock leading out to the airport.

    "Try making an environmental shield," Fiona said.

    Kiera reached out and claimed some of the ether nearby. She shaped it into a shield around her, and caused the barrier to trap air, increasing the pressure. She heated it, so it would be about room temperature. The pattern, or etherweave, was relatively simple, though Kiera still whispered an incantation with her lips. "Inve pen clia eth, wea eth rarow kin, ess derarow shea, clia hearth, nia hei vin nia hei veth za za vash, nia wid veth khe declia, preah clia ess, sol vash, declia declia heara clia ess, nia tena veth za za sen, declia dekin declia."

    The bubble appeared around her. Kiera was proud of it.

    "A bit slow," Fiona said, as a similar bubble instantly appeared around her. "It''s more important that you understand the structure of the etherweave, the actual words are not important. The words are just so you can read the research papers on new weaves and try them out yourself."

    Fiona depressurized the room then opened the exterior door. There was one of those great black predatory bird-looking machines parked just short walk away. A half a dozen women fussed over the machine, walking around opening and closing panels and checking off boxes on long checklists. A pair of women with a small motorized car drove up with a long, tube-like device attached to the back. They lifted the big white tube and mounted it on a pylon on the bottom of the machine''s wings. All the women had a very sharp way of moving, and they seemed to have an extremely serious look on their face, both indicators that they were very well trained soldiers. As Fiona got close the women saluted her.

    Fiona walked up to one of the white tubes and unscrewed the cone on the front of the tube. It slid off, revealing a glass cone underneath. Inside the glass there was an eyeball attached to some tubes. It was an oculomancer eyeball.

    "Eww!" Kiera said. The eyeball twitched.

    Fiona screwed the cap back on. "Yeah, if you think that''s gross, wait until you see how these missiles are made." She said. "It requires a human sacrifice. There is a beating heart of an etherborne somewhere in there, kept alive with a life support system that only lasts a few hours. These things are extremely expensive," She added. "About the cost of an entire kingdom worth of land for a single missile."

    Fiona walked around the craft a few times with her own checklist and checked off boxes. Then a ladder was brought out and she climbed up to the glass canopy and climbed inside. "You''re up next," She said to Kiera.

    Kiera slowly ascended the steps and awkwardly climbed into her seat behind Fiona. There was a stick jutting right up between Keira''s legs. There was not a great deal of space for her arms, and her legs had to be tucked down into individual compartments below her. There were a pair of pedals for each foot, one higher than the other. Kiera stretched her leg and accidentally compressed one of the pedals.

    "Don''t touch that," Fiona said. "In fact, don''t touch anything."

    "Should I take my hat off?" Kiera asked.

    "Probably, yeah. We oculomancers can see straight through our hats, in fact we can see straight through the fuselage of the jet. But you don''t have your eyes yet."

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    An oculomancer came by and closed the canopy. She saluted Fiona one more time then the ladder was taken away.

    "Pay attention to what I do, try to feel the weaves." Fiona said. "Up we go."

    The craft shuttered slightly then slowly levitated straight up off the ground. Slowly, very slowly.

    "What is happening?" Kiera asked.

    "We are going to take the ferryway," Fiona said. "It''s not something you can do on the ground, because the places where the ferry way touches the ground is blocked by the Spires. The ferryway is an ether-sien field between our planet and the Sister World. This field is shaped like a large tube between the two planets, that splits into several smaller tubes spread out across the continent. Each of those smaller tubes ends in a Spire. The Spires were created by the ferryway as the planet cooled, billions of years ago."

    Kiera tried to make sense of the weaves that Fiona was using. It was more complex than a simple environmental shield. She was doing something to keep the craft moving in six dimensions.

    "I don''t usually take the ferryway, but I doubt your body is ready for the acceleration of a normal takeoff right now." Fiona said.

    After a long while the craft began to move up at an angle. By then the Spire was far below them, and an endless blanket of fog extended over the entire world below. Only the Spires penetrated up from the fog, Spire Nydia below and Spire Lin far to the south. Spire Erika, a seventy thousand foot monster of a Spire, loomed in the distance to the southwest, beyond Spire Lin.

    The nose of the aircraft was pointed directly at Spire Erika.

    "Now we are going towards the Great Ferryway and Spire Erika," Fiona said. "If we kept going we would end up on the Sister World."

    "Really?" Kiera asked. "Have you ever been to the moon?"

    "Obviously," Fiona said. "These eyes of mine are not from this planet. Now pay attention, I am going to lead you through the startup procedures for our kerosene turbines. Pay careful attention to the weaves I use, I am going to start the right engine."

    Kiera felt Fiona claim nearby ether and use it to spin something on the right side, of the craft, behind them. Lights began to activate inside the chamber where Kiera was sitting, and gauges began to snap and twitch behind small, round pieces of glass.

    "This is the mechanical-electricity generator," Fiona said. "It''s relatively easy to start, just use ether to spin it really fast until this gauge here is in the green," she said. Kiera had to peer over Fiona''s shoulder to see the gauge she was pointing at. "Then, open this red guard here," She said, pointing to to a wide red case covering some switches, "except yours will be on the left because you will be starting the left engine. Finally press this button for three seconds. When this gauge is in the green here, then you can stop using ether to spin the generator. It will run on it''s own from the turbine''s power."

    The engine behind them began to make a whirling, spinning sound, followed by a campfire roaring in a howling blizzard. Half the gauges started moving. Suddenly it got quiet. "I created a sound bubble around us so our ears are not injured by the sounds of the engines," Fiona said. "But we can still talk to each other. Go ahead and start your engine, now."

    Kiera did the same steps that Fiona had done. It was surprisingly difficult to get the generator to spin fast enough for the gauge to reach the green area. After she held the right button down, the other half of the gauges started moving. Soon, they were all in the green zone.

    "My airplane," Fiona said. "I am going to take us out of the ferryway." Kiera felt the stick between her legs move forward slightly. Suddenly Kiera understood why her uniform''s shorts showed off so much of her legs. A nice long skirt would make it impossible to handle the stick.

    The nose of the aircraft dropped, and they were almost pointed at the ground. The plane began to pick up speed. Then suddenly they dropped like a rock, falling out of the sky rapidly. "We have left the ferryway," Fiona said. "We need to gain some airspeed and the fastest way is to point the nose at the ground."

    After a short while the nose rotated back up at the horizon. The world rushed past below. By the time they were level they were closer to Spire Lin than they were to Spire Nydia. Still they gained speed. Kiera looked behind them and saw two long trails of white smoke extending off into the distance. They were far above the clouds. The sky had become a pure blue color, like a vast bowl made of smooth, polished sapphire.

    "Altitude fifty-five thousand feet, speed Mach two point seven, we are less than one hundred miles from the target," Fiona said. She reached back and handed Kiera a piece of paper with some numbers written on it. "See this console here?" She said, pointing to some keys with numbers on them. "Press this button, then type those numbers into that console, then let go of the button."

    Kiera did so. The buttons seem to fight back as she tried to press them down, but made a clicking sound when fully pressed. When she released the button a red light began flashing.

    "Do you feel the trigger on the stick? It is almost like a rifle trigger." Fiona asked.

    "Yeah."

    "When the light turns green pull the trigger."

    "Okay," Kiera said. She felt a bit uneasy. Is this a weapon of some sort? she wondered.

    When the light turned green Kiera pulled on the trigger. Suddenly the white tube on the right side of the craft detached from the pylon and fell away, then rocketed rapidly down towards the ground. Kiera gasped. Then she saw, and felt, something truly horrible. A heinous, revolting red aura of some sort started burning around the tube as it fell. Even from the vast distance between her and the tube, Kiera knew that something was very wrong with that thing.

    "What is that?!" Kiera said.

    "A burning crysien entropic field," Fiona said. "It disables etherborne powers, that missile is designed for killing witches."

    "Wait, that is going to kill a witch?" Kiera asked.

    "Yeah, a witch that would have been more powerful than the Elder Saint, by quite a bit. But, it''s best not to think about it."

    The missile vanished into the fog. There was a flash of light, then nothing.

    "No trace of etherborne powers anymore," Fiona said. "Mission success, Kiera. I''ll tell the Elder Saint that you have helped subjugate the etherborne. She will be very pleased with your progress."

    "Who, who did I just kill?" She asked.

    "His powers were about to manifest, he was about twenty-two years old. Lived alone in the woods, a hunter. That missile should not have hit anyone else. As I said before, we have a short window of a few weeks where we can see his powers before they actually manifest. Timing for this sort of thing is very important. A strike mission like this is ideal for witches that manifest in rural areas."

    "Do you know his name?"

    "No, the oculomancers in the spy aircraft can see things like relative age and sex but we don''t ever get close enough to them to really know who they are. Not unless they live in a major city in which case we can''t exactly blow them up with a missile."

    Kiera shivered. Maybe Fiona was right. Maybe it was best to just, not think about it.

 Chapter 9: Aviation Club

    "In the year 630 B.E.S. the Charlatan King Reyndell Marunavi sent the Purifier to the Island of Vjiskald to prosecute the war against the tribes there. Reyndell''s subordinate at the time, the Witch Fiona of the Morning Mist, betrayed him at this time, because he had attacked her tribe. In those days, the Charlatan King was known to use statistical fraud to generate bogus scientific studies to prove one thing or another. It is ironic that Fiona did not realize this until the Charlatan King had attacked her own tribe."

    Quinn yawned. He didn''t expect these University professors to be such bores.

    "The structure of this fraud is worth noting. Reyndell would have some clinical study repeated one hundred times across various laboratories in various countries. He would sort the results of these studies according to his political desires, and only publish a single one of the studies. He would use the oculomancers to erase the evidence that the other studies ever occurred, and intimidate or blackmail the scientists into silence. Six months or so later he would repeat this process, and publish the best of one hundred studies, with a citation of the first study. Thus, there was a clear historical record that the studies actually happened, and there was seemingly a replication study as well. He used this scam to convince the population that his ideologies were correct. He fooled many skilled scholars of that era. There is a lesson in this. As scholars, it is your responsibility to not fall for the same tricks."

    Quinn slowly beat his head against his desk. I. Just. Want. To. Make. Flying. Machines.

    "Next week, we are going to turn our attention to Reyndell''s daughter Annatiki Marunavi, also known as the Bloodraker, who played an important role in the war. There will be a quiz on the content of today''s lecture as well, so be prepared. Class is dismissed."

    Quinn ran to the door, and stood there as the other students passed. "Aviation Club today! Aviation Club today!" He said. "We are going to be meeting in the park just east of the quad in thirty minutes time! Come meet with people who want to invent flying machines!"

    Seth had proven much more effective in his recruitment. Quinn managed to find a single person who was interested in the Aviation Club, while Seth had found half a dozen.

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    "Our first order of business is to establish a Club Charter and a schedule, with a list of members. If you wish to become a member of the Club, then a reliable method of contacting you must be furnished and recorded in our ledger. In addition, me and my brother Seth will be testing the reliability of your contact information. Once a reliable schedule is established, we will begin design on our flying machine. Seth is the official operator and tester of any machines we make. I will be the final approver of any designs. We have many open roles, such as Chief Carpenter, Chief Materials Expert, Chief Rigger, Chief Mathematician, and Chief Meteorologist. If you have any of the relevant skills, please fill out an application with the Club and we will be sure to apply the appropriate due diligence."

    "And if we succeed at flying," Seth added, "we will may even have girls wanting to join the club!"

    This seemed to make the seven men more interested than anything Quinn had said, though he was not very surprised. "Me and Seth are co-presidents, so talk to one of us if you need anything. Please begin filling out these papers here..."

    "Excuse me." A feminine voice said. Seth''s head snapped up. She was very tall for a woman, with striking golden hair and eyes like the sky. Oddly enough, she wore clothes like the ones in the paintings at the Seven Witches Cafe, including a pointy hat. "Um, can I join your club too?" She asked.

    "Are you a student here?" Quinn asked.

    "I am now," She said. "My teacher told me I should join your club. She said I would learn a lot. So, will you have me? I am a trained physician and nurse. If you uh, hurt yourself I can probably patch you up."

    Quinn was astonished. Seth was grinning like a madman. "What is your name?" Quinn asked.

    "You can call me Kiera," she said. "So can I join your club?"

    "Kiera, you are going to be our Chief Physician! Welcome to the club!"

    "Oh, thank you!" She said.

    "We just need, some contact information." Quinn said.

    The other seven men, after looking at the striking woman in the pointy hat, all rushed forward to fill out their papers.

    After the club adjourned, Quinn gathered the papers into a pack and began the march back to his dormitory. It was dusk then, and the trees cast dim shadows on the crimson concrete of the campus roadways.

    Suddenly Quinn stopped. There was the silhouette of a woman, standing high in the air, on one of the pillars behind him. He froze at first, then snapped his head around to the pillars and searched for her. He saw nothing, just quiet stones. A gust of wind blew through the quad, stirring the grass. He had uneasy dreams that night.

 Chapter 10: The Graveyard

    Class was being held outside, in an open field of grass near the campus.

    "The Aurascribe will inscribe the inside surface of your aura with the patterns required to make a fireball," the professor said. "All you need to do is reach out and claim the ether inside your aura, then feed that ether into the section of your aura that contains the pattern. This will create a fireball, which you can shoot at the targets."

    Quinn quickly discovered that magic was actually extremely easy. He reached out and claimed the nearby ether and did as the professor instructed. A fireball appeared in his hand, and he aimed it at the target. It shot off a few moments later, hitting the target and exploding.

    "Professor!" one of the other students said. "It''s not working, I can''t claim the ether!"

    "Stand apart." The professor said. "Look, you are standing right next to another aura. You are both probably trying to claim the same ether. I went over this in class, you should have paid better attention."

    Seth shot a fireball at the target. "With this, I''ll be unstoppable!" he said.

    "Ok, class. Now get the two barriers from the Aurascribe. There is an inner and an outer barrier. The inner barrier is very strong, but the outer barrier will break after taking a few hits from the fireballs."

    The students shuffled over to the Aurascribe. It was a boxy looking machine with some rotating dials and a lever. Quinn placed his hand on his heart and held the lever in his other hand. After pulling the lever, the new inscriptions appeared on the inside of his aura. He could feel them, though the aura itself was invisible.

    "So we are going to have ourselves a deathmatch between the boys." The professor said. "Take too many hits from the other students and your outer barrier will break. Once your outer barrier breaks, stop participating. The last man standing wins ten percent extra credit on tomorrow''s quiz. The ladies will get the extra credit for free, and they do not need to participate if they don''t want to. The contest will begin on my command."

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    "I will not be participating," Kiera said. "It would be unfair, you boys are outmatched."

    "Is that so?" Seth asked.

    She pointed her hand at him. A bolt of blue light shot at Seth. It went straight through both barriers and exploded in his face, showering him in frosty white powder.

    "Kiera please refrain from murdering the other students," the professor said.

    "Cold, cold," Seth said, shivering.

    "Begin!" the professor finally announced.

    "I say we have a truce," Seth said. "We''ll fight each other at the end."

    "Deal," Quinn said.

    They stood facing opposite directions, just far enough apart to create a space between their auras, and started lobbing fireballs at the other students. They took out a dozen other students, but in the end they both lost their outer barriers and needed to quit the game.

    After the contest ended the professor dismissed the class, then walked up to Quinn and Seth. "I need to speak to both of you," he said. "Walk with me."

    He led them through the campus to the far corner, beyond the bank. There he showed them a small graveyard.

    "Alright boys, it is tradition at this school to bring young men like you to see this graveyard. Please take a look around and read the headstones."

    Seth and Quinn did so, taking different paths through the graveyard, reading the inscriptions.

    Here rests Marty, who looked to the sky and dreamed to fly, one inscription read.

    Rest in peace Chad, who paid the blood price of the sky.

    All of the gravestones had the same theme.

    "This is a special graveyard for the students at this university who died trying to invent flying machines," the professor said. "Look me in the eyes, Quinn. I promise you, if you continue with your ambition to invent the flying machine, you will die and you will be buried here in this graveyard with the others who came before you. Do you want to see your brother die?"

    Quinn said nothing. What could he say?

    The professor turned and walked away.

 Chapter 11: Zacharys Quest

    Zachary was impressed that the little craft was able to land on the short, secluded runway in the valley to the south of White Chasm. The fog was so dense that he could not see the edge of the runway. The pilots were both oculomancers, and they could see through the fog somehow, though he had never been able to get an oculomancer to give him many details.

    As he left the plane, the witch Fiona was waiting for him.

    "Sir Zachary," she said. "Thank you for coming. I need to take your aura, however. Our business must remain private, and King Edwin will be able to feel you entering the city if you have an aura."

    "Very well," Zachary said. Then his aura was instantly gone. She didn''t even reach out and place her hand on his chest.

    "Follow me," she said, and began to lead him up into the hills on one side of the valley. "It''s a long walk to the caverns below the city, please tell me about your quest."

    "I just want to know how they kidnapped the Princess that night. We had oculomancers at the doors to the Imperial Palace who were interviewing everyone to entered or left. They ask the standard questions, ''Do you intend to cause harm to the Imperial family?'' But that night, somebody slipped through somehow."

    "That seems unlikely," Fiona said. "I had heard that Heritor Alyesha had been kidnapped but I do not know the entire story. There are rumors that she was beaten, that her virtue was stolen, that she was mauled by dogs."

    "You could ask Kiera," Zachary said. Fiona shrugged. "You can''t believe the rumors. It is true that she was attacked by a dog as she tried to escape her captors. She has small scars on one of her legs from that attack. However she was never beaten or violated, and an oculomancer verified her entire story.

    "Sasha was taken to the south of the Ash Sea, in Theocracy lands, to a castle owned by a man named Lord Naxis. Sasha simply bribed the castle garrison with promises of riches once she returned to the Empire. It worked, the guards mutinied, and she effectively became the Lady of the castle. She even sent a letter to her father informing him of her location, and she hid her subterfuge from the nearby lords, who still thought that Naxis was in command of the castle.

    "King Sullivan Blaine of Cloudsea sailed across the Ash Sea to fetch the princess. Kiera Blaine was traveling with him at the time, serving as a medic in his army. When they arrived the gates to the castle opened right up and allowed the Blaine family soldiers to walk in. They found Sasha sitting on the throne sipping cherry wine and being entertained by the court bard, and they found Naxis locked up in the dungeons. King Sullivan promptly ordered Naxis to be sent to the mines in Cloudsea as a slave.

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    "Sasha kept all the promises she made to those men. She vowed to get revenge for the kidnapping however. She is gathering her armies to invade the Theocracy now that she is the Empress."

    They entered into a cavern at the base of a cliff and began to ascend the interior. The cavern had frequent openings along one side, where ferns grew in the light places. The rock was red and white and there was a small system of creeks running through the caves.

    "These passages were used by the Aden Clan during the war," Fiona said. "There is a cafe in White Chasm where I met with Renna. That was the day I offered Renna the chance to speak with the Bloodraker. The Aden family scouts led me through these caverns that day. I am very familiar with them. Me and Annatiki used them frequently after we switched sides."

    They arrived at a long, dark stairway spiraling up through the rock. Up and up they went, until finally arriving at an iron door. Fiona opened the door. Beyond the door was the Aden Palace dungeons. They found a handful of oculomancers inspecting the empty cells and taking notes.

    "There are two boys here in the city who are trying to start an Aviation Club," Fiona said.

    "I would expect you to be an expert," Zachary said, "at murdering such individuals and erasing them from public records."

    "I sent Kiera to join their club," Fiona said.

    "Kiera is too kindhearted to murder a couple of kids,"

    "There are lessons that she needs to learn through experience. Anyways, I was notified immediately when those two boys withdrew auras from the bank."

    Zachary whistled. "Did King Edwin betray his oaths?"

    "No, the account was owned by Heritor Maxius the Younger of Renna. I found him here in the city. Apparently he and some of his friends were here in these dungeons hiding from the oculomancers. We don''t know why. We have tried asking him lots and lots of different questions and he reveals nothing. He is not lying to us either. He legitimately did not know what those two boys were going to do with their auras. What is even more troubling, is that Maxius genuinely does not know why he is in the city, he does not know why he was in these dungeons, and he does not have any ill intentions towards the oculomancers, the witches, or the Elder Saint."

    "And you want me to question him?" Zachary asked.

    "Yes. You wanted to know how those men from the Theocracy kidnapped the Imperial Princess while she was in the middle of the Palace surrounded by oculomancers. Here, we have somebody from the Theocracy who broke his oaths without knowing it and appears to be able to lie to oculomancers, something that we thought was impossible."

    He felt excited. His brother, the late Emperor Corrin, had tasked Zachary with solving the mystery of that night. He had died not knowing, but Zachary intended to keep his promise.

    "Thank you for thinking of me, I''ll see what I can do."

 Chapter 12: Seesaw

    The roster of people who actually registered and paid their dues ended up only numbering five. Seth and Quinn, Kiera, and two more men. The first was a gentle-looking man named Vince who enjoyed painting pictures of birds. The second was a burly man named Bjorn, the son of a minor nobleman from the island-continent of Vjiskald. The five of them moved into an empty classroom on campus. Their low numbers meant that they would need to outsource the actual construction of final components to a carpenter''s guild in Lowtown.

    "Our first order of business," Quinn said, "is to solve the problems that Seth currently has with controlling the machine." Seth dragged the oversized kite into the room for the other club members to look at. Kiera was taking detailed notes.

    "The thought of sticking a spinning propeller on this thing terrifies me," Seth said. "It has a nasty tendency to want to nose-dive into the ground. It requires all my strength to control it. What I want, is for the kite to prefer to fly straight without me using any of my strength."

    "So our first task is to design this preference into the shape of the kite itself." Quinn said. "But first we need to figure out why the kite tends to nose dive into the ground. Kiera, can you create wind?"

    "Of course," she said.

    "How strong can you make the wind blow?" Quinn asked.

    "Strong enough to knock over this building definitely," Kiera said. "Maybe strong enough to destroy the Palace of the Spine?"

    Quinn was astonished. Their building was built from stone and the Palace of the Spine was literally inside a mountain.

    "Mother summer!" Quinn said. "Where did you learn to use magic?"

    "Oh, the Eight Color Monastery on the north slopes of Spire Erika." Kiera said. "It''s where Heritors go to school. I was in the same class as Empress Sasha and also Princess Lucia Aden of this city. The three of us, uh, got into a lot of trouble."

    Quinn nodded. "Naturally. Kiera can you please create a tube of wind across this kite?"

    Kiera did so, and Seth held the kite, attempting to hold it down. His muscles strained with the effort. Quinn lit a flare and allowed the smoke to blow across the wings of the kite.

    "I am going to tip the nose down and show you," Seth said. "Make the wind faster."

    As the nose began to dip, suddenly it accelerated towards the ground. Seth was ready and sized the kite before the nose smashed into the ground.

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    "Exactly like that!" Seth said.

    "I see the problem," Bjorn said. "It is a divergent function."

    As massive and muscular as the man was, for some reason Quinn could not fathom, the man was one of the best mathematical minds that the school had seen in decades. "I have no idea what a divergent function is," Quinn said. "Can you explain?"

    "Consider the angle of the nose at time T to be a function of the angle of the nose at time T minus one," Bjorn said. "This function is divergent and grows rapidly toward infinity. Basically, the wind hitting the top of the kite causes the nose to drop, exposing more of the top of the kite to be exposed to the wind. This is a death spiral. The angle grows fast and the speed at which the angle grows increased exponentially, at least. The exact function may be much more aggressive than exponential. I''m not sure."

    "So how can we fix it?" Quinn asked.

    "Subtraction," Bjorn said. "You just need to subtract off the function by a factor that is large enough to prevent the function from being divergent."

    "That''s a good idea," Seth said. "Can you explain that in a way that a five-year-old would understand?"

    "I think what you need to fix your kite is a method of making the nose go up faster than it goes down," Bjorn said.

    "Yeah," Quinn said. "That is the problem we are trying to solve. The question is how."

    "One method of creating enough subtraction to converge a function is to make the amount subtracted proportional to the inputs."

    "One thing that I noticed," Vince said, interrupting the conversation. "Is that your kite does not have a tail. Birds have tails, and I imagine that your flying machine needs a tail in order to fly."

    Kiera was busy recording what they were saying. When the conversation stopped, she began playing with her pencil. In Quinn''s estimation Seth would never be able to seduce the woman. Even Seth had quickly grown somewhat formal toward her, only speaking when asked direct questions. Though Vince and Bjorn seemed comfortable around her.

    The woman held her pencil in between two fingers, in the center. She played with it, pushing the eraser down and the tip went up. Like a seesaw.

    Like a seesaw.

    "A seesaw!" Quinn said. Kiera perked up. "Kiera you are a genius!"

    "Ah!" Bjorn said. "Yes, I know what you are exactly what you are thinking."

    "We add a tail," Quinn said.

    "I told you, we need a tail!" Vince said.

    "A smaller wing on a boom, angled slightly down," Bjorn said. "The smaller wing in the back nose-dives first because it is angled slightly down, and causes the tail to dive down, and like a seesaw the front wing goes up. This would create an oscillation that is convergent." He nodded, satisfied. "I have solved the problem, right?"

    "Don''t forget that Kiera helped solve the problem," Seth said. Kiera looked... guilty?

    The boys quickly hacked together a boom and a second smaller wing using wood and cloth. They attached the boom to the kite and repeated the experiment with Kiera''s wind magic. The smoke blew over the wing, though as Seth tipped the nose of the kite, the kite refused to nose dive. In fact, when Seth released the kite it just sort of floated in one spot until it drifted to one side and fell out of the wind.

    "This is it," Seth said. "If the thing wants to stay in the same spot while flying, then I can save my strength for control."

    "Next," Quinn said. "We need to think about control. How do we control this thing? That will be the topic next time we meet. For now, I need to draft a design and send it to our carpenters. We will want to test this new design before we jump to conclusions."

 Chapter 13: Aerodynamic Stability

    "So they have discovered aerodynamic stability," Fiona said. "After just one week? That is new. Usually they discover stability after they discover three axis control."

    Kiera and Fiona walked through the halls of Spire Lin. Fiona wanted to introduce Kiera to somebody, but she didn''t know who.

    They walked out onto the upper platform of the Spire, where the airport was. Both Kiera and Fiona were instantly able to create environmental shields. Kiera had once tried to walk around outside without the shield and it was quite uncomfortable. The air at seventeen thousand feet was thinner and it was also extremely cold.

    Fiona led Kiera to a tiny, tiny airplane. It had a high wing and a single propeller on the front. Fiona made Kiera climb into the left seat. The inside of the airplane was cramped and felt old. The seats were old leather died red, and the little glass gauges were all scratched up.

    "As I said, questions are more important than answers. And I hope that your time in the Aviation Club has given you some questions," Fiona said. "Aerodynamic stability is the tendency for an aircraft to want to stay going straight in all axis of control. I am going to teach you how to fly now, this lesson will involve three axis control systems and regimes of flight. We need to pick up Princess Claire and bring her to the Spire, and I thought this would be a good opportunity for a flying lesson."

    Fiona reached out and claimed the ether nearby and began to levitate the little airplane up into the ferryway. Kiera was becoming much better at sensing what Fiona was doing, and she was also beginning to sense just how weak Fiona was. Kiera could literally wipe the floor with Fiona''s face and there would be nothing that she could do about it.

    But there was also the Elder Saint. And if Kiera''s theory was correct, then the Elder Saint was the old Annatiki Marunavi, the one that her grandmother had warned her about. The Bloodraker. Kiera did not want to meet the woman again. After her encounter in Spire Nydia, the Elder Saint had returned to her home at Spire Annatiki in the far west, which was fitting.

    "Is the Elder Saint also the Bloodraker?" Kiera asked.

    "Does your family remember nothing?" Fiona asked.

    "I don''t know what to say."

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    "The propaganda campaign to rebrand the Bloodraker as the Elder Saint was the most expensive project that the oculomancers ever did." Fiona said. "We call it the Scouring, or it''s long name, the Scouring of the Stacks. During the Scouring, almost every text that humanity has ever written needed to be corrected."

    They floated up into an arc over Spire Lin and started moving toward Spire Erika, which was much closer than Kiera was accustomed. Fiona pointed to a red knob in between the two seats.

    "This airplane does not have a kerosene turbine," Fiona said. "The mechanism is actually remarkably similar to the engine that is used on Quinn''s little project. It has several small rectangles arranged in a radial pattern, and you simply push on them with force magic. Crysien blocks the force from one side, causing them to rotate rapidly. The power is transferred to a gearbox and then to the propeller. Kiera, please begin spinning the engine."

    The propeller began to spin and the airplane was sucked forward. They fell out of the ferryway, one wing dropped and the world went mad.

    "This is called a spin," Fiona said. "Down on the stick, rudder in the opposite direction to the spin."

    The world span around them. Kiera didn''t know which way was up.

    "Down on the stick, rudder in the opposite direction to the spin. NOW!" Fiona repeated.

    Kiera did as she was told. She slammed the stick all the way forward and smashed her leg against the rudder pedal. The madness ended.

    "Pull up on the stick slowly," Fiona said. "Level off, and recover."

    Kiera did so. After the plane was facing the horizon, it behaved very well. Moving the stick allowed Kiera to change direction or elevation. Everything was right.

    "Aerodynamic stability does not matter one bit when you are falling out of the sky like a rock," Fiona said. "Three axis control and power is what matters. I hope that you can understand this question."

    As they flew towards the ground they passed into the fog. Intellectually, Kiera knew that Fiona could see through the fog, but it still was uncomfortable. Quickly Kiera saw the boundary of the runway pass underneath and then the airplane hit the ground. Kiera slumped forward and almost fell asleep.

    Claire Aden was a teenage girl, perhaps fourteen. She had the raven-black hair of the Aden Clan, just like Lucia, though it was cropped above her neck. She wore a black dress with silver and crimson filigree. "Honored ancestor," Claire said, bowing to Fiona.

    Fiona walked up to the child.

    "Do you understand what will happen to you if you become an oculomancer?" Fiona asked.

    "My body will be poisoned and I cannot have a husband." Claire said.

    "And you agree to this?" Fiona asked.

    "Yes," Claire said.

    "You are not lying," Fiona said. "Very well, fly with us."

    "Princess Kiera!" Claire said. "Have you met my sister Lucia?"

    "Me and Lucia got into a lot of trouble at the Monastery," Kiera said. "But Sasha kept us in line."

    The child smiled.

    "Are we going to the moon, honored ancestor?" Claire asked.

    "Yeah" Fiona said. "We can get you your eyes faster because you are a Heritor. I also need to get Kiera a pair of eyes. A special trip is worth it, in this case."

 Chapter 14: Mystery of Flight

    "At this meeting of the White Chasm Aviation Club," Quinn said, "I want to discuss my Three Axis Theory of aircraft control."

    Kiera looking frightened.

    "Vince has pointed out in his paintings of birds that the tips of the wings can be warped up or down, each wing being warped opposite the other, so that birds can fly." Quinn said. "So this is the first axis, surfaces on the end of the wings that go up or down. The second axis is on the tail. It is a pair of surfaces that go up or down on that smaller wing in the back. This controls the pitch. You can point the nose up or down with that control. These two axis of control can be wired to a stick in front of the pilot. The question I want to answer in this meeting of the Aviation Club, is how the pilot can physically control a third axis."

    "Why would we need a third axis?" Vince asked. "Birds have wings and tails, why would we need more than that?"

    "The third axis is the rudder, like a ship''s rudder," Quinn said. "A vertical fin extending off the tail. I don''t exactly now when we would use this surface, but I want to add it just in case it''s needed. This is related to my three axis theory, To me, flying these machines will be like riding a bike, and with practice a pilot will be able to keep the nose straight without expending too much energy."

    "Princess Kiera," Seth said. "Do you have any ideas?"

    "Um, do you think maybe, you could, uh, use your feet?" Kiera said.

    "Feet?" Quinn asked.

    "To you know, uh, control the rudder." Kiera said.

    Quinn nodded. "A stick for the first two axis, and the feet for the third. Kind of like riding a horse. Yes, this could work."

    The boys began to frantically design the cable and lever system that would allow such a three-axis control scheme to work. Kiera mostly just recorded the list of books that they referenced and took detailed notes about the things that they said.

    "Have you ever been in a balloon?" Kiera asked.

    "I went up in a balloon once," Quinn said. "It was deeply disappointing. Most people think that balloons are flying machines, in fact if you ask a person to draw a flying machine they would probably draw a balloon."

    "You didn''t like it?"

    "It was boring. The thing didn''t fly very high and it was tethered to the ground with a long rope. Seth was able to convince the old men who ran the thing to allow him to carry his kite up there, and he jumped off and flew down to the ground. The idiot. I was absolutely certain my brother was going to die."

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    "You love your brother?" She asked. Quinn said nothing.

    "Do you have brothers?"

    "I did, but they, uh, died trying to protect Sasha when she was kidnapped. I miss them." She looked very disturbed. After a moment Quinn saw that she was beginning to cry.

    "I am sorry that you lost your brothers," Quinn said. "I can''t think of what would happen if Seth was killed."

    "Then why do you keep insisting on inventing a flying machine!?" Kiera said. "Have you been to the graveyard, do you know how all those kids died?"

    Seth, who seemed to have been paying attention to the conversation, approached them and said "I think she makes a good point. We should research how all those other students died and figure out how we can avoid repeating their mistakes."

    Quinn attempted to do so, though the actual records of those students had been erased for some reason, and the professors refused to answer his questions. Over the following weeks Quinn found the most reliable source of information was firsthand accounts from previous generations of students who had gone on to perform menial jobs, making ice for the restaurants or operating sunlamps at the Spire.

    "He strapped a rocket to a big wing and flew very high," one old man said. "However he ended up falling out of the sky and his body broke on the ground. His corpse was cold, cold. Covered in frost, he was."

    "It was the snow, I think," another old man said, when asked about a different student. "The snow stuck to the wings and the wings broke apart! He fell. Terrible! Terrible! You should have heard his screams. This was, oh, sixty years ago."

    Quinn roamed about the city, crossing countless bridges that spanned the chasm to speak with an equally countless number of old men who had been to the University at White Chasm and had friends who died trying to invent the flying machine. The general theme was that they tried to fly when it was cold and ice buildup on the wings caused the shape of the wings to change, or the wings fell off entirely.

    At the next meeting of the Aviation Club, Quinn finally addressed Kiera directly for the first time. "Kiera, how do you think we should stay safe when flying?"

    "Maybe, uh," Kiera said, "you could keep a list of everything that could go wrong and then check that it''s impossible for that."

    "I agree with this strategy," Bjorn said. "Even if we make mistakes and die, then future students will have access to our lists and they will refrain from making the same mistakes that we make."

    "Birds don''t have checklists," Vince said. "We should try and design the flying machines to have the lessons of our checklists encoded into the design."

    "If possible," Seth said. "Otherwise, we can just expect a competent pilot to do a good job. Take a risk, roll the dice."

    "Very well," Quinn said. "Kiera, please record our very first rule for pilots. Check for ice! Lots of pilots have died because ice changed the shape of the wings, and I think we need to make it a standard procedure to check for ice."

    Kiera looked horrified.

    "Is something wrong?" Seth asked, a rare occurrence of interacting with the woman without being directly addressed.

    Kiera had tears in her eyes. "You should be certain to not test the kite when it is cold," Kiera said. "And this world tends to be, very, very cold."

    Quinn was astonished. Did this woman know something about flying machines? She was a Heritor after all. And King Edwin has been somewhat uncomfortable with the idea of working on a flying machine. Kiera was a mystery, though, perhaps not as mysterious as the problem of flight itself. However, the idea of the checklists was a good one.

    "Vince," Quinn said. "Birds do not have checklists, but we are not birds. I want you to prepare an official checklist for the club."

 Chapter 15: To the Moon and Back Again

    Claire Aden insisted on sleeping in Kiera''s apartment. The apartments in Spire Lin were spacious and a second room was allocated for Claire. Kiera could not understand why the child wanted that, though she suspected that the Princess was lonely. After all she had no friends in the Spire and her only connection was to Kiera, who was friends with her older sister Lucia.

    There were few other children her age, and Kiera empathized with the child. Most oculomancers joined the Spire when they were older, perhaps about twenty. Claire was sent to the Spire because she was a Heritor, and the oculomancers needed future leaders from the ruling class. Also King Edwin wanted to get rid of his sisters for some reason.

    Claire immediately began prodding Kiera about the Aviation Club.

    "Are the boys cute?" She asked.

    Kiera shrugged.

    "Then I''ll just have to see for myself," Claire said.

    "Heritors are forbidden from helping to invent the flying machine," Kiera said. "You should know this."

    "So then why are you in the club?" Claire asked. "And you didn''t answer my question."

    "Seth is cute," Kiera said. "So is Bjorn. I''m pretty sure Vince is gay but I might be wrong. Quinn is a creep."

    Claire nodded. "I should like to meet Seth and Bjorn."

    The door opened and several servants entered, followed by Fiona. "Fiona of the Morning Mist!" the herald at the door proclaimed.

    "Honored ancestor," Claire said with a bow.

    "Everything is prepared, you get your eyes now." Fiona said. "We take off as soon as you are ready. Get dressed."

    The craft that they entered was fat and looked worn. It had stubby wings and an extremely tall tail fin. Kiera could not fathom what material the craft was made from, though it was painted white on the top and black on the bottom. The flight deck had four chairs, occupied by only the three women. Claire sat behind Fiona.

    Like the other flights on the smaller craft, the thing floated up into the ferryway. But unlike the other flights, the craft kept going. And going. And going.

    They floated off into the darkness between the planets. The galaxy was like a sunrise, so bright against the darkness of space. At first they flew at the Sister World, and gravity seemed normal. Then the craft flopped over and began to fall in the opposite direction. Gravity returned to normal, but they were falling towards the moon.

    Fiona piloted the craft as they entered into the Sister World''s atmosphere a few days later. Kiera was horribly bored on the trip. She sat in her quarters and Claire rambled on about her childhood memories with Lucia, which Kiera was certain she had heard before from Lucia herself.

    Then the craft began to tilt back and forth. Then it was on fire.

    When Kiera arrived on the flight deck she could barely walk. The craft was rocking back and forth and the outside was completely consumed with flames. Fiona was not manipulating ether or sien, so the entire craft was just operating with mechanical or electrical power.

    They had become a glider on another world.

    Finally the craft smashed into the ground and slowed down to a halt. Even then, Kiera was forced to wait almost an entire day as the craft just sat on the runway waiting for the oculomancers outside to arrive. They needed to dress up in spacesuits to leave the craft. When Kiera walked outside she looked up into the sky.

    For the first time, Kiera saw her blue homeworld.

    The sky was black, as if the world had no atmosphere. In every direction was arid desert, tall pillars of red rock, and the occasional black lake. But in the sky, where the Sister World would have been, was a great blue disk, with a spider-like continent in the middle.

    "The air here is extremely poisonous to humans," Fiona said. Her voice sounded muted, as if they were in a snowstorm. "That is why this place was never colonized. There were plans to terraform this planet, but those plans ended when the Charlatan King dragged all the water across the ferryway and changed the climate of our world."

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    Fiona looked disturbed.

    "Billions died," Fiona said. "Either way, the Water Temple is just ahead. In Lake Rath, one of the few bodies of water left on this world."

    The first thing that Kiera noticed about being on the moon was that there was no ether. She felt naked.

    Fiona led them to the edge of a lake with no shores on the horizon. The water was pitch black. There was a passageway made of white stone that seemed to lead deep underwater. Soon they were walking through hallways made entirely if glass, with great forests of kelp and terrible fishes on both sides.

    Down in the deepest parts of the Water Temple, they found great pools filled with dark water, fussed over by crews of elderly oculomancers. In those pools there were fishes with glowing purple eyes, their bodies lined with glowing teal fractures.

    "The fishes here have a very strange life cycle," Fiona said. "They are all female, and the male fishes are tiny. The parasite has a symbiotic relationship with the females. Males attach themselves to the bodies of the females. The parasite releases a poison that literally dissolves the male brain. That is why men cannot become oculomancers, their brains would dissolve."

    "Perhaps that would be an improvement?" Kiera asked.

    Fiona walked up to the women fussing over the pools filled with fish. She pointed to Kiera. One of the oculomancers began to write notes, and then scampered off to a different pool. After a time several women returned carrying a flopping fish between them.

    "Heritor Kiera please drink this sedative," Fiona said, handing her a glass vial. "Unless you want to feel your eyes being gouged out."

    Kiera grabbed the vial and drank it. It had a chemical taste to it. Fiona drew her sword and set it against the wall. "This is an ethersteel sword," Fiona said. "You can claim the ether in this blade when you are ready to burn off the sedative."

    Kiera began to lose her sight. Then she stopped hearing anything. It was total loss of all sensation, though she could still feel the sedative and, if she wanted to, she could use the ether locked in Fiona''s sword to burn the sedative away and regain her senses. That would probably be a bad idea.

    After a long while Kiera began to see again. Except the world was just a different shade of darkness, populated by horrible glowing blue and red shapes. Far below her, there was a red light as bright as the sun, and far above her there was a glowing blue light, also as bright as the sun.

    Like a second way to focus, Kiera could control the degree to which she saw that other dark world. She focused instead on visible light, and began to see the room around her normally. The oculomancers nearby had a slaughtered fish in their hands, which they lowered respectfully into another pool of black water.

    Kiera blinked, and then saw two bloody eyeballs in a jar that Fiona was holding. She drew on the ether in the sword and burned away the sedative. Then she keeled over and vomited on the ground.

    "Here," Fiona said, handing Kiera a syringe. "A painkiller, it helps, in my experience. Claire has already gone under, but she will not be able to burn off the sedative. We will need to wait until she wakes up.

    "What are red and blue suns?" Kiera asked.

    "Ah, you must be seeing the vendark. The red sun below us is the core of the Sister World, which seeps sien into this planet. The blue light you see up above us is the core of our homeworld, which seeps ether. The cacophony of patterns that you see in between the two is the sum of human activity. Auras, flight waypoints, airports. That sort of thing."

    Kiera shifted her eyes along the new spectrum, back to the dark world filled with the light of the two planets, a world without the sun, the place that Fiona had named vendark. She could see every single fiber inside Fiona''s body, all the bones and muscles, internal organs the state of those organs, as she shifted slowly between visual and vendark."

    "Here is a mirror," Fiona said. Kiera looked at herself in the visual spectrum.

    She had glowing purple eyes, and the glowing teal fractures had grown all through her face, illuminating her cheeks.

    She was an oculomancer.

    "When Claire wakes up we will begin talking about how to use your new powers," Fiona said. "I assure you that they will be very useful in your task, especially considering that those fool boys have already discovered three-axis control systems."

    Kier left the Water Temple and stood at the shores of Lake Rath, looking up at her great blue homeworld in the sky. Many Spires lined the horizon of the Sister World, mirroring the Spires on her own planet. Material in the crust that worked it''s way up along the ferryway as the planet cooled.

    Nothing was more disturbing than not feeling ether around her. Instead, she felt something else. Something dark and bloody. Wrongness.

    Pure sien. She reached out and claimed it. It seemed eager. This feeling made her cringe.

    Suddenly she could feel the whole ferryway. She could feel all the ether on her homeworld, every tree, every cloud, every insect. It was all a part of her. She was complete.

    Then she felt the other one.

    The other one felt her.

    "Bloodraker," Kiera hissed. She felt like she wanted to vomit again briefly. "Mother summer, what is that!?"

    Fiona looked over her, glancing up and down sympathetically.

    "So you can feel Annatiki," Fiona said. "Remarkable, I was not able to do that right away, though I am not nearly as strong as you are. Thankfully, the child will not be able to feel her. This is something that you must suffer through."

    Kiera looked up at that great blue disk in the sky. She did not want to return to that world.

 Chapter 16: Prototype

    On the day when the parts arrived at the campus post office, Kiera also arrived with a new pair of eyes. She had become an oculomancer.

    Kiera also seemed to have a companion as well. The same teenage girl that Quinn had seen sitting next to King Edwin the one time he visited the Spine. She, also, seems to have acquired new eyes since he last saw her. She said little, and stayed close to Kiera.

    The boys began to assemble the prototype outside the campus on the same empty field where their professor taught them about the Aurascribe. The wings would be too wide to fit through the door of any of the buildings on campus. The club had to hire the services of a few professional sailors to help make sure that the rigging was solid. As for the wings, they stretched thin cloth over the wing spars and then painted them with a mix of chemicals that would make the cloth stiff.

    "Those chemicals are extremely flammable," Kiera said.

    "Good point," Seth said. "Quinn, please add a new item to the checklist for this problem."

    "No possible sources of fire near the airplane and no flying during thunderstorms," Quinn said. He scratched a note on the checklist before returning to working on the wings.

    The assembly took many hours of work. During those hours they would sometimes rest in a small tent constructed on the field. For lunch they made stew at a campfire and washed the pots with water from a bucket. They hired children to run the bucket back to campus to fetch water when it was empty. Kiera and Claire left the group for lunch but returned a few hours later, before the assembly was complete.

    The final problem was the propeller. Quinn had ordered several different shapes of wooden propeller to be built in the harbor district. Bjorn and Vince were busy setting up the propeller on a post connected to the engine mechanism.

    The engine was similar to that used in an ethermancy-powered boat. There was a rectangular piece of wood coated only on one half with an extremely expensive material called crysien. The opposite half on the opposite side was also coated in this material. The idea is that an ethermancer could use pure force magic to push on the rectangle, and the crysien would block the force from hitting one half. The rectangle would flip over and over rapidly as more force was applied. This was attached to a gearbox for the propeller.

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    They tested each of the propeller designs and measured the air pressure coming off the propeller in various places using a small glass tube from the campus laboratories. They picked the one that generated the most pressure, which was longer and thinner than a ships propeller and could spin faster.

    The team flew the plane a few times with sandbags in the seat instead of a person. Ethermancy could be used to power the engine at a short distance and they walked along side the craft with ropes holding it stable. It actually flew, even with double the number of sandbags.

    Finally Seth sat in the chair and snapped on a pair of safety goggles. The ropes were removed and the team ran through their checklists.

    "Time to roll the dice," Seth said as he began to spin the engine. The propeller whirled, the craft shuttered the lurched forward. It gained speed, floated up off the ground, and then flew. It was actually working, and it actually looked very easy. Seth flew a short distance, keeping the craft going straight by manipulating the three axis control system that they had designed, and then softly skid onto the grass of the field.

    Quinn, Bjorn, Vince, the children and even the sailors were astonished to see this. Kiera and Claire did not share their enthusiasm. "That looks dangerous!" Kiera said.

    "It is a risk, yes," Seth said. "However these are the types of risk that I love best. Brother, we should go into town to celebrate. I am thinking that we should..."

    Then he started talking in a low whisper, "maybe I should not say that near the ladies." Quinn nodded.

    "I think a celebration is a great idea. Any expenses you have, you can charge to my family account. I just need a piece of paper and two different colors of ink."

    Quinn realized that she was serious. The woman was always flaunting her wealth with all those bobbles she wore and offering to pay for club expenses.

    "Absolutely," Seth said, then whispered, "we can go to the expensive place in Hightown, a real courtesans'' guild."

    Kiera scribbled some lines on the paper with both colors of ink. It just looked like an incomprehensible blob drawn by a child to Quinn, however Kiera said "show this to any oculomancer, they will understand the message, and they will charge my family account for your expenses. Have fun!"

 Chapter 17: Professionals

    Kiera unlocked the door to the classroom that the club was using as a workshop. Fiona, Claire, and six other oculomancers shuffled inside. The room was pitch black, but none of the oculomancers needed any light to see.

    Every book in the room was replaced with a corrected version. Every little scrap of paper was modified in some way, using the author''s own handwriting. Pressure tables, material strength tables, temperature, measurements, wing shapes and angles... everything that looked like a number was replaced with a different number. The oculomancers had some devious method of changing those numbers so that they would still produce good results for some inputs but not for others.

    "Pay attention to their methods, my apprentice," Fiona said. "These women are professionals. They were personally trained by Lin, also known as Lin the Historian. We rely a lot on Lin to make corrections to history books and the like."

    "This seems like a lot of effort," Kiera said. "In retrospect it might have been a good idea to..." She didn''t want to say it.

    "Knives in the dark?" Claire asked.

    "And change public records so that the were never born," Fiona added. "Yes, my apprentice. That is one approach. However if people start talking about how inventors are being murdered, it may spur even more interest in flying machines than we can handle without it becoming too expensive. I have been doing this a long time, and I am not too concerned. I am happy that you were able to see it for yourself."

    "See what?" Kiera asked.

    "Just how easy it is to invent the flying machine," Fiona said. "I want you to understand that technological advancement happens very rapidly. You should be afraid."

    "I am," Kiera said. "Are you going to kill those boys?"

    "I might be willing," Claire said, "this city belongs to my family, after all. I think Seth is very cute though. Maybe we should kill Quinn first and see if the club falls apart?"

    Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

    "No," Fiona said. "There is still a lesson that I wish to teach my apprentice."

    <hr>

    The next morning when Quinn woke up he realized that it was quite late in the morning. He had likely missed all his morning classes. He also had a hangover.

    It was a night to remember, though Quinn didn''t quite remember all of it. There were girls. Very pretty and very expensive girls. Quinn also learned that Vince seemed to prefer the male courtesans, which in retrospect seem very unsurprising.

    After classes ended the club met in the workshop. Kiera and her teenager friend were absent for some reason. That wasn''t too much of a problem, Quinn was beginning to suspect that the Aden Princess really did not like him.

    What was a problem though, one which befuddled even Bjorn, was just how any mistakes they began to find in their notes.

    It was as if the laws of physics had suddenly been upended overnight. They found dozens of mistakes in their designs. Quinn was shocked that the craft even flew and didn''t break apart instantly. Even the textbooks seemed to disagree on basic facts that the club members had taken for granted.

    Quinn thought that his hangover might be the problem. Everyone was clearly frustrated, though everyone had also been out drinking the night before.

    Something was nagging at Quinn. He double, triple checked his notes. They were definitely written in his own handwriting. The invoices from the carpenter''s guild had his signature. The textbooks still had his notes in the margins on the correct pages.

    However, Kiera and Claire were the only ones in the club who did not go into Hightown with the rest of them the night before. So where did they go? And, disturbingly, they were both oculomancers now. Maxius had warned him to avoid oculomancers.

    "Boys," Quinn said. "Do you remember that piece of paper that Kiera gave us last night?"

    "It looked like a children''s drawing," Seth said. "Just a bunch of scribbles."

    "I have a theory." Quinn said.

    Bjorn perked up. He was clearly disturbed by the state of his calculations.

    "What if oculomancers can copy handwriting perfectly?" Quinn asked.

    "That might be possible, but they would also need to be able to make perfect copies of textbooks, notes, design diagrams, pressure tables, and..." Bjorn trailed off.

    "I don''t think we can rule it out as a possibility," Quinn said.

    "Alright," Seth announced to the club. "I have an idea. In the best case, we can''t trust our past selves to not make mistakes. In the worst case, Keira and Claire are actively trying to sabotage the club, which, by the way, we don''t have evidence of. But right now, we do have a working flying machine, and even if we wake up every day assuming that our notes are bogus, we can still make improvements to the flying machine and test those improvements against reality directly."

 Chapter 18: The Flying Man

    It was a cool morning, and the fog was beginning to roll into the city of White Chasm. There were a few gaps in the massive clouds overhead that allowed the blue sky to peek through in place. The sky was dynamic, the shapes of the clouds shifting in the wind. It was cold.

    The members of the White Chasm Aviation Club went through their checklists as a small crowd of students and professors watched. Quinn''s ethermancy professor was even present. His face looked serious, as if he was attending a funeral.

    After the checklists were finished Seth strapped himself into the seat and put on his goggles. Something seemed wrong to Quinn. His intuition was telling him that he forgot something. He felt a chill down his spine.

    He looked at his checklists again. Yes, something was missing. The checklist was missing the step that involved taking the temperature.

    "We forgot to do a temperature check," Quinn said.

    "I will go get a thermometer," Bjorn said.

    "Get a fresh one from the campus laboratories," Quinn said. His theory about Kiera modifying his notes didn''t have any evidence, but if it was true, then maybe the other instruments in the workshop had been modified?

    Bjorn returned with the thermometer and handed it to Quinn. The temperature read fifty degrees.

    "Fifty degrees, Bjorn what is the safe flight ceiling?" Quinn asked.

    Bjorn quickly sketched out some calculations on a piece of paper. "Much higher than this thing has any business flying," he said.

    "Don''t fly too high brother," Quinn said.

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    Seth smiled and said "I take my own risks brother." Then, he yelled "clear the propeller!"

    Everyone backed away and it began to spin. The craft slid forward across the grass and then lifted into the air. Up and up and up it went. There were gasps from the crowd.

    "It actually left the ground, fascinating," one of the professors said. Children started screaming and cheering and running after the craft as it flew away, perhaps thinking they themselves could fly.

    Seth was beginning to fly a little too close to the apex of White Chasm, where the two cliff faces met and the chasm dropped away. They had theorized that there would be low pressure at that point, and it would cause the craft to sink and maybe even get sucked down into the chasm. Seth turned the craft toward the campus just as a massive cloud blew behind him. He vanished into the cloud.

    Everyone waited. Nobody could see Seth anymore. Silence.

    Suddenly somebody cried "up there!", pointing behind them. Everyone had to crane their necks around. Seth had looped back behind them and was approaching from the direction of the campus. He was directly over the quad. The sunlight caught the craft and it was shining, glowing white.

    It should not be white.

    Grabbing his telescope, Quinn rapidly zoomed in on the little airplane. It was completely covered in a thick coating of ice. Seth was clearly struggling. He had ice on his body and had removed his safety goggles. He held one hand in front of his face to block the cold air.

    Then the craft must have hit a low pressure bubble as it passed over the campus. The plane dropped a few feet and recovered, but as it recovered the left wing snapped clean off. It immediately began to spin.

    "Brother," Quinn said, running towards the falling plane. "BROTHER!"

    Seth SCREAMED.

    He vanished into the fog. The screaming stopped.

    The students, the professors, and the members of the Aviation Club rushed towards the campus quad to help Seth. Quinn stepped cautiously through the dense fog, feeling his way across the cobblestones with one foot. He felt something squish under his shoe.

    It was an eyeball.

    Then, they all came across Seth. He had exploded into a mass of meat and bones and blood all over the campus quad. The broken, frozen wreck of the airplane had crashed into the fountain, though the fountain did not look damaged.

    Quinn fell to his knees. "Brother," he whispered. A caring hand grabbed his shoulder.

    "Another one for the graveyard," his professor said, shaking his head. "''I take my own risks brother'', the perfect epitaph for his gravestone."

 Chapter 19: The Broadsheet

    Tragedy strikes this morning at the University of Ethermancy at White Chasm. A devious plot to murder a student and collect the insurance payment was recently reported to the Hightown constabulary. What is worse, the perpetrator conspired to murder his own brother. The oculomancers of Spire Lin have verified that the life insurance policy purchase was in fact valid and signed with the perpetrator''s signature. The perpetrator has been arrested and is currently being held in the Hightown Constabulary Prison.

    We have an eyewitness account from none other than Right Honorable Princess Claire of House Aden, the younger sister to our own dear King. Here is what she has to say about the incident:

    "It was so horrible to see. His body was all broken up. I am terrified and haunted by what I saw. How could somebody do something so horrible to another person? And their own brother?"

    Sources say that the victim was witnessed inside of a flying machine, with the exception that this flying machine was not a balloon. While this may seem ridiculous and outrageous, it was this very flying machine that fell out of the sky and killed the victim. We received the following report from the Hightown Constabulary:

    "We are seeing an uptick in fraudulent insurance claims in other cities. The scam works like this: some charlatan lures the victims in with promises of being the first person to fly in a flying machine, while also purchasing a life insurance policy on behalf of that person, generally claiming to be a sibling or spouse. Then, the machine falls out of the sky and kills the victim. If anyone out there in the public is listening, we implore you to please report any instances of charlatans who claim to have invented a flying machine. It may save your life."

    Our Senior Correspondents have found the world''s leading experts on flying machines. Here is what they have to say:

    "Flying machines are relatively safe and well-understood, so long as they are balloons. There is no safe way to fly through the air without a balloon. The weather patterns are too unpredictable to fly very far, and balloons are required by Spire Law to be tethered to the ground. The fact that the victim''s body was found broken apart on the ground is proof that the human body is not robust enough to withstand the forces that will be subjected to it without the slow, predictable motions of a balloon."

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    The professors at the University claim that there is a graveyard on campus for students that die while trying to invent the flying machine. The victim''s body is going to be buried there. The professors had this to say:

    "We inspected the classroom that the perpetrator was using as a club headquarters. We read through their notes and designs. They were complete nonsense. None of the calculations were correct, none of the facts and figures were correct, and the design contained blatant flaws and direct contradictions. We concluded that the perpetrator had never actually done any real design work on the flying machine, but only created an elaborate illusion that design work was taking place. This is strong evidence, in my mind, that fraud may have been involved."

    We know this tragedy may be very disturbing to some readers, but we have published it without a content warning because the message is too important: don''t be a victim yourself!

    Quinn set the broadsheet down on the floor of his prison cell after he finished reading. The witch with the blue hair, Fiona of the Morning Mist, loomed over him outside. Kiera was standing behind her.

    "Your reputation is destroyed, you have been expelled from the University, the Maidens came and took your aura, and nobody will ever trust you to make a flying machine ever again," the witch said. "I offer you a simple deal, the same deal I made Vince and Bjorn, and they wisely both accepted my offer. Swear an oath with an oculomancer as witness, that you will never make another flying machine for the rest of your life."

    "I refuse," Quinn said.

    Fiona turned to Kiera. "See? I told you this was a waste of time."

    "I want to know something," Quinn said. "Did you sabotage the thermometers in the school laboratories?"

    "Those thermometers have never worked properly at low temperatures, not in a thousand years. Why do you think," Fiona hissed, "that the only school in the world to teach commoners like you how to use ethermancy, is also located in the worst possible climate for flying?"

    "I''m sorry Quinn," Kiera said. "It''s the best I could do. I didn''t think it was fair that they were not going to make the same offer that they made to the others."

    "You are going to end up in the mines of Cloudsea as a slave, boy," Fiona said. She turned around and left.

    "Please reconsider," Kiera said. "The trial is in a few days."

    "A sham trial," Quinn said.

    "That should be relatively obvious," Keira said. She also left.

    Then he was alone. Alone with his broadsheet.

 Chapter 20: The Gambler

    Zachary tracked Maxius the Younger through the city and out into the harbor. It was there that Maxius boarded a ship that his family owned. Zachary carefully monitored the ship for several days but could not approach, with help from the oculomancers to wake him up if the ship sailed away as he slept.

    The talk on the streets was that some kid at the University flew around in a flying machine, but the thing iced up and broke apart in the sky. The fools should have added an anti-icing system, though Zachary probably imagined that such a system would be low priority for a bunch of kids playing with wooden sticks and cloth. It was widely known that Quinn had been arrested and was being held in the Hightown Constabulary. Zachary knew he should not be so surprised at the oculomancers'' capacity to slander people and make them vanish. Though Maxius had been in contact with the boy, and Zachary hoped that the Heritor would make a move to rescue Quinn.

    His hopes were realized that night. An agent left the ship and began wandering through the city. Zachary was able to keep an eye on him, though it was difficult to get close. He stalked over rooftops in the darkness. Without the eyes of an oculomancer, he could not see into the shadows, however the light of the Sister World was enough to allow Zachary to track the man. Strangely enough, the man appeared to be wandering about at random.

    The man donated some coins to a homeless man, pet a cat, fed a vegetable to a horse, waved to a prostitute, and countless other seemingly meaningless little adventures. Zachary found a chance to sneak closer without being seen. The man did something very strange. He took out a piece of paper. Zachary could barely make out a long list of numbered lines on the paper, though they were too difficult for Zachary to read. The man rolled a dice, slid his finger along the page to one of the lines, then started off on one of his random behaviors.

    Finally, the man approached the harbor gateway into the city and stood in line to speak to the oculomancers. Zachary was easily able to arrange a secret observation of the man as he was interviewed.

    "Do you intend to commit a crime in the city?" The oculomancer asked.

    "No," the man said.

    "Do you intend to free Quinn, brother of Seth the Flying Man, from his prison in Hightown?"

    "No."

    "Do you intend to take any action that is against the interest of the oculomancers, the witches, or the Elder Saint?"

    "No."

    "Your papers check out," the oculomancer said. "You may enter the city."

    Zachary began tracking the gambler again as he worked his way up the bridges of white chasm. He always seemed to have some random task to do. And they were truly random. Until the man reached a tree in a park. He climbed the tree, grabbed a bag that was hidden in the branches, and then pulled a new stack of papers out of the bag. Then he found a brazier, burning in the park, and tossed his old papers and dice into the fire. Then, he continued on, doing random things, until he arrived at the Hightown Constabulary.

    "I have just acquired a royal decree by King Edwin, signed and sealed by the King himself. It grants me the authority to select one prisoner of my choice and grant them the King''s Mercy."

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    The constable looked over the seal and then said "everything is in order, go on inside."

    A while later the gambler left the building with Quinn at his side.

    This was it. This was how to lie to oculomancers. This was what he had been searching for, knowledge that evaded him for years. Oculomancers could see when a person was lying, but if the person themselves didn''t know what they were going to do next, because it was completely random, and they had a carefully designed schedule of random possible tasks, the master of such a gambler could calculate out a very high probability of having some specific task done, without the oculomancers knowing about it.

    Zachary watched Quinn and the gambler head towards the cliffs beyond Hightown, the Eastern Face. They were likely going to take some old smuggler''s cave through the city to avoid the oculomancers. The cave networks in the city were expensive and it would be unsurprising if many of them were not even charted, let alone actively guarded.

    Zachary turned and found a dark shadow behind him. He didn''t hear anything, didn''t see anything, didn''t even sense anything with his intuition. He was absolutely certain he was not being tracked. It seems the hunter had been followed by an even better hunter.

    "Sir Zachary," a feminine voice said. Monotonous. Emotionless.

    Mother summer, Zachary thought.

    She walked out into the moonlight where he could see her better. She had pitch black witch clothes complete with a pointy hat. Her hair was long, and he knew it was blood red in color. Her eyes seemed to shine purple in the darkness, as did the teal fractures on her face.

    "Sir Zachary this possibility was known to my father," The Elder Saint said. "That dice and randomized lists of instructions could be used to evade detection by the oculomancers. Now that you know the secret, you are dangerous."

    His first thought was, if you knew this was possible, then why not just ask people if they are carrying dice when crossing checkpoints? But then he immediately realized that would be stupid. It would be giving people clues about an easy way to lie to oculomancers.

    His next thought was: The Elder Saint thinks I''m dangerous. Shit.

    The Elder Saint said nothing else for a little while as it sank in.

    "So, what are you going to do to me?" Zachary asked. He assumed it would not be good.

    "I release you from all oaths of service, as is my right, as defined in the Heritor Precepts. I will now make you an offer which would be a great dishonor to refuse. Heritor Zachary, scion of Varelion, I wish you to become my personal Knight."

    "I accept," Zachary said instantly. He assumed that being her personal Knight reduced the probability that should would rip him to pieces in the very near future. At least, he hoped. "What oaths do you with me to speak?" He asked.

    "Nothing so barbaric as that," said the Elder Saint. "I will now give you something, and it will be physically impossible for you to talk about it. It will enter into your body and will remain there for your entire life. Nobody alive knows that this technology is even possible. Only me and my father knew, and I killed my father. Not even Fiona is trusted to know about this."

    Two long, silvery daggers appeared, one in each hand. They grew, and grew, and then started twisting and forming towards Zachary. They were not daggers, he realized, but globs of shiny silver goo.

    "Do not be alarmed. Hold still," the Elder Saint commanded.

    One of the silvery blobs rushed towards his head, the other towards his heart. They seemed to seep straight through his clothes and into his skin. They penetrated his skin with a cold, metallic feeling. They went into his body. Then they were gone. He didn''t feel any different after that.

    "Can you hear me?" the Elder Saint asked, except... her lips didn''t move.

    "Yes," Zachary said, "How..."

    Do not speak. Think. I can hear your thoughts, the Elder Saint said.

    I understand, he thought.

    Good. Sir Zachary, you will be my blade in the darkness below. You will come to understand shortly, however know that my father contemplated this possibility and prepared the weapon that is now in your body for this exact scenario. I must return to the Spires to continue my focus. I must subjugate the etherborne.

    "Yes, Elder Saint." Zachary said aloud.

    I give you my permission to address me by the name my father gave me, Annatiki. One more thing, you are now an oculomancer. Do not be alarmed when you start to experiment with your eyes.

 Chapter 21: The Secret History of House Renna

    All the general officers and other high-ranking officers of the Imperial Army were gathered in one place. In the front of the room, Lucia Aden sat at a table next to Sasha''s father, King Sullivan of Cloudsea, the Marshal of the First Army. Nearby, King Vash of Vjiskald, Marshal of the Second Army, sat with his children, all warlords, and also Fredrick Mason, the chairman of the Bank in Grael Nydia. The stage was empty. Servants scurried about offering glasses of water and wine to the officers at the various tables.

    Sasha was going to make the proclamation that the whole Empire, if not the whole world, was waiting for. Lucia felt relived to finally just be over with the waiting.

    Empress Sasha of Great House Varelion ascended a small stairway up onto the stage. She was wearing resplendent armor crafted from countless iridescent blue-green scales perfectly fitted together. She was not wearing the matching helmet though, and her salmon-brown hair had since been dyed darker brown. The room fell dead silent, waiting for her to speak.

    "I will now reveal to you one of the cherished family secrets that has been passed down in my family since long before the time of the Charlatan King. I will speak to those gathered here about the secret history of House Renna."

    Lucia was astonished. True knowledge of the world before the war was extremely rare and extremely valuable. The oculomancers made sure that humanity forgot much from before that time. House Aden had access to very little knowledge from before the war. This, this was priceless.

    "Renna the Witch, also known as Renna the Scientist, was a remarkably curious woman. One day, she became deeply curious about the true nature of religions. So, she fed all of the world''s holy books into an electronic machine capable of learning from text. Then, she asked the machine to generate one hundred unique Holy Books, complete with mythologies about how the world was created, answers to questions about the immortal soul and life after death, and other trappings of the religions of that time."

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    They had machines that could read and learn from text?!

    "Renna built one hundred walled cities, large and self-sufficient, with glass gardens to grow food in locations with access to a healthy water table. These became the Hundred Walled Cities of Renna. Each city was assigned a single Holy Book. Each city was designed to be impossible to leave. The cities were populated with enslaved people, who continued to reproduce for many generations, while being forced to convert to the religion in their Holy Book. After hundreds of years, these cities were overflowing with religious zealots, ready for the next phase of the experiment.

    "Renna demolished the walls with explosives, causing them to collapse outward. The trapped people inside those cities were then free to leave. Thousands and thousands of fanatical believers flooded out of each city, and quickly discovered their equally-fanatical neighbors. Thus, the great Tournament of Religions began. Renna made a prediction about which religion would win this tournament. She predicted that one god, a fearsome omen of war, would be the final victor. But she was wrong.

    "It took two hundred years for the war to end. The number of people who died during the war measured in the hundreds of millions. To Renna''s surprise, the Church of the Lawgiver won the Tournament of Religions. Renna discovered why. The Lawgiver demanded a certain amount of time spent gambling with real money, at all ages. From early childhood, children strengthen the risk-taking muscle. This experience gives them a skill that they can use for their entire life, an intuitive understanding of when to gamble, and when to play it safe. The Church of the Lawgiver developed new technologies rapidly, while also having the standard trappings of religion, such as a class of warriors as well as the subjugation of women.

    "Renna converted to the religion, and her son became the Primarch. Ever since, the Church of the Lawgiver has been entirely controlled by the Renna Clan. The large population of devoted followers was the primary differentiating factor between Renna and her peers. It is why she was so successful during the war with the Charlatan King.

    "The Lawgiver had no Prophet, and the Book of the Lawgiver was written by a machine. The Lawgiver is a false god! As Empress of Nydia, I declare a Holy War between the Empire of Nydia and the Theocracy of the Lawgiver! We will bring Father Winter''s justice to the Heritors of House Renna!"

    The room erupted in clapping and cheers.

 Chapter 22: King Edwin

    Fiona led Kiera and Claire through the halls of the Palace of the Spine. The banners and rugs were all bright red lined with black and silver filigree, the colors of House Aden. There were statues of ancient Aden family members, some of them that predated the war with the Charlatan King by thousands of years.

    Kiera thought that King Edwin''s throne room was an otherworldly sight, and Kiera had been to another world. The far wall was made entirely of glass and ethersteel support structures. It punched outward over the open air. Outside, clouds could be seen far below. The throne was raised up on a platform that was hanging from the roof of the throne room, surrounded by two smaller thrones on smaller platforms.

    King Edwin sat on his throne with an advisor standing by his side. He was at least fifteen feet in the air above the glass floor of the chamber. As Fiona walked through into the center of the room, the Herald began to announce them.

    "Honored Ancestor Fiona of House Aden, Witch of the Morning Mist! Princess Keira Blaine of Cloudsea! Right Honorable Princess Claire!"

    "Sister," Edwin said. "I had commanded you to convert to the Lawgiver''s Faith, and you run off to join the oculomancers. I command you to remain in the Palace and to convert, as I have."

    "I won''t!" Claire exclaimed. Edwin signed.

    "What is it that you wish to discuss, Honored Ancestor?" He asked.

    "You allowed Quinn to be released from his cell at the constabulary." Fiona said. "He has managed to sneak out of the city! Can you possibly imagine how much of my time that you have wasted?"

    "I did not know that the man would release Quinn," Edwin replied. "I did not even know he was in prison. You see that I am telling the truth."

    "That does not matter!" Fiona said. "You have, through your actions, directly violated the Heritor Oaths. It is my role to enforce those oaths..."

    "Enough Fiona." The voice came from behind them. "I would not wish the other Heritors to name you kin slayer." It gave Kiera chills to hear it. This was the first time that Kiera had ever seen the Elder Saint without her silver robes. She was instead wearing a solid black witch uniform with a pointy hat. It was so dark that seemed to absorb light. Her long, blood red hair casually draped down one shoulder.

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    Even the Herald was speechless at first. "A Witch!" he managed to announce. His face was red. Sweat started to form on his forehead.

    "You honor me, by..." Edwin tried to say, but then his jaw slammed shut. He was clearly struggling to keep a straight face.

    "Heritor Kiera, do you feel the sien in this man''s aura?" The Elder Saint asked.

    "Yes, I do," Kiera said.

    "Claim that sien. It should not be difficult, you are quite strong."

    Kiera reached out and claimed the sien in Edwin''s aura. Instantly, the center of the aura snapped, with infinite speed, from where it was resting around Edwin''s heart, directly inside Kiera''s own chest. And then she could feel all the weaves inscribed there.

    "Good work," the Elder Saint said. Then she leapt all the way up to Edwin''s throne and threw him down to the floor. He tried to break his fall with his hands and his hands both snapped. He screamed. Claire looked away.

    "Brother," Claire muttered.

    The Elder Saint hopped back down to the floor. On her right hand she was wearing a gauntlet made of what looked like solid silver. It had very long and sharp fingers, like blades. She lifted Edwin''s head, and raked her fingers across his throat. This completely ravaged his throat, and he began to bleed all over the Aden family rugs. The Elder Saint released him and he fell face first onto the floor, convulsing.

    The Bloodraker, Kiera thought.

    The Elder Saint said "Heritor Edwin I have lost confidence that you are capable of keeping your oaths." She stood over the man watching him die. Kiera looked away from the dying man.

    "Kiera?" Claire asked. "Can I have that aura? That was my father''s aura, and I''m next in line to inherit that aura after Edwin."

    "Of course," Kiera said. "I was looking at the weaves encoded on the aura, they look interesting."

    "I would advise against that," Fiona said.

    "Teacher?" Kiera asked.

    "That must be the forbidden technique of the Aden clan." Claire said. "It''s called Second Sunrise. Fiona is a master of the weave, I don''t think Edwin knew how to use it."

    "It can be used to instantly destroy entire cities, kill millions of people. I don''t think you would be interested in something like that," Fiona said.

    "You know what, you are absolutely right." Kiera said. "Here Claire, take this." She placed her hand on Claire''s chest and transferred the aura to her.

    "Whoa," Claire said. "So much ether."

    "He has stopped moving," The Elder Saint said. "I must tell Lin to make the appropriate corrections to the records. Kiera?"

    "Yes, Elder Saint?"

    "Fiona please fly Kiera to Spire Annatiki. It is time."

    "Yes, Elder Saint." Fiona said. Then the Elder Saint left.

    "Um, Guards! Guards! I proclaim myself Acting Reagent until my sister has been informed of my brother''s death. This is a command from your Reagent, please remove my brother''s corpse from the throne room and have it delivered to the family tombs. Servants, clean up the blood on the floor!"

    Kiera shuddered. What did the Elder Saint want with her at Spire Annatiki? What was it time for?

 Chapter 23: Underground

    Quinn was not an expert in geology. However, even he knew that rocks were not supposed to be glowing blue.

    Maxius the Younger led Quinn through an endless maze of caverns. Maxius and his servants had all originally held torches, however after some time the glowing blue walls of the twisting caverns made them irrelevant. Down they went into the glowing darkness. Until the darkness opened up into vast chambers, filled with artificial light. An entire city rested in the depths. Many of the buildings were shaped like pyramids, dice resting on one corner, half the building carved down into the rock, the other half reaching up in to the empty space of the cave. This gave Quinn the impression of a sawtooth skyline. The blue glow of the rock above replaced the stars and the galaxies of the night sky, though the Sister World was missing.

    "I see your surprise," Maxius said. "The network of caverns below this region was carefully constructed by my ancestor, Renna the Scientist. She understood the mind of Annatiki Marunavi. Renna was too dangerous, and had no hope of surviving the war. Annatiki would betray any agreements she made, and murder Renna. Which she did. Thus, Renna prepared humanity for a future in which fighter jets would rain down missiles from the sky, killing witches as they gained their powers. This cavern system was meant to protect against that scenario.

    Maxius feared that the Charlatan King had foreseen this scenario as well, and prepared Annatiki against it. As Quinn learned more about this place, he began to understand why.

    Maxius allowed Quinn to see a very rare, and possibly inaccurate map of the Underground. Thousands of miles of underground tunnels, built in ancient times by Renna the Scientist, as a hedge against Annatiki winning the war. There were at least twelve fully self-sufficient cities built underground. Apparently, Renna had experience building self-sufficient cities, as Maxius confirmed, in private, the rumor that was being spread by the Blue Wolf of Nydia. Renna had built one hundred such cities in her attempt to understand religion better.

    There may have been more cities as well. Maxius would not say.

    Maxius led Quinn to a mine cart. The mine cart had a rocket strapped to the back. It looked unsafe, in Quinn''s estimation, but Maxius was absolutely certain that they were both being trailed by something very dangerous, and insisted that Quinn strap himself into the cart. Quinn did so, and then the cart literally rocketed down the track into the darkness.

    In the pale blue light of the cave, Quinn counted no less than seven junctions that seemed to move back and forth randomly. At the end the mine cart slammed into a steel barrier by the side of a body of water. Across the water, many young couples kissed each other and looked up with dreamy eyes at the glowing roof of the caves. Seven, with a junction each time. That would be... one hundred and twenty eight possible outcomes. These people from the Theocracy were innate gamblers. Maxius had sent Quinn somewhere, and there was less than a percent chance that he knew exactly where. Genius. If the oculomancers got to him, he would not be able to tell them where Quinn was.

    He was accosted by guards but Quinn showed them a letter from Maxius. Then, they covered his face, tied him up, and threw him into a cart. Then he ended up in another mine cart. He counted no less than six junctions. That would be... eight thousand one hundred and ninety two possible locations. At that point Quinn was certain that Renna was just paranoid.

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    Some guards marched him for a few hours through the tunnels after that. Finally, Quinn arrived at a large room filled with schematics on wooden writing boards. Quinn immediately recognized what was on those schematics. Designs for flying machines.

    "Quinn!" A voice called out. It was a young man in expensive-looking black and gold robes. "Quinn, brother of Seth, the Flying Man, is that you?!" He said.

    "It is I," Quinn admitted. "To whom do I have the honor of speaking?"

    "I am The Messiah," The Messiah said. Quinn was dumbfounded.

    "Great Messiah," a guard said. "You should never be in the same room as this one, you know that you are being hunted!"

    "What is the probability that the Ghost would end in the same place as both of us?" The Messiah asked.

    "Two million, ninety seven thousand, one hundred and fifty two." A voice droned on behind the Messiah.

    "Those are some good odds!" The Messiah said. "Come, Quinn, let us speak for a while. I will explain everything."

    The Messiah led Quinn through the caves to an area that dripped with wealth. It even had rugs and banners hanging on the walls.

    "Quinn," The Messiah said. "I am a witch, I developed my powers down here, in these caves, where the witches cannot kill me with their fighter jets."

    Then the room shook slightly, as if there was a minor earthquake.

    "That," The Messiah said. "Was probably a missile, fired from one of their fighter jets. Which means that I probably don''t have much time left."

    Quinn had many questions, but he realized that there was one that was obviously more important than the rest. "Why do you think that you don''t have much time left?" Quinn asked.

    "Because the Ghost will kill me soon," The Messiah explained. Then he grabbed a leather-bound book and handed it to Quinn. "Don''t worry about me, the Primarch has already said that my soul will go to Paradise immediately, it is guaranteed. This life, is just part of the Lawgiver''s plan. Anyway, take a look inside the book."

    Quinn did so. It was incomprehensible nonsense.

    "That book is the sum of the knowledge that witches down here have been able to accumulate. It took seventeen witches to make that book, and hundreds of copies exist hidden all throughout these caves. It''s a guide, meant to educate the True Messiah when they manifest. Each Messiah adds a little to the book, until the True Messiah will be born, and the Lawgiver will manifest his judgement against The Witches of The Spires."

    "That actually makes a lot of sense," Quinn said. "However, what the hell is a Ghost?"

    "All the Messiahs die," The Messiah said. "They have heart attacks, a few days after they manifest their powers. It''s the Ghost of the Bloodraker. She has sent a Ghost to delay the coming of the True Messiah!"

    "So, you are saying," Quinn said. "That the Messiahs record their learnings about how to use their witch powers in that book, and then after a few days the Ghost of the Bloodraker kills them, and you are all just waiting for a Messiah to be born that learns from the book fast enough to use their powers to survive long enough to become the True Messiah?"

    "Essentially," The Messiah said. "Also, we have lots of pretty girls that we can sleep with, so it''s not as bad as that."

    Quinn understood completely.

    "Wait!" Quinn said suddenly. "You have this completely wrong, you should not be down here in these caves. Your enemy already knows how to kill you, why not just..."

    "Stop!" The Messiah said. "I am doomed, but the next Messiah will have a few days. If you have an idea, tell it to him or her."

    Quinn understood once again. The man was right, if he was right.

    Guards came and took Quinn away. They led him through the tunnels for several days, to a second workshop where the engineers were designing flying machines. Then they put him to work. And he was happy, for a time. Then he heard that the Messiah had suffered a heart attack.

 Chapter 24: The Knight, the Ghost, and the Messiah

    Zachary followed Maxius the Younger and Quinn, brother of the Flying Man, until they vanished into a system of caverns. Annatiki urged caution, as to not reveal their existence. The guards at the door of the cavern were extremely sensitive and suspicious. It was a shame, because Zachary lost track of the boy Quinn. As he tried to follow the boy through the mine cart shafts, he realized quickly that they were designed to provide a random outcome. He gave up when he realized the odds were less than one out of sixty four of picking the right shaft. Annatiki warned him it was likely hundreds of times less likely than that.

    Being the chosen Knight of the Elder Saint had some perks. He had super human strength, stamina, speed, and was invisible. Those attributes were all very useful down in the caverns. He was a literal ghost, haunting the walls, stalagmites, and rooftops of the underground cities below the Theocracy.

    You are not the first, Annatiki said in his mind.

    What happened to the others? Zachary asked.

    They ended up in bad spots, the weapon self destructed and erased all evidence that it existed, and they died down in those caves.

    Wonderful, Zachary thought.

    All Knights must face death, Annatiki said.

    He began to explore the caves and get a feel for how to get around. The caves appeared to be deliberately designed to frustrate any attempt to navigate. The natives to the cave, however, had a habit of rolling dice to decide which way to go next. Zachary tried to imitate this gesture, and indeed found that more often than not he ended up on the main ''highways'' of the deep underground."

    The etherborne you seek is in a special location to the west, Annatiki said. They have already manifest their powers, but are inept at using them.

    Annatiki continued to feed him information from her spy planes. The oculomancers knew the general area of where the etherborne was hiding, but he was deep underground and they could not hit him with missiles. The winding, twisting passages would often lead Zachary in the opposite direction from where he wanted to go.

    You have been on the opposite side of this passage, Annatiki said. You have access to more of my power than you realize, melt the rock and pass through it, cool it on the other side after you are done.

    Remarkably, it was not too hard to figure out what she was talking about. Indeed, he was able to control her power to some degree, and melt the rock, swim through it, and cool it into a solid wall once on the other side.

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    Annatiki warned him against swimming through the rock for too far a distance. He could end up popping out into a chamber in clear view of thousands of people who would give witness to the event. What he needed to do was to find an accurate map of these caverns. That would allow him to pass through walls only into small corridors where it was unlikely to encounter people. He was also invisible, and capable of simply murdering anyone who saw an invisible blob of air pass through a molten lava wall.

    Zachary finally found a good map in a room high above the floor of an open mining shaft. The high-quality ethersteel ore in the mine was going to be sent to a handful of factories where it could be worked into drills the like. He used the map to navigate to the area where Annatiki had said the witch had manifested their powers.

    After scouting the area and slipping through more than one molten wall, Zachary had isolated the room where the witch had been staying. He snuck into the room when it was empty and hid under the bed. Then, he melted the rock below him and swam down one level to the hallway directly below the bed. Then, he waited, invisible, in a secluded area nearby and waited.

    Annatiki had her spy aircraft monitor the area. When the witch was almost directly overhead, exactly where the bed was, Zachary waited about a half an hour and then approached the spot. Annatiki confirmed that the witch had not moved. He was likely asleep.

    Zachary melted the ceiling and slipped through the rock into the room. Lying under the bed, he could hear the witch above him snoring softly.

    Hunter protocol initiated, deploying unit C.

    Whatever it was, it was not the voice of Annatiki.

    The silver blob appeared on his chest, seeping through his clothes. It turned into a spider, crawling menacingly, and silently, towards the witch sleeping softly above. After a short while there was a gasp, then silence. The spider crawled down under the bed again and seeped into Zachary''s chest.

    How the hell? Zachary asked.

    It''s a specific alloy designed to create a maze in the soul of the witch, Annatiki explained. It''s a method of killing inexperienced witches regardless of their relative strength. The weapon seeps into the victim''s body and surrounds their heart with the alloy. The heart is the locus, the point at which the soul connects to the body and the point that is required for a witch to user their powers.

    After surrounding the hart with the alloy, the Unit snaps closed all open holes, severing any critical arteries. Blood instantly stops flowing through the witch''s body. The counter to this, is to grasp at ether and heal the damage. However, only the soul can grasp at ether, and the soul is trapped in a maze created by the alloy. The victim dies by simply not having any blood flow through the body or the brain, as the soul tries to navigate the maze. It takes about a hundred thousand hours of practice to become skilled at navigating the maze, so that this weapon ceases to be effective if the witch is old and familiar with this alloy.

    Killed because of inexperience? That made a lot of sense. Zachary had lost more men that way than he could count.

    He melted the floor and swam down into the caverns. Then he ran, like a ghost, through the endless caves, and waited for news of his next victim.

 Chapter 25: Ethersteel Warbirds

    Quinn was surprised that he was not the only aircraft engineer in the world. He also wasn''t the best. There were several engineers down in the Underground who knew a lot more than Quinn, and they already had developed most of the schematics for a warbird made from ethersteel. And it was beautiful.

    The first thing that Quinn noticed was that the designs included things called "flaps" that were mechanical devices placed on the inner wings. The purpose of these devices was to change the shape of the wing to lower the stall speed at the cost of efficiency. This was useful when landing because a safe landing at low speed was more important than efficiency.

    Some of the engineers had even been hiking to the highest peaks and waiting hundreds of hours for tiny glimpses of the airplanes and fighter jets that the oculomancers use. Quinn didn''t even know that the oculomancers could fly, that the flying machine even existed. But, they provided detailed sketches. And those sketches were even more beautiful than Quinn could possibly imagine.

    There were at least six categories of flying machines that the people down in the Underground had managed to sketch. The sketches were the result of grueling hikes, some hundreds of miles long through horrible weather, in order to have a small chance of witnessing. The common Faithful around the Underground had all manner of superstitions as well.

    The first category of aircraft had a single propeller and a high wing design. They typically were flown very poorly and were likely used as training aircraft for inexperienced oculomancers. The second category of aircraft was the double propeller design that was more stable and was likely used to ferry the oculomancers between the ground and the tops of the spire. The third category was that of the long tube-like craft with loud engines that were likely used to ferry the Heritors to the tops of the Spires for their secret meetings with the witches. The fourth category was the larger tube-like aircraft that were likely used to carry large numbers of oculomancers between spires. The fifth category was the arrowhead-like planes that flew so high that they could only been seen with a telescope, and were likely used for spying. The sixth category of aircraft were angular and predatory, and the engineers theorized that they only had one propose: fighting.

    The design that they called the Warbird was a compromise. The oculomancers had access to some technology that they did not understand. That technology allowed the aircraft of the spire to fly very far and very fast and the engines made a lot of noise. The Warbird was an extrapolation of the first category, a single engine design, though the wing wasn''t placed as high and the engine was more powerful. It was sleeker, more predatory, and capable of flying faster. In theory.

    Quinn began to make contributions to the design. He learned the mathematical methods that the other engineers used. Lift, drag, stability, pitch, roll, yaw. He learned many new terms for communicating ideas with the other engineers. He also had a keen eye for safety problems, which made sense. His brother had died in a flying machine.

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    The biggest problem was that Quinn needed to learn the notation that the other engineers used. They used a mix of different types of mathematics which they believed had not been modified by the oculomancers. They believed this because the base assumptions seemed self-evident and the proof by inductions were all verified and peer reviewed by multiple mathematicians throughout the caverns.

    Quinn quickly realized that the most important aspect of engineering was communication. The notations that they used were designed to facilitate communication while also making it difficult for charlatans to copy the format and produce pseudo-science or pseudo-math. The fact of the matter was, any flying machine was going to kill the pilot if the engineers designed the aircraft wrong. So there was no room for getting things wrong.

    Over the next few months Quinn found himself designing mundane, but important, aspects of the aircraft, such as the gunsight, the anti-icing system, and the landing gear redundancy systems. It taught him a lot about engineering. The engineers working there had seem some horrible things, just as Quinn had. They just had more tools to prevent those horrible things from happening again.

    Quinn began as a junior engineer, but he was shortly shifted far away through the caverns to a less competent workshop. He suddenly became the senior engineer in the room, teaching others about the proper notation for communicating ideas and making proofs. Ultimately, the goal was to avoid charlatanism, Quinn understood, but the younger engineers did not understand this. They wanted to be told what the right answer was.

    But the sky didn''t have right answers. It offered only the blood-price of being wrong. Many professors can pass out bad grades, but professors generally do not kill their students and remove them from the sample when they are wrong. It was unfortunately impossible to convince the more junior engineers of the danger for the pilots.

    After being shuffled around to various workshops and making various contributions to the design of the Warbirds, a final design was sent to him for review. He was locked in a secret location with the design, deep in the caves. The designs were probably an aggregation of the ideas contributed by multiple workshops.

    The final design as a tail dragger, with a small wheel on the tail and two larger wheels near the front that retracted into the body through mechanical devices. The airplane was equipped with an anti-ice system, flaps, machine guns on the wings, a gunsight, and a propeller powered by an advanced ethermancy-powered radial engine. Quinn''s design improvements were significant, though he understood he was standing on the shoulders of giants. The design as it existed before he arrived was quite good, and he learned a lot about airplane design.

    The schematics were sent to various factories throughout the cavern network. They sure loved redundancy. There were a dozen factories making the components and assembling the airframes. The actual airframes were finalized in large chambers inside of caverns with one open cliff where they could be hoisted up and then flown over the edge of a canyon. Many young men volunteered to become pilots on the craft. The Primarch had declared that anyone who died in a flying machine would have their soul instantly travel to Paradise.

    War was breaking out with the Blue Wolf of Nydia, Sasha Varelion. The armies of the Theocracy stood at the ready. Battle was on the horizon, the the Theocracy had a surprise waiting for the Blue Wolf woman. The Aethersteel Warbirds, an ill omen of death for the soldiers of the Empire.

 Chapter 26: The Way Things Were Before

    Fiona made a heroic effort at providing flight training to Kiera as they flew to Spire Annatiki, but at some point she had given up. She took control of the airplane and masterfully flew and landed on the Spire Airport. She led Kiera down into the spire, which was by far the most luxurious.

    There were large glass tubes filled with black water running throughout the spire, and the fishes from the Water Temple on the moon could be found in those tubes. The halls were white stone and silver decorations. The room where Annatiki waited for them was massive, empty, and white, with a long, long table covered in plates with luxurious meals and nobody to eat them. Giant glass tubes carried black water and terrible fishes overhead.

    The Elder Saint sat on the throne at the end of that table. A scantily-clad young woman stood next to her.

    "Kiera," The Elder Saint said as she slurped down a desert of strawberries, chocolate, and some sort of white foam. She had a sensuous look in her eyes, like she was enjoying the food too much. "Fiona you may leave. Let us be alone."

    Fiona left, and the scantily-clad servants left as well. Kiera felt a chill. She was in a room alone with the creature.

    The Elder Saint walked towards her. "Have a seat, and drink this. You will take a short nap for a while, but you will still be able to experience the memories. The method of giving you those memories is for me alone to know."

    She handed Kiera the same liquid that Fiona had given her on the moon. It tasted the same as well. After a while, she could no longer see, hear or feel. Then the memories began.

    <hr>

    Annatiki was taking care of patients in her hospice. Most of the patients were her own siblings, father''s failed experiments. They had become thralls, but the process backfired. Father had introduced a contradiction into their focus. He wanted to say Subjugate the Etherborne, Except Reyndell Marunavi. This caused them to simply ignore the first command and proceed to do nothing at all, because doing nothing would not lead down a path that caused them to Subjugate Reyndell Marunavi.

    So Annatiki cared for them. She changed their clothes, cleaned their bedpans, put food in their feeding tubes, and listened to them mumble, taking notes. She trained the other nurses, and even trained some of the doctors on the lessons she had learned. She hoped to learn proper medicine in Cloudsea but her father wanted her to go to the Eight Color Monastery to learn about magic. The war with House Renna was making father irritable.

    Suddenly her father appeared in the room.

    "Annatiki, you have developed witch powers."

    Annatiki felt a chill.

    "Father, do you intend to make me into one of them?" She asked, pointing to the thralls lying in bed with their bedpans. "If you do, who will care for them?"

    Her ignored her protest, then placed his hand on her chest. She screamed.

    <hr>

    "Something has changed," Renna said, her long green hair flowing in the wind. "Reyndell has done something, something that I did not predict."

    "Great Ancestor," Overlord Maxius said. "We have lost many witches to the Marunavi clan. But our spies have indicated that Reyndell has not left his Spire. He has taken a thrall capable of killing witches. It must be so."

    Renna nodded.

    "This path, is a disturbing one." She pressed a few buttons on her laptop and it began to make a sound, it''s fan blowing hard as the CPU attempted to keep up with the computations. "We must begin an immediate propaganda campaign. We shall brand this new threat as the Bloodraker, whatever it is. We will be certain of the identity of Reyndell''s new thrall, but in the meantime we shall not waste time allowing the public to idolize them. Bloodraker is an ominous name, and it will spread even in Reyndell''s lands."

    "Yes, Great Ancestor," Overlord Maxius said. "It shall be as you say"

    <hr>

    Fiona Aden stood upon a great field of flowing grass. The wind was great. The enemy was greater.

    "Bloodraker," the enemy said. "I am stronger than you, you are a fool to challenge my power."

    "I have killed stronger," the Bloodraker said, emotionless.

    "Teacher!" Fiona said. "Take this aura! Burn it!"

    The Bloodraker immediately claimed the sien in Fiona''s aura, and began permanently burning it to make herself stronger temporarily. Her strength surpassed that of her enemy instantly. Then she created a burning crysien entropic field. The enemy shuttered, then fell to one knee. The Bloodraker lanced forward with her silver hand, fingers like claws, and raked the man''s neck open. He bled to death.

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    "Teacher!" Fiona said. "We have run out of sien!"

    "We must retreat," the Bloodraker said, "father will know what to do. We must subjugate the etherborne, at all costs."

    <hr>

    "The future of the human race," Reyndell said, "depends on our ability to face what comes next. For that, me and the Exalted Ones have determined that we shall be forever exiled, from any future where humanity survives, if we do not draw upon the waters of the Sister World. Let it be recorded!"

    Reyndell reached for the sky and claimed the sien in the ferryway. He then began to summon the water from the moon, to drown out all the continents of the world, except the Great Plateau of the Spires.

    Renna shivered, watching the broadcast. "Report," she said. "Calculate the probability of human survival if Reyndell pulls the main water table off the Sister World and brings it here." Renna said. Several aids scurried about, and then returned.

    "There is no chance for human survival," the Master Statistician said. "The probability of extermination is one."

    Renna nodded.

    Water began to flow through the ferryway. Over the next few weeks it slammed so hard into the Great Plateau that it created two new seas. The ocean level began to rise. The climate began to chill, becoming far below sustainment levels.

    "Renna!" Overlord Maxius asked.

    "Silence!" She commanded. "I am still trying to figure out a way, any way!"

    "Fiona of the Morning Mist has offered to meet with you, in private, at a cafe in Hightown White Chasm!" Maxius said.

    "Hmm," Renna said. "Tell the Morning Mist I will meet with her. I wish to hear of her opinion on the odds of humans surviving this mess."

    <hr>

    Fiona Aden sat in the upper floor of a cafe in her hometown the city of White Chasm. Massive pillars of water poured down from the moon, flooding the oceans. Billions were already dead. Billions more would die. Reyndell had battleships all along the Great Plateau, shooting sixteen inch shells at innocent children in wooden boats.

    Fiona was people watching. A good hobby, in her estimation. Young, old, middle aged. People, going about, buying shirts or ice cream or leather shoes.

    Soldiers marched into the plaza, and the common citizenry screamed and left. These soldiers however were not from White Chasm or from Spire Lin, they were enemy soldiers from Renna. But they had an invitation from Fiona.

    Renna arrived in Fiona''s little cafe. She ordered a latte from the waitress.

    "What is it that you offer?" Renna asked.

    "A swift death, but also the death of Reyndell." Fiona said.

    Renna contemplated.

    "How?" Renna asked.

    Fiona took out a sheet of paper and wrote a large number on it. Renna looked at it puzzled.

    "This number is what will save humanity," Fiona said. "This his the quantity of standard units of sien that Annatiki will need to kill her father, Reyndell."

    "Absolutely not, the Bloodraker is too dangerous," Renna said.

    Fiona stood up and began to leave. "Remember the number," she said, then left.

    <hr>

    Renna had surrendered her secret. Then the Bloodraker killed her. For all her computational power, the only outcome that Renna had achieved was absolute certainty of her own death in exchange for a chance for humanity to survive.

    Fiona and Annatiki climbed into the aircraft. It was more of a spacecraft really, as Spire Erika was seventy thousand feet tall. They took off and reached supersonic speeds. Fiona flew, because Annatiki was a terrible pilot, but Fiona seemed to be good at it.

    The others had spoken oaths to Annatiki, in exchange for killing Reyndell. "We and our descendants shall craft no machine in the likeness of a bird. We and our descendants shall not enter into the Tombs of the Founders. We and our descendants shall not seek the Ven."

    They would become the Heritors of the new world, great leaders who inherited spherical sien auras and ruled with an iron fist.

    At about eighty thousand feet they entered the ferryway above Spire Erika and began the slow descent down to the jagged peak of the Spire. Annatiki shielded herself from the harsh environment and left the spacecraft. Fiona watched from the ship at first, then her curiosity got the better of her, and she followed Annatiki up to the very peak.

    Annatiki Marunavi began the ritual. She sucked in all the ether and compressed it into a single point. Then she used that single point to suck in sien, and compress that into a single point. She repeated this process in a divergent function, as Renna had indicated, until she held all the ether in the entire world in a single point on one finger, pointed at the sky. It glowed like the sun, a bright blue dot.

    Red lightning flashed across the surface of the moon. It converged on a single point on the surface of the moon. Then it lanced out toward Annatiki.

    Red lightning from the moon struck Annatiki''s hand from across the void of space. The thunder shook the world.

    Then Annatiki became a god.

    She burned trillions and trillions of times the world''s economy per second, flying at hundreds of times the speed of sound, towards Reyndell''s location. Fiona intellectually knew this would happen. As she gazed into the oculomancer spectrum, she saw Reyndell''s witch powers blinding her with his light. That light faded. Then vanished.

    Reyndell was dead. And Annatiki had killed him. She went on to kill almost all the other witches in the world, except the thralls that the banks used, the cleaning thralls in the Spires, and a few more that she had agreed not to kill.

    The war was over. There was no more Renna, no more Reyndell. Now they only had Annatiki.

    <hr>

    Kiera slowly woke up in her chair in front of an empty table. The Elder Saint stood nearby, watching her. Kiera had experienced much of the war. The memories still took a while to sink in. She thought back to the first one. Annatiki had been a good person, a good woman. She cared for others, she tried to help her sisters. And then she saved the world.

    "Oh, Mother summer!" Kiera said. "Annatiki, I didn''t know."

    Kiera walked up to the Elder Saint and hugged her.

    "You just wanted to care for others, you just wanted to make sure that your siblings were taken care of, and then..." Kiera sobbed.

    "Listen to your teacher," the Elder Saint said. "And please, do not hate me because I killed my father."

 Chapter 27: The Ven

    "The memories are incomplete," Annatiki said. "I wish to tell you about the war between House Renna and House Marunavi that changed the shape of the world led to our current order. This is important knowledge that will aid you in the quest to subjugate the etherborne. However, you must prepare yourself."

    Annatiki handed Kiera a helmet of some sort, it appeared to have some material lining the inside.

    "Wear this for a full day, it will block all forms of vision. Light in the visible and vendark spectrums will not be able to reach your eyes. Your eyes need time to adjust to a total lack of senses, because otherwise they filter out what you need to see. Return to me after a day has passed."

    Kiera was given an executive apartment in Spire Annatiki while she wore the helmet. The lower face was open enough that she could eat, but she had to be fed her food by the Spire staff. She sipped on cherry wine and listened to a bard play music until she fell asleep. Later the next day, Annatiki entered her room. She was wearing a very cute little white dress with a matching handbag. It was quite fashionable. Her long red hair was neatly braided and draped over one shoulder.

    "It is time," Annatiki said. "Follow me."

    Annatiki led Kiera through the spire to a special turret on the outside edge of the spire. Annatiki described it as extending far out over the spire. She guided Kiera''s head at a specific angle, and then said "Shift your focus into the vendark spectrum fully, no visible sight."

    "Done," Kiera said. It was still pitch black.

    Then Annatiki removed the helmet. Far, far away, there was a bright pink star in the otherwise empty black sky. The star was surrounded by a vague cloud of pink and green gas. It was absolutely the most beautiful thing Kiera had ever seen in the sky. Far more beautiful than the normal stars or galaxies of the night sky.

    "What is that?" Kiera asked.

    "That is called the Ven," Annatiki said. "It is an ancient word for beacon, and it is a short word, an easy word to say and remember. It is believed that this word was very important to super-ancient civilizations. The Ven is a terrible omen, and is considered a sign of the end of the world."

    As Annatiki was talking, the Ven and the cloud around it slowly faded and then vanished into total blackness.

    "It''s gone!" Kiera said.

    "No, your eyes have just decided to filter it out. The parasites must have evolved the ability to filter out things that it knows are very far away so as to not confuse the simple fishes that it infects."

    "How far away is it?" Kiera asked?

    "The Ven is an object that orbits our star once every twelve thousand years. It is believed to contain a portion of the core of a super planet. This super planet was struck by a very fast object and split into two planets before it had cooled. These two planets are our own world and the Sister World. The object kept going, carrying a portion of the core of our planet with it. That fragment of the core of our planet is called the Ven. It produces a third type of ether, called venthys. Ether, sien, and venthys are the three that we know about.

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    "Venthys is what creates witches. And once every twelve thousand years the Ven orbits close enough to our worlds to bathe the surface of our worlds with venthys. Can you imagine what would happen?"

    Kiera gasped. "Everyone would become witches all at once! Mother summer!" Annatiki began to walk out of the overlook. It had a stone floor and a glass bubble around it with the open sky outside. After they left the overlook, Annatiki and Kiera continued talking as they walked through the Spire hallways.

    "And now you understand why the Ven is associated with the end of the world, why it is such a short and simple word. Now that you have seen the Ven with your own eyes, you can believe me when I say that it is the cause of the war a thousand years ago."

    "But it''s so far away," Kiera said. "How long until it moves close to us?"

    "About three thousand years from now it will arrive," Annatiki said. "During the war, it was about four thousand years away."

    "And that caused the war? Something that would take four thousand years to arrive?"

    "You must understand that a major discovery was just made. We landed on the Sister World for the first time, and found all the ruined cities there. Far, far more infrastructure development and far larger cities than existed on our world. There were buildings that were miles high, that could support the population of an entire city, and there were entire cities made of those buildings.

    "Scientists found records in some ancient language, preserved in vacuum containers for tens of thousands of years. The records included many images, associations between words, and associations between words and sounds. There was millions of hours of entertainment, music, written literature. A record of an entire civilization. They fed all that information into a learning machine, and the resulting machine was able to translate all of the content, language, and art into our own language. That civilization existed over forty-eight thousand years ago."

    "But, the atmosphere of the Sister World is poisoned!" Kiera said.

    "It was not, at the time. In fact, our world was an absolute desert. Not a single drop of water. That civilization stole all the water from our planet to use in their own civilization. There are records of this. One faction wanted to try and terraform our world, but a different faction wanted to take the water for people in need. The latter faction won out.

    "That civilization had also developed flying machines that worked in the darkness of space outside of the ferryway. There was a detailed record about the actual final terraformation of our world. They crashed high-water asteroids into the atmosphere and created oceans. They seeded this world with their own plant life, and it became the chosen resort of the extremely wealthy.

    "It was a thriving civilization, until the Ven arrived. Then everyone became witches, the wealthy witches on our world had access to ethermancy using both sien and ether, which is much more powerful than using one or the other by itself. There are many more non-linear interactions between the two types of ether. The wealthy elite destroyed all the spaceships flying to the resort world, and then they found a way to poison the entire atmosphere of the Sister World. That ancient civilization was completely wiped out. There are detailed video records of the fall of such a large civilization. Experts estimated that fifty billion people died.

    "Civilization here on this world would rise and fall many times in between then and now. There would be times of peace and then the Ven would arrive and everyone was transformed into witches. When Renna learned of this she computed the probability that humanity would survive the next time the Ven arrived. The probability was astronomically small. When she published her paper, that triggered the war."

    "Wait here," she said. "I need to get Diana for the next part of the story."

    When she returned, the was walking with another woman. She had cropped purple hair and purple tattoos on her face. She appeared to be wearing some type of very dark military officer''s uniform. "So this is the one," Diana said.

    "Diana, please tell her about my father," Annatiki said.

 Chapter 28: The Charlatan King

    "Reyndell was such a charming man," Diana said. "He was the most powerful witch in the world, a fact that you could learn in the book of world records, and something that nerdy young men knew about, but which was otherwise of no consequence. He was not a head of state and he was not in the military. He was a wealthy socialite who had many lovers. I was one of them.

    "He had been trained at the Eight Color Monastery to use his witch powers, but he rarely actually did. Mostly he just went to parties and live music festivals. He was the life of the party and many women loved him, including myself. This was up until the moment Renna published her paper. Then he changed.

    "One technique that powerful witches can do, is slow their perception of time so that they can reason things out, read, or learn new things very quickly. They can experience hours and hours of subjective time in just a few moments of objective time. Reyndell must have used this technique to contemplate deep into the future. He came up with a method of saving humanity, in a way. It was an extremely stupid method, but it was a method, and even Renna had not considered it.

    "He contemplated that just before the Ven arrived, he would gather all the witches on to the Great Plateau. All non-witches would be forced to leave and live down on the normal parts of the planet. Then he would drain all the water off the Sister World and flood the world, killing basically all of humanity. Then, he would create thralls out of all the witches, one giant pyramid of thralls, with a small, hand-picked population of females that were not thralls. Both me and Fiona were included in that group. It should be noted that thralls cannot have children because a female thrall cannot create a soul for the child, and the child will be stillborn.

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    "When the Ven came, nothing would happen because everyone was already a thrall. Even if some of the witches increased in strength greatly, they were his thrall so it would not matter. Then, after the Ven went away, he would move all the water back onto the Sister World and then repopulate the planet using his hand-picked female non-thralls. His plan would have actually worked, until he announced that he had a plan for when the Ven arrived.

    "Renna heard his announcement and was disturbed. Then she redoubled her efforts to contemplate possible futures. Her machines were able to give her the answer: Reyndell planned to kill everyone and turn all the witches into thralls. The machines even correctly predicted that he intended to pull the water from the Sister World. She confronted him with pointy questions about his plan in public. He foolishly revealed too much to her, and she confirmed that her machines predicted his intent.

    "Renna instead had a plan to build flying machines capable of flying through space, send herself up to the Ven before it arrived and drink in the venthys, making herself orders of magnitude more powerful. Then when the Ven arrived, she would be able to keep a population of witches in line with her vast power, making thralls if needed. This plan is obviously better, however Reyndell claimed that he already contemplated that possibility and that it was impossible for a single witch, no matter how powerful, to control the current population of the world if they all suddenly gained their powers. The only solution was to have a smaller population of witches who were all thralls, with a small group of breeders that were already trusted.

    "Renna and Reyndell could not come to an agreement. After hundreds of years of quarreling, Renna finally thought she had enough technology to kill Reyndell. So she attacked, and her initial attacks failed. Reyndell felt betrayed by the attack and retaliated brutally. Thus the war between House Renna and House Marunavi began. I lived through those days, and nobody thought that the war was going to become what it did."

 Chapter 29: A Tale of the Sea

    "Thank you," Annatiki said to Diana. "That is all, you may carry on with your work."

    "Wait," Diana said. "Kiera, I would like to tell you another story. It is quite amusing, in my opinion."

    "Sure," Kiera said.

    "So you are the first witch to join us in a thousand years. That is because the last thousand years have been absolute hell for us. The first few centuries were total chaos. The Heritors quarreled endlessly and we witches were still trying to figure out how to work with each other. The bank was constantly creating hyperinflation bubbles, pyramid schemes, or outright fraud, and we didn''t have enough oculomancers to take control of them yet. Furthermore, there was actually another civilization out there in the world."

    "Where?" Kiera asked.

    "On the exact opposite side of the world, in the blind spot that we oculomancers cannot see. The core of the world glows so brightly that it creates a shadow where we cannot see. It turns out there was a mountain range there, and those mountains were still above the water as an island chain. There were other mountain ranges above the water as well. However, no islands had any people, because Reyndell made certain to depopulate the islands after he was finished bringing the water to this side. The islands are also quite small, and could only support a few hundred people at most. The conditions are very cold and food is hard, but not impossible, to acquire.

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    "As guardian of the sea, me and my submarines are tasked with guarding these islands to make sure people don''t move out there. However, a very clever Heritor family invented a very silent submarine that was powered entirely by mechanical energy. It was not magic at all, so we oculomancers could not see it, and my submarines could not hear it. They set up a little breeding colony on that island chain. They lived in cellars, essentially, and they knew our patrol patterns and hid in their cellars when we went to the surface to survey the island. They lived there for hundreds of years before we found them and by then they forgot why they were there at all, and they had several witches living there. I was stronger than them, so I promptly killed the witches and sent a ship to pick up the other people on that island.

    "However, this is an example of how we didn''t quite know what we were doing back in the early days. We made many mistakes that could have led to a powerful witch being born and challenging Annatiki here. Sometimes we were too efficient, and that created fragilities that would lead to sudden crises. When that happened we would often have to backtrack on our methods. But recent centuries have been quiet. It''s a good time to recruit new witches, I think. There may be many more witches that join us, after you."

 Chapter 30: The Elder Saints Answer

    Diana left the Spire, and Annatiki led Kiera to a chamber near the center. Thralls were busying themselves running around with plates of food for non-existent diners or cleaning the floors as they walked. Then they entered an area where nobody could be found, an empty maze. Annatiki led Kiera through the maze to a massive, glowing red spike hanging from the ceiling.

    "Kiera, I give you permission, just this once, to attempt to draw the sien out of this spike." Annatiki said.

    Kiera did so, but she found that the maze she had just navigated was orders of magnitude easier than the shifting, evolving, self-repairing maze that guarded the sien in this spike.

    "Enough, stop." Annatiki said. "It will take you tens of thousands of hours of objective time to gain enough experience to be able to reliably pull the sien out of this spike. If I see any witch in this chamber practicing, I will kill them. Even Fiona."

    "I understand, Annatiki. I promise that I will never attempt to pull sien from any of these spikes," Kiera said. "This seems very important to you."

    "It is important to me. Kiera, you have likely begun to suspect, as your skills continue to grow, that you are stronger than I am," Annatiki said.

    "I did not want to say anything, but you are right. I did have my suspicions. But I promise Annatiki, I just want to be your friend. I don''t ever want to hurt you."

    The Elder Saint nodded. "Me and Fiona needed to know how my condition would react to having another etherborne around with your strength." Then she froze. "Wait, you said that you wanted to be my friend?"

    Kiera nodded vigorously. "Let''s be friends."

    "I may consider it," Annatiki said. "Follow me, there is something else you need to see."

    Behind the spike there was a long narrow hallway that ended in a chamber made of natural stone with a broad borehole in the center. The borehole was lined with the tops of those glowing red spikes. There must have been a hole drilled into the wall of the borehole so that the spike could be inserted like a peg. There were thousands of the spikes, snaking down into the borehole.

    "This is my life''s work," Annatiki said. "Every day for a thousand years I am either working on making a new spike or inserting it into the wall of the borehole here. My spire is twenty-eight thousand feet tall, the tallest of the spires with the exception of Spire Erika in the center of the continent. I chose this spire for this purpose. These spikes are designed to be dropped from aircraft and impale themselves into the ground. I will have an emergency supply of sien on demand to consume and destroy any witches, even if they are stronger than me. There is enough sien in this borehole to kill my father ten times over. And I am only halfway down the spire.

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    "Every decade or so, Fiona flies me to the top of Spire Erika on a day when the fog is very thick. I pull down more sien from the Sister World, and magic stops working for about a day because I must claim the entire world''s supply of ether. Charlatans at the universities have been instructed to tell people that this is a natural phenomenon. However, this task is absolutely critical, and I cannot suffer the risk that somebody from the surface will invent a flying machine, which will be available to a witch who somehow manages to puzzle out the methods that we use to get our sien. That might put the world at risk.

    "And so, Fiona expends some of her effort on making sure that the people on the surface do not have access to flying machines. And she generally does a very good job in an efficient way."

    "Why don''t you have the oculomancers just ask people if they are trying to make flying machines?" Kiera asked.

    "We tried that, it had the opposite effect. Every teenage boy in the world wanted to invent the flying machine."

    "I can see that," Kiera said.

    "Diana left out an important detail when she told you about Renna''s plan. Renna saved Diana from being turned into a thrall, and likely does not want you to think badly of her. My father wanted to use Diana''s submarines as a sort of deterrent. If he was ever killed, the submarines were to surface and use the Aden Clan techniques to kill all of humanity. Renna intercepted Diana, and Diana was certain that she was going to die. However, Renna instead warned Diana of my father''s plan, and encouraged her to mutiny, which she did. Then she vanished beneath the waves for the rest of the war.

    "What Diana failed to tell you is that Renna intended to keep a bank of male genetic material in a safe location, and then exterminate the entire male population. Male fetuses would be aborted, and humanity would continue as an all-female race, under the absolute control of Renna after she returned from the Ven with her new powers. I think that both my father and Renna made the same mistake. We cannot solve the central problem that Ven presents us with through killing off half the population or by turning everyone into a thrall. I rejected both of these answers.

    "And thus I have my own answer. Kiera?"

    "Yes, Annatiki?"

    "I will accept your offer. I want to be your friend as well." Annatiki said. Kiera squealed.

    "Yes yes!" She said. "And I think I understand what your answer is. You want to create a society where people who are stronger than you, can still be trusted to follow your command. That you can subjugate even those who stand above you in strength, not through force but through trust and respect. And, if something goes wrong, you have a backup plan."

    "And the cost is very small," Annatiki said. "The only downside is that sometimes young men look to the sky and dream of flying, only to have those dreams crushed."

 Chapter 31: Risk

    The Gale Temple in the southeast of the Theocracy was a holy site built into a natural tunnel. The tunnel was long and broad enough to fit a small down inside. The ground was made from beach sand, and the mountain above the tunnel was capped with a small tropical forest. One end of the tunnel faced the ocean and the other end faced a shallow marsh. The holy site had to be destroyed to make way for a massive wooden terrace that spanned the full length of the tunnel. It was sturdy and smooth and raised above the sane with stilts.

    Quinn stood on one end of the terrace and watch the sun rise. Pilots gained experience flying the new warbirds by doing laps. They would leave the tunnel exit facing the ocean, into the wind. They would loop around over the marsh and then land against the wind that was funneled through the tunnel.

    The sun was rising, and the wall of fog loomed on the horizon. They trained the pilots at this time of day because it was light enough to see and generally the weather was clear, but the oculomancers didn''t like flying in the morning because they would be too easy to see. They hoped that their flight tests would go unnoticed. All the auras in this area could easily be explained by the old Gale Temple that had occupied this area. The Blue Wolf was moving her armies across the Ash Sea, and Claire Aden and the armies of Lin were moving through the undefended heartland to the west.

    Quinn watched the little airplanes do their laps with envy until Maxius the Younger arrived and addressed him. "Quinn, we need to get you to someplace safe up here on the surface," he said. "Something happened. I think you are in danger."

    "I disagree," Quinn said. "But before that, tell me what happened."

    "The western enclave of engineers is gone. Wiped out. They were being guarded by members of the Lawgiver''s Templar, and they all had auras. None of the knights or engineers survived."

    "Was it the ghost?" Quinn asked. "Did they die of heart attacks?"

    "No, I think this might be unrelated to the ghost," Maxius said. "Many years ago we found out that the Emperor was married to a witch, but they sealed away her powers with a special aura. There was a plan to kidnap her daughter Alyesha and bring her down here into our breeding colonies. This plan backfired because the girl bribed the castle garrison while she was on the way into the Underground. One of the guards must have told her what they intended to do and why, because now everyone calls her the Blue Wolf and she is an existential threat to the Theocracy.

    "That''s less interesting than what happened after. The Emperor demanded satisfaction. He sent his Knight and brother, Sir Zachary, to the local Church temple to make an example of them. The temple was guarded by Lawgiver''s Templar, just like our engineers. The Templar and all the people worshipping inside the temple were all slaughtered. And our spies discovered that the templar had been killed with a crysien ethersteel sword. Those weapons are extremely rare and generally only the witches have access to such weapons, but Sir Zachary is known to have one."

    "So you are saying this Sir Zachary has been sent by the Empress to murder the Messiahs?" Quinn asked, and then said "wait... the Messiahs were killed by a simple Knight?"

    "I don''t know," Maxius said, "As I said the ghost might be a second individual. Sir Zachary was the Emperor''s blade in the dark. He must have been sent ahead by the Blue Wolf woman to soften us up before her armies march in here and smoke us out. She must know what we are doing down here. She might even know that we are making these warbirds. So we need to move you to a safehouse somewhere else in the Theocracy before Sir Zachary finds you."

    "Maxius I am tired of running. I think it''s time that I took a risk." Quinn pointed at the warbird that was barreling down the terrace. "If the Empress is looking for me, then I can hide in one of those."

    "That is a stupid idea Quinn," Maxius said. "The goal is to keep you alive. We anticipate a ninety percent fatality rate for this mission."

    "I know that," Quinn said. "I am tired of running and I just really, really want to fly."

    Maxius sighed. "That is a huge risk, but I suppose that''s a bit of a surprise. You don''t believe in the lawgiver. What happens if you die?"

    "I have no opinions about your god," Quinn said. "He doesn''t seem to value his Messiahs very much. Either way, it has nothing to do with religion. I have been in these caves for months being shuffled around randomly to different workshops. And how helpful will I be in some safehouse without access to the mines and factories of the Underground? You just said that the Empress is going to smoke us out of these caves anyways. So any contributions that I can possibly make to the design of the warbirds is not going to be worth much moving forward."

    "I guess there is no point in trying to argue with you Quinn. Very well, I''ll talk to the air sergeant. I guess it makes some sense that the last place they would expect to find you is up in the sky."

    <hr>

    They trained Quinn in a wind tunnel first with only two axis of control. The nose of the thing was tethered to a post by a rope. The wooden mockup would leave the ground briefly and Quinn''s job was to keep the craft straight for a few seconds before both the craft and the post sank down.

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    Maxius and his subordinates had been given most of the Renna family auras. Only Maxius had the skill to subdivide auras, and the family auras could only be subdivided into about three dozen auras that were still large enough to fly with. When Maxius gave Quinn an aura he was surprised at just how big it was compared to the tiny aura that he used in White Chasm.

    At first Quinn was only allowed to move quickly down the terrace. The warbird did not have any breaks or a ground steering mechanism. Everything was human-powered, with people holding the tips of the wings and running to help keep the nose straight as the plane first started moving. The entire ice protection system was just some ethersteel wires along the leading edges of the craft, and the pilot needed to use ethermancy to heat them up to high temperatures. The most important thing, the more experienced pilots insisted, was to carefully manage airspeed. This was the only instrument inside the airplane, and it was connected to a single pitot tube.

    They allowed Quinn to sit in one of the only two-seater trainer craft to learn to take off and fly around. They used ethermancy to create a sound bubble around them, so that the more experienced pilot could give Quinn instructions. Taking off and steering was extremely easy. Keeping the plane straight was easy, and even the rare instances when he had to use the rudder was easy to identify. Sometimes while turning the nose would drift in the opposite direction slightly, and he would need to kick the rudder to correct it.

    Landing, however, was extremely difficult. They had to lower the flaps and manage airspeed according to a specific schedule. The general goal was to not stall and fall out of the sky while approaching the terrace, and also not be traveling too fast and fly straight through the tunnel and fall into the ocean on the other side. Fly too low, and you crashed into the swamp. Fly too high, and you smacked into the mountain.

    It took Quinn about twenty attempts before his instructor was happy with his landings. They were not perfect, but the people on the terrace would run out and grab the wings to prevent him from going side to side after he slowed down a little. The men must have been brave to run at a spinning propeller like that.

    <hr>

    One morning they woke Quinn up abruptly before dawn. They were being deployed to the battlefield. The pilots all lined up and got briefed by the air sergeant.

    "Follow your flight commander and stay in formation. Many of you have practiced formation flying but many have not. Stay in formation! If your commander flies into the ground and dies, then you also fly into the ground and die. The Primarch has already said that anyone who dies on this mission will instantly go to Paradise. Now go and report to your commander."

    It took a long time before Quinn''s aircraft was dragged out into the terrace. Only four aircraft at a time would fit on the big lift from the hangar down in the underground. Then the planes had to be carried on carts to the tunnel and set up on the terrace. Though they did not run out of fuel once airborne, because there was plenty of ether, so once Quinn was actually in the sky he had to fly around in circles following his commander until they were ready to fly to the battlefield.

    The fog rolled in below. Their only sources of navigation were the peaks and Spire Renna looming to the north. Spire Lin could barely be seen in the far west. Suddenly the commander veered up and faced Spire Renna. Gleaming lights were approaching.

    Fast. Very fast.

    He followed his commander up to meet the lights, but they were so high up in the sky that the warbirds would start to stall out as they tried to climb higher and higher. They needed to wait until those lights came lower. And the lights were coming lower. For some reason. Quinn assumed that they had long range missiles that they used to murder witches in rural areas. The logical thing to do was to fly up into the sky, not down. However, if those missiles were extremely expensive, then maybe they were going to get closer and use shorter range guns.

    And they did have shorter range guns. And they began to use them.

    It seemed impossible. They were still very high up but they were lobbing very accurate streams of white hot bullets down at the warbirds. There were two enemy fighter jets, silvery, mean looking and predatory. They hunted together. They killed together.

    The first volley of bullets took out no less than four warbirds. The pilots of the warbirds quickly took advantage of their smaller size and smaller momentum. Shooting down at an angle was likely difficult, especially when the warbirds started swerving around chaotically.

    Then the fighter jets got in behind another pack and took out six more. This cost them, because they needed to descend quite a ways in order to get a nice clean line up. Quinn''s commander took advantage of this to move in behind one of the jets from one side. Quinn wondered if she knew that they were coming.

    Each of the warbirds was mounted with a single large grapeshot cannon integrated into the body below the pilot. The bottom of the propeller was just above the lip of the cannon. Quinn lined up the gunsight and pulled the trigger when the enemy airplane was nearly filling his entire gunsight. His entire plane shook and lost airspeed, reeling to one side. As instructed by the other pilots he pointed the nose down and used the rudder to prevent a spin. His shot was too low, however.

    Between his legs there was the canister release and reload levers. While holding onto the stick with one hand, he went through the arduous process of reloading the craft. It took a lot of his attention and he even started to lose power. It was important to pulse the engine to prevent a loss of airspeed as you rapidly reloaded the gun. Quinn regrouped with the commander and followed him as he approached the enemy jets again. They had moved quite far away and were moving fast.

    The jets must have ran out of ammo, because they pointed their noses at the sky and rocketed off at tens of thousands of feet per minute. They left a long trail of smoke behind them far into the sky, towards Spire Renna.

    There wasn''t any time. They were going to return with higher numbers and half the warbirds had already been shot down. His commander must have been thinking the same thing because they immediately started flying north towards the battlefield. Quinn just hoped that they arrived at the battlefield and at least did something before those jets came back and murdered them.

 Chapter 32: Invasion

    Queen Lucia stood upon the deck of the Emperor Corrin, flagship of the fleet. The ship flew the Blue Wolf banner that Sasha preferred. They sailed south across the Ash Sea, and the high cliffs of the Theocracy were slowly getting closer and closer. They had been careful to prevent the enemy from knowing their exact landing point. The cliffs ahead looked heavily defended however. They knew that the army had left the Empire, and they likely set up ethermancers along the edge of the Ash Sea to wait for Sasha''s massive aura to pass over them. They could then triangulate her position and predict a landing spot.

    "Queen Lucia," Sasha said, approaching from behind. She was wearing her iridescent blue-green scale armor, and was addended by a few female guards. "You may begin, you have my permission to claim ether. Open up a landing spot for us, but don''t cause the cliffs to collapse, please."

    The deck was built with a large, circular platform jutting out over the front. The platform did not have a rail, and was the perfect spot for long range ethermancy, usually aimed at enemy ships. Lucia walked up onto the platform and claimed all the ether in her aura. This preempted any ether that the enemy ethermancers would have claimed already, locking it to Lucia and preventing a general defensive barrier.

    She fed ether into one of the ether family weaves inscribed inside her aura, and began to feed the correct support weaves with perfect timing. Air, ether, and heat began to be sucked upward towards a single point above the cliffs. The air became heavily compressed and heated into a plasma, and yet more and more air and heat was sucked in, repeating the process in waves. Then she created a barrier and collapsed the barrier down to a single point, causing fusion of the smaller atoms in the air. Her family secret, that the other Heritors didn''t know about.

    She rotated the aura, with the angle of rotation changing chaotically. Then she gave the barrier a slight wobble. Finally, she punctured the bottom of the barrier like a pincushion. Jets of white hot fire exploded down towards the ground, and as the barrier wobbled and span about these streams danced along the cliffs, causing destruction at random.

    "I think that your graduate theses at the Monastery was slightly better," Sasha said. "How long will it last this time?"

    "It should be gone by the time the ships get close. We should not have any trouble building a net here."

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    The first ship to arrive was the net ship. The entire hull was occupied by a cube-shaped net as long as the cliffs were high. There were wooden support structures spaced out on the outside of the net. Sasha used ether to levitate the ethersteel anchors on the top support structure while some engineers rode on top. When they arrived they secured the top of the net into the bedrock using a combination of ethermancy drilling and long ethersteel spikes. They constructed the elevator at the top and attached four cables to a platform. It slowly lowered down the middle between the four walls of the net, while soldiers climbed the net on three sides.

    Lucia watched this process through a spyglass with fascination. This approach to scaling a cliff could also be used to quickly ascend the cliffs of the White Chasm. When the elevator platform arrived at the bottom, Sasha and Lucia stepped in and began to ascend.

    They could not feel Heritor Maxius the Senior, so they knew he must be far away. That meant that the enemy army would be defenseless against the Empress and her enormous aura. When the platform slowed down to a halt at the top, Lucia and the Empress stepped out onto the prominent peak of the cliffs. The soldiers had set up a perimeter for them, though they were both protected by powerful barriers. The sheer prominence of the location would allow them to ravage anything alive nearby using long range ethermancy. At least until Maxius arrived.

    Lucia set up three similar fire streamers in the forests nearby. Sasha had yet to use her ethermancy offensively. Her techniques tended to be highly specialized, and general offensive magic was more of Lucia''s expertise. After all, what could beat a spinning fireball of death floating in the sky?

    More ships arrived at the cliffs, and more nets were constructed. Over many days the army ascended the cliffs and began their advance into the Theocracy. In spite of the heavy defensive formations in the cliffs, there was little resistance to the march. The enemy must have placed small pockets of forces periodically to try and protect the cliffs. King Sullivan correctly predicted that the entire region was likely mostly undefended.

    They began to form into a more standard formation. Knights with their crysien weapons on the front line, as their weapons could penetrate simple barriers and kill ethermancers. They also had auras and could create barriers for themselves. Full combined crysien ethersteel blades were much more rare. Sir Zachary had owned one but he vanished, and not even Sasha knew what happened to him or his weapon.

    A mix of  defensive and short-range ethermancers, musketeers, crossbowmen and pikemen in specific formations made up the second wave. In the rear was the long-range ethermancers and the critical leadership, including King Sullivan. While on the battlefield, Sullivan essentially dictated where Sasha and Lucia would be deployed, if at all.

    As they advanced into the northern Theocracy, they began to get reports from the ethermancer scouts that a large aura had passed over them. An extremely large aura was approaching from the south. Maxius the Senior was near.

 Chapter 33: The Battle in the Flowers

    It was one of those rare clear days at the start of summer when the fog did not envelop the land. There was stilly muddy snow in places throughout the shady parts of the forest, and Lucia and Sasha confronted Maxius the Senior in a field of golden flowers. Sasha brought Lucia with her, though Maxius was alone. A small creek separated Sasha from Maxius as they spoke.

    "Heritor Maxius," Sasha said, her blue-green armor gleaming in the sunlight. "I want to know if it''s true. Did you really order my kidnapping?"

    "Aye," Maxius said.

    "Why?" Sasha asked.

    "Because the path to my dream passed through that moment, as it does now. A world without the witches or the Elder Saint. A world for Kings and a world for God."

    Sasha nodded. "I understand. The path to my dream passes through this moment as well. I will make sure that your religion, which was generated by a machine, will be lost and forgotten to us. Know that I do not hate you, and I do not hate your religion or your faithful. My heart knows no hatred. I believe with all my heart that humanity deserves better than a wayward science experiment that has lingered far too long."

    "I am very, very sorry, Heritor Maxius." Lucia said. "House Renna was old when my clan was founded by the Morning Mist. It''s a shame really, that it must end this way." Maxius did not reply.

    They turned and walked back towards King Sullivan.

    The front lines were bursting with eager soldiers ready to get their next promotion. Sasha''s Knights, with their crysien-coated tower shields, were arrayed around her like a blood-red wall. Lucia stood close to Sasha, but she would not be able to contribute once the battle started. Sasha and Maxius both had much larger auras and they would claim all the ether instantly.

    "Tell me when he tries to claim ether," Sullivan said. Salt-and-pepper hair and a beard framed his eager face.

    "He won''t make the first move," Sasha said. She closed her eyes for a long moment, then drew her crysien ethersteel blade and pointed it at the sky. "Prepare for battle!"

    Then she claimed either.

    Then, screaming. Men rushed out onto the field of flowers. The first wave was armed with rifles and crossbows, supplemented with pikemen. The knights would be useless without ether and thus were not deployed immediately. Sasha moved forward, her face determined but strained. Her knights formed a tent completely surrounding her with their tower shields. Lucia was able to huddle inside the formation.

    "You don''t need to be here," Sasha said.

    "This guy might try to surprise you," Lucia said. "I can keep watch while the knights guard you."

    "Right," Sasha said. "Warn me if something goes wrong."

    The two intersecting spheres that were the two great auras were filled with useless ether being claimed by two Heritors. However, each Heritor had a section of their sphere in the far back which was outside the enemy sphere. It was in that section that they could claim ether. They could still cast spells, and it was that tiny margin where the true duel would begin.

    The men clashed near the creek between the two Heritors. The field of golden flowers was quickly turning red, and the creek had turned foul with blood. The enemy soldiers were fearless fanatics, rushing into battle without regard for their lives. The first volley of rifle shots had ended and it became a battle of spears and crossbows as the riflemen reloaded. The formations in Sullivan''s army were executed with precision, and this gave their army an advantage. However the sheer zeal and size of the enemy army pressed them back. Still the Heritors did not use ethermancy, each waiting for the other.

    Then, Lucia heard the rain of bullets smashing into the tower shields that surrounded them. She heard a whirling sound. Confused by the sudden intrusion, she peered in between the shields at the enemy lines. Nothing. She heard more whirling overhead, it seemed to be moving above them. She looked up and saw airplanes.

    These were not the sleek, technologically advanced airplanes that the oculomancers used. They were not the predatory fighter jets that Fiona preferred. These planes looked like they had been constructed by children using ethersteel, wood and glue. They had a single large cannon on the bottom, likely for grapeshot. That would explain the rain of metal that struck the tower shields. There were over a dozen of them that Lucia could count. And they were making passes blasting their cannons at Sasha''s tower shield formation.

    "Sasha!" Lucia cried. "Enemy airplanes! They have been sent to assassinate you!"

    "Don''t panic!" The knight commander said. "Send the signal to the other knights to prepare replacements if we fall. Stay strong! PROTECT THE EMPRESS!"

    Sasha strained with the effort of holding all that ether at bay. She was beginning to sweat.

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    "Wait, how are they still flying?" Sasha asked. "Where are they getting ether?"

    "The airframes themselves made from ethersteel!" Lucia said. "They must be consuming the ether to keep flying."

    "That''s suicide," Sasha said. "Those things will weaken then break apart."

    "This is a suicide mission then," Lucia said. "They have probably been told that they will go to Paradise when they die. Can you claim the ether as it seeps out of the ethersteel?"

    "No, they are moving too fast and I can''t focus on that right now," Sasha said.

    More blasts from their grapeshot cannons smashed into the knights. One side was exposed. Several of the knights on one side collapsed into formation, using their bodies to shield the Empress even before they could orient their shields. Dozens of more knights rushed in and formed a second ring around the Empress, even climbing on top of each other, forming a large dome of crysien and steel around her.

    "Lucia," Sasha said. "Do you remember my thesis when we graduated from the Eight Color Monastery?"

    "No, the professors forbid anyone from witnessing it, after you told them what you intended to do. I wasn''t there."

    "Hmm," Sasha said. "I am surprised that it has come to this, but there should be just enough ether in my free section to pull it off."

    Sasha began channeling ether into her aura, activating the inscribed weaves there. A cacophony of different weaves. The ground began to tremble, and giant rocks and fireballs assaulted the knights. Maxius must have felt that Sasha was using her reserved ether and began his attack. Sasha was able to spare enough ether to create a barrier to block the stones, and the crysien shields deflected the fireballs in random directions. Sasha continued to channel her spell.

    Then, the forest exploded. Every tree in the entire forest behind them disintegrated into powdery chunks of wood. And from that wood the tree sap was extracted, forming a long, sticky web of pale golden liquid that seemed to float through the air and converge directly above Sasha. Two massive, trunk like legs of tree sap smashed down on either side of the knights, and a torso and arms formed high above.

    A forty foot tall golem made from pure tree sap loomed over the battlefield.

    It moved with astonishing speed, throwing it''s stretchy, sticky arms out to catch the little airplanes in the air as they attempted more shots on the Empress. The planes stuck to the sap and crunched, the wings snapping and the bodies bending. The thing, though being forty feet tall, was able to sprint. It sprinted across the battlefield towards Maxius, threw itself forward with it''s arms into the knights and wormed it''s way in-between their shields. It grabbed Maxius, hurled him high into the sky.

    Whatever spells Maxius had at his disposal, a barrier that protected against tree sap must not have been one of them. The shock of being thrown into the air above the battlefield must have stunned him, because he lost control of most, if not all of the ether in Sasha''s aura. Suddenly Lucia was thrown outward by a massive wave of wind, as were all the knights. The area around Sasha was clear, and she pointed her hand at Maxius as he flew.

    Then she incinerated him with a bolt of lightning from her palm.

    Lucia smashed down into the mud and crushed yellow flowers. The Empress was busy zapping the entire enemy frontline with lightning as Sullivan''s Knights ran forward with their auras working once more. Friendly ethermancers began to join in the assault as well. Sasha''s golem sprinted about overhead, catching the little airplanes like butterflies by turning one hand into the shape of an oversized bug net. Lucia retreated to her tent.

    Her handmaidens stripped her down and scrubbed her body clean with sponges and soapy water from buckets. She rested for a few minutes, drinking water as the handmaidens fussed over her. They dressed her in a fresh pair of white trousers and a fine red blouse. By the time she returned to Sasha the enemy front line had already been completely crushed, and Sasha''s sap golem had captured nine airplanes. The last three airplanes had vanished.

    "Lucia," Sasha said. "Use your family technique on their backline."

    Lucia created a second burning sun in the sky above the enemy army. It span about, shooting streams of death down on their reserves and their supply caravans. Sullivan''s men eagerly surged forward, chasing the retreating army and slaughtering them. Sasha had ceased using her abilities as the last of the enemy soldiers in range died. The ground shook as the golem stalked across the battlefield, carrying it''s prizes. It reached down and deposited the airplanes on the field in front of Sasha. The pilots were still alive, and the knights dragged them out and cut their throats.

    One of the airplanes was in very good condition, as it had been caught by the golem''s bug net. Sasha regarded it.

    "Have the words ''I must subjugate the etherborne'' painted on the side of this thing and ship it to the Elder Saint as a gift from me," Sasha said. "Destroy the others immediately. All soldiers in our army must swear oaths of secrecy about what they have seen here today."

    "It will be as you say, Empress." King Sullivan said. He trotted off on his horse to give the orders.

    By the time they had painted Sasha''s message on the side of the airplane, the Eyes of Empire, Sasha''s personal oculomancer, had arrived to see the enemy flying machines.

    "I will send a message to the Elder Saint through emergency channels," the oculomancer said. "Heritor Alyesha, the Elder Saint will know of your gift and wish it destroyed presently."

    The soldiers gathered the airplanes into a line and Lucia in destroyed them all with her family technique. There was nothing left of them except a long blacked scar through the flowers. The air was filled with smoke and the scent of burnt flesh.

    Sasha was naked and being fussed over by her handmaidens when Lucia entered into her tent. Her iridescent blue-green scale armor was piled in a heap in one corner.

    "You didn''t need to be there, Lucia," Sasha said.

    "I felt like I need to be by your side Sasha. That hasn''t changed since our time at the University."

    "You quickly noticed that the attacks were coming from enemy airplanes, you were the only one of us who was not actively focused on something else. The knights probably wouldn''t have even noticed. I was able to make a quick decision. Thank you."

    "Maxius must have been desperate, to use an attack like that. Though I guess I wouldn''t want to face you on a battlefield without some sort of backup plan."

    The handmaidens finished toweling Sasha dry and then she dismissed them without getting dressed. With a lusty look in her eyes she dragged Lucia over to her bed.

    "I am happy, Sasha" Lucia said. "I''m happy that you survived. I''m happy that I get to see tomorrow with you."

 Chapter 34: New Strategy

    Quinn, his commander, and two other aircraft were the only survivors. A massive monster made out of something sticky and malleable was roaming the battlefield catching the other warbirds in a giant bug net. The commander turned and fled after a bolt of lightning struck something flying in the sky. Quinn was certain that the rest of his squadron had been either shot down by the jets or captured by the monster.

    The fog had not arrived near the battlefield and the commander was able to fly very low, almost hugging the treetops. The low altitude and winding path through the hills did not protect them very well, however. The oculomancers could see auras even through stone and trees. The fighters from Spire Renna were returning. The two warbirds from a different squadron were ahead when the commander veered off to the west. Quinn followed him, and the fighters above split.

    Over a remote river basin the commander began to slow down and lower his flaps. Quinn didn''t see any place to land but stayed in formation, carefully matching his airspeed. They seemed to be getting dangerously close to the trees, and the single fighter that was chasing them was lining up behind them. Suddenly a clearing appeared, a long stretch of grass wide enough for the wings of the airplanes. The commander slowed down and landed first, and his landing was smooth. Quinn had not practiced landing here and he hit hard. His propeller hit the ground and the the entire warbird flipped over and skid, upside down, along the grass runway.

    Quinn was upside down, and the canopy could not open because it was pressed against the ground. Ethermancy tore at the airframe, causing it to rip apart on one side. Quinn climbed out of the shattered warbird, dazed. He heard a hissing sound mixed with a crackling fire. The fighter jet was lining up for a shot.

    Quinn dashed into the forest. The oculomancer would be able to see his aura, and knew exactly where he was, however she seemed to prioritize destroying the in-tact warbird that had belonged to the commander. Hot white bullets shot out causing guizers of dirt and grass to shoot up in a line, ripping the airplane to pieces. The fighter pulled up and shot off into the sky. It grew quiet.

    <hr>

    It was a short hike down into a cavern entrance to the underground. The enemy fighter did not return. Quinn was placed in a mine-cart and sent down a random set of tracks. When he arrived at the bottom he did not know where he was, and nobody knew how to contact Maxius. It would be days of walking on the surface to reach the Gale Temple where he had last seen Maxius, and in the Underground it could be weeks or months to navigate the maze and arrive there. There were some minecarts with very gentle slopes that could be used to travel long distances, however the distances were much smaller than those that an aircraft could cover.

    It took many days for Maxius to find Quinn. "You came back!" he said.

    "Me and my commander were the only ones in my squadron to survive," Quinn said. "There were two other warbirds that got away but they were being chased by another jet."

    "They didn''t make it," Maxius said. "I have more bad news. Another Messiah has been killed."

    "I didn''t know there was another Messiah," Quinn said.

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    "Nobody did, it was an extremely tight secret. He was placed in a chamber and the entrance was destroyed with explosives. He was sealed inside with some food and water, nobody could get in our out of that chamber. This tells us two things. First, the oculomancers are definitely involved and they can definitely see witches through stone. Second, the Ghost of the Bloodraker can travel through stone. In fact, when we inspected the chamber afterwards, our geologists insisted that one section of the cavern floor under the bed appeared to have been turned into molten lava and then rapidly cooled."

    Quinn was astonished. "An assassin that can swim through lava?"

    "Listen, Quinn, there is something else. Did you see lightning strike something in the sky, originating from the ground?"

    "I did, that was when we ran away."

    "My father, Maxius the Senior, was killed by the Blue Wolf in that instant."

    "I''m sorry," Quinn said.

    "His aura detached from his body and just remained there in the sky." Maxius said. "The same can be said for all the pilots that were killed by the fighter jets near the Gale Temple. We don''t have hardly any auras left. My entire aura was invested in that attack on the Empress. Now my family does not have any large auras to defend against her."

    "Do you need this aura back?" Quinn asked. Maxius nodded.

    "If you please."

    Maxius placed his hand on Quinn''s chest and attempted to take the aura. It didn''t work.

    "What''s wrong?" Quinn asked.

    "Nothing," Maxius said. "I took the aura just fine, why do you ask?"

    "Because I can still feel ether," Quinn said.

    Maxius just stared at him, eyes wide, mouth almost falling open.

    "Quinn, if you can feel ether, that means you are developing witch powers."

    "Are you certain?" Quinn asked. "Could you have accidentally not taken the entire aura?"

    "I''ve been working with auras for decades," Maxius said. Come on, we have a way of testing.

    Maxius led Quinn to an extremely long, straight tunnel. There was a torch at the end of the tunnel, so far away that it looked like a star in the sky.

    "Can you feel the ether by that torch?" Maxius asked. Quinn tried to feel anything that far away. In fact, he could feel that ether.

    "Yes, I can. My little aura could have never let me feel that ether," Quinn said.

    "Then the only explanation is that you are a witch. And, the next Messiah. Come with me, we need to take you to the breeding chamber. Trust me, the girls there are very pretty and you''ll be able to do your job no problem."

    "No, absolutely not. I am not part of your religion, I do not want to stay down here."

    "Well then where are you going to go?" Maxius asked. "The surface? You''ll get blown up by a missile."

    Quinn shook his head. "I won''t stay on the surface. I''ll keep going up. I''ll take a warbird and fly away, their missiles are likely only designed for ground targets and won''t work on a fast airplane."

    "That is insane!" Maxius said.

    "What about sitting down here in the dark and plowing girls until an assassin swims through the wall and murders me? That is insane. Look, just give me a copy of that book of yours. If my powers develop fast enough, I might be able to strip metals from the ground and craft myself a fighter jet like the ones the oculomancers use."

    "Eventually you have to come back down to the ground though," Maxius said. "You can''t fly forever."

    "Why not? Maybe my powers will let me steal food from markets at a distance. Maybe I could install a toilet on my fighter jet and a place to sleep. I could live in the sky forever. See Maxius? I think that the mistake that all these Messiahs made was they stayed down here. Salvation is up, in the sky."

    "You are a genius!" Maxius said. "We can really sell this. Alright, I think that you will start a trend here. All future Messiahs can also roll the dice trying to use their powers to fly forever. After all, how are we going to challenge the might of the Bloodraker if we can''t fly?"

 Chapter 35: Bloodraker

    The Elder Saint brought Kiera to a workshop within the spire. It was orderly and clean, with pure white light and white paint on the smooth walls. A witch awaited for them when they arrived, and Kiera estimated that she was even weaker than Fiona. She had the same purple hair as Diana.

    "Thank you for answering my summons," Annatiki said. "This is Sophia the Engineer."

    Kiera waved to her. "Are you related to Diana?"

    "I am," Sophia said. "She is a cousin."

    "I have asked Sophia to fly here for a special task," Annatiki said. "She excels at this work with ease."

    "Come with me," Sophia said. She led Kiera to a table with a tall wooden box. The top of the box was open.

    "Stand on this stool and let your arm rest inside the box," Sophia said.

    As Kiera''s hand dangled inside the box, Sophia began to mix two liquids together in a large bucket with some type of hand-held mixing machine. Then she poured the mixture into the box around Kiera''s hand. The mixture began to grow out of the box and turn into a solid.

    "Make your arm and hand immune to physical trauma," Sophia said. "Annatiki assures me that you know how to do it."

    Kiera did, though it was still unnerving as Sophia used a mechanical saw to slice through the box and the solidified mixture. After the entire box was cut in half, there was a perfect mold of Kiera''s hand.

    "That''s all I need for now, come back in a few days."

    <hr>

    When Kiera returned to the workshop Sophia gave her a gauntlet resembling the one that Annatiki used to kill Edwin. It had the same long, razor sharp, claw-like fingers. Upon closer inspection the tips the fingers had tiny holes, almost like a syringe. When she tried it on, it fit perfectly.

    "Press the button on your forearm," Sophia said. It took a while for Kiera to find it, but when she pressed it, the forearm popped out, revealing a deep round compartment hidden inside.

    Sophia handed her a vial. The vial was filled with a swirling ruby-silver liquid. Kiera slid it into the compartment and snapped it shut.

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    "Don''t make your arm immune to physical damage this time, but feel free to remove the pain. Rake your fingers along the top of your forearm hard enough to break the flesh."

    While it make Kiera extremely uncomfortable, Kiera did so, and the gauntlet left four trails of the ruby-silver liquid along her bleeding arm.

    "Try to heal the wounds," Sophia said. Kiera claimed ether and attempted to repair her arm. She was met with a shifting, maze-like trap that prevented healing. It felt similar to the time Annatiki allowed her to attempt to draw sien from the spikes.

    "I cannot," Kiera said.

    "Indeed," Sophia said. "This gauntlet dispenses a liquid crysien alloy. It is designed specifically for killing witches. Throughout the entire war, Annatiki never failed to kill a single one of her targets using this weapon. There is enough of the liquid in each vial to be used about five times. I will give you a supply of the vials, be sure to keep a spare vial with you at all times."

    "Um, how do I heal my arm."

    "I will do it," Annatiki said. She pressed her hand against Kiera''s arm. Kiera felt the other witch claim ether and perform some incomprehensible etherweave. Suddenly Kiera could heal her arm again.

    Kiera bowed to Annatiki. "Thank you!"

    Annatiki thanked Sophia and they left. As Annatiki led Kiera through the spire, she said "the one you must meet next will deeply disturb you. But understand that this is critical for you. You must quell your instincts."

    They arrived in a circular chamber lit with pale blue light from ethersteel stone deposits in the walls. In the center of the chamber, a man knelt on the ground, as if he was being knighted. Annatiki approached him. "What is your focus?" she asked.

    "I heal myself," the man said.

    Kiera shivered. "No, please no."

    "You must gain real experience using the gauntlet," Annatiki replied. "This thrall is stronger than you. You will not be able to suppress his powers and therefore you will not be able to harm him."

    Kiera felt relieved. Until she saw the Aura Maiden enter the room.

    "I am going to teach you how to burn sien to gain a temporary advantage against witches that are stronger than you," Annatiki said. "You are going to practice killing this man until it''s as easy as breathing. I will be here to remove the liquid from his wounds."

    "Listen, Annatiki, this makes me deeply uncomfortable."

    "I know. But you are my friend, and I want to make sure that you can defend yourself if you end up facing a strong witch when I''m not around to help."

    Keira resigned herself. Annatiki was right.

    "There are a few more details. First of all, you must only view the target in the vendark spectrum. This is to prevent you from seeing a family member or an old friend. When I killed my father I did not even see his face. Second, you should be moving very fast. We will practice high speed flying while under the effects of burning sien. Finally --and this may seem pedantic-- you will need to surround all your clothing with a barrier to allow you to move fast and not end up naked by the time you kill your target."

 Chapter 36: Ascending

    Maxius the Younger stood upon a stage in front of a crowd of the faithful. Quinn stood nearby, next to a brand new warbird, on a smooth flat surface in a cavern with a large opening at the end. Fog swirled near that opening.

    "I will now reveal to you one of the deepest secrets from the sealed scrolls, given to us by the Lawgiver to help protect us from the wicked harlot that calls herself the Elder Saint! It is one of the lost prophesies! The Lawgiver said onto us, ''And he shall soar the skies in defiance of the harlot.''"

    The crowd seemed transfixed by his sermon. Quinn was impressed with the delivery, it seemed somewhat convenient that this ''prophecy'' was being revealed just as Quinn was about to fly away. Maxius had done a good job of making it sound sensible. Quinn studied his copy of the book that the previous Messiahs had written. It was actually extremely useful. Essentially, his witch powers took advantage of deep structure in reality.

    Quinn was particularly interested in the chapter where one of his predecessor had made himself more intelligent. It seemed like a complex technique to begin with, though Quinn estimated that it would be worth the investment because it would make learning other spells much easier.

    "And then Lawgiver said onto us, ''And he shall ascend in both body and mind.''"

    Another chapter of note mentioned a spell to change the user''s perception of time. A witch could use this to experience minutes or hours of subjective time each second of objective time. That, combined with increased intelligence, would allow him to advance through learning new spells extremely quickly in objective time.

    "And then the Lawgiver said onto us, ''And he shall craft for himself machines in the likeness of those of the harlot,''"

    He attempted the intelligence spell again. Suddenly it made complete sense. In fact, everything he read before suddenly had an obvious structure to it, as easy as reading and understanding a fairy tale written for children. He rifled through the book, instantly understanding all the information on each page.

    "And then the Lawgiver said onto us, ''And he shall master and surpass her.''"

    When Quinn got to the spell that described time manipulation later in the book, he instantly knew what he as missing. He attempted the spell, and then the world stopped. He noticed every single motion of every single person in the crowd, Maxius moving his lips extremely slowly, the wraiths of fog moving like snakes through the air...

    Quinn realized that it would help Maxius a lot if he performed some sort of spectacle. In this ascended state, he designed a new spell to make himself glow as bright as the sun. He resumed objective time and waited for Maxius to finish speaking. Then Quinn cast the spell, bathing the entire room in shifting mother-of-pearl light.

    Quinn knew what Maxius was about to say next. He had heard the speech several times. "And then the Lawgiver said onto us," Quinn bellowed in a carefully calculated voice, "''And then the Faithful shall inherit the world!''"

    Maxius winked at him.

    Quinn regarded his little warbird. The design seemed so quaint, as if designed by a child. He would need to transform it into a fighter jet as soon as possible. He waved to the crowd before hopping into the warbird.

    Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

    <hr>

    Zachary sprinted with superhuman speed through the narrow caverns of the Underground. Annatiki was giving him directions somewhere, and he seemed to be going up. There were rumors in the Underground that the Ghost of the Bloodraker could transform the walls into lava and then swim through it. Zachary assumed that he had outlived his usefulness to Annatiki, though she insisted that was not the case. He needed to leave or he would die with everyone else, besides there was a witch nearby that he needed to hunt.

    In a secluded little alcove deep within a winding passage, she commanded him to melt the ceiling and swim straight up until he reached the surface. He did so, holding his breath and moving his entire body like an eel through the lava, melting the rock just above his face. His lungs burned as he ran out of air, though something seemed to be preventing him from losing consciousness.

    I will heal you as I would heal myself, Annatiki said.

    He burst out into the open air, pulling himself forward through the steaming pool of lava towards the ferns and dead tree trunks in front of him. The light was blinding. He scrambled out into the forest and collapsed, gasping for air.

    East, go east, and uphill.

    Zachary continued to follow her instructions through the woods. This was a very remote valley, and there were no villages. There were sheer cliffs jutting from the forest floor. The clouds and fog were floating up at the level of the cliffs, giving the impression that the entire valley was a pocket of clear air below an ocean of gray. Snow crunched beneath Zachary''s boots as he walked.

    He followed a trail along the mountainside until he saw a group of oculomancers across the valley standing in front of a cavern. The cavern opening was completely covered with a strange, clear film, with a tube penetrating the film. The other end of the tube was connected to a tank shaped like a cylinder with rounded ends.

    What is in the tank? Zachary asked.

    The atmosphere of the Sister World, it is a poison that inexperienced witches cannot protect themselves from.

    Zachary shivered. You are going to pump the Underground full of the stuff. Everyone will die.

    Yes, Annatiki said. You gave us many detailed maps and we know where most of the entry points are. We can flood eighty percent of the Underground with this poison.

    Did you want me to help them? He asked, looking at the oculomancers.

    No, go east and up. Stay focused.

    Zachary ran along the valley floor, until he reached a large cliff with an opening to a cavern exactly at the bottom of the cloud layer. There was a bright mother-of-pearl light illuminating the bottom of the clouds. Suddenly a dinky airplane flew out of the hole in down into the clear air. Zachary shifted his eyes into the ''vendark'' spectrum. There was a brilliant golden light moving through the sky above him.

    Dangerous, very dangerous, Annatiki warned. Hide in the shadows, and stay away from that one. Witches usually go down to seek safety, the fact that he goes up makes him very dangerous. Fiona will kill him.

    The golden light in the vendark was moving fast. Zachary hid in the forest until the little airplane was far away.

    There is an aura in that cavern where the airplane was before, Annatiki said. Ascend the cliffs, kill the owner, but do not take the aura. Do not be seen.

    Directly below the hole in the cliff, Zachary melted the rock in front of him then swam into it. After swimming forward for a while, he ascended, his lungs burning by the time he reached the hole. He stayed below the opening, and then melted the rock behind him and swam back out. He was on the side of the cliff then, just below the opening. He climbed out and used is enhanced strength to cling to the ledge. He peered inside as the lava cooled.

    There was a crowd of people shuffling out of the room. Maxius turned and began to walk toward the opening. Zachary dropped down lower and waited.

    Soon Maxius was standing directly above Zachary, looking out over the valley and the fog. "The Bloodraker''s own luck to you, Quinn," Maxius said. Zachary leapt up the ledge and rammed his crysien ethersteel blade through the man''s brain.

    It was bad luck that we couldn''t catch the other one, Zachary said.

    Good luck, Annatiki said. We cannot risk him discovering the weapon inside your body. We don''t know how fast he was advancing. Your mission is complete, return to Spire Lin and await further orders.

 Chapter 37: The Festival

    The second army of the Empire of Nydia, commanded by King Vash of Vjiskald, met the armies of Lin in the heartland of the Theocracy. The tip of Spire Lin could be seen in the west on a clear day, but the sky was cloudy and it was snowing lightly. The soldiers of the two armies fraternized at the border between the two camps. There was a circus, large tents converted into makeshift taverns, and many, many brothels.

    Women stood on the sides of the pathways, wearing garments worthy of a queen with the exception that they did not cover the important body parts. Oculomancers stood at the door, checking men for diseases by looking for specific patterns in the vendark. Kiera continued down the main road between the two camps and tried to ignore the women. She needed to meet with the other Heritors.

    King Vash sat on a massive throne constructed of bronze on a wooden platform. He had hair that was the same color as Annatiki, with matching eyes. His arms and legs were as thick as tree trunks, and his chest was covered in blood red tattoos.

    A smaller throne sat on his right side, and in that throne sat Lucia Aden. Fiona stood near Lucia, and Sasha was talking to Claire nearby. In the center of the clearing in front of the thrones was a line of enemy prisoners. They were naked except for a pair of robust smallclothes in case they soiled themselves. There was a completely naked woman, tall and muscular, holding a sword near them. Her entire body was painted pale blue, except the area around her eyes which was painted a much darker blue. There were gaps in the paint creating an elaborate pattern.

    Kiera winced as the woman beheaded one of the prisoners. The screams and cries for mercy began. Kiera turned away, standing behind Fiona. Lucia looked bored.

    Once the final prisoner had died, the executioner approached Fiona. "You honor me, Great Mother, for painting me with the patterns of your tribe," she said with a bow.

    This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

    "You honor my tribe with your grace and skill," Fiona replied. Kiera thought the whole spectacle was barbaric, though apparently it was an important religious ceremony in Vjiskald meant to honor Father Winter.

    An oculomancer sprinted into the clearing, panicked. "Fiona!" she said. "Urgent message for you on emergency channels!"

    Fiona snapped her head toward Spire Lin. Kiera peered into the vendark and looked at the Spire herself. There was a large, flashing blue pulse. The communications oculomancer was burning ether in pulses according to a special language. Kiera still did not understand that language.

    "Father Winter" Fiona hissed.

    "What''s wrong?" Kiera asked.

    "I need to leave, NOW."

    "Let me go with you," Kiera said.

    "Walk with me, but remain at the festival," Fiona said. "We need to talk. I may need backup down here on the ground. Listen, Kiera. I need to tell you about the secret purpose of the Heritors. Heritors have large auras, and those auras contain enough sien that, when burned, the Elder Saint can become strong enough to kill witches that are stronger than her, without needing to consume one of her spikes."

    Kiera nodded. "I understand, but why are you telling me this?"

    "Look to the east in the vendark," Fiona said.

    Kiera saw a bright golden light far to the east. It was moving fast, as if it was flying slowly.

    "Mother summer," Kiera said. "A male witch, flying?!"

    "This is an emergency, I need to handle it immediately," They arrived at a small field, and twin-propeller aircraft hissed by and slammed down. The engines roared, and the little airplane slowed down to a stop almost instantly. There were screams from the nearby prostitutes at seeing the airplane fly overhead, and even the soldiers were gathering to look. "I will try to keep him nearby. If I fail to kill him by myself or I judge that I need your help, I will try my best to put him on the ground. I command you to claim the sien in all the auras you can feel and burn it to reach and kill the target in that case."

    She hopped into the plane.

    "He may be developing very fast. Remember your training."

    The little airplane took off in a short distance, then set out towards Spire Lin with an escort of dozens of fighter jets. The sky became a dull roar. Hundreds of fighter jets appeared in the clouds, they peppered the sky. The soldiers watched, fingers pointed at the sky in wonder.

 Chapter 38: King of the Skies

    Quinn was a god.

    He could control his perception of time, and his mind worked hundreds of times faster than a normal person.

    He quickly noticed that the fighter jets seemed to be terrified of him. They flew very high, far away from him, and never come low enough for him to see them clearly. He had to work from memory.

    He dropped very close to the ground and flew through the twisting valleys and rolling hills. He felt alive. If he saw something particularly beautiful, he would slow his perception of time, drawing out the scene for hours and hours even though it would only last a second. He lived an entire lifetime flying through the sky, just seeing how beautiful it was.

    However he needed to remember is purpose.

    He reached down deep into the ground and sucked out as many different types of metals he could find. He began to forge them, doing experiments to figure out the best way to make the metals very strong. He decided that aluminum would be a good choice for the outside of the aircraft, with some ethersteel for the places that required additional strength or would provide additional control. He tried to reshape the aircraft around him into the shape of a fighter jet, but quickly realized that the propeller was not spinning fast enough to pull so much weight. He stripped off the heavier metals and shaped the airframe over and over, but he could never quite get the power.

    He realized that he would need to invent a new power source.

    He found a nearby town and looked for a library. He ripped the roof off the library and sucked out all the books. He sorted them by topic, and was particularly interested in chemistry, physics, and engineering books. He could read entire books instantly just through the sound waves from his propeller striking the book. He could tell the difference between paper and ink on any page anywhere in the book at any angle, even if it was completely closed. He read all the books in the library and realized that they had been corrupted by oculomancers.

    They had been corrupted in such a clever way also. The corruptions would create inaccuracies in equations or facts when used in ranges that might be used in the construction of flying machines. And there was otherwise no pattern to the corruptions, they seemed to be intended to frustrate anyone attempting to read the books.

    Quinn reached down into the ground and the trees and the rivers and pulled as many chemicals out that he could find. He began to perform experiments while flying, filling in the chemistry and physics gaps created by the oculomancers. This process took a long time in objective time.

    He saw fighter jets observing him, however they stayed far away. They were observing him, probably reporting his progress to other fighter jets. Yes, such a system would be useful. The oculomancers must know that this exact possibility might happen, that a witch would slow time and increase their intelligence to transcend their limits and invent all of aeronautical science in a few hours. They probably have some contingencies in place.

    He would need to be faster.

    He decided upon a design for an engine that would use turbines to compress air to very high pressures and temperatures. Then, there would be small nozzles that inject atomized kerosene into the stream of hot air where it would be ignited. This would turn a second turbine that would power the entire shaft with a large intake fan. The exhaust would blast out the back freely. He tried it, building the device, but it could not reach the temperatures he needed to burn the kerosene. So he added an electrical starter that would create sparks on engine start and then automatically stop the sparks when the inside of the turbine was hot enough to light the mixture automatically.

    You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

    He noticed that there were not oil deposits in the ground. The oculomancers must have found them all and sucked them dry. However he could use chemistry to make kerosene on the fly. He built two of his jet engines and then built a new, fighter-jet shaped airframe around that. it had a tall tail fin with a rudder, the entire horizontal stabilizer could be used like an elevator, a triangle-shaped pair of wings with a single combined flap/aileron surface on each wing, and a tube-like body with a nose cone. He attempted to fly the machine but it did not handle very well, so he added canards near the nose of the aircraft to help stabilize it. That worked very well, but he still needed to burn a lot of ether to increase his strength to operate the controls. He was moving very fast, after all.

    He designed a hydraulics system, which allowed him to move the control surfaces easily. He linked various control surfaces together with mechanical devices that would prevent positive feedback loops from developing. He flew very fast and very high, looking down at the top of Spire Renna. It had a long runway painted with numbers and while lines. He realized the numbers matched values on a compass. A very sensible setup.

    He saw some aircraft flying around, but decided not to destroy them. When he killed the Elder Saint and replaced her he wanted to inherit as much of her stuff as he could, and destroying it seemed wasteful. He did get into a dogfight with a few fighter jets and destroyed them with his power. They were not carrying any weapons that he could tell, so he had nothing to copy. Weapons might be useful though, because they could be shot at a distant target and operate on their own, whereas he would have to focus on each target he wanted to destroy, and it needed to be close enough for his abilities to work. In theory, he could develop new weaves that would travel a long way, however that would be effectively the same thing as just making missiles, and would waste his time as he focused on controlling the spell as it moved towards the target.

    He returned to the surface, pulled up more raw materials and began working on missiles. He settled on a design that resembled a tube with fins on the back and a nose cone. He designed a heat-seeking mechanism that would drive actuators in the fins of the missile and allow it to be attracted to other fighter jets. He developed a firing mechanism and wired it to a trigger on the control stick. As he flew to the west towards Spire Lin, he noticed that there was a great many fighter jets in the sky. He tested out one of his missiles and it worked, killing the enemy from far away.

    He was flying directly over a large army camped in the heartland of the Theocracy. No, not one army. It was the border between two army camps. There was a large festival down below. The enemy fighter jets seemed to be orbiting this area. He wasn''t certain why. Spire Lin was to the west, and at the base of the Spire, through a gap in the clouds, was an unfamiliar view of a familiar place.

    He gave could see the Spine, the University Fjord with it''s double-arch Bank and the tall tree-like campus administration building. The gentle slope of the snowclad grass of the University Fjord. Finally, the great White Chasm itself, which was indeed just that. A chasm, with many bridges and dwelling build into the walls, painted white with snow.

    He was admiring his home city when something hit him in the face and destroyed most his chest and throat.

    Annoying.

    He reached out and took control of all the flesh, blood, and metal that had been displaced, and carefully put it back where it was supposed to go. He made himself immune to physical trauma, which would have been a good idea, in retrospect. More projectiles rapidly tore at his fighter jet. He looked up.

    It was the most beautiful thing that he had seen in his entire life.

 Chapter 39: Crysien Raptor

    Quinn was astonished. It was completely smooth and rounded in many places. The surface of the fighter jet was completely red, and it did not appear to have a glass canopy. It was likely coated in layers of the expensive material called crysien that he had used on his engine back at the University. His powers would not work on that thing, he realized. Very very good design.

    The thing peppered him with bullets from it''s cannon. The bullets were also coated in crysien, so barriers did not stop them. The craft flew straight behind him at a curve and pointed it''s nose at him again, peppering him with projectiles.

    Wait, that should not be possible.

    The thing maneuvered again. A symphony of control surfaces activated, not just the three axis controls that Quinn''s fighter jet had. Quinn counted dozens of moving parts. Surfaces on the front of the wing that changed the shape of the wing, it had two tails with two rudders each at a slight angle so that they could move inward or outward for extra elevator control. Genius!

    However, the thing was still doing stuff that should be impossible. It would get caught in a flat spin over his head, but still manage to point the nose at him and blast his airplane apart with cannon fire. It was dancing in the sky directly above his head and it always seemed to be able to point it''s nose at him and use it''s cannon. No matter how fast he could turn, it could always turn faster. It seemed to always be in a blind spot. Most of his effort was spent repairing the damage to his fighter with his powers. He struggled to focus on where the enemy was spatially.

    Then Quinn noticed that there were these cute little nozzles on the exhaust that could vector the thrust.

    That. Changed Everything.

    He needed to get close to the ground so he could pull up more minerals and add those. Those beautiful, beautiful thrust vectoring thingies. He pointed his nose at the ground and started his descent. The ground below was a patchwork of dark rock and white snow. The sky in all directions was a cacophony of billowing black, gray, and white clouds. There was a pocket of clear air directly blow him and he flew into it.

    That had been a mistake. As soon as he did, the crimson fighter jet above him fired missiles at him. He could not block them.

    His fighter jet ripped apart in the sky. He reached out to try and grab the pieces and repair it, but the explosion had released some sort of red fog that was weakening his powers. Then he noticed that in every direction, hundred of fighter jets were firing missiles at his falling form. Not all of them were aiming at him, more like a cloud of missiles that would explode around him in a firework pattern.

    You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

    Those explosions blew most of the pieces far away from him, making it difficult to sense the metals. The sound deafened him. His flesh burned and the shrapnel tore his body to shreds.

    He was falling then, his clothes burned away. He was using all his power to heal himself. He figured he would just go underground and build another fighter jet, this time with those beautiful thrust vectoring nozzles. Then he would be unstoppable.

    He was busy designing the new airplane when he hit the ground.

    Annoying.

    He landed in a snowy field, surrounded by trees caked with snow. The wind was blowing the snow off the trees. The sky above was gray. The crimson airplane continued to pound him with those nasty red-mist missiles.

    Fucking annoying.

    He stood up, and in front of him he saw the light of dawn, burning with the intensity of the heart of a fighter jet. It came closer. Burning, burning.

    It was a woman with a gauntlet on one hand, traveling at likely faster than the speed of sound, her clothes pressed skin-tight against her body, with fire all around her and something much worse burning as well. She started moving faster towards him.

    Wait no, she wasn''t moving faster. The snow blowing from the trees was also moving faster as well. And faster, and faster. Wait, why couldn''t he think of a reason? Why did he feel so stupid? Where was he again? What had he been doing? And why did he feel so weak? He reached for ether and found almost nothing, barely a trickle. That burning red mist around her was revolting. Wrongness.

    Then the woman ripped out his throat. He snapped back hard enough to crack trees, and sank into a snow bank.

    He sat in the snow, bleeding. The woman didn''t really have any expression on her face. It was as if she could not see him. She adjusted her clothes and her pointy witch hat. Her long golden hair blew in the gentle breeze along with the wintery powder from the trees.

    Wait? Was that Kiera Blaine?!

    It was. Those were oculomancer eyes. It didn''t make any sense. Could she always fly at supersonic speeds? How did she even know to be here as he fell?

    Oh wait, he was dying. He needed to heal, fast. He tried to use the tiny trickle of ether that he could sense to heal his throat. He found it was impossible. There was some shifting, evolving, self-healing maze of crysien infecting his wounds. He was bleeding all over. He would bleed out before he could fix it.

    A fighter jet flew over Kiera''s head. It was the color of sunset, and blood.

    Then it hit him.

    Brother, help! BROTHER! HELP!

    <hr>

    Kiera continued to look only at the vendark spectrum as the golden glow of the man faded and finally went totally black. She could hear the sounds of fighter jets overhead. She waited a few minutes to make sure that the golden glow did not return. She was still burning sien, still creating an entropic field to block powers.

    Her sien ran out. She shifted her eyes back into the visual spectrum. The man was naked, his clothes likely burned away by the missiles. And he had a familiar face.

    "Quinn?!" She gasped. It was Quinn. She had killed Seth''s brother.

    She felt, not pain, and not pity. Not hatred. Not regret. She felt empathy. He must have felt that he was born into the wrong world the entire time. Every time he looked up into the sky and dreamed of flying there, but the whole of human infrastructure was perfected to prevent that.

    Fiona''s red fighter jet flew over Kiera''s head. It flipped upside down into a flat spin and shot off flares in salute to Kiera''s kill. Then it''s thrust vectoring pointed the nose at the sky and it rocketed off. Fiona vanished into the clouds.

 Epilogue

    Zachary stood in front of two graves somewhere in the University of White Chasm. The first had an epitaph that read "I REFUSE", which Kiera insisted was the last thing that he had said that she could actually have written in public. The second grave read "I TAKE MY OWN RISKS BROTHER". Kiera knelt before the first grave.

    "You were just born into the wrong world," Keira said. Then she knelt in front of the second grave. "Seth, I will celebrate your life." Then she opened a bottle of cherry wine and poured it over Seth''s grave.

    Piss on Quinn''s grave, Annatiki said.

    After Kiera left the graveyard he did as she commanded.

    The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

    I hate people like him. Annatiki said. I fear the problems that the infinite future will throw at our order. The oculomancers are going to be telling stories about that man, who discovered flight and then became a witch, for generations. But I have a strong feeling that things will get easier from here on out, now that Renna''s clan has fallen.

    Zachary walked through the campus to an empty classroom in the corner. He opened the door and stepped inside. The bright eyes of young men turned to face him.

    "Have you come to join the aviation club?" the man at the end of the room asked.

    "Something like that," Zachary said. He melted the doorknob so it wouldn''t open.

    Fiona says that these ones have already invented the three-axis control system. Their records are being scrubbed as we speak.

    Then the screaming began.

    THE END

 Appendix A: Worldbuilding

    Nations and Politics

    At the start of the story, there are three main spheres of influence: The Empire of Nydia, the Theocracy of the Lawgiver, and the Truscasia Defensive Alliance.

    The Empire of Nydia controls the entire top half of the continent, including the island continent of Vjiskald. Central Nydia is controlled by the Heritors of House Varelion. Cloudsea is controlled by the Heritors of House Blaine. Lin is controlled by the Heritors of House Aden. Vjiskald is a loose collection of tribes led by King Vash, but is not controlled by any Heritor family. Tiamir is mostly unoccupied but the armies of Vjiskald protect against border incursions from Andomei.

    The Theocracy of the Lawgiver in the ancient region of Renna is currently occupied by the armies of Empress Sasha of House Varelion.

    Truscasia has more technology than other nations, and is led by the Heritors of House Valka. There are many secret factories in this nation where fighter jet components are constructed, under the oversight of Sophia the Engineer. Truscasia leads a defensive alliance with Zairo and Andomei, both nations led by their own Heritor families with matching names.

    Finally there is unclaimed land around Spire Erika which is too cold for any nation to claim. Sophia the Engineer has built secret ski resorts and airports in this region that the Heritors sometimes use for recreation.

    Spires

    The Elder Saint leads the other witches from her seat of power at Spire Annatiki. She sometimes flies to other Spires as well.

    Fiona of the Morning Mist is the only witch that does not have a Spire named after her. This is because she is responsible for controlling the world''s airspace, killing witches before they develop their powers, and punishing wayward Heritors. Her duties prevent her from staying in the same place for too long.

    Spire Lin is where Lin the Historian trains oculomancers in the methods used to corrupt the world''s textbooks. These corruptions are designed in such a way so as to slow down anyone who is attempting to invent an aircraft. The University of White Chasm, where commoners are trained to use auras, is administered from this Spire.

    You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

    Spire Renna does not have a resident witch, however this Spire specializes in propaganda. The Scouring of the Stacks was organized by the oculomancers of this Spire.

    Spire Sophia is where Sophia the Engineer designs fighter jet components and weapon systems. There are factories in the Spire where new fighter jets are assembled and old fighter jets are maintained.

    Spire Nydia is where Nydia the Midwife manages the various Heritor families. There are facilities in this Spire that aid in the fertility, birth, education, and marriage of Heritors. Nearby, on the north coast of the unclaimed land, north of Spire Erika, is the Eight Color Monastery, where Heritors are trained to use their auras. This school is administered by Spire Nydia.

    Spire Diana is in the ocean, and specializes in submarine component assembly and maintenance. Diana uses this Spire as her home base, and has aircraft carriers nearby so she can fly up to her Spire.

    Finally, the unoccupied Spire in Cloudsea has been renamed Spire Kiera and a new city at the top of the Spire is being constructed for her use. This Spire will specialize in medical technology and the central administration of the world''s hospitals.

    Note: the Banks are not administered by the Spires, and while the oculomancers have significant oversight of the banks, the banks are also relatively independent, provided that they follow Spire Law.

    The Triumvirate

    The Triumvirate consists of three major factions: The Heritors, the Banks, and the Oculomancers. These three factions work together to control and develop the world. The Triumvirate Precepts are a set of laws that all members must follow. This includes the three oaths: We and our descendants shall not seek the Ven. We and our descendants shall not enter into the Tombs of the Founders. We and our descendants shall craft no machine in the likeness of a bird.

    The Triumvirate was created by the witches, under the command of the Elder Saint. All members of the triumvirate must follow the orders of the witches, and any witch can free any member of the triumvirate from any oath and supersede that oath with their own.

    The Heritors often give themselves titles such as King or Emperor, however the witches do not recognize these titles. The Heritors have vast auras and are primarily responsible for having sien available for Annatiki or Kiera to consume in an emergency when killing other witches. They are also responsible for governing the masses, preventing the spread of unwanted ideologies, making and enforcing local laws, and levying taxes.

    The Banks are responsible for storing sien and leasing auras out to commoners. They issue currency as well in each nation where they operate. The currency is always pegged to units of sien/month. The Banks are also responsible for preventing deflationary spirals by slowly creating inflation. This requires that Annatiki periodically pull down more sien from the Sister World to give to them.

    The Oculomancers are the closest faction to the witches, as they occupy the Spires. Oculomancers can tell when a person is lying, they can see diseases, they can see bloodlines, they can see inside the human body, and they can see into the vendark. They can communicate across long distances with infinite speed using aura flashes. Each Spire specializes in a different task, though many oculomancers leave the Spire to work in Banks, brothels, or hospitals.