Sixteen years of not knowing her past, her truth. Sixteen years spent in the arms of the Scattered Shards in Kalderim in the north. Sixteen years training in aetheurgy, training to become a preacher of the Pentax against her wishes.
That was why she’d fled. Drenth called to her. Her past called her.
Surrounded by the Sea of Mist, Drenth was a mega-city unlike any other. One of the few great cities to rise from the ashes of the Fall of Eminence. Protected by the searing desert that bordered the southeastern coastline of the Drakewing Deep, Drenth sprawled. Skyward as well as outward, upwards of one thousand feet. Hundreds of thousands called Drenth home.
But that’s not what made Drenth stand out from the other mega-cities. No, it was something else, something far more dangerous. More ominous, foreboding. Far more connected to her past, even if not yet founded.
But as her gaze took in the city and the beast above, she knew it as truth.
A shadow at this hour, the sun still not breaking its horizonal plane, left the city bathed in umbra. Two thousand feet above, twice the height of the tallest complex, it floated. Anchored by four building-wide chains tethered at the corners of the city, the massive links straining in the early morning sandstorm. It hovered over Drenth like a god, held aloft by burning aethecite, the scree of spent fuel twinkling down upon the city like ashen rain.
Gargantua its name.
The massive floating fortress was city blocks in circumference. Rocky at the base as if Zenith had reached down from His heaven and scooped the earth. Dozens of aethecite-powered propellers fanned in a steady circuit, keeping the bulk afloat, the plumage of the fuel a storm of its own. Metal walls grew out of the stone belly, forming an outer shell. Rotating aethecite-cannons pocked the bulb like a pincushion, enough aetheric firepower to demolish cities whole.
The Fallen’s greatest achievement, his most deadly of weapons. And the harbinger of the orphan’s current condition. For she wasn’t the only one to be torn from family and home by the Fallen and his war against the Pentax Gods.
“Think any ev’r tried to ride ‘un before?”
The girl turned to find a hobgoblin standing next to her at the rail. The ugly voidspawn was all limbs and barely up to her chin. He had short, dark hair that was loosely curled around his pointed ears, and scarce any but wisps atop his gnarled, grey-green skinned skull. He was wiry, with longer arms than his legs, an angular face, and nearly black eyes.
“Have to be daft t’ try, dummy,” said another hobgoblin as he skittered up besides the first, whacking it upside the head. They were twins, the girl had learned. Slow on the uptick but mildly humorous to be around, unless you were the butt of their attentions. “Doubt they make hooks for et, eh, Stray Cat?”
Upon fleeing Kalderim to chase her past, the girl had stowed upon a ship called Marrow’s Lover. She had tried to stay hidden, but one of the deckhands had chanced upon her barely two hours from the Golden Throne. The captain had demanded her name, but the girl had refused. It was unlikely the captain would’ve known a sprat of the Scattered Shards like her, but it helped to be careful. Luckily, the captain hadn’t decided to toss her overboard. The twin hobgoblins had taken to calling her ‘Stray Cat’, so the name stuck, for it didn’t matter to her what they called her.
The girl shrugged in response to the voidspawn, though she did wonder who’d have the seedpods to ever think of riding a vvyrm.
Like any mega-city, though, Drenth had a defined port for airships to dock, but unlike any mega-city, Drenth’s was a singular, fat tower near the city’s southern edge. Made of metal with bays, almost like a cylindrical piece of lace. Hundreds of feet tall, each bay a different size, larger at the base, smaller at the apex. All along the rims of each bay, lights blinked.
It didn’t appear to be very full, perhaps due to the civil war raged by the man the locals called the Gutter King.
The orphan girl leaned upon the bowsprit coughing every now and again, ignoring the sibling hobgoblins as they gawked. Her body clenched from the aetheric poison ripping through her.
Drenth, the orphan girl thought. Home.
Her taskmaster in the Scattered Shards had once told her she was Drenth-born. A babe when the Fallen had invaded the desert city, her parentage unknown. All her taskmaster knew was that she’d been spared from the destruction, placed in his hands because she was special. Special because she was borne of aether, the magic of the Pentax Gods. A harsh taskmaster, he was, but the girl desired only one thing, and one thing only: to uncover her past.
That’s why she’d fled, why she’d come to Drenth. To discover who she was. Of her blood and lineage. O, the girl had many names over her seventeen years of life, but none that were her own. She needed to know, to truly become whole. Drenth was her last chance. She didn’t care that it was a war-torn place.
The captain deftly brought the airship over the outer wall, where vacuums regurgitated the mist into the raging sandstorm, toward the docking bay. Marrow’s Lover was a sleek, seventy-footer, with its aethecite engines amidships port and starboard, and low of keel. Within the bay, people ran about in organized chaos. Some used aethecite-powered lighted sticks to guide them in, others remained ready for the crew to throw their mooring lines.
One of the hobgoblin deckhands tossed his line, a dock worker catching it and tying it off. He jumped over the railing, sliding down to the bay. His twin tried to repeat the process, but his toss was piss-poor, not even close to the worker prepared to receive it. The voidspawn let out a curse while the other cackled on the ground, taunting him.
“What kind of harebrained throw was that, Zig?” the captain demanded as she exited the pilotbox.
“I’m Zag, Cap’n,” said the hobgoblin as he coiled the line, readying for another toss. “Zig’s down ‘ere.”
“One of you needs to grow your bloody hair out or somethin’,” the captain bellowed down to the one on the ground. “I can’t ever tell you buggers apart. I think you do it on godsdamned purpose.”
“’Course we do, Cap’n,” responded Zag with a snaggled-toothed, dung-eating grin. “Where’s the fun be if yous knew who yous was talkin’ t'?”
“Get back to work!” Laughter roiled about the docking bay. “By Mother Marrow, you try me so.” The girl chuckled softly, which drew the ire of the captain. “You think it funny, poppet?”
“Never would I dream of such a thing, Captain LeFleur,” she answered, hiding her grin behind a cough that brought up some tarry phlegm.
“See to it you keep it that way, hear?” Captain Neenah LeFleur said as she rifled through her shaggy brown hair, then tugged at the ascot adorning her pristine, baggy-sleeved shirt, followed by a run of her tongue across her lips while seamlessly admiring the few golden teeth in her smile. All because the pilotbox was a flawlessly reflective surface, allowing the most dashing smuggler—her words—in the Mistlands a chance to laud herself. “Drenth isn’t no place for fools, little bint.”
“The hobbies on your crew tell me otherwise.” Her taskmaster had always said she’d best mind her tongue lest it get herself in a world of trouble, why would she start now? “Captain,” she added when an immaculate brow was raised in her direction.
The few passengers of Captain LeFleur’s ‘legitimate’ business endeavors lined up as a plank was lowered to the docking bay. Two members of the crew—a short, broad-faced dvergir with tattoos covering the entirety of his visible flesh and a cherub-faced giantess with a wicked noose scar wrapping her neck—stood nearby, helping escort them off the airship.
Seeing the final paying guest disembark, the captain returned her attention to the stowaway orphan girl. “Neenah LeFleur suffers none herself. Remember, I could’ve tossed your scrawny backside overboard when Tris found you.” The orphan nodded along; it wasn’t the first time she’d heard such a speech. “Don’t let it be said, Neenah LeFleur doesn’t care for her own when she takes them in. You certain you don’t want to stick with us, poppet? Drenth isn’t a place for younglings your bloody age. Eat you up and swallow you whole. Seen it far too often, godsdamnit. Almost happened to me if you can bloody well believe such a thing. But no one can keep Neenah LeFleur down, not even Zenith on high.”
The girl held back a comment, for once, becoming serious instead. “I have to.”
Neenah appraised her. The girl knew she wasn’t much to look at; skinnier than a fresh sapling with raven black hair and snowy white eyes, but she was Scattered Shards trained, so she could handle herself. Her taskmaster always said she had a warrior’s heart.
“Then best be on with it. I know a place you can squat until you get your bearings. Elian’s a wily bastard, not one to trust with a purse full of quadrans in a dark alley, but he’s a loyal one, if I could bloody say so. Not many in Drenth’s underbelly are the sort. He’s one. On my word, I’ll see you to his place. You godsdamned pissing mind him. I don’t want my hard-earned reputation spoiled by a runaway little runt from Kalderim, hear?”
“Wouldn’t think of it, Captain.” This time the girl meant it. She needed a place to stay if she was going to uncover her past. And Neenah LeFleur’s aura blazed a royal blue, which meant the woman had an honest heart and could be trusted.
Neenah hopped the rail, sliding down the mooring line with a graceful ease that made the girl jealous. Something about the vain smuggler made her cherish what her future might hold. It was a far cry different than her training in the Scattered Shards. More freeing, less demanding.
If anything came out of her flight to Drenth, at least she’d be making her own decisions.
The desert heat assaulted them as they entered the seventh sector in Drenth known as Marketside. It wasn’t the girl’s first trip to Drenth, so she knew all nine sectors, but this was the first time she had been there on her own. Liberating, it was.
In the southern reaches of the desert city’s sprawl, the midday sun normally had full reign of the streets as the floating shade of Gargantua left little cover. But since it wasn’t yet dawnbreak, it wouldn’t be for a few more hours before the Fallen’s behemoth would spill shadows into this sector. The gritty sands of the desert danced about the paved streets with the ankle-high mist a lazy swirl. The sweltering heat was growing worse by the minute.
