1
BOWED LOW IN her saddle, Nyx rode out the tempest atop Bashaliia. Her mount’s leathery wings were swept wide, their tips vanishing into the dark clouds to either side. It was as if Nyx were part of the storm, birthed from its fury, heralded by thunder, framed by lightning.
She leaned closer to the furry warmth of her winged brother. But their truer communion was in the shared thrum of bridle-song. She sang to Bashaliia, a tuneless chorus of reassurance, while he keened back at her, twining his golden melody to hers.
Her message was a simple one.
Return to the ship.
Within the storm’s grip, Nyx peered through goggles that protected her eyes. The world around her was reduced to swirling mists and lashing rain. Hail pelted her leather-clad body. Above, black clouds cloaked the sun. Below, the land and sea had vanished.
She shivered in the cold and clung tight to Bashaliia. It was as if they had never escaped the Frozen Wastes and were still trapped in its perpetually icy darkness.
But that’s not so.
Last midwinter, she and the others had fled from the Crèche aboard their wyndship. Even with the Fyredragon’s huge forge-engines, it had taken them until the tail end of spring to reach the broken scarp of the Ebyn Mountains that bordered the Eastern Crown. Unfortunately, it was just in time to run into the teeth of the monsoon season, where storm after storm swept the region. The ship’s navigator, Fenn—who had lived most of his life in this half of the world—had warned them of this danger.
Still, with the threat of moonfall drawing ever closer, they had dared not wait. Plus, Graylin and Darant had believed the Fyredragon could use the cover of the storms to cross this arc of the Crown, to avoid the eyes of their enemies.
But such was not the will of the gods.
As they entered the Eastern Crown, the storms had proven far worse than expected. Four days in, lightning struck the ship. The blast ripped away the stern cables that secured the ship’s balloon and destroyed one of its flank forges. The damage forced them to land on the island of Spindryft in the middle of the seas of the Eastern Crown.
Repairs proved tedious. Two months slipped away, and now midsummer would soon be upon them. They all sensed the press of time, especially with the looming threat weighing on them.
Moonfall …
A full year ago, Nyx had her poisonous vision of the moon crashing into the Urth and destroying all life, a prophecy further supported by the alchymies of Frell and Krysh. Through their farseeing lenses, the moon’s full face had been growing incrementally larger, drawing inevitably closer to the world. Back then, they had all heard Shiya’s own assessment, gleaned from ta’wyn knowledge reaching back to the Forsaken Ages. The bronze woman had placed a date upon this doom.
In five years’ time. Maybe as short as three.
And now a year of that span was gone.
Urgency sharpened Nyx’s bridle-song to a demanding note.
Bashaliia responded and dove steeply through the lashing rain. Even this storm—unusual for midsummer—was a reminder that all was not right with the world. The ship’s alchymist, Krysh hy Eljen, had expressed concern that the savagery of the season’s storms was likely fueled by the moon’s approach. Tides had become more extreme. Quakes continued to rock the globe. It was as if the Urth itself trembled at the inevitable doom to come.
As Bashaliia dove lower, the dark clouds broke around rider and mount. The seas appeared below, lit by flashes of lightning. White-capped waves lined the dark waters, sweeping toward the forested island of Spindryft. The atoll was ringed by reefs and protected by spires of black rock that stuck out of the sea. The route to its small port was treacherous, even in calm waters. Still, ships—bearing sigils from many lands—crowded the docks below. Spindryft was part of no kingdom or empire. It served as a neutral trading post for most of the Eastern Crown. Even long-haulers out of the Western Crown circled the Urth’s seas to come to this side of the world to barter for spices, silks, and rare ores.
Bashaliia sped toward the island without any guidance. By now, the Mýr bat knew his way back to their ship. The Fyredragon occupied a berth in Spindryft’s mooring field, positioned in the highlands above the port. Scores of wyndships filled other slots, their balloons jostling in the storm winds.
Nyx easily spotted the Fyredragon among them. Not only was it the largest, but its sculpted draft-iron figurehead had been carved into a wyrm with its head rearing high, its wings outstretched, hugging the bow’s flanks. Firepots across the open upper deck blazed in the rainy gloom, setting the dragon afire.
Their ship’s berth lay off to one side, separate from its neighbors. None dared approach too closely, especially given the Fyredragon’s dangerous cargo.
Nyx guided Bashaliia toward their encampment.
As they neared the fiery ship, Bashaliia swung in a smooth arc toward the stern, keeping the bulk of the gaseous balloon between them and the other vessels. Nyx had been warned by Graylin to keep her flights hidden from sight. The cover of the storm had offered her this rare opportunity to venture forth with her winged brother.
But now it was over.
Bashaliia raced the last of the distance. He cupped his wings and landed deftly in the meadow behind the moored ship.
Raised voices drew Nyx’s attention to the side. Graylin and the pirate Darant hy Tarn crowded with a group of men near a tent. It served as a makeshift smithy for their repair work. The damaged forge-engine had already been restored and was being dragged on sledges, ready to be remounted onto the ship. Darant and his daughter, Glace, had also used the time to inspect the remaining forges, resecure the ripped cables, and fill the balloon’s gasses.
The hope was to be underway in the next few days.
But there remained one critical refurbishment of the ship that was beyond the scope of Darant’s crew. Before they traveled into the sunblasted Barrens, it would have to be completed.
Nyx stared through the storm toward the west. She pictured where they must travel next and felt a hopeless despair.
For untold millennia, the Urth had circled the sun with one side always facing the burning glare of the Father Above, while its far side remained forever frozen in icy darkness. The Crown lay between those extremes—a circlet of land trapped between ice and fire.
Last winter, Nyx and the others had crossed the Urth’s frozen darkness, traveling from their homelands in the Western Crown to this eastern side of the world. In those icy lands, they had discovered the Crèche and its people—the Pantheans—who made their home deep under the ice. There, they had also encountered the distant brethren of Bashaliia—the raash’ke—deadly ice bats who shared those dark and frigid lands. The colony had been tainted and enslaved by a half-crazed ta’wyn, an immortal bronze sentinel named the Spider, one of the traitorous Revn-kree who sought dominion over the planet. The Spider had been tasked to guard one of the massive world-moving machines, the turubya, hidden in the Frozen Wastes. Nyx and the others had defeated that deadly guardian, freeing both the raash’ke and the Pantheans. In doing so, they had also activated the turubya, readying the great engine to do the impossible: to set the world to spinning again—as their planet had done untold millennia ago.
Such was the only hope of stopping moonfall, of driving the moon back into its proper orbit. But to achieve that required activating a second turubya, one buried far in the Barrens, the sunblasted half of the Urth. By all accounts, the journey there would be even more treacherous than the one taken this past winter, especially given the threat that awaited them. The turubya in the Barrens was guarded over not just by a single Reven-kree, but by a small army, one led by a ta’wyn far more powerful than that bronze Spider.
Nyx searched to the west, recognizing a hard truth.
How can we hope to defeat such a force?
Still, her fingers tightened on her reins, accepting what was equally certain.
Because we must.
A shout rose behind her. “Nyx!”
Startled, she swung in her saddle and spotted Jace hy Shanan, her friend and former tutor, rushing toward her from a gangway into the Fyredragon. He lifted an arm and smiled broadly, his cheeks flushing above his ruddy beard.
The ship’s alchymist, Krysh, accompanied Jace. The lanky older man hailed from the rugged ranchlands of Aglerolarpok and kept an easy pace with his long-legged strides.
“You’re both back!” Nyx called over as she slid out of her saddle and landed in the wet grass. Still, she kept one palm on Bashaliia’s flank.
The two men were dressed in traveler’s cloaks fitted with hoods. They must have come directly from the port. The two had left a fortnight ago, sailing south to the Kingdom of Bhestya. Their goal was to scour ancient texts related to the Barrens. The librarie complex at the kingdom’s capital was said to have the most extensive collection pertaining to those sunblasted lands.
Jace closed the distance toward her. “You must hear what we have to tell you! And see what we found! Not just a crate of books, but also a crude map of the Barrens. I can’t wait to show it to Fenn.”
Nyx had no doubt the ship’s navigator would find such a chart immensely useful, as little was known of the lands beyond the sandy necropolises that bordered the edge of the Crown.
When Jace reached her, Bashaliia twisted his neck with a low hiss of warning. Still attuned to her winged brother, Nyx felt the frazzle of emerald fire behind the golden glow of his bridle-song.
Jace backed a step. “Sorry. I should know better than to rush at him.”
“At least he didn’t snap at you this time,” Krysh added, keeping a wary distance himself.
Heat rose to Nyx’s cheeks. “Between the storm and being cooped up inside the ship for so long, he’s in poor spirits.”
She ran a palm over the crown of the bat’s head, knowing neither explanation was the truth. After defeating the Spider, Bashaliia remained plagued by bouts of fury, which was so unlike his typical calm manner. She pictured the corrupting bridle-song that had trapped not only the raash’ke, but also Bashaliia for a spell. Nyx had broken him free, but some damage remained.
She pictured her winged brother when she had first encountered him a year ago. He had been no bigger than a winter goose. Poisoned shortly thereafter, Bashaliia had died, but not before his spirit and memory were preserved by the immense horde-mind of the Mýr bat colony and moved into another body—one larger and older. Then last winter, Nyx had been forced to slit his throat, to free him yet again. With the help of the raash’ke, she had moved Bashaliia’s essence into the abused body of Kalyx, a Mýr bat who had been enslaved by Iflelen forces and tortured into a monster.
Nyx’s fingers felt the old scars across Bashaliia’s scalp, hidden now under his regrown pelt. They marked where copper needles had been drilled into Kalyx’s brain. The enslaving needles had been removed, but some damage remained—wounds that went far deeper than flesh and bone. It fueled a fiery madness, an ailment that might never fully heal.
As bound as she was with Bashaliia, she herself was not unscathed. It was a burden she accepted and shared, knowing she owed Bashaliia: for his love, for his brotherhood, for his sacrifice. Even the bat’s wary reaction to Jace might not be solely born of madness, but possibly incited by Nyx’s own deep-seated misgivings about Jace.
She stared over at her friend, studying him circumspectly.
Like all of them, Jace had not escaped the Frozen Wastes untouched. He had nearly died—and maybe had for a spell—after being blasted by the energies of the turubya when it had been activated. Before he had been revived, Nyx had probed him with strands of her bridle-song. She discovered a vast emptiness inside him, one far larger than could be contained within his small skull. Even now, that memory iced through her. After Jace had recovered, that emptiness had vanished. He seemed like her same old friend.
Still …
She hid a wince. Guilt ate at her for her continuing wariness of him, especially for a friend who had always been loyal. She stared up at Bashaliia.
Have you been sensing my unease? Is that why you reacted so poorly?
To soothe her own heart as much as Bashaliia’s, she sang chords of reassurance to him and shook off her angst.
She stared up at the bulk of the wyndship. “I’d like to see that old map, but first I must get Bashaliia settled into the hold. I’ll meet you both at the Fyredragon’s wheelhouse. I saw Fenn up there before I headed out.”
Krysh’s eyes narrowed. “I’ll leave that task to you and Jace. I must secure the crates in my cabin and begin cataloging the books. In the meantime, hopefully the map will offer some guidance for Fenn and the ship’s captain to determine the best route across the Barrens. We must be underway as soon as possible. We’re already drawing too much attention.”
The alchymist glanced over to Bashaliia.
“What do you mean?” Nyx asked.
Jace’s next words grew doleful. “Over in Bhestya, word of a dragon-helmed ship, one carrying a hold full of winged beasts, has spread to those shores.”
“And rumors will continue to fly farther afield the longer we sit idle,” Krysh added. “Until word reaches the wrong ears.”
Nyx understood. They may have escaped the Hálendiian forces in the Frozen Wastes, but surely the enemy was still hunting them. She had no doubt that both the king’s legions and the Iflelen dogs led by Wryth il Faash were scouring the Crown for any sign of them. So far, it seemed their group had not been discovered. But every day they tarried in Spindryft, the risk grew.
Nyx pointed to where Graylin and Darant wrestled the repaired ship’s forge-engine toward the Fyredragon. “Jace, alert Graylin and Darant about what you heard.”
“I’ll let them know.” Jace swung away but glanced over a shoulder. “Then I’ll meet you at the wheelhouse.”
Nyx nodded her acknowledgment and set off with Bashaliia toward the Fyredragon’s stern ramp.
Krysh followed her, but he kept a buffer between him and the massive Mýr bat. The alchymist suddenly stopped midstride. He stared up at the layer of dark clouds, which hugged close to the top of the firelit balloon of the Fyredragon.
Nyx followed his gaze.
Dark shapes scythed out of the storm—one, then another, then three more.
Nyx’s heart clenched into a knot, but it wasn’t out of fear. She recognized those who swept down toward the ship. Before leaving the Crèche, the Pantheans had gifted their group with five of the raash’ke to accompany them on this journey, to serve as formidable mounts for the task ahead of them. The hulking ice bats carried riders—all trainees—saddled on their backs. Like her and Bashaliia, the group must have decided to use the cover of the storm to hone their skills.
Copyright © 2025 by James Czajkowski
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