It is a known fact that the intercontinental war was just a spillover from the main battlegrounds back on the ancestral continent of Occidania. What history almost fails to mention is, there was a third party who did not take part in the war rather, they chose to adopt a non-interventionist stance as the whole continent went to the Pits with the squabbles of various monarchies, duchies and other form of blue-blood governance. This was the Drkahryggur Imperium. Ever thought why the embossments on the obverse and the reverse of gold coins, and imperial coins came from? Excerpt from Valerith Quilworth’s Treatise on the History of the Alkerdian Continent.

Day fell away and darkness took over the reins. There were no moons in the sky, only the stars and nebulas shining with their unfettered brilliance against the dark firmament. Most of the mana storm had passed but and even though its vestiges still lingered around, the light of Lux crystals bathed the town.

Under the floating mage lights, the ambience, food and drink was akin to that of a festival. Celebratory laughter rent the air as the towners shared in the mood—disaster had been averted. By who, the Guard didn't mention since only a couple of witnesses were there to see it for themselves.

Across the town walls where the Guards and adventurers shared a stiff drink, the hulk of a monster lay, a smoldering husk as it could be seen from that far. Smoking stumps and ash dotted the surrounding landscape, painting a grim image of what had taken place. While most of the explosion had been redirected to the sky, there had been no stopping the aftermath of the fire that had burned the surrounding forest to the ground. Perhaps it was for the best, because it burned the effusion from the monster that would have tainted the surrounding area. Nature would sprout from the ashes again.

As the Aldmoorian’s descended into merriment, they were oblivious to the aership rising from the chasm, the scar left on the land after the deep wurm's eruption into the world above. In the darkness, its silhouette was no less imposing with its knifehead-like visage. The bow lights had been left unlit, while the pulses of arcane thruster fire seemed somewhat subdued as if the ship was running on fumes.

Perhaps it was all the better that people were deep in their cups because the Stormbreaker’s crew needed to fly discreetly. Therefore as stealthy as an aership against the night sky could be, the dark silhouette glided over the walls unseen like a nocturnal aerial predator .

Arcis navigated the craft towards the Lalilab’s estate, which was surprisingly quiet. The garden Lux crystals on the back porch were lit showing that there was yet some activity from the residents of the mansion.

However, the atmosphere there was rather somber, a departure from the rest of the town. Conversations were muted even as a gathering of acquaintances sat around on wicker chairs. At a glance, it was obvious that their mood was in the dumps.

The mood suddenly shifted as a sudden gust of air alerted them to the descending craft. A quartet of turquoise flames brightened up the vicinity of the little glade garden as gasps of relief and surprise escaped the onlookers. On their watch, the gun-metal gray outline of a peculiar vessel intruded into the illumination.

It was with no less shock that they regarded the hissing steam, leaking water and marred hull; the aership also looked battleworn from the scuffs and scratches, pockmarks and burns. But all that was put to rest when the landing struts extended fully. Careful to avoid crushing the garden flowers and sculptures, the synth at the helm deftly coaxed the vessel sideways, parking it parallel to the perimeter wall. With a groan, the leaf springs flexed as the bulk of the vessel finally made landfall.

First to step out of the hatch door was the man of the hour—Arthur who suddenly became their center of attention. Gazing over the small gathering, he found equal parts awe and cautious looks. Nonetheless, he’d put up a strong front irrespective of the bruises and aches smarting all over his body from their daring escapade; the presence of his companions served a reassuring bastion of confidence.

Peeking from behind him was his adopted daughter, comically behaving as a child would. It was non-sequitur that she could out-maneuver a battle schooner and face a deep wurm head on yet shy away from normal people. It was a comical departure from the girl who’d done the unthinkable in the face of insurmountable odds, saving both ship and crew.

“Arthur…” Edel called out, breaking the tense silence. The [Alchemist] motioned for one of the house guards to get a gardening step ladder, but Arthur beat him to it, jumping down on his own. Nora did as well, keeping [Shadow Port] under wraps, the less people knew about it the better.

With a depth, well technically a combined draught and freeboard of that came to a height of 2 mesurs it would have been a stretch ro expect an Erythean child to jump down. Arcis seemed to hesitate like a small animal, looking to and from the open hatch and the people below. She peered over the gunwale, hemming and hawing in hesitation not because of the drop but because she was rather anxious. Arthur seemed to notice this and came towards the ship,

“I'll catch you,” Arthur called out to her, offering his hands with an eye roll. Arthur knew her constitution was sturdier than that, but they kept up appearances in case someone was watching. Their entrance might have been inconspicuous but nothing screamed out of place than an aership parked in the backyard—Erythean aerships seldom made landfall even. Arcis seemed to nod; her expression turned mischievous however—

“Hey, wait...what are you—”

She jumped.

Some sore arms and more bruises later, Arthur was in the midst of the Lalilabs, peppered with questions. Nora was likewise, by no less than Elena and Nevine who asked what had transpired.

“ I was so worried when the Guard told me about what happened.” Edel opined. “We also felt the earthquake while we were in the safe room.”

“Er, yeah—” Arthur scratched the back of his neck wryly “ that happened. It might have been a tad too powerful what we made,”

“A pity you had to sacrifice your artifact while at it.”

“Nothing to it,” Arthur said ,sighing forlornly. “That can be replaced, the lives of the people of Aldmoor ,not so much,”

“And the dwarves?” Edel asked. “Last I heard they were in the area…”

“Huh? How'd you know? Did Orhill tell you that? I recall seeing him over the town walls.”

“Of course. He came by after the Guard did,” the alchemist supplied. “Told him everything about the weapon too.”

“I see; we're not out of the woods yet.” Arthur remarked. “We caught the eyes of the dwarves too; by dawn they'll be combing the vicinity for any sign of us. I'm sure they've marked us.”

He paused looking at the people around them, Arcis had somehow found herself the subject of snuggles from Hannah. The sunny girl was gushing over the shy synth, much to the fluster of her maid. Nora, Elena and Nevine were also in a heated discussion of their own.

“So why did you risk coming back here?” It was the wife who spoke. “After what the council also did to you…”

“Eh, I had to see a friend for the last time.” Arthur remarked, looking at the Alchemist.

“I am glad to call you my friend as well,”

“Master Arthur!” Hanna shrieked, dragging Arcis along. “Please say you're going to stay longer.”

“I would love to. Unfortunately, circumstances are not on my side” Arthur said ruefully as the younger girl approached him.

“You’re leaving?” Hanna asked, deflating a little. Her hand loosened just enough for the synth to scamper away from him and run to Arthur with a helpless expression. There was nothing of [Host-Mind] in that face. Arthur sighed, nodding acknowledgement to the Lalilab girl.

She stared longingly, at the 42 mesur long vessel sitting in their backyard. It felt like getting an aership was just a touch, a couple of paces away. Yet it filled her with anxiety when she saw the marks of battle on the ship. The enormity of getting one for herself stared at her in the face; she was still resolved that some day she'd get one of her own.

“Father… Can we buy one too?” she seemed to mumble in hesitation.

“Ah…” Edel looked at his wife. His wife too hesitated as she mulled over their daughter's wish. The elder sister and brother also craned their necks to see what would become of it; of three of them, Hanna was the most doted on.

“Much as I would loathe to cast a cloud on your aspirations,” Arthur interrupted. “It will take a while to change the status quo. Besides our Stormbreaker is not yet done and—”

“Ah,” Hanna seemed to slump further.

“Easy easy Miss Lalilab,” Arthur quickly added. “Just because it'll take a while does not mean it'll take forever. I'm sure many other people are willing to jump at the chance to have one of their own too. I just have to find the right people in power, or pose such a significant deterrent that the dwarves will have to bow to having other aerships in Erythean skies.”

That seemed to cheer up the girl somewhat; Edel quickly jumped in to redirect the conversation elsewhere.

“Son... you'd better keep more wits about you,” Edel said. “While I am averse to creating arcane weaponry, I think you should do everything to ensure you're not corralled into a corner.” Edel said, pointedly looking at the Stormbreaker's new scars.

“I understand….I think,” Arthur said.“ I'd love to stay longer, however, I fear we must part before someone notices her. She does look out of place on your estate.” Arthur added, looking at the starlit skies.

“But before that—Arcis,” he looked at his adopted daughter who'd been silent all the while, he crouched down to her and whispered,“ Think we can get them a comm badge?” while winking at the end. Arcis' face crinkled her face in confusion before it dawned on her.

“Oh,” she muttered, as she made a show of rifling through her dress pockets and took out a teardrop shaped locket. It had an insignia of an S in the shape of a dragon in the foreground, with sharp edges where the latter curved on itself. Wings sprouted from the top half and the bottom half slanting down to form the sides of an A in the background. The metal it was molded from was burnished silver with tiny sylvani runes on its periphery.

Wide-eyed, Hanna received the locket from the shy synth with an incredulous expression, until she flipped it open and saw the galaxy blue and purple gem inset within.

“With this, I think you can reach us anytime,”Arthur roused the girl from her trance. ” You can just hail us with [Farspeak], or send a [Message] with a stored matrix, though, that'll depend on how far it can reach and how adept you are at using communication spells.” Arthur shrugged as he rubbed at the back of his neck.

“By Thea,” Odessa seemed to gasp with her hand to her lips.

“What is it dearie?” Edel asked worriedly.

Odessa Lalilab took halting steps towards her daughter,” I've heard the stories of sylvani artifacts that can send your voice to another as if you were there with them but those were expensive,” her eyes twinkled as she took both of Hanna's hands in hers.

“Likewise I heard about dwarven artifacts in the big cities that help people send [Message]. But out here in the frontier those are hard to find ; I had to learn the spell matrix the hard way,” she said as she gazed at Arthur, an inscrutable expression on her face.

“Eh, It's the least I can do,” Arthur said, scratching the back of his neck. “We'll hail you sometime…”Arthur said, pulling away from the family.

Nora and Elena seemed to take that as their cue to leave; Nevine looked torn between staying and going but he finally made up his mind and jogged after the two. The gardening step ladder was hoisted against the Stormbreaker's hull so they just went up the gunwale as the Lalilabs watched below.

“Nevine…” Arthur held back the younger man by his shoulders. The freckled boy seemed to shrink back a little from the more imposing of the two. “Relax, I heard about what you did for Arcis. I don't know about you but...the Guard won't be pleased with what happened. ”

”“I—,”

”Not that I'm ungrateful or anything but, are you sure about this?” Arthur asked with a narrowed brow,” We're up against the dwarves and maybe even the Magocracy if what Arcis told me is true.”

The boy gulped at the implications, he peeked over Arthur's shoulder at the aership. Steam was still wafting from beneath the landing strut and the battle scars stood stark clear against the lights of Lux crystals.

“My luggage is already on board, I would be a fool to disembark at the last minute,” Nevine said with resolution in his face.

“And your mother?” Arthur inquired. Arcis had told him all about the guild intern—former guild intern, who helped her escape.

“She'll get a letter,” the boy said, looking over his shoulders, the Lalilabs were crowding around the youngest member of the family as they gushed over the artifact.

“Fine then, I'd like to welcome you to the Stormbreaker's provisional crew,” Arthur said, patting the boy at the back. He stood aside to watch him clamber up the stepladder.

With one look at the family, he too got onto the Stormbreaker, lingering a little before he tapped his watch, now transmuted to resemble a sylvani telecry. Arthur found it more comfortable wearing it on his wrist instead of his breast like a ripoff of a sci-fi communicator.

“ Arcis…”

“ Yes Pa?” a voice replied. The arcane watch was linked to his Psiphone and of the two it would be less conspicuous to use in public.

“Prepare for take-off”

“Right away Pa,” the arcane watch winked out just as Stormbreaker’s engines whirred to life. The vessel rumbled beneath his feet, kicking up gusts of wind. The family turned their attention to the aership which, ever so slowly retracted its landing struts as its hover turned into a climb.

“Arthur! ” Edel the alchemist called out.

“Yes?!”

“Surely you wouldn't mind if we were willing to fast track your efforts with some coin?!”

”Huh?!” Arthur couldn't hear him over the whirr of the mana thrusters. “ Say that again?”

“Think of it as an apology from my wife for how the council treated you!”

The last words were swallowed by the wind, as the Stormbreaker had already ascended over the mansion. It turned away from the town, away from the trade routes where an occasional dwarven mercenary aership might spot them and zoomed off into the dark night.

The good thing about runecraft, unlike electronics, was the creation of independent systems. Independent in the sense that they could be isolated and function sustainably, taking mana from the air and giving out light as in Lux crystals for example.

On the other hand, mundane systems codependent on the arcane did not fare so well; so while the cooling enchantments worked just fine, the heat exchanger was itself not doing so well as it sprung leaks. Either, the steam pipes had been rattled way too much or Arthur was just a bad quality control technician. It hadn’t been that bad; not since [Detect Flaw] had consolidated with [Diagnostics] and became [Appraisal].

So while the older women and a certain bespectacled boy were up on the promenade deck watching glitterbugs flitter through an idyllic night, Arthur and Arcis were stuck in the bowels of the ship fixing pipes and replenishing water. There was no need for emergency flashlights whatsoever.

It was a disconnect from a curbside repair job on Earth where someone would delve into the hood of a car with a flashlight shining into the guts of whichever offending car part had blown a gasket or ground a bearing the wrong way or something. As a result, things had to be switched off. As for the Stormbreaker, the Lux crystal’s ambient lighting akin to that of daylight made repair work surreal.

There were no portside windows at the aft of the engine deck, where an engine compartment was demarcated by its thick bulkheads so the sense of time was skewed somewhat. But Arthur’s internal clock told him it was late in the day, very late because he felt his concentration flag with exhaustion. It had been the longest day; the fight on the walls, sneaking through the city, crafting a weapon, a plan and then delivering the weapon to its target.

It was as he was sealing up the last of the leaks that he raised one of the questions that had been bothering him. The modifications to the ship, if they could work, then they wouldn’t need to depend on the heat-exchanger and neither would they need any moving parts because it worked through incorporeal force.

The tellusphere had saved their ship from crashing into the deep wurm’s pit by holding the aership’s position static relative to its alignment with Eryth. At least that's how Arcis tried to explain it. In effect, everything that was in contact with the Stormbreaker at the moment of imminent impact had its momentum shunted to zero, where did all that energy go? Was the question that was on Arthur’s mind.

They didn't, however, get to test the phenomenon again after extricating themselves from their deadstop as the conduits had been corroded by the excess mana flow; alloyed silver could only withstand so much channeling. Before that, they also had had to wait for the tellusphere to bleed off its excess mana into the surroundings before they could move the aership.

“ Did you know the tellusphere could do that?” Asked Arthur as he looked at his adopted daughter. Arcis was sitting on an empty crate with her palms to her cheeks while her arms rested on her knees. She stared at Arthur, watching him work with the innocent curiosity he’d ever seen out of her, not the cold analytical eyes of [Host-Mind]. The absence of [Host-Mind] was yet another issue he needed to ask about.

“ Y’know Pa, I don't remember much of it, from that time as [Host-Mind] I mean. I feel like something’s missing and not,” she puffed out her cheeks in indignation. “ I knew that the lever switch had to be there because I get these flashes and glimpses of random memories when I sleep..”

“ Like dreams?” Arthur said, frowning.

“ Yeah—like dreams,” Arcis said, jumping down from the crate. “ Somehow,—” She dusted off her dress from the residual metal that had gotten on it when she was transmuting some bracing for fatigued pipes. “ …somehow these dreams are real. I find knowledge I did not know I had; things I don't remember doing.”

The synth paused looking around the ship as if wondering how much alteration she’d covertly done as [Host-Mind]. She was the one feeling responsible for it and had been anxious that Arthur would come to scold her for going behind his back.

“Can’t you reach your other side?”

‘Can your left brain talk to your right?’ Arcis almost wanted to blurt, “ Dunno, “she said instead. “ There is no other side— in fact there is no other, “ she shrugged. “Though,” she mumbled, disillusioned,“ I feel like there’s an unreachable ethereal door somewhere at the back of my mind, hiding something away and I can only tell because some light spills from beneath the door…”

“ Mmh?”

“I don't know, yknow?” she bit her lip, “ things are kind of fuzzy. I remember being smarter than this too, Now? I feel like a processor with limiters,” she threw up her arms. “ Otherwise the dwarven ship would not have strafed our undersides and damaged the ventral thrusters.”

“ Uh, yeah, that… We don't have heavy duty tools hereabouts,” Arthur said. He leaned back against the bulkhead, folding his arms while being wary of the sealed pipes where a chalky sealant dried. [Basic Repair] had well required him to [Appraise] every centum of the pipes before he fixed it; squinting at metal could only push a man’s patience so far.

“ It’s not your fault — ‘sides you got us out of that in one piece. And also, you made us these, '' Arthur said, tapping his newly transmuted arcane watch-telecry hybrid. “ You don't have to constantly feel like you have to go above and beyond to prove yourself to me you know,” Arthur said, yawning. “C'mere, ” he beckoned.“Lets go top-deck….I think I'm going to turn in early tonight,” he said, stifling another yawn with the back of his palm.

“’Kay,” Arcis brightened up as she latched onto his forearm.

Elsewhere, a silhouette squatting on the chimney of a soon to be former Sturmdrache estate looked up from its perch as she spotted the black silhouette streaking off into the night. Brown eyes followed its ascent, almost lazily using [Dark Vision] taking in every curve and edge of the vessel; cataloging features unknown and unknown.

The person sighed, exhalations muffled by its wraparound mask. No presence detected in the proximity, they sat down on the hip of the roof, and removed their cowl, running their gloved fingers across their hair .With another sigh, the shadow put two fingers to its temples and spoke.

“[ Urgent Message]; the dragonling has left the nest. Supplementary report to follow…”

At the same time, another message was sent to a Grand Magus Artificer detailing everything that had transpired that day. For the crew of the Stormbreaker, things were about to get much hairy it seemed.