Jesandra Dyarwood busied herself with a pair of wooden dice. The main deck of the Silver Spire spread out before her, not like the sky-ship she had called home since she was nothing more than a whimpering babe seeking a mother’s teat, but more like a row of planks with each slab of wood representing another anxious thought into her head. Hastily, she rolled the numbered cubes between her fingers while flipping them between her hands. Dicing had been one of her constants, being the only human ward of the ship’s Ellvaar captain, Alric Dyarwood. Every day a new land. Every night a different set of stars in the sky. But the dice, they remained the same and the girl learned from an early age how to manipulate the die, how to roll the cubes on her fingers just so to make them land on the desired digit.

The crew of the Spire learned to stop dicing with her when she turned seven. Not that she could have blamed them. Most of the crew had assumed she would be an easy mark; teach the girl an early and important lesson on the finer points of life among the clouds; hundreds of sovereigns, a crafted dark steel foot and several bruised egos later and they learned to give the young ward her due respect.

Jesandra tucked her thumb underneath one of the cubes and flicked it into the air above her head then snatched it just as quickly and sighed deeply. She tossed another cube in the air and this time it drew her eyes skyward where a menagerie of red-tailed hawks and white winged sky-angels danced and whirled among the clouds floating across the midday sun. She grabbed the die as it fell, but she kept her eyes focused on the birds.

“I thought I might find you here,” Symon remarked as he came to her side, arms folded behind his back.

“I like it here,” Jesandra replied without taking her eyes off the sky.

“You always have. Ever since you were a child. I could always find you here, staring into the clouds.”

“I’ll be happier once we’re back among those clouds. I don’t like the idea of being here on the sudden whims of a new employer.”

Symon shrugged and turned to the railing. Below them dozens of men, young and old, islanders dressed in nothing more than bits of cloth to cover the parts of their bodies travelers might find obscene. The poor or slaves, for it was nay impossible to tell the difference, working for a sovereign or two, hauled crates stamped with the insignia of Anuar’Bashal to the loading dock below where the Silver Spire floated, rocking gently on the island breeze barely a hundred feet in the air. It was here Ellvaar sky-runners under the command of Captain Alric Dyarwood took possession and readied the cargo for transport. “Try not to think about it,” Symon said. “Jobs are scarce these days since the Unification. Alric is simply trying to keep us fed as well as airborne.”

Istarbel, largest city in the island nation of Sika spread out before Jesandra and Symon as they looked on. The port was separated from the main city to accommodate ships that took to the water as well as those that took to the skies. The port was built into a series of long stretches of green sea rock expanding out from the red-stone outcropping that supported the city proper, giving the entire area a slight yellowish glow whenever the sun reflected light from the surrounding waters.

To Jesandra, the entire port reminded her of a hand with long fingers clutching the sea in a bid to bring ships into her harbor. While the sounds below were nothing more than a buzz to her ears, the port was alive with activity. Four other Ellvaar sky-ships were moored to the ground, connected by thick chains holding the swaying ships in place. Jesandra recognized them all.

The Suns Grace was helmed by Yura, a raven haired Ellvaar woman with a penchant for solving her issues with the tip of her favored blade, a rapier she had aptly named, Needle. The Ellvaar woman possessed a fierceness few Ellvaar had and it was Yura, on Jesandra’s thirteenth day of birth, that presented her, the first and only human ward of an Ellvaar sky-runner, a pair of cen’tu daggers and offered to train the girl in the styles of combat not found outside the trees of their ancestral homeland.

“Perhaps a weapon more her speed. A spear or the long sword? Cen’tu are unwieldy even for those born with the agility to properly handle them.” Alric had said when she, standing before them amidst the deck of the Spire, tossed the daggers to Jesandra.

“Well,” Yura purred. “It’s a good thing you have a master on deck to help train the child.”

“Please, father.” Jesandra whined playfully while staring at her warden with her deep, violet eyes that he had never could refuse.” Besides, I want to do more than dice with Ceril and Yoren. It’s boring when I always win. And, don’t you want me to be able to protect myself?”

Alric sighed and ran his fingers through his blonde curly locks then eyed Yura who stood defiantly in defense of his ward. “You’re an evil child and,” he said while staring at Yura, “you’re no better.”

“Gracious as ever dear brother. Now,” she said turning to Jesandra, “your first lesson. Don’t die.” Digging her feet into the deck Yura launched herself towards Alric’s ward with her favored blade, Needle, leading the charge. “Show him child! Show him how much of an Ellvaar you truly are!”

Jesandra didn’t flinch but instead grasped her new weapons, with grips wrapped in the finest leather sovereigns could afford and blades of the finest dark steel that curved inwards near the tip creating a pair of deadly hooks when held in hands blessed with nimble fingers. She crossed the blades over top of each-other and waited.

Yura couldn’t help but smile as she lunged Needle right for Jesandra’s heart but was met with a defiantly strong resistance that caught Yura’s Needle in the crux of the blades and held her at bay. Yura wasn’t done with her show just yet and back stepped pulling Needle from Jesandra’s double bladed grasp and lunged again this time aiming for the young girl’s thighs.

Jesandra saw the move coming and slid her own foot behind the other and just as quickly as Yura moved, the human girl moved. Jesandra twisted her wrist, dipped a blade low and caught Yura’s rapier in the hook of her cen’tu, twisted the blade in her hand and with a quick roll of her shoulder she hooked Yura’s blade leaving the elder Ellvaar defenseless. Then, faster than even Alric had ever seen, she crossed her feet like an elegant dancer performing on the richest stage in Estermont and rolled around to Yura’s side and slipped her cen’tu a mere inch from Yura’s exposed throat.

Yura laughed and pushed Jesandra’s cen’tu away and looked to her brother who was wearing a wide grin he tried to hide as soon as he saw her eyes upon him. “Well brother?”

“There’s a shipment of dark-steel making its way from the Dwarfkin stronghold near the Silver city to the Fringe. I want her trained and armed before we strike the caravan.”

Yura smiled and bowed low. “As you wish brother.”

Where Yura was now, Jesandra couldn’t began to fathom. The Ellvaar rogue had not been seen since the Silver Spire docked in Istarbel. Most likely she was where Alric was. Somewhere deep in the city courting new contracts for her ship.

Beyond the Suns Grace, other Ellvaar sky-ships could be seen floating above the island dock. The Elders Eye under the command of Darabont, the Sky Reaver helmed by Kuren and the Nights Shadow captained by Toreth. What any of them were doing here was a mystery but if they were here courting contracts, they must be worth their weight in sovereigns.  

On the Sun Grace’s deck, Ellvaar women with a dazzling array of colors in their hair, from deep violet, lavender, and periwinkle to vibrant cerulean, crimsons, golds, umber, and turquoise, wove a majestic rainbow of movement as they worked the rigging of the upper deck and sang songs of their homeland. Songs Jesandra could barely hear from her place on the Spire’s deck but songs she knew all too well for her own crew would raise their own voices in unison with the howl of the wind in a choir of joy and remembrance of the thick trees whose trunks became a city’s walls and whose branches became a city’s roof.

“What do we know about him? This…Bashalian?” Jesandra asked suddenly.

Symon shrugged.

Jesandra turned her gaze from the islanders and the sky-ships to Symon. The man was Ellvaar through and through. Standing nearly a head taller than Jesandra herself, he had a wiry frame and sinewy muscles that flexed beneath an open vest of Dyarwood leaves and hard-boiled leather straps that crisscrossed around his back. He kept a dagger on his hip and a long blade of Dwarfkin dark-steel named Midnights Kiss, strapped to his back. His eyes were dark, similar in nature to all Ellvaar which only helped to accent their naturally sharp features. He had a long narrow chin covered in a short beard that he kept cropped close to his skin, a thin mouth kept in a perpetual jovial smile, a slightly hooked nose that gave him the appearance of a red-tailed hawk scanning for prey and a wide and tall forehead made even taller by the fact he pushed his turquoise hair back into a tight tail.

Symon’s appearance belied his age however. The helmsman was old even by Ellvaar standards, yet he was bold like Yura and as cutthroat as Toreth but, he had a sense of loyalty far too few possessed.  While many of the men and women who served upon the Silver Spire, and all sky-ships, served only to fulfill their need to fill the coffers of their homeland and be granted the gift of the Dream, Symon however refused the rest he had already been granted by the Elders of the Wood and instead chose to stay aboard serving as helmsman as well as the right hand of Alric.

“Ceril and Yoren were a part of Alric’s guard when we landed and it’s not like either of those two to keep quiet. So, spill it. What do you know?”

“Nothing more than what was already known.” Symon conceded. “Even Ceril and Yoren, loud mouthed as they are, had nothing more to share beyond the school the man belonged to. Evocation”

“A red…. Knowing we were taking a job from a Bashalian was bad enough,” she said turning back to the railing. “But, taking a job from a red?”

“The sovereigns are good. Too good from what I hear and besides, we’ve taken jobs from the magically inclined before. A Tylosian Sorcerer, those reprehensible bog witches, and—”

Jesandra quickly cut in. “Not a red—"

Symon silenced the young woman with a hard look. “—Even a job or two from the Citadel itself if you care to remember. The schools of Abjuration and Divination I believe.” 

“Nothing more than shield slingers and scryers,” Jesandra replied in a huff all but ignoring Symons steely-eyed gaze.  “Evocation is different, and you know it as well as I. Even the masters of the Citadel don’t trust those who take the red robes. Divine only knows what we’re even hauling for the Void worshiper. Demons blood? Powerful aretfacts that could throw us from the sky?”

“All these years and you still plead to the Divine? Blood by blood Jesa. You do not share our blood; however, you know our ways. The jobs we take are not for us to question. The cargo doesn’t matter. All that does are the sovereigns paid to our coffers. The crew demands it as they are promised the Dream in return for their work. Alric took this job and we will fulfill the contract.”

Jesandra huffed and dropped her dice into a leather satchel at her hip. The skies had been her home for as nearly long as she could remember. Her family were rogues; sky-runners who sailed the clouds on massive ships born aloft by their willingness to suffer the indignities of people whose world they would never share but lands they would toil in daily for the meager scraps the humans and other races tossed their way. But, a job was nothing more than a job. Symon made sure to remind her of that and the fact that the Silver Spire did not fly on magic nor with a pact from a demon born of the Void.

No, the Spire and her crew lived and soared on a coffer full of sovereigns.

 “For the Dream,” Jesandra said relinquishing her argument.

“For the Dream.” Symon echoed then gripped Jesandra’s arm giving it a soft, reassuring squeeze before stepping away towards the lower deck. He called over his shoulder before disappearing below. “Get off the Spire while you can, see the city, I’m sure Aveir would appreciate the company and besides, Alric will return in a few days’ time and we’ll be sky-borne again.”

“I will,” she called back turning her eyes towards the dock below where the last of the crates bearing the symbol of the Magister’s city were being loaded into the hold. “As soon as I know what we’re hauling,” she whispered to herself. 

Next Chapter: Unification Through Subjugation