Her mother was a water baron’s daughter, noble born, her father a financier in Havensreach’s upper ring. Time to fly.Īimee de Laurent was born to wealth, finery, and great privilege. Magic that constrained.Īimee allowed the glance to last only another moment, then turned resolutely towards the vessel’s interior. The floating upper ring where she’d grown up was out of sight, and she couldn’t see the mystic energy field of the portal shield enveloping the port, but her trained senses could feel it. From here, she could only see a small sliver of the port, and beyond it the expanse of Havensreach’s white walls. ![]() Just before they entered the bay, Aimee turned to steal a last glance at home. They tromped up the loading ramp as the last of the dockworkers jogged down. That should have unnerved her, but in the brief moment of realization she felt only a surge of curiosity before they were clambering aboard. Closer still, what the sorceress had initially thought to be divination sensor-pods looked more like well-concealed, very big guns.ĭespite being designated in the official rolls as an “explorer,” Elysium was better armed than most gunships she’d seen. Looking closer, the graceful curve of apertures on the nose had –if her ship lore was accurate – to be powerful ether-cannons, the sort you normally only saw on high-end military craft. She was freshly painted a bright silver, and the two fins of her tail were short and slanted.Īimee paused. Two large exhaust ports for her top-of-the-line metadrive glowed with a faint blue light, flanking the stern gun turret. “It’s time to get on board.”Įlysium was a long, slender skycraft, her wings swept forward and angled down from the hull. You will be aboard my ship for months between stops. I want more of that going forward, Miss Laurent. I’ve been in Havensreach for all of my nineteen years. “Other isles have trees, teacher,” Aimee deadpanned. “It’ll be weeks before you see trees again, but I don’t see you staring at those,” Harkon chuckled. “After all, when’s the next time I’ll get to see Drakesburg from the grand wall? It might be years.” But there was so much else she would see. “I thought I might snatch a few moments to take in the view,” she said. His dark brown skin was marked by scars and laugh lines, and his well-trimmed hair and beard were white as moonlight.Īimee gave the old man a sideways smile. He folded his arms on his chest, and his gray and violet robes of mastery billowed in the breeze. “There are more productive ways to spend your time,” he said, “than waiting for the loading to finish.” His name was Harkon Bright, and he would hold her apprenticeship for the next several years. She was lost in her thoughts before footfalls sounded further up the dock, and the tall, well-groomed form of Aimee’s instructor stepped up beside her. Her teacher boasted that a smaller, lighter ship such as Elysium could reach it in half a day. It looked so close from here, but it was a two-day journey by behemoth or ferry to reach its ports. In the distance, the nearest isle to Havensreach hovered amidst a vast bank of ochre clouds – a thin line of mountain-crowned earth, suspended in the heavens. Just one more hour.Īimee drew in a breath of fresh wind, and drank in the trackless ocean of sky. One more hour, and the full breadth of the world would open before her. In her right hand, her burnished, silver apprentice’s badge hung on its gleaming chain. ![]() In her left hand, she held a leather bag with her most precious personal possessions: mirror and brush, her most recent journal of mystic forms, the atlas her father had given to her, and her mother’s ring. The breeze tugged stray bits of gold hair out of her braid to tickle the front of her pale, resolute face. She stood only ten feet from the lip of the bottomless sky, dressed in a long coat of faded blue with a high collar, black boots, snug pants that left her free to move, and a light shirt looser about the neck than school regulations allowed. Crates and workboots thudded against the ramp of the loading dock. Market vendors shouted their prices in a drone overlaid by the mighty, whipping winds. The servitude of studentship would be gone forever, and adventure, danger, and wonder lay ahead. Then her home city of Havensreach and the Academy of Mystic Sciences would be left behind. In less than an hour, she would board the slender skycraft called Elysium. On the sun-kissed docks at the edge of the world, Aimee de Laurent awaited her freedom.
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