Kambria

Gunshot

A Skyship streaks instantly into the open sky what's probably ten thousand feet aboveground, a shockwave from its arrival rolling like a tsunami through the bamboo forest—stalks centuries-old bowing. Submitting. Soon it'll be our turn to bow.

"It's Regimentals," I shout to Ji, who's busy trying to pluck a fruit from some bent tree I don't know the name of, "should we get back?"

"Where?" Ji's fingers slip off a red, glossy, fruit shaped like a gourd. It's slick with dew. He curses, grappling his way onto my boulder and gazing over the forest valley it overlooks, mists from towering, spire-like, mountains swirling aside into pale haze about halfway to us. Gaining. "Nevermind."

We scamper down, seeking refuge behind a stone wall as straight-line winds hit like a bomb. A maelstrom of flurrying leaves, trembling soil, ear-breaking roaring, and acrid dust pricking at our eyes follows. It's over fast, birds taking wing in an army like they're heading off to duke it out with this rude, floating, intruder thousands of times bigger than them. Ji climbs back up.

He says, "Zephyrin, look at this thing's guns."

I'm back up a second later, brushing some chipped wood and soil from knots in my hair. Sure enough, the mist's been cleared. There's a better view.

An ironclad. Newer, particularly militarized, Skyships ditched wood for their staunch metal. It's midday and its hull is so dull not an inch catches the sun's glint—brutal ironwork, artillery bristling like harpoons sticking from a whale, gigantic, bulbous, aether engines at the rear glowing violet and topaz. Keeping this thing afloat. Unmoving. It's a warship alright. A huge black crest of a willow tree is burned into its frame. Sigil of the Blache Empire.

"It's close to home." Ji's wonderment is gone.

So is mine. My eyes trace down, and scarcely visible past towering trees, bamboo, and silvergrass fields are homes, roads, and palaces all drowning in this ship's devouring shadow.

It was time to go.

Getting to where we get in the forest isn't easy. The Frontier stretches endlessly until it meets the ocean, and in between there is only bamboo, woods, mountains, and rivers. Rolling mists thick enough to block your own hands from view. Ji and I weave our way through thin trails, between choking ferns and clawing shrubbery, stacked stones serving as waypoints to another stroll beside a thundering river or a hop across a thin gorge. There's a lot, but it usually blends when you've got someone you're comfortable enough with to tell about those times you may have smuggled stolen valuables in from the Capital using a horse, a shovel, and its rear end. Or about times you tried eating sponges thinking they were cakes. Or fights. Fights for stupid reasons.

Now, though, crushing silence. Just boots crunching on dead wood, plants clawing at our thin clothes, croaking birds, and as peaks from our village's tallest buildings begin growing from little sticks into looming boughs on the horizon we hear a pulsing, waterfall, thrum from our visitor's aether turbines.

Ji looks at me and says, "There's only one reason they're wasting Skyship fuel on our village." He can't keep eye contact.

"That's not it, shut up."

"Yeah? Well, I think it is, Zeph."

"So what," I catch up with him, drive an elbow into his side, "Boarder's got us, he owes us one."

"And what could he do against that?" Ji stops, looking up through a portal in the forest's bamboo canopy occupied entirely by plate metal, guns, and engines. A monstrosity meant only for battle costing more resources to assemble than most would make in their lives.