The Dragon Ship Chronicles

First Flight

I took a deep breathe leaning out over the side of the air balloon. My head swam as I see how high up we are. And I lean back from the railing.

Maybe this isn't such a good idea. How did I end up here?

It had seemed like such a fun thing to do. Watching those air walkers in their gliding suits using their dragons fire to fly. Up into the clouds back down at incredible speeds just flitting around on the wind. Free. Unrestricted by the blasted ground. Well that's how I'd seen it from the inn I worked at when I was little. Every time I went outside to run an errand or to do anything for that matter. There they were, touching the clouds.

Then my parents died, and I was stranded working for the devil himself at ten years old in a run down inn on the bad side of Metarau city. But out of the terrible grief and horrible toil, good things came. The waves of life brought me from trough of the wave, the worst of life... To the crest. It's the way life works. You have the ups and downs, like waves bobbing you in a giant ocean. You go from the best moments to the worst. It's unpredictable, you never know what it will do next, but as long as you remember that everything evens out in the end life can't go too wrong. My mother taught me that. I never will forget it.

I made a friend. That's the simple version of what happened, I was working one night and saw a traveller come in and order a room. Now this traveller was of the mysterious sort. The type that wear their hoods up and talk in hushed voices, and pay too much for a room to keep people quiet. Suffice to say at ten years old this is the exact sort of thing that raised my interests. So I shadowed him around the inn a bit and found his room number.

He was real careful that no one was following him and it took a good bit of concentration not to be seen. Once he had checked for the third time outside his door he finally went inside his room and shut the door real fast behind him. I heard the lock click into place and the scraping of a key being pulled from the door and tucked into a pocket and I hurried over to the door. Being ten and at the perfect height of key holes I had a pretty good look into the room despite all his checking and locking.

Inside the stranger was sitting on the bed sorting through his things. He was a middle aged man with blonde hair faded to almost white at this point. Slicked back over his head. His face had a slightly crooked nose obviously previously broken and bushy eyebrows. He had a strong chin and face in general, a very hard face. But the real stand out was his eyes. Both were a bright almost solid silver color, the likes of which I had never seen. I noticed all of this as he was unpacking his things into the room from his one overnight sack he wore strung over his shoulder. Finally he got to a small curiously engraved box toward the bottom of his satchel and looking around quickly as men with secrets do even in the safety of their own home, in their own room. Then tentatively almost reverently he took a key from around his wrist and unlocked it, carefully lifting the lid. The contents cast a light blue muffled light on his face and the look in his eyes was nothing but pure awe. It was at that moment that I resolved I was going to see what was in that box. I shifted position trying to get a better angle through the key hole and I bumped he handle of the door making a rattling noise from the lock. The man looked up with wide eyes, slamming the lid to the box shut and I didn't stick around to see anything else. I made record time to the staircase and down to the mess room and out through the kitchen into the back courtyard. I hide for a solid two hours before I was sure that he hadn't followed me to skin me alive.

The man didn't make a debut at dinner which chaffed at me as, at the time I was being slowly eaten by an enormous youthful curiosity of the box which this mysterious stranger possessed. I waited through the evening but the stranger didn't come down for a smoke in the common room either. Finally it got too much for me and I hatched a new plan.