Chapter 1: On the Horizon

Prologue Chapters

…

It felt like it would be a normal morning. The night before had given no indications of a pending event. And the night before that. And the night before that one. But it had been that way for over a month now. One month of sailing. One month of searching. One month… to wonder if he had really gone mad.

To be fair, he had been wondering about that last item for the past two years now. Two years ago, he had been involved in an incident of life-changing, even world-changing proportions. He had lost his first command to a misguided attempt to rescue a princess, a fairytale task which the real world was all too happy to demolish under his feet along with his ship. The real world, however, had apparently forgotten a rule that all airmen had known as a fact of life since their first days on the job: that anything that ever fell to the surface died. Surviving shipwrecks should have been another kind of fable, but it had somehow saved him from certain death, even if he had not been in the best of conditions afterwards. His recovery led him to the defense of a small town on the surface, the same town that had taken him in after he had effectively lost everything he had once had and known.

From there, his sanity must have been questioned by others. He probably had not noticed it at the time, consumed as he had been to get himself and a new friend back home. Looking back on it had always reminded him that he had had very little reason to have survived life on the surface. The colossal, armored insect of the Lost Woods; the homicidal machine of the Iyuk Mountains (made by a member of his future crew even); the lava-guzzling worm of the mines of the Fire Realm; the gargantuan, sand-dwelling fish of the Sand Realm; and the nearly invisible tentacle monster of the Ocean Realm had been the larger threats in a world with Wolfos, Malgyorgs, paralyzing heat, frigid heights, and potential lunatics at every point of civilization he had come across. But he had survived. And then he had gone home by the grace of people whose lives had been changed by him. Some of those people had even become his first crew.

Perhaps returning had been the first sign that he had been losing his mind. What he had expected to be an eventless homecoming had turned into a life of running from the very people he had expected to welcome him with open arms. On top of this revelation had sat the machinations of the same demons that had taken his first command. From port to port, he faced living skeletons clad in armor and blades, humanoid reptiles with a talent for firearms (including one specially designed to double a target's weight with lead), self-aware rock which had gone as far as creating a duplicate of him just to ensure someone's death, and a fake princess made of glass and rage, and each creature had displayed a level of psychosis greater than the previous threat. If not for his crew of mild sanity and great loyalty, his time spent running would have come to an abrupt end.

And then, when everything had finally calmed down, the world had taken a turn for the worst. People had lost their homes; some had even lost their lives. Two islands had been devastated beyond recognition even to this day. And then there was the disappearance of an entire race hidden among the black expanse of an immortal storm. That may have been the first time that he had started doing things that no sane man would ever dream of. He had dove into battle with his fellow sailors against dangerous enemies. He had used ancient magic to bend the roads of his homeland to his will. And then, he had set a trap for one of the most vicious creatures in existence, a creature that had not just done evil as a means of conquest, but had done evil as part of an order which it had been determined to follow for over two hundred years. He had his orders, too: save the princess. In the end, he had accomplished his goal so well that the demon captain, his crew, and his ship had fallen from the sky forever.

During the following two years, however, in the midst of his work and his search, it had sometimes felt as if he had not shaken the demon captain. There had been times when he had found himself in the maw of the horrendous creature or being pursued by its talons as he had been falling from the sky. Each time so far, he had awoken with a start, covered in sweat and suffering from a dry throat. He had tried hard for the past two years to not think back on those events, but that had only ever seemed to bring those memories to the forefront.

Did it mean he was insane? He did not believe so. Maybe a little rattled. A little nervous. He had had reassurances, but the feeling lingered.

Kon kon. "Captain?" asked a man's voice through the door. "You should see this." The captain did not want to respond. He did not even want to rise. He would have been content to remain under his covers for the rest of the morning.

Then came the high-pitched yawn from a miniature bed hanging above his mattress. "Līnca, nùctīpa," the voice then said in a girl's voice. "Laħìna kicī."

He groaned and pulled the quilt off his head, revealing unkempt but bright, blond hair. His deep, blue eyes surveyed the deckhead with the ire only available to those who had to haul themselves out of bed. It took another minute for him to throw the quilt off his thin frame, revealing that he had been sleeping in an almost skin-tight, lime green suit that left his hands, head, and neck exposed. He swung his legs out and sat up on the edge of the bed. Then he stood up and reached for the nearby desk.

His fingers found an oval-shaped amethyst on the desk and pressed down on it. "Irleen," he said with a scratchy throat, "I'm gonna change."

"Got it, Link," the girl's voice from before replied.

Link first relieved himself behind the partition of his cabin. Then he changed into a cleaner body suit of the same color, referred to as "cleaner" because there was little soap to be had on the whole ship for the purposes of laundry. Over that, he put on a pair of brown work trousers and a green, sleeveless tunic around which he fastened a belt with a circular buckle made of pewter depicting an anchor. He used a mirror inside his wardrobe to comb some of the tangles out of his hair and make an effort to at least appear presentable. A few months without a haircut had left his bangs long enough that they had occasionally gotten into his eyes. After putting on a pair of black leather boots, he stepped outside.

The swirl of the wind surrounding the ship tossed his hair about, and he had to hold the door firmly until he closed it. The navy-hued sky indicated that it was still early in the morning with no sign of the sun in sight. He looked out across a weather deck adorned with six masts arranged in two rows in line with the length of the ship. The two fore-masts had their gaff-rigged sails set perpendicular to their direction of travel as if to form one large sail between them. The sails of the main-masts, rigged in the same manner, had been opened at an angle halfway between the fore sails and the straight-back-set sails of the mizzen-masts. This arrangement made great use of the Sky Lines, the trails of great, permanent winds that allowed airships to travel about in the sky high above the world. Link could see that the ship was still in the Sky Line that they had been traveling for the past month, revealed by the small, blue bits of magic that could occasionally be seen as well as the soft, deep howl as the Sky Line encompassed the ship.

Unusual for the crew, everyone stood at the bulwark on the starboard side. While Link admitted that there was not much to do during the course of a regular day, the morning crew should have been inspecting the rigging in case any of the lines needed to be replaced. In addition, only seven people should have been on the main deck in the morning; around twenty people appeared to be on deck this morning, a few of them the off-duty engine room crew. Link only knew of one thing that could possibly cause the crew to crowd one side of the deck. So he walked toward the bow and ascended the five steps to the forecastle. Someone standing at the base of the steps hollered out "Captain on-deck", alerting the helmsman. Link would normally berate the more experienced sailor who had done so because he hated the tradition; it had regularly felt to him that the crew had to speak up to account for the fact that people overlooked him because of his height. Today was different, though.

Because they had found land.

The helmsman adjusted a control, and the ship slowly descended. The hull jerked beneath the crew's feet as it dropped outside of the Sky Line. The sails followed shortly after, providing the ship a stable loft high above a blue ocean visible to the edges of the world.

Then both young men looked out at the sky off the starboard bow. The island appeared much clearer without the incredible torrents of wind and shimmer of magic warping their view. Without a sun, the distant island was cast in a deep, grey shadow that blocked out most of its features. The general silhouette of the island bore the feeling of a mirror; the topside sported the sharp angles of tall, manmade spires flanked by shorter squares of structure while the bottom bore stalactite-like spears of bare, jagged earth with a prominent formation at the center. Where the highest tower touched the sky appeared about as high into the air as the lowest point that the earth below the island stretched. The crew seemed to stare for hours, and it seemed even more so as the sun rose to cast orange light across the bottom surface of the island. But they appeared to be alone in the sky. Any island in Hyrule would be surrounded by small junk airships while the larger vessels crowded the ports or occupied the air on their way into the Sky Lines; here, the island sported no such signs of modern civilization with its barren skies. And while they may still have been too far out, no one on the crew could see any sort of banner to indicate who may have claimed the island.

Link took in a deep breath as he tried to sort out his feelings. His heart had at first pounded with excitement. Any airman would have had the same reaction. Having sailed for a month created a thrill for the regular airman. For a captain, it brought about the knowledge that not only had one month of work finally paid off, but that the crew would soon be at rest and experience a new port that they could tell their friends and family about in the years to come.

However, the island's bereft appearance left a bad knot in his stomach. The entire reason that they had set out on the journey in the first place was to find the Sorians, an older race who had brought about the sky kingdom that was now Hyrule and created the Sky Lines that hundreds of airships used every day. The island looked as if it did not even sport a population of birds, let alone the bird-like people to which one of his own crew belonged. Even if it was so early in the morning, he still felt unnerved by the bare skies. He silently hoped that things would improve as they approached, that the regular signs of civilization were merely hidden behind the shadowy cloak of a slowly waning twilight.

"Looks deserted."

The helmsman's youthful voice broke into Link's thoughts, but he managed to avoid any visible start. He glanced over at the redhead. Then he looked back out at the island with a newfound dread welling up inside his stomach.

"Let's hope not," Link told his best friend as he watched sunlight finally reflect off the tallest spire of the island. "This is our only stop."