- THE BEGINNING –

"My dearest one." Kurn whispered.

"I can't leave, I can't, we just got here." Nella whimpered. "I can't leave my home again."

He knew she sensed every protest behind his lips, and spared this sweet creature the insult.

"And I cannot leave you." He said.

She looked heartbroken. "Then I will have to come with you, because I need you."

"Not half as much as I need you."

She began to cry.

"Nella I want no more of this Lindblum nonsense. We will return here, and very quickly.

She drew her head up stared up at him.

"I will respectfully terminate my affairs in Lindblum. Not with it, but in it. I wish to live here with you.

Her gaze of love, warmth, trust and gratitude was interrupted by an afterthought.

"But what of your promise to Lord Puck?" She clutched softly at the hard lump of the twinstone in the pocket of his robe. "And what of dear Cid?"

"My sweet treasure, do you think I would ever forget that? We will hand Cid off to Artania the moment we return. He's a lucid fellow; he must have surmised this decision of mine would be coming and inevitable since I discovered you. Even had Cleyra not been reborn, I wished to emigrate to Burmecia some day, with you, and live amongst its people – your people, to truly understand you. And do not fret for a moment that I might leave that kingdom I have served so long empty handed. Years of service should entitle me to whatever battlecruiser I so choose. Besides, it does not sit right in my bones leaving Cleyra undefended and unattended. A call for help might be answered far too late should I continue to dwell in Lindblum. The distance from here to there is much too far for my liking, especially since you fell into my heart."

She nestled her head under his chin, in the folds of his long black beard.

"But Nella?"

"Mmm?"

"You must tell me if the idea of an immense iron fighting contraption such as Voltaire living in the branches of your beautiful tree offends you."

"Not if you let the flowers and ivy grow upon it." She kissed him.


From where riveted iron hull plating met green leaves, echoed the end of lovely overture;

"And be well, my dearest Friends."

The Regent's outstretched hand and sleeve was met with a hundred white, tugging forepaws. He felt his heart grasped by them just the same, a pull he found it very difficult to resist. Of all the creatures great and small that populated this colorful world, he had always found the rats of the two Kingdoms the most pleasant, amicable and earnest.

"We love you, Cid." A young male spoke up, mournfully. "Please come back soon."

"I promise." He replied, letting the rustling of the leaves under his feet and those crowded around him punctuate the promise.

High above, the Captain's blustering farewell was far more stoic and avoidant of emotional exposition.

Puck, Nina, Claire, Sharon, Shannon, and Kildea all gazed up at him from the green carpet of a towering branch as he stood just above them on the protruding catwalk of the rotor shafthouse.

"I very much doubt I or this airship shall leave the port of Lindblum again for a considerable time, if ever, after this adventure!" He declared more at the air than to them, but then let his gaze and tone fall somewhat. "However…."

They craned their necks.

"However – it has been a true and rare pleasure both for myself and this ship and her crew, to meet and assist all of you, and to come to know your two Kingdoms, which I had previously considered merely an annoyance and an operational distraction to my route…."

A gilt edged red robe flashed in the sunlight in his peripheral vision. He paused as he felt Cid's powerful directional beam of disapproval tunneling into his being from far away. Damn his keen hearing.

"And I very much wish to see you all again."

The warm force of their sudden smiles bored into the chainmail of his soul and threatened to either melt his insides or tip him backward into a fall.

"But of course in Lindblum, among my familiar spires and chimneys, the stone towers, marble walls, pulsing clocks and airship docks of my old and familiar Haunts, where the fountains of Gin and Tonic spring eternal and there is always enough bloody coal on hand, – and where the bells are mounted securely enough in their towers to be made Regent-proof!" He glared at the red robed dot amongst the white dots down below in the leaves.


Puck wrung his forepaws opportunistically as he finished relating his plans from the anchor of the airship. Nina sat cross-legged on a branch, smiling at him with her head tilted.

"You would never want for anything, ever again, if you came back with me. I would make sure of that." He said, in a tone quieter and more yearning than he ever thought he could generate.

"Lord Puck." She almost whispered.

"It's just Puck, dammit!" He stamped up and down, blushing, his rehearsed tone and manner ruined.

She giggled, which instantly silenced him.

"I must remain with my Home Tree."

His shoulders dropped and he became crestfallen. They stared at each other, she leaning slightly forward, smiling and having the upper hand, he bedraggled and at her mercy.

His posture suddenly raised and the spark returned to his gaze, fiercer than before.

"Than I shall stay here with you!" He declared, grinning. "I love it here anyway!"

She startled and her expression changed to shock, their roles were instantly reversed. She knew a bluff when she saw one, and this was most assuredly not.

His gaze drilled into her. He not only meant what he said, he meant it with honor, and a force she was not accustomed to from anyone so young.

They again gazed at each other in silent impasse, now with him leaning forward and she bolt upright.

"Puck…" She murmured. Her gaze slowly turned from surprise, to admiration.

He melted into his shoes.

After some contemplation, she gently rose to her feet and put her forepaw on his forehead, between the roots of his ears.

He involuntarily began to violently wag his tail. She commanded all the resistance inside her soul to avoid laughter. Buoyant joy filled her voice.

"Puck, Burmecia needs its King."

"It got along just fine without me for a few years." He said, indignantly through his blush.

"No, Puck, it didn't." She shook her head, and stroked his.

He frowned and could not argue.

She bent down, and kissed his forehead. She was taken aback when he abruptly raised his head, and kissed her back.

"I love you. I shall return for you, M'lady, because I wish to marry you."

Nina stared at him. Her breath faltered. How was it that a statement so ridiculous did not sound ridiculous at all, from this young one?

"And tell fairest Claire, that William of Burmecia wishes to ask the same of her." He finished, saluting, turning around, and padding off before she could find a response.

Her whirling thoughts were interrupted by the loud and deep voice of El Adrel's steam whistle.


"Up ship!"

The telegraphs rang and spun their hands in reply.

Bancroft's immense hand tightened around the king spoke of the telemotor wheel. He had relieved the helmsman, declaring that if his hand on the controls of the old ship would get them home even seconds faster, then he stand at them for the duration.

Airscrews churned and beat the air as El Adrel pulsated underfoot. One last time, surely, her engines and frame and masts began to bear her weight. A light haze of clean coal pulsed up her chimneys.

"I know you're tired, I know." He muttered. "So am I."

El Adrel shifted on the branches.

"Come on you. Come on.

Despite being lightened of the tonnage of cargo, El Adrel groaned.

"Just once more. Persevere, I know you can."

The airship lifted from the tree.

"To hearth, and home, and nest and flagon!" He roared.

"Course for Lindblum laid in, steer ninety eight degrees magnetic!" Called out the navigator.

Bancroft did so with glee and rage. He focused the sweep of his eye on an imaginary spot on the horizon and drew a line to it, sighted through the invisible Falcon's gate, at the doors of the hangar the ship had departed from at the very beginning of this voyage, and where she had originally been destined for when leaving Alexandria now, it seemed, so long ago. The manwheel at the front of the bridge whirled in response. El Adrel's great iron rudder swung to port.

All who stood in the branches of the tree watched as the immense steam driven flying machine slowly turned toward the south, and laboriously made away, toward the Horizon.

Cheering erupted as they saw from her stern waved a flag of blue with a white cross against it, the original banner from before the people of Burmecia and Cleyra were separated.


The great tree at his back, still towering on the horizon and having grown seemingly no smaller for a time, as it if were slowly shuffling after him, Puck plodded across the sand, solitarily, lost in thought and loneliness.

He felt the weight of Burmecia crushing him. There was absolutely no way he could serve as a King in any capacity, in any way he could think of. There were too many of the simple concerns that had never occurred to him until this most recent series of events, such as food and drink and shelter for his people, to ever think about filling his father's shoes.

How he wished he could apologize to him. He felt the sting of tears again. What schemes he would not concoct, what pain and what of his own limbs and any material object he would not trade to see his father again, and prostrate himself in front of him, and beg for forgiveness and to be worthy of being called his Son again. To pick dandelions together again in the eaves of the armory as the rain trickled warm and silently down.

Behind him towered a tree of regrets, and before him, over the horizon yet to be seen, were cliffs ringing and howling of profound aloneness and emptiness. Bringing Nina back with him had been his last idea to either distract himself or seek assistance. It was a hapless idea, what would a soft-spoken dancer have to say in matters of court and country. He and the weight of all the affairs now his would bring her only tears.

He became incensed, and beat his fists at the air. That could not be so. He must have her, and learn what the point of life was with and from her, and would not bring misery to her with him. If he would not be King, and he could not be King, then he knew someone who could.


The delicious spell had not yet worn off. Freya was still free of the pull of gravity, and Fratley still locked her in his arms. They had not left the safe confines of the tiny stone dwelling.

She had grown softer, plumper, healthier, as he had fed her everything she craved and sought after. Gone was the stark and lanky physique and tiring alertness of a life of fighting.

Every itch was met with a scratch; every yearning to be touched was satisfied. Every urge to be together was met with playful wrestling and confinement and orgasms in dark closed spaces. Every time sleep called, the call was obeyed.

He nourished her with love and physical contact and attention as much as food and water. Her softer and more relaxed body was as changed as the new laughter lines and tranquil smile on her face and in her eyes. Her movements and posture had changed from those of a warrior to those of a dancer. Whether this was from her happiness, the weightlessness of her body, or both, he did not know, but gazing on her and holding her, the latter was obviously an accentuation of the former. They were one and the same.

Even her hair had grown healthier and richer in body, and lighter. It seemed to glow in the dark as moonlight.

Due to all this, she was close to being unrecognizable from when he had first caught sight of her during the attacks on Cleyra.

They lay in bed, he inside her, she securely sandwiched underneath him. He would not allow her body to escape from him the way it softly, insistently, constantly was trying to. She squirmed with pleasure and equal desire to stay. He suckled on her soft bosom and moved between her breasts and her face, massaging her there when he moved to kiss her. She bit her lip as the worshipful attention to her large sensitive nipples sent waves of blue and violet pleasure into her.

"I love you." She sighed.

He rested his complete weight on her and hugged her in response.

"I need you." He whispered, his words muffled by the blankets and her weightless hair.

"Do you know what I always loved most about you?"

Fratley sucked her ear into his mouth in response. The grasp of his tail around her thigh grew tighter.

"I love how you are always gentle with me." She began to softly cry. "I always felt so safe with you…"

"I love making you feel safe." He whispered, and retook her ear.

His hug tightened and he began to softly hump her. She yelped in delight and returned the thrusts. All of him pressed against all of her, her buoyant self could not escape him. They came almost instantly.

"I'm not leaving the house until you won't float away anymore."

"Then I hope I stay like this." She blushed. "I love how this feels, and I love being safe inside with you."

"We have discovered the last secret, then."

"Hm?"

"That this is the point and meaning of life, to exist in this way."

"Fratley…"

"All we went through. All these trials and misfortunes. All was for us to learn this one lesson, and discover this one secret. We may be the only creatures in any land to know it. We are the luckiest two there ever were."

"Then I may now rest assured that you will not think down on me." She beamed at him.

"What ever for?"

"For I have decided to relinquish my Knighthood."

Fratley slowly broke into an uncontrollable grin.

"I feared the same, for I have decided to do just the same. I only love you more for it. How could it be bad to reconsider a decision and life that brought us only misery, and hastened the destruction we lived through?"


Over the next week, a slowly brewing problem became markedly pronounced when Puck made his way back through the outer gate of Burmecia.

Nobody in a position of power seemed to desire it.

William spent more and more time in the palace, in the tiny secret room Puck had used to dwell before ever running away and where he had now re-made his home. It was here, on a night of particularly heavy rains, amongst candles and sizzling meat in a small pot that Puck told William his plan.

"I am going to find a replacement King." He stated, flatly.

William stopped chewing and stared at his friend. "You can't do that." He said, flatly.

"I can do whatever I want, I'm King!" Responded Puck with indignance.

"But you won't be if you do that, and if you aren't King, you can't do whatever you want! Besides, who in the whole world would you pick? A King has to be…"

"Sir Fratley." Puck instantly replied.

"Oh…."

"There, you see?" Puck grinned. "He is the strongest Dragon Knight in Burmecia, he knows more about this Kingdom than I do, my father trusted him, and is the most just and loyal and good and wonderful one of us there ever was, and so is his Lady Freya. They were so kind to Jack when…."

Tears flowed.

"Jack?" William asked.

"Fratley deserves to be King." Puck deflected

"But what if he doesn't want to be?"

Puck opened his mouth and no words came. Of all the directions he had prepared for the argument to turn, he had not thought of this one.

"Of – of course he will want to be. Who wouldn't want to be the King of Burmecia?"

"Uh…..you wouldn't." William looked him sheepishly.

"Silence!"


Fratley strolled with Freya, who had begrudgingly found gravity again for the time being, through the palace grounds, with the royal summons that had drawn him there in his forepaw. Neither of them were entirely pleased to be plucked from their bliss or to see the royal seal again, but they figured now would be as good a time as any to make good on their mutual promise of renunciation of sword and service.

"Sir Iron-tail Fratley, and the Lady Freya!" Their entrance was met with annunciation.

"Could have done without that." Freya murmured. His grasp around her tightened in agreement.

The great hall was deep and dim, flickering with the orange firelight of torches and the purple hue of the stained glass. The fragrance of burning incense everywhere relaxed them.

"I am so glad to see you, sir Fratley." Puck panted as he scampered up.

Fratley could not help but beam down at him.

"I am glad to see you too. I have a very important matter that I – " He glanced at Freya. "That we, would like to discuss with you."

"So do I." Puck nodded.

"I gathered by the Royal Summons." Fratley tilted his head. "You know there was no need for that, you are always welcome in our home."

"This is very, very important, and I've been advised to have witnesses."

Fratley and Freya noticed many of the rats standing in the dark, shuffle uncomfortably at this remark, peering out from corners and between the columns and abruptly returning to stoicism when the couple glanced back.

"What is it?" Fratley asked, sinking into his boots and feeling Freya do the same.

"You go first." Puck stated.

They were silent for a few moments. Freya looked up at Fratley, and he down at her. Neither wanted to speak first.

"We have decided – " She broke the silence. "We have decided to…"

"We have decided to renounce or Knighthood and retire our service to this Kingdom, with profound gratitude, effective immediately."

The fit of rage they both expected never came.

"That's great!" Puck jumped up and down, happily.

Freya and Fratley, and all the rest of those present stared wide-eyed and shut-mouthed at Puck. One could hear a pin drop in the grand and cavernous space.

"It is?" Fratley shook his head.

"Yes, because that makes it much simpler!"

"Makes what much simpler?"

"You taking my place as King!"

Fratley stared again, tilted his head forward, and was overtaken by laughter. Freya buried her snout in the folds of his clothing to try and silence hers, to no avail. All others present remained in stunned and horrified silence.

Fratley's mirth turned quietly exasperated, and slightly saddened. The thought of it being a joke passed as quickly as it came. He knew it wasn't.

"Lord Puck." He eventually was able to bring himself to speak. "I cannot accept this generous offer."

"It isn't an offer, it's a request."

"Then I must decline your request."

"Then it is no longer a request, Dammit!" Puck stamped up and down. Finally, the fit of rage they had been expecting. "I am ordering you to take my place as King."

"I must refuse."

"You can't refuse a royal order."

"You cannot make a royal order if you are no longer King."

"But I am still the King!"

"Ah, but you won't be if I followed this order!"

"I told you!" William wailed from the knees of the statue of the Protector, jumping furiously up and down. "You wouldn't listen to me but I told you, he's got you on this one just like I did!"

"Silence!" Puck screamed.

Fratley could not keep his eyes open such was the force of his grin, and he held Freya tightly as she erupted her joy into his tunic.

"You must do as I say, Burmecia needs a King and I am not it, you are the good and just and kind and decent and brave Sir Fratley, my dad loved you, you would be a good King for Burmecia, I just want to do one thing right for my Dad."

Fratley now understood.

"Puck, your father loved you far more than I. Far more than any other, anywhere."

Puck almost fell to his knees.

"I cannot do as you say, for the purpose of my life is now to serve and care for my Freya. Sometimes we cause the most horrible things with the most pure and good intentions. My service to this Kingdom, and Freya's, only helped to bring about the awful war that killed your father in the first place, and almost left our people without a Kingdom."

"And almost destroyed our people entirely." Freya added.

"You will make the best King that our Burmecia has ever had." Fratley finished. "You will do so much with this pain."

"I don't want to be in pain." Puck shook his head.

"Abdication of your Kingdom would not lift it from you. It was pain that made me understand what I truly needed, and not to let go of who I loved." He instinctively tightened his grasp around Freya, and his ears fell knowing his words were falling on those that were deaf.


Puck pouted, and seethed, and schemed with William under the arch of his favorite shadowed alcove in the palace garden.

"If Fratley won't take the position of King, I'll force it on him."

"That's terrible." William shook his head vigorously. "And how would you do that anyway, the whole court heard Fratley refuse."

"I'll forge his signature on a document on royal parchment saying he accepts." Puck's eyes burned with determination. "I'll have his signature once I ask him to sign the parchment about renouncing his knighthood that the clerk has made up. If he tries to object, it will be too late because I will have run away to Cleyra to be with Nina, and you'll come with me to be with Claire."

William grabbed puck's face and forced him to lock eyes with him.

"Running away from your problems, forging your friend's name on something to force him to face them for you? Puck, that's really the dumbest thing you've ever said and I'm not gonna just sit here and let you do this."

"But I'm the K…"

William's fierce gaze and the absurdity of his idiotic reply deadened it on his lips.

"What would Nina think."

Puck blushed, angrily.

"She'd never want to marry a coward."

His blushed vanished and was replaced by a look of utter misery. He recoiled and writhed as if to crawl out of his own skin.

He felt William's forepaw on his own.

"Puck, you are not alone in this."

"Yes I am."

"No you aren't, because I am going to make a vow to you."

Puck looked back at him with a grief twisted face.

"I promise to you here and now that I will become a Dragon Knight, like Fratley – was. And I will faithfully serve you the way he served your dad. I can think of no better way to serve a King who is such a good friend. I mean it."

Puck started to cry.

"And I'll marry Claire when I am older, and you will marry Nina, and this will make our two Kingdoms one again." William could not resist a powerful smile.

Puck placed his other forepaw on top of William's.

"And I'll make you assistant King."

From behind the garden wall, they heard the laughter of two very familiar voices.

"Hark, we've been spied upon!" William hissed.

Freya and Fratley had overheard everything. As they locked forepaws and tails in the flowerbed behind the wall, they reveled in the unfamiliar and exotic feeling of true hope for the future.


Steiner made his way studiously up the long marble staircase in a blur of images. At once he was at its top and moving across the large checkerboard tile patterns toward the Queen's gallery. At once he was through the door and under the sun of an autumn sky, and at once the violet velvet backed silver cross was being offered to him.

"Sir Adelbert Steiner."

"Yes, your Highness."

"Do you hereforth and hereby accept…."

Steiner, always the man of proper observance of formalities, cut her off. "Forgive me your majesty, but it is customary that I kneel before you."

"You kneel before no one." Garnet declared. "Surely after all of our adventures, and your conduct, I speak to you as an equal."

Steiner was rendered speechless.

Garnet knelt before him, instead.

"Sir Adelbert Steiner, Do you hereforth and hereby accept the position of Supreme Commander of Alexandria, and the position as General over all forces of the Kingdom?"

"I do, my Queen."

Garnet pressed the silver cross deep into his outstretched palm and held her hand over it for a moment. "I am grateful. Our domain will finally be safe and in good hands for the first time since Brahne's King died."

"Surely not." He responded. "You have been a just and admirable rul…."

"Steiner." He stopped.

"I'm not even a queen, the royal family lineage died with the real Garnet."

He was silent, and she turned away to look over the city from the balcony.

She spoke in a way that betrayed things held inside her for far too long a time finally boiling to the surface. He had never heard true fury in her voice before, and knew it instantly though it was muted. "I was not a proper Queen in blood and more importantly, not in conduct. Had I not tried so hard to help my mother, had I listened to the others instead of poisoning their food and playfully undermining their reason and decision-making like a stupid child, had I not dragged you with me like a child's doll, almost everybody who died would instead have lived."

Steiner instantly swallowed he reflex to cottle and apologize and quell her anguish. Service was a more nuanced thing, and friendship moreso.

"You are correct about your conduct." He nodded.

Garnet whirled, but not out of anger, at the delight of finally being able to have a conversation with a man finally freed of a rigid and narrow view of things, and it showed in her face.

"So what do you intend to do?" He asked. "Whatever that may be, I am here to assist and – " he paused, thoughtfully. " – council, if I may be so bold, and should the need arise."

"Wisdom fits you well, Adelbert." Garnet beamed at him. "I can think of no better house for it to live in than your soul."

For the first time, Steiner beamed truly and honestly with a pride, and of a different sort that nearly threw him from his feet. All his life he had felt pride as sunlight, showered upon him by others as if from a distant place. This fierce warmth he felt was coming from deep within his own core, solid and entirely his own and utterly untouchable, unremoveable and irrevocable by any other, and it was a feeling so new as if he had just drawn his first breath of air again. It split his face into a wide toothy grin that he did not even realize he wore.

"In five years….." Garnet began

"My Queen?" Steiner raised an eyebrow.

"In five years…perhaps sooner – you and I will sit and discuss the true future of this Kingdom."

"What do you mean?"

"In a time of absence of true bloodline, I have concluded that someone such as a proper Ruler must be chosen by conduct and by their character, not by descendancy. What we have all been through has only proven that to me."

"Abdication?" Steiner's grin melted into an expression of horror.

Garnet threw her head back and laughed. "Yes, but fear not, for You will be first King of Alexandria ascended from a Knight in hundreds of years."

Steiner was again silent. He swallowed another reflex, one to be aghast, and to argue with her.

"I have never known someone with a heart more Alexandrian, and with where you came from, how you have striven, how you have never given up even when you should have, your love for King and Country, its people and all we have ever been – if this Kingdom were one man, it is well and truly You."


"It's Alexandria, we're finally home!" -Adelbert Steiner

Steiner would throw himself at the work he had been appointed with a wild abandon. The fruits of Status meant nothing to him and meant even less now. His first order of business was to civilize the forces under his command. Beatrix had insisted on an army division entirely of women.

He put pen to paper to institute service beyond the sexes, the only criteria of service to be dutiful countenance and the ability to fight. Many archaic traditions began to whither under his hand, although part of Beatrix's pomp and circumstance, practical armor for women in the service with far less needless exposure would ensure a better ability to defend ones self was his first order of business for the Alexandrian Army.

His second order of business met with equal parts accolades and criticism. Putting the army in a defensive only role, he seriously reduced the size of the fighting force and gave all those in service, including the army, Civil service directives.

Those who had joined for glory and stature bawked, and some left of their own volition, which Steiner viewed as a pleasant side effect. Others complained that with the eventual dissolution of the Alexandrian Navy into a tiny coast guard force, the Kingdom was turning too inward. Steiner noted that it was these loud voices that benefited most from the spoils of the Kingdom focusing more on its own, and as proof of the soundness of his decisions.

Those who had joined for service exalted the new General, and more began to join for this reason.

He would never let what the late Queen Brahne had done happen again. He saw to it that the state infrastructure that made it possible to reach the destruction she achieved was dismantled and that what remained be friction-braked into the slow doldrums of bureaucracy. For every visible or announced change in directive or arrangement, he made ten more quietly behind closed doors, all to soften and stratify the power of the monarchy, and to place hidden wheels in the offices of trusted confidants and respected colleagues that would spring into motion at the sign of anyone in the higher echelons of state becoming power-mad. These wheels did not just extend throughout the castle, but all the way to the desks of the regency in Lindblum. This infrastructure of contingency only grew as those in power around the world came to recognize him as a boulder of conscience, a deep well of principle and pillar of virtue, the nature of whom was wholly irrefragable and incorruptible.

It even went so far as to become a well-meant joke in certain halls, with his arrival being heralded as that of the clichéd do-gooder in children's books, but all humor fell flat in the face of his ceaseless toil to genuinely improve and soften the lives of his people.

His third order of business was to focus the hand of state far beyond the capital, to the settlements, towns, villages, hamlets lying near the outer borders. Goods and services, fresh running water, royally funded infirmaries and education, literacy, transit, and readily available assistance in the event of bad fortune or disaster became his directive.

When asked, he understood it simply as a debt to be repaid to the small outlying village where he had been born, and then stripped of everything he'd known by the war.

It became known, by his actions and not by his words, that everything he did, he did for the love of Alexandria, and the whole of it; for Alexandria did not end at the castle gate, or ramparts of the inner or outer walls, or at the edge of the shimmering waterfall of the capital. It was every blade of grass, every stream rounded pebble, every playing child and every freshly painted fence under the sky within its border.

"Princess, Alexandria may only mean the castle to you, but….." Adelbert Steiner

In every action was foremostly his concern for the as yet unborn Adelbert Steiners so they might not lose their parents to war and strife and misery, and for the as yet unborn Sir Fratleys so that they might not leave the as yet unborn Lady Freyas due to fear of the power and lack of compassion of other kingdoms. Of all the states to hold major power, Lindblum was the only one who had demonstrated to do so reliably and not run amok through the world, and he trusted it intrinsically to be so as long as there was a Cid at the head of the Regency.

And he visited the great tree, to see the sandstorm Beatrix's echo whirled around its trunk, would marvel at the distant shining violet and indigo glassy spires that would eventually be seen perched atop the just visible emerald green of Cleyra that overtopped its rim.

And he would atone for her mistakes, for that was the greatest gift he could give her. He thanked her each day, foremostly for teaching him these lessons, even moreso than her love for him.


"Silence! – Ribbit" - Cid Fabool IX

The spacious Grand indoor dock sat halfway in shadow and halfway bathed in golden light. The hazy silhouette of Lindblum's busy, multi-layered bulk framed the open door against the dimming but still vibrant late afternoon sky.

The regent strolled the long gallery decks that stretched across the cavernous space as he often did, long red sleeves occasionally brushing the mirror-polished ornate bronze railings at their sides. At every intersection stood an equally ornate and highly polished bronze lamppost bearing huge gas lamps. At the central intersection where most of the principal walkways met, a tremendous clock encased in beveled glass in a gilded frame, the prismatic rainbows from the many finely cut glass panes dancing slowly across the room at raucous angles. Here he stopped.

Cid had always thought there was something deeply satisfying and cathartic about seeing ships at rest in drydock.

El Adrel sat off to his right, berthed in what was now the shadowed half of the dock. The airship lay upon the blocking underneath it, silent and still and heavy as stone, belying its true nature and appearing as an immense, immoveable, timeless object that had been there since the entire edifice was built and would always most assuredly be there. One of the rainbows cast by the clock glass had settled on the beautiful bronze scrollwork along the bow and gave the iron-hulled monster a touch of soft ethereality.

On the opposite side, equally silent, equally still, but bathed in warm peach-gold light sat the grand theatre ship Prima Vista, and, as Cid let himself sink into deeper thought, the airship that had truly started it all. With this ship, it seemed so long ago now, had departed the catalyst to start the fearsome whirlwind that had changed so much so quickly, and laid waste to so much, and swept up so many lives.

It had been a joyous and storied day indeed when he had salvaged her from what had once been the Evil forest using Leviathan, the largest airship in all the world and now a legend in her own right, but that was when he had the bit of work in his teeth to distract him. He had been similarly distracted with her subsequent repairs, and the effort and engineering challenge to refit her with steam engines.

Too much free time in ponderous thought had always been dangerous to him, and now he found himself silently screaming in his head, had this entire sequence of events been worth it?

Whenever beset by these fits, he had always found some way to use what was around him to claw to the answer that it was indeed, until he was told the story of Jack.

That story had and was still spreading through the world, and upon reaching his ears and mind had wholly shattered a large part of him and now, he found himself thinking it was in fact not worth it; that all of what had happened had been reasonless and deterministic and senseless. His sense of fate, and destiny, and meaning, and all of the other now seemingly clichéd old concepts that had guided him since childhood and his family for generations now lay scattered about in broken bits on the floor of his world. The man who made ships fit to fly now had a heart heavier than stone, and it became horribly apparent when his incessant motion ceased.

Behind these vessels of luxury and commerce towered the shielded rams of two sisters, Viltgance and Voltaire. Two of his father's armada, the marvelous and respected flying battlecruisers of Cid the Eighth. The vessels to claim more "Firsts" than any other before or since. To this date the only airships built to a family class, the first and only ones who shared interchangeable parts, the first to test and successfully employ the controllable pitch airscrew among other noteworthy innovations. The first creation in Gaia to achieve a speed record of Lindblum to Alexandria in one day. The first power to bring a lasting peace to the world, which had only collapsed due to their absence in the hour of need….

The First Cid had been known as the Explorer King, and by all accounts that was in every way true. Through folly and adventure and hardship, he had made the physical and figurative foundations that his feet and those of his citizens now rested upon. All the world had been his playground.

Cid the Eighth had been known as the King of Peace, for his armada of flying machines stopping the wars.

Cid the Ninth wished to be the King of Kindness, whether he was known for it or not.

Airships had brought the world to his doorstep and brought his doorstep to the world, and he had always viewed airships as an idealistic and absolute Good, as had his family since the first one pulled itself off the earth. Through the shining open door they offered him he had seen that world and its peoples in remarkable and painful clarity, but the disastrous exploits of the Alexandrian flagship and the fearsome Terran vessel had tarnished this old view, airships were only as good as those who made and flew them. It was his duty to ensure this idealism and opportunism was restored.

He remembered the collective sigh of relief the whole world seemed to breathe when his father's fleet of battlecruisers, his inheritance, had pushed through the clouds and forced a peaceful end to the perpetual bloody conflicts between Burmecia and Alexandria. He had never felt so confident and trusting of a technology or an idea before or since, and he would return the idea to this state by not resting until his far reaching hand of flying ships had breathed health and prosperity back into the lives of the two wrecked kingdoms.

He traced another rainbow with his finger to one of the many long, Blackwood benches that bordered the walkways at their intersections. Upon the bench it fell he spotted the instantly noticeable white ears of Nella, who was wrapped in the arm of Kurn. Every so often his bald head would shift, as would her ears, as they spoke in hushed tones and love language.

Cid let his ears adjust. Once his mind acquired the quiet, unintrusive pendulum of the clock he was able to put it into the background of the great room, and after a few moments he could detect their whispers over the floor of white noise that hung in the air, but could not discern them.

Their whispers echoed under the arched ceiling and high walls and machinery-laden floor far below, as did every flutter of a bird's wing, every gentle wisp of air, every water droplet falling.

"Bancroft gone, I presume?" Asked a familiar voice, shattering his now whisper tuned eardrums and startling him, causing him to jump backward and be torn from his meditative state. He found himself abruptly in wonder at his own experience, he had never become still enough for that long a period to become in tune with silence. Having no reference point, he would never have thought such a thing possible.

"I must – try to return there…." He murmured.

Artania strode up quietly and on time to the minute for their appointment, for the moment he stopped and drew his feet in line, the works in the great clock tripped with a thunderous steely click and a whir, and began to boom the sounds of seven hours past noon through the hangar from its gongs. A loud and distant chorus of echoing gongs, bells, chimes and steam whistles of all pitches sounded from behind the walls, and issuing up like a chaotic orchestra from the city below outside the hangar door.

Looking back, Cid observed Kurn had covered Nella's ears with his hands and she had nestled under his chin as if it provided shelter from the rain of idiotic sound.

Artania eyed the clock and only some time after it had stopped striking and its echo had subsided in the great hall did he murmur "When you've quite finished" and turned to address his colleague.

"Yes" Cid begun, before he could start. "Captain Bancroft Ellenroad is gone, and I predict he is down wreaking his usual havoc, as well as providing a single-handed economic boom to the theatre and business districts."

His mind was instantly filled with horrifying and all too well detailed images and scenes of just this, all joined together with the commonality of flying droplets of gin propelled by a great and booming and perpetually unwelcome baritone voice behind immense yellowed teeth.

And, if only briefly, the regent's silent disquiet was replaced with mirth.

"It is agreeable to see you again, Regent." Artania raised his eyebrows.

"And you, minister. We must reduce the volume of those bells."

"Need I remind you, that you were the one who asked that they be made louder because you thought they couldn't be heard over the engines."

"Quite right Minister, quite right. And now I've changed my mind."

"Better than your body." Artania narrowed his eyes.

Cid widened his and the angle of his moustache became much more severe.

"Was your trip home uneventful?"

Cid laughed. "Never."

"Good." Grinned Artania. "Lindblum has been grounded in the mundane as you can well see. Nothing to report that can't wait until tomorrow….."

A sharp and pronounced "twang" echoed from inside the great clock that could be felt in the walkway beneath their feet, producing a brief but noticeable irregular shift in the minute hands. Kurn and Nella looked up at it.

"…..or next month." Artania finished grimly, again eyeing the great mechanism suspiciously.

"I love my city." Cid said with a strange combination of laughter and rare, far away wistfulness.

"There is another matter I must discuss with you." Artania continued, turning toward him with his fingers interlaced.

Cid raised an eyebrow, the opposite side of his moustache following suit as it always did.

Artania turned, and leaned sideways and downward. "Come now, this is the man I told you about."

Out from behind the formidable pedestal of the clock shuffled three tiny, bedraggled young rats. Two males around ten years old in appearance by his reckoning, holding each other's hands, and one female who looked to be about half their age trying to keep hidden behind them. Despite being clothed in fresh pressed garments that were obviously recently given to them, their appearance was haggard, weary eyed and miserable.

"As you ordered, any airship under our jurisdiction, including all civilian vessels has been directed to seek out and return any orphaned children from Burmecia or Cleyra immediately to Lindblum should they require medical care."

Cid felt his heart melting into his shoes.

"These three…."

"I am Cid." He cut Artania off.

He went to them and knelt. "And I am at your service."

"I'm René, and this is my brother Sean." Spoke up the short one of the pair of boys in an easily betrayed mixture of resolute and nervous. "We stick together no matter what."

"Of course you do." Cid smiled.

"This was my first time on an airship." Sean spoke up, quietly. Cid beamed at him.

René tilted his head toward the younger girl, "Her name is Lily, but she doesn't talk to Humans because you destroyed our home and killed her mum and dad.

Cid recoiled visibly and was silent for a long time. Artania uncomfortably turned away, and some distance away, Kurn and Nella notably shifted.

"Where do you hail from?" Cid asked, much more quietly.

"We're from Cleyra, but not anymore, because the whole tree is gone now." René explained flatly, continuing to stare Cid in the face with a flat but piercing expression. Sean shuffled his feet and suddenly appeared to be near tears.

"Our mum and dad died from the huge fire that made it fall." He continued.

René then became silent and he and Cid stared at each other in mournful silence. As the regent drew breath to speak, René again interrupted him.

"I didn't see it happen because I got hurt too much and I couldn't see, but Sean saw it happen. They told us to run away and cried a lot, and then they got turned into smoke and fire." Another long silence, and an even more piercing stare.

"I didn't know parents cried." René said, matter-of-factly, raising his right arm in a mild gesture. Cid observed that its end was a stump, with no forepaw attached to it any longer and an ugly bandage where it should have been.

Sean broke his grasp with René's intact left forepaw, turned around and sunk his face into his own.

Artania stomped his foot, muttered something sharply under his breath and quickly walked away.

"Don't leave me here like this you cruel selfish fucking gray bearded bastard. You come back and help, and suffer with me." Cid fiercely thought toward the vanishing minister.

"Yes." Cid's voice cracked like thin glass. "Yes they do. And they only do when there is nothing else they can do." He felt hot and ugly tears falling. He was actually able to hear them hitting the floor under him. "And I guess that makes it special."

No one spoke. Cid found himself at a complete loss and felt his knees faltering under him until he felt a gigantic hand come gently down on his shoulder. He looked beside him and through his tears could make out Kurn's highly polished black boots. The fleet admiral towered reassuringly over his Regent.

With the sound of scampering paws, he saw a white shape in his peripheral vision begin to move. Clearing his vision of tears with his sleeve, he watched as the tiny broken bodied Lily ran unevenly and silently toward Nella. Nella had already instinctively knelt down and had stretched her arms forward. She caught the child in her arms and drew her instantly against her bosom and underneath the curve of her chin. As soon as she had steadied herself from the catch, she began to rock the little one gently back and forth, and did not stop as she craned her head down to hear something that Lily whispered in her ear, and still did not stop as tears began pouring down her face.

Cid remained on his knee.

"René, Sean, of Cleyra." He spoke in a whisper, lest he disturb the gentle and sacred thing he was witnessing just a few steps away from him.

The whispers echoed in the great space and, as before Artania and the clock had interrupted his heightened senses; he heard and traced them from wall to ceiling to oblivion.

"Yes, Regent Cid." Said René, equally quietly, his tail shifting from one side to the other, his forepaw finding his brother again.

"If you wish it, it would be my desire and my honor to care for you, and provide for you a home, and to see to it that you are looked after."

René stared intently and scrutinizingly at Cid for a time. Cid saw Sean's forepaw tighten around his.

"Yes, everyone has been so nice to us here." René said abruptly, and then breaking his stare away from Cid for the first time and turning his gaze to Nella; "But only if you do the same for Lily"

Kurn spoke. "You need not even ask, little one. We have already accepted."

Nella inhaled sharply through her tears as she rocked Lily.

"Your Cleyra's Home Tree lives again, you know, and it is just as green and beautiful as you remember it."

"That is impossible, it was destroyed." René stated. "How?"

Cid shut his eyes and offered his hands to René. "Let me tell you about a brave and wonderful boy much like yourself, his name was Jack…."


Rainbow beams gently radiated from cupped hands of the Protector under the vaulted ceiling of the great cathedral.

Puck gazed up at the subdued spectacle and was pleased with himself. He had been carefully gathering shards of glass from the original windows for quite some time, left in the corners made wherever walls met ground, after the repair efforts completed and left certain areas, at the bottoms of the basins of fountains, buried just under new cobblestones or repacked soil, or stealing them off the workbenches of the glass casters who used the old pieces to replicate the shattered stories, pictures and figures of the panes anew.

He had arranged the shards in a crude frame of hardened clay and twisted wire left behind by the millwrights of Lindblum, and set it in the hands of the protector with a flame inside. The lantern cast beams of every color through the smoke of the incense and dotted the dark with rays and stars. Those who came to the palace on this day remained there, staring at this lovely scene.

And two who had come on a specific errand clutched paws and were stopped in their tracks due to it.

The Great Sanctuary of the Burmecian Palace had always been a dim and contemplative place where all had sought solace, but with a penchant for the grim and the somber musk of the ages. Here something that was undeniably from the heart of a child lit up the vaulted ceilings and arched alcoves that were normally dark and only lit by somber torchlight from below.

"Lord Puck?" Asked Freya, arm in arm with Fratley.

"Yes?" His look silently conveyed his desire for her to omit "Lord" from her greetings.

"We have come to make a request." Fratley bowed to him.

"If you mean that stupid parchment about your renunciation, It's in the ward…."

"No, not that request."

"We would like for you to Marry us." Freya knelt before him, and Fratley followed.

Puck's tail dropped to the floor.


"Are you mentally deficient or does the fact that I have a bloody headache mean anything to you?" Drunken Bancroft spat toward the immense clock standing against the wall of the business district pub, while the other patrons watched with interest, confusion, and discomfort.

The clock continued ticking loudly in reply, its swinging pendulum serving to further taunt the drunken airship captain.

"You noisome little bastard, that will be five months work in the slag-house for you if you do not be silent this instant!" He craned his neck toward the glass pendulum door and spilled some of the beer in his flagon on the floor in a torrent of suds.

"Impostor!" He roared, alcoholic fizz escaping his mouth. "Trying to look like me won't help you, you rotten little wall urchin. I've dealt with your sort before!"

"I think you aught to leave." The shopkeeper stomped over. "You're frightening my customers."

"You do understand…." Bancroft turned to the shopkeeper, incensed. He furiously pointed at his reflection in the glass pendulum door. "You do after all, understand, that someone going out of their way to look exactly as you do can only mean he intends several variations of only one thing, and that is impersonation, deception, theft of one's identity and stature and most likely their belongings and family as well, trickery of the highest order! Not that I would miss my wife in any shape or form…."

"You haven't looked in many mirrors, have you!" The shopkeeper grinned, trying to restrain laughter.

A grin of absolute arrogant zeal flooded Bancroft's face as he folded his arms, the sort of expression one would get only after the most astounding cornering and decapitation of the opposition in a vicious argument.

"Mirror? This is a clock, you imbecile."

Giggles broke out from here and there amongst those seated at the tables, and "He's got you there, Arthur!" Came across from one of his regulars.

The clock struck eight, and Bancroft's eyes almost shattered.

"I told you to be silent!" He hurled his fist at the glass door, shattering it and bloodying his hand. He didn't notice.

"I'll have you sent to the orphanage at the base of the inner wall, I'll give you to the shoe-blacking works, they'll teach you right respect there you ungrateful little pigeon!"

The clock was silent.

"Are you pleased with yourself, you fuckin' tosser?"

Bancroft glared at him with razorblades in his eyes.

The shopkeeper suddenly grinned, and crossed his arms to match Bancroft's.

The clock, unfinished with its reply, began to slowly lean forward.

Bancroft did not notice.

The clock went from tilting, to looming, to rapidly accelerating, all with an imperceptibly quiet rush of air. Its growing shadow deepened the dark hollows of Bancroft's eyesockets under his thick and bushy brows.

It then fell upon him with a crash that resembled a thunderous explosion, he disappearing completely underneath and inside it. The many patrons in the pub cheered.

The mirth of others died away to reveal the sound of crashing and tumult inside the clock as Bancroft screamed and fought with its moving parts. A torrent of spilling beer, furious threats and insults mixed with the clatter of flying fists and boots, breaking springs, spinning gears and thrashing and dislodging of arbors, taper pins, racks, pinions and chimes, all hurtling about in what sounded like a whirlwind confined in a box.

All those in the Green Marble Pub who knew the infamous airship captain knew two things at this moment. Bancroft was Happy, and Bancroft was Home.


The wrought iron benches in the Theatre district were long and comfortable. The curve of their back seemed somehow fit all who sat in them of all shapes and sizes. A marvel of civic planning.

Nella nestled under the black waterfall of Kurn's beard. She clung to him as he massaged her and was met only with kisses when she looked up at him. As he deepened the massage, she fell asleep in his arms.

An old man who had been feeding the birds on the adjacent bench got up to give the couple some privacy.

"Not like humans." He remarked to Kurn as he passed, very quietly.

"Not like Humans at all." Replied Kurn in a whisper.

He closed his eyes, felt her softness clutched to him and drank in all of the little sounds she made, and remembered when he had first done this to her and what a delightful discovery those sounds were. And how, before then, he had been the unfeeling and ceaseless Wheel.

He had passed the Twinstone and its promise to Cid. Their time in Lindblum was drawing closed. Cleyra's soft, glistening green arms far away stood open to them.


Fratley kissed his way up Freya as she knelt on their bed, gazing out the tiny little window. Only when he reached her ears did he take any notice of what she was looking at.

Wei and Kal's children were playing in the tiny lot in front of their dwelling and the street beyond it, and under the eaves of the old cistern shed where she had found Fratley sleeping.

He instantly knew what she was thinking about, and he suddenly found it very hard to resist thinking about it too.


It was a day of smoky haze and shadow when Adelbert Steiner arrived in Lindblum aboard the airship Athiria. Cid's summons had been brief, cryptic and urgent. Steiner hoped fiercely against a quiet tide of his own internal dread that there wasn't yet another setback or catastrophe he would have to bear witness to or participate in.

The hangar of the Grand Castle was cool and dim. A draft of fresh autumn air filtered in from somewhere unseen even with the great doors shut. Most of the machinery lay silent. The Alexandrian guard saluted Steiner as he disembarked the airship's highly varnished deck and almost immediately he nearly tripped over Puck.

"Steiner!" He jumped up and down. "I'm so happy to see you!"

Steiner startled, then grinned. Finally a face he wanted, but did not expect to see.

"Puck, what are you doing here?"

"Cid summoned me, what are you doing here?"

"He summoned me too, do you know anything about it?"

"No, I don't! He just said to meet him right here, today. Artania greeted me when I got here but then he had to go off and do something else, and I've been waiting here for hours, and nobody came to tell me anything! I don't know what to do now, it's so damn boring!"

Steiner was dumbfounded. "You managed to remain in one spot for several hours?"

"Hey." Puck stamped. "I'm King now…..I have to."

Steiner looked strangely proud of him. This infuriated the young rat.

"Then we shall go and find someone." Steiner resolutely trudged toward the steps, beckoning Puck follow him.

It was not long before they found a familiar pointed helmet of the Guard.

"My good fellow, I…"

The guard whirled. "King Steiner! Why are you not with the Regent?"

"We wanted to know where he is." Puck added.

The guard looked down. "He's….. well he should have met you two here! We were all given specific instructions that Regent Cid was to meet you here."

He looked this way and that, and then asked, hesitantly; "I don't suppose you were told what he summoned you for?"

"Of course not." Steiner and Puck both said in Unison, the former furrowing his brow and the second trying to restrain a fit of giggles.

"Well he didn't tell us either. Although, knowing Cid I suspect it may have to do with – " The guard paused in thought for a moment. "Come with me." He quickly hastened them down a velvet carpeted marble staircase and through a series of doors.

"Commander!" Their guard addressed another, with a slightly taller helmet.

"Yes, what's…Oughtn't these two be with Cid?" The latter asked.

"Yes, they want to know where he is – where is he?"

"Down on that new Market Street project of course, we all thought these two were with him!" The commander replied.

"Damn and blast!"

The commander gestured toward the door. "Well then get them down there, by any means you can!"

"Gentlemen, since the aerial omnibus service no longer exists we shall have to find other means of conveyance, this may be somewhat inconvenient, follow me please."


One whistle from the guard was enough to flag down a millwright passing in the street on a large wooden carriage pulled by a chocobo. It was piled high with barrels.

"Goodness me, two Kings at once?" The old millwright asked, his mustache bristling as he braked the carriage to a stop with a long iron lever. The chocobo's feet slid over the cobblestones as he too tried to stop.

"Yes and by Royal double-deposition we must implore you for travel to the corner of Market Street and Pollander Boulevard. I will instruct any goods you leave here to be looked after by my men until your duty is complete, and that you be compensated for your time!"

"Oh you mean the new Municipal Railway! That explains it, right lend a hand you!"

"Municipal railway?" Steiner and Puck asked each other.

The Millwright began moving barrels off his wagon and beckoned the guard to assist, and was surprised when Steiner and Puck began to as well, to the guard's utter horror.

"What's this? Kings that work, of all the novelty! What will they think of next!" the Millwright chortled.

Steiner and Puck shared a joyful glance as they shifted barrels.


The Chocobo, who's name they found was Sir Arnfield, was fast. George the Millwright coaxed him on a bit faster than anyone else aboard would have liked, and they flew through the cobblestoned streets on four gigantic wooden wheels, dodging children, cats, old women, teams of streetlayers and pipe fitters, other carriages and all manner of city bric-a-brac. Two strong steel-shoed bird feet pounded on the stones.

-Bang-bang-bang-bang-bang-

They descended a steep hill away from the castle, between the shadows of great artificial vertical faces completely covered in buildings and stonework.

George fashioned himself a tour guide as they went.

"That's the fire ant pub, it's got the distinction of being the only pub in this district to never change family ownership!"

The wagon lurched over a bad cobblestone.

"And that building there was the first brickworks to ever produce more than one ton per day!"

Steiner held Puck in his lap so he would not go flying off the wagon. He had given up asking to slow down several streets back.

Then they passed over Harrowgate.

Puck and Steiner looked down, and down, and down, into an infinity of buildings and bridges and funnels and plumes of steam, a cut made down to the very bottom waters of the natural basin Lindblum was built in. Looking back in time, older and older city the further down they looked, like the rings of rock in a canyon. Down to the Old city, before it had ever reached its present towering heights. The miniscule forms of the steam tugs shoving barges under stone viaducts built under stone viaducts built under iron bridges of every description, crisscrossing the cutting who's cliff-like vertical sides were walls of stacked buildings. Engines and machinery whirled and panted hoisting clamshell buckets, crates, platforms and other machinery up and down these dizzying elevations.

The street they were on turned off the bridge over Harrowgate and for a time hugged the rim of its far side, and the two new Kings looked down spellbound and transfixed into the gap, until the wagon turned down another alleyway and the image was left burnt into their eyes and memories, so that the rest of the trip became a blur of windows, doors, brick and shop fronts in its lasting shadow.

They arrived on the spacious and wide avenue of Market street to a completely unfamiliar spectacle as far as the familiar sights and sounds of Lindblum were concerned. The street was so full of wagons and construction materials, regular traffic had been entirely disrupted. Cranes of all sorts towered into the sky like the branches of a forest. Nearly the entirety of the street was shadowed in a gigantic elevated structure, a bridge that followed the street itself and which rested on rows and rows of riveted iron trussed legs, arched at their tops, and who's deck of crisscrossing timbers filtered sunlight down through thousands of regular slots.

"This is shaping up to be quite a project, I get a lot of business from these big public works!" George grinned as Sir Arnfield drew the wagon to a stop at the side of a bridge leg. "I will finally be able to buy my wife the greenhouse she wanted…"

Workmen bustled about, hooks lifted all to be seen skyward, and the general trend of all supplies, objects, and bodies seemed to be upward, from street to bridge.

For a moment, Puck was suddenly back in Burmecia, during the rebuild. That same fierce energy of making order from chaos, and making something exist where before had been nothing, and that sense of industrial purpose that seemed so entirely Human, flooded his senses. The syncopated beat made itself known from what on the surface appeared to be organized disorder. Fleetingly, the method and the melody made itself apparent to him. He read before his eyes glimpses of the sheet music of the song of work and creation unfurling before him. Without understanding how he understood, he began to understand.

The crescendo of a sunbeam punctuated the symphony. The two blades of a silver mustache shewn gold as the head it was attached to sat on top of scarlet that billowed in the wind, on top of a pyramid of timbers and framed by a white and shimmering plume of steam behind him.

Cid waved to them.

Puck found himself waving back.

"Figures we would find him where the work is." Steiner shaded his eyes with his hand as he looked upward.

"Don't just stand there!" Cid shouted down, furiously waving his arms. "You're late and we've got steam up!"

Steiner spread his hands in exasperation and glanced at Puck with his mouth open. "Of all the…"

He found Puck's eyes filled with laughter and his forepaws raised to his mouth. The complaint died on his lips.

"My service to you ends here!" The guard said hurriedly to the two of them, then turning up to Cid and saluting him. Cid saluted back haphazardly before turning away and disappearing down the stack of timber and away from the edge of the bridge, briefly re-appearing at the railing to impatiently beckon them up.

"Good luck your worships!" George shouted as Puck and Steiner were hurriedly ushered up a rickety set of wooden stairs set up by the workmen.

"Kweh!" Sir Arnfield added.

On the bridge, above the shadows cast upon it to the street below they found themselves in quite another world.

The bridge formed an avenue of railway track, several sets in parallel, crisscrossing at junctions and then continuing on in a straight and unbroken set of silvery parallel lines until the street curved and them with it, out of sight around a corner. Flat, straight and uninterrupted, it looked like a newly laid skittles alley in wood and metal, the sunlight glinting off the perfectly straight rails. Steiner was familiar with the somewhat haphazard single-line trackwork of the Berkmean cable cars but this was far more substantial, presented itself as smooth and permanent and demonstrated possibilities he had never imagined. Rodding and bell cranks sat underfoot on iron bearings bolted to the bridge, connected to point mechanisms in the track and curious little objects with painted arms lanterns on posts dotted the line side as far as they could see, and near them were rows of what appeared to be water standpipes.

Cid stood atop a strange and purposeful looking contraption. Puck and Steiner instantly found it beautiful, the latter in spite of himself. It stood proudly on the rails upon eight silvery rimmed and extraordinarily finely made wheels and at a glance, it appeared to be a self-propelled carriage made to run on them, covered in copper pipe and apparatus and obviously driven by steam.

"Gentlemen!" Cid exclaimed. "Welcome to the Lindblum Inter-District Municipal Railway, our latest Public venture!"

"What is this?" Steiner asked.

"Yes, what is it?" Puck jumped up and down with excitement.

"This is called a locomotive!" Cid replied exuberantly.

"Hah! What an idiotic word." Steiner threw his head back.

"Says you!" Cid jumped down from it's driving platform. "We've already had small ones in the hangar for a long time to move things around, the first one came in my father's day, before that you had to shove those carts up there around on the rails by hand and it took such a long time to do anything. Would you believe we had powered cranes up there before we had these?" He banged on the plum painted side. "Of course this one is much different, it's meant to go fast!"

Cid spoke with a force they had known from him only in his deep creative passion. They had last heard it in him so long ago when they had ridden with him on the first test run of the third airship named Hilda Garde.

"I'll know if you've been mucking about with my engine!" shouted a sharp and scratchy voice. A pencil-thin young man with a harsh and sooty face, sunken eyes and high cheekbones, a pointed nose and a close shaven head walked briskly up with a large brass oil pot and a box of tools. He was covered from head to toe in coal dust and his clothes were stained in oil.

"Haven't, I swear." Cid put his hands behind his back.

The young man eyed him suspiciously.

"Right then make yourself useful, and that goes for the lot of you if you're coming."

"Coming?" Steiner asked.

"We get to go for a ride?" Puck added with excitement.

"This is what I summoned you for, I wanted you to see our grand new experiment first hand, this new elevated railway system is history in the making, there was no way I'd let you miss it." Cid replied. "It's bad enough you missed the first leg of its construction, and the first runs over it!"

"I thought something terrible had happened! Why couldn't you bother to say that in the summons!"

"And spoil the surprise?"

"Cid, I hate surprises!" Steiner jumped up and down on the spot. "We've all had enough surprises to send us all to an early grave!"

"You hate everything, Adelbert!" Cid laughed. "And you will most assuredly hate this, so come and do so merrily my friend."

"A man who hates everything is a man I can understand. The world can be such a stupid place." The young engineman said, extending a hand to Steiner.

"I certainly do not hate everything. I only hate what is out of the ordinary." Steiner replied, completing the handshake and being surprised at the immense size of the hand that was offered, and at the force the sooty young man put into it. "And you are?"

"Alexander."

Steiner paused with surprise.

"Something the matter?"

"That is an excellent name!" Steiner beamed.

The young man blinked. "Why?"

"That is the name of a great and powerful and true protector. My Kingdom draws its name from one who shares yours."

"Ah I see now, that's who you are!" The young man's grin split his blackened face with yellowish white. "Sir Steiner, don't worry I'll dispense with all that your highness stuff. Just call me Alex."

Steiner was instantly dismayed.

"But I think I'd know you anywhere." Alex turned to Puck, and bent down. "It's so good to meet you."

Puck took Alex's big hand in his forepaw.

"Give me just a moment." Alex turned, leaned against the side plate of the locomotive and shouted, "For the last time, where is Phil!"

Several workmen looked up, and one of them shouted back. "Last I saw he was headed to the tavern to cram his face!"

Alex appeared furious. "That fat bastard. Nobody can ever stick to a plan when there's food around now can they!" He whirled back to the three Kings.

"Gentlemen, it seems I've lost my fireman. I wish I could say this wasn't a regular occurrence! Which one of you knows how to fire a steam engine?"

Steiner and Puck blinked.

"I do!" Cid raised his fist.

Steiner was aghast and Puck again covered his face with his forepaws.

"Right then take this." Alex handed him a wood handled coal scoop, and banged on the handles of two large long fire irons resting on forked brackets down on top of the big side boxes that formed the engine's water tanks. "Poker and fire rake live here, be careful where you swing them and don't hit the sight glasses, and don't get coal all over my footplate you fancy-dressed bastard."

Steiner's eyes turned to dinnerplates.

"Right!" Cid saluted.

"Damper's there, blower's here, your feedwater pump recirculating valve is there, blastpipe choke is this one, steam heating to the tank is here. Yes, before you ask the brake ejector draughts up the funnel. Superheater damper iiissss here! Safety valve starts to lift at a hundred eighty. Leave the rest to me." Alex pointed to several levers and wheels in succession.

"Oh so you've improved upon the ejector then?" Cid asked.

"Yes no more of that over the side nonsense, and we are now maintaining vacuum with a pump driven off the crosshead instead of a second ejector. Uses less steam, works way better."

Cid's mustache bristled and he opened the fire door. Inside burned a bed of red hot coals. Puck was suddenly transported back through his memory to El Adrel's engine room. The Regent scooped up four shovelfuls of the shining black rock from the open bunker behind them and evenly sprinkled them over the fire. The new black coal bed quickly sprang to life with tongues of flame. He pulled up the lever he had been shown for the damper.

Alex spun a large crank beside the boiler and put his hand on a long and curved brass lever mounted in a quadrant above the fire door on the back of the boiler and gently pushed it away from him.

The locomotive, which had until now presented itself as a fairly inert object besides the wafting steam from its funnel, the dull roar of its fire and quiet percolations suddenly seemed to tense up and spring to life. Steam hissed out from the undercarriage and seated the machine on a cloud of sunny white vapor. Steiner immediately grabbed the sturdiest object he could find, which was a large brass wheel on top of an iron pedestal coming up from the deck.

"I see you've found the handbrake. Release that please." Alex directed him.

Steiner stared dumbly.

"Counter-clockwise."

Steiner spun the wheel as he was told. The locomotive slowly began to glide backward, toward a curious looking wagon sitting a short distance behind them. A frame of plumb-bob accelerometers sat in a steel-clad cabin in the center along with several weights on springs, a curious looking clock and other instruments that were harder to recognize. Benches sat in rows along its flat bed and the ends were adorned with lanterns and brass railings.

"We've been using this car to test the track, and what happens at different speeds, and even how different types of wheels work and which are best. Recently we've been using it to determine what the optimal taper for the wheel treads are!"

Alex drew the brass lever toward him and the machine coasted, and backed gently onto the car. A man clad in old slacks jumped on from the side and with a deft movement, coupled them together with a chain. With a quick word of thanks, Alex then spun the crank several times around and moved the brass lever away from him again.

Another cloud of steam and this time they rolled forward, with the car rolling behind them.

"You have the token!" Shouted another man leaning from the window of a curious building built right on the bridge, directly adjacent to their track. Alex leaned out to meet him and received a small brass staff with a parchment wrapped around it. "You are lined up for the middle track all the way to the Grand Boulevard, no opposing traffic and nothing laid up!"

"Right!" Alex saluted as the locomotive began to speed up, and pocketed the staff.

"The possession of this token means we have permission to go down the middle line without worrying about hitting anyone else, if we have the token, nobody else can, and thusly nobody else can take the line!" Cid explained. "It's a bit limiting but it will do for now until we figure out the signals better!"

Alex moved a lever on the floor forward and the hissing of steam from underneath stopped, and was replaced with a defined rythmatic beat up the funnel. The machine began to speed up further and everyone present was overtaken with a sense of definite motion, as their speed began to exceed that of an able-bodied sprint. The tracks divided and the locomotive negotiated the complex arrangement of rails with great ease, and a great deal of clattering.

Alex and Cid glanced at each other, and Cid made several rapid changes to the controls he had been given as Alex slowly pushed the long brass lever all the way over to the opposite end of its travel, and quickly wound back the crank in front of him.

Everything changed. The sound from the funnel loudened into that of cannon blasts and the locomotive seemed to lean ahead, like an athlete hurling themselves into a run. Without lurch or jolt, the machine pulled itself to a speed neither Steiner or Puck had ever been accustomed to on land, and it simply kept accelerating.

"Yes!" Cid roared. "Yes, yes, yes!"

Buildings and rooftops and windows flashed by on either side as they darted in and out of beams and shadows cast by the low hanging morning sun. They found themselves suddenly hemmed in on both sides by rises in the buildings and land as the street became a cutting, they passed under a steeply inclined stone viaduct, and as quickly as it came, everything dropped away and Market street was on a viaduct of its own over a great height, with their railway bridge straddling it on its iron legs. The steam engine careened forward like a shooting star as Alex continued to wind back the crank, scowling and bent over his controls. The funnel blast was now a constant roar, and down under the side boards the wheels and rods that connected them were a blur of silvery whirling motion.

"What say you!" Cid laughed as the locomotive jumped and swayed.

"This is terrifying!" Steiner responded, clenching the side of the bunker in a death grip.

"It's faster than an airship!" Puck proclaimed with delight.

"And it's faster than this!" Alex grinned, and opened the steam valve for a shrill whistle that cut the air over the city. He wound the crank forward a half turn and spun a brass handle coming up from the footplate. "Cid, tend that fire!"

Cid stoked furiously until the fire bed was a white hot sun behind the firedoor. The steam gauge climbed and with careful adjustments of the big silvery crank the engine did the seemingly impossible and again picked up speed. Now even Puck held on for dear life as his ears billowed behind him in the wind.

They had never seen this or any city unfurl before them like a carpet before. Lindblum opened before them like a book, and the pages flipped by as if that book had been opened into a gale. The steam locomotive devoured distance and time and the railway line and city in front of it with a ravenous appetite. Neither Steiner nor Puck had ever imagined something on wheels could ever move this fast.

"This railway will be able to carry more – far more – people, goods, anything imaginable, than the fleet of flying omnibuses we had before!" Cid began to shout at them, his mustache appearing on the verge of being torn from his face by the wind. "And it will do so faster and in a safer and less costly way!"

"Pardon me if I am dubious about our safety!" Steiner yelled back.

"Nonsense!" Cid more banged than patted Steiner on the back. "Compared to all those flying machines filling the air? Do you know how often our municipal air omnibuses would almost hit each other? And sometimes they would, I had far too many reports of that on my desk for my liking when the service really gained popularity! This system is based on structure!"

The engine navigated an uneven track joint that sent them all stumbling around the footplate, except Alex who appeared cemented to his spot and for all the world to be a part of the machine itself.

"Structure that needs improvement!" Steiner furiously responded, making sure he had not crushed Puck.

"The good thing is…" Cid regained his footing. "When this steam locomotive can be less powerful than the awful little mist engine fitted to one of those flying cabs, and yet draw behind it five hundred people instead of ten, and let them off and on anywhere along a predetermined route with almost no risk of collision, you've got what I would call a tangible improvement!"

"Where do you all get the energy for any of this?" Steiner asked. "Isn't it enough for anyone here to live a quiet life after all that has happened? Why do any of this?"

"Because I love my city and I love my people!" Cid beat his chest. "I will do anything to improve their lives, Nobody said my father could make a ship fly the skies, either!"

Steiner and Puck gazed at him and seemed to forget the rocking and speed of the vehicle that bore them along.

"A people who are free to move are prosperous, a society where all basic needs like health, food, water, heat and transit is democratic and fair for all, whether they deserve it or not! Everyone has the chance to better themselves and live free of pain and misery and scarcity and suffering! The world has had more than its fair share of that! Great Public Works such as these are the most effective way to make these dreams real!" Cid wrung his hands with a fiery passion, his silvery hair and mustache shimmered with the fire of the passing sunbeams as if they were made of spun gold and his face took on an expression that they had never seen in him before. It was very different from the childlike glee they had seen when he had finished a new airship.

Puck and Steiner felt a hand upon their backs and saw Alex had moved from his post racked over the controls and had his arm behind them. Without any prompt or request to do so he began to explain the machine as he worked it.

"Regulator!" He pointed to the long brass lever at the back of the boiler. "Moderates the flow of steam from the boiler to the engine! It's all the way open now, when you shut it off, there's no power anymore and we will coast to a stop!"

He then pounded on the large crank beside the boiler he had been working to different positions. "Reverser, but does more than that!" Steiner stared Dumbly while Puck followed Alex's finger by laying his paws on the machinery. "This changes valve timing, it doesn't just reverse the engine but changes the entire way it runs through different speeds!"

"The boiler is a closed vessel filled most of the way up with water, it surrounds the fire on all sides, the exhaust gasses from the fire go through tubes under the water in the long portion and into the smokebox where the ash settles and up that chimney, the steam exhausting from the engine helps blast it up there, fairly simple!" He waved his arms this way and that as he worked. They were reminded of a crab. "Engine drives the wheels of course, and a water pump. As the water boils off we need to force in more to the boiler to replace it, there's a pump between the frame driven by an eccentric, you can vary the stroke with this lever!"

He waved to two glass tubes in brass housings to either side of the regulator. "These give you the level of the water in the boiler!" And then to the largest of several ornate and highly polished gauges. "And this is the steam pressure – which seems to have gone away, what's all this!"

Alex went from manic to furious and instantly opened the fire door.

"Cid you bastard what happened to the fire!"

In his fierce orations about matters of Lindblum, Cid had forgotten to tend the furnace. Inside burned a sickly white hot irregular bed of coals with holes burnt away showing red-hot fire grate bars. The steam pressure had rapidly fallen away.

Alex snapped the regulator shut and slammed the dampers closed. "Might melt the bloody firebars too! Don't just stand there!"

The funnel was silent and the locomotive coasted.

Cid began shoveling coal on like a madman to Alex's utter chagrin, and he slowly urged up the dampers. The newly added coal only served to smother what little remained of the fire, and did not ignite.

Alex's eyebrows drew down a letter V over his eyes and his scowl cut ear to ear, and he settled down on the seat box lower and lower as the locomotive backed down from its great speed.

Cid angrily cracked the fire door again and again to check and re check the fire, willing the new coal to catch. He saw only total darkness. Each time he peered through the slot between the doors, Alex became more miserable.

Due to the low steam pressure and their low speed, the brake vacuum began to fail and the brakes crept on, bringing them rolling to a disappointing and thoroughly embarrassing stop.

They stared at Alex and Cid, Puck with mirth, Steiner with nervous apprehension. Cid looked at Alex sheepishly and Alex glared back with a peculiar blend of rage, misery, futility and pathos.

"Regent, you've put out the damned fire."