i.
The Omniphrax Fleet
The fleet of sky ships advanced through the eternal night, led by the Edgesaver.
The howling wind was subsiding in earnest, and the air was growing deathly still, a sign that their journey was almost at an end.
The silence was shattered by a voice. "I can see it!" shouted one of the Pirates Academic.
Durix and Celestia turned towards the sound. Silhouetted against the glow of the flight-burners, the Pirate was pointing straight ahead. Sure enough, a faint hazy glow was starting to emerge out of the blackness.
Celestia nervously fingered the receiver at her belt. The tiny phraxcrystal at its heart was connected to a transmitter that sent a radio signal. This high-tech device would enable her, Durix, and Leris to stay in touch with the others as they journeyed towards the Support Tunnel. However, the Phraxguardians were capable of tapping into their frequency, so any use of the phrax transmitter would run the risk of revealing the whole plan to the enemy. It was therefore only to be used in the event that one party was in mortal danger.
She was burning to use it now…to learn what had become of Bron and the others. But she forced herself not to remove it from her pocket. She withdrew her trembling hand and turned to Durix. He looked back at her solemnly. Neither of them could bear to voice their questions aloud, for they felt that to reveal them would be to make their attendant fears more solid, more absolute.
Leris strode over to them. "I have news from the Pirate General," she said. "Our mission has…changed, somewhat."
"Changed?" said Celestia, confused.
"Well, not changed, as such. Amended would be a more accurate description."
Durix and Celestia stared at Leris.
"You see, General Venvax believes that we are too talented as fighters to simply serve as backup for the others. If we receive word that the others have failed, then we will carry out the original plan. But…until then, we are to pursue another objective."
"What's that?" said Durix nervously.
Leris paused, took a deep breath, and said, "We're going after Vartolius Xax."
ii.
The Great Phraxtower
"M-M-Most High Phraxguardian, sir," stammered a white-robed fourthling, bursting into the sumptuous chambers. "There…there is a f-fleet of sky ships approaching Riverrise!"
"What?" snapped Vartolius Xax, his head jerking around to stare at the intruding Phraxguardian.
The Phraxguardian did not answer, instead turning tail and bolting out of the room before the dictator could call him back. Vartolius Xax rose to his feet, strode across the room, and grabbed his telescope. As he flipped the switches on, it glowed red, the glister inside it powering the automated magnification. Peering into it, he saw a cluster of bright lights approaching from the east.
Slowly, a sneer spread across Vartolius Xax's hard features. After all the tremendous irritations he had had to endure this month—the loss of his flagship, the scattered resistances, the degradation of order in the remote settlements—fate had once more smiled in his direction. It seemed that the fools from Omniphrax had grown a little too bold for their own good.
Vartolius Xax burst out laughing. He collapsed into his magnificent armchair, roaring with mirth. The idiots had achieved the impossible in bringing down the Vilnix Pompolnius, and now they had deceived themselves into thinking they could do the same to the city of Riverrise!
"How gracious of those acadimwits to hand me my own final victory," he chuckled. He leapt to his feet once more. There was work to be done. Everything had to be perfect. The destruction of Omniphrax must be swift, total, and above all, humiliating.
Nor, Vartolius Xax noticed as he gazed up into High Sky above him, was this the only piece of news that made his heart leap. Far in the distance, but approaching fast, the dictator could see a massive, throbbing, pulsing bank of clouds that seemed to emanate chaos and power.
"Sky be praised!" He bellowed, dropping to his knees and raising his arms in reverence. "She is returning! Hail, the Mother Storm!"
iii.
The Empty Range
The Nimbuscleaver was being buffeted and battered once more.
As the sky ship flew further and further northwest, and the lights of Riverrise grew fainter and fainter, the howling wind and turbulence was becoming more insistent.
"Not to worry!" shouted Raziel over the wind. "As long as we hold the exact course and maintain a thirty-five degree angle against the wind, the Nimbuscleaver will not be torn to pieces!"
"I don't find that very reassuring!" called Nate from the flight rock platform.
Raziel looked down from the helm, and gave him a sly wink. "Considering the skilled hands sailing her, you should."
Bron feverishly triple-checked the tolley-ropes, making sure that they were completely secure. In this swirling, unstable air, there was no room for error.
"Keep pumping those flight-burner bellows, Nate!" yelled Raziel. "We can't let the wind blow them out, or we'll turn turvey for sure!"
"Aye-aye, captain!"
"And Bron, see to the rigging!"
Bron leapt from his post and checked the rigging. The ropes securing the aftsail and spinnaker were coming undone. Hastily tying off the flapping ends, Bron suddenly noticed something much more worrisome.
"The topsail's rigging is fraying!" he shouted in alarm.
"Then release the sail! We can't risk it expanding freely!"
Bron drew his cutlass and sliced through the main rope securing the topsail. Instantly it flew off into the darkness.
"Get ready to raise the mainsail!" roared Raziel. "We're about to turn to the northeast!"
Bron held the necessary rope ready. A few feet away, on the flight-rock platform, Nate was huffing and puffing almost as loudly as the bellows themselves. Thanks to his efforts, the flight-rock was still warm enough to maintain a steady altitude.
"NOW!"
Bron released the rope, just at the moment that Raziel spun the steering wheel. The Nimbuscleaver twisted in midair, lurched, then shot forward. They had made it. They were now flying above the Empty Range, and on their way to the dark side of the Riverrise mountain.
BOOM!
Bron spun around. The sounds of battle coming from Riverrise were loud enough to hear even from this distance. Dozens of glisterbeams were firing, and the brilliance of the blasts was so great that they cast a white glow over everything. For the first time, the three of them could see the landscape below them, eerily luminous below the still pitch-black sky.
The sinister, craggy peaks of the Empty Range rose up all around them. The Riverrise Mountain loomed far ahead of them, clearly outlined by the brilliance of the thousands of explosions taking place on the other side. It almost looked like a sunrise. Bron looked back over his shoulder to see hundreds more mountains, fading into the distant blackness.
WHUMP!
Abruptly the Nimbuscleaver listed alarmingly to starboard. Nate cried out as he was nearly torn from the flight-rock platform.
"The peri hull-weight!" cried Raziel, wrestling with the controls. "It's tangled in the flight-rock cage!"
"I'm on it!" shouted Bron. He flung himself across the deck, seized a grappling rope, and plunged over the balustrade. Gripping the rope for dear life, he walked down the side of the hull until he saw it. The weight was lodged in the rock cage a couple of strides away from him. He kicked out at the weight with all his might, and it swung free. Instantly, Bron felt the shuddering ship right itself, and started to climb back up.
Suddenly, the rope jerked forward. Bron swung wildly and only just managed to maintain his grip. What had happened?
And then he realized with an icy surge of dread that the Nimbuscleaver had stopped moving. It was clutched in a massive, scaly hand the size of the flight-rock itself. Bron heard the hull splinter and crack. Turning his head slowly, Bron found himself staring into three monstrous red eyes.
The creature to which they belonged was the ugliest, most gargantuan beast he had ever seen in his life. It had a mouthful of gray, serrated fangs, a haphazard mess of horns in all shapes and sizes on top of its misshapen head, and a spiky armored body that was so huge that the creature's legs were lost to darkness. The hand in which it was holding the Nimbuscleaver was attached to the only complex appendage the monster had; the others were a trio of slimy, writhing tentacles.
"A Nameless One," gasped Bron.
iv.
The Omniphrax Fleet
"Arm those catapults!"
"Take aim at that large structure over there!"
"Call back the first wave of ships!"
The deck of the Edgesaver was in total chaos. Everyone was scurrying this way and that, making adjustments, firing the weapons, shouting reports of retaliatory fire. As planned, the Edgesaver was far enough from Riverrise to be out of range of the glisterbeams, but it was by no means out of danger. Dozens of small glisterships were launching offensives and boarding parties. Fortunately, the fighters on board the Edgesaver were managing to repel most of the enemy ships.
The Pirates Academic were suffering the brunt of the casualties. As each group of sky pirate ships swooped down over Riverrise, they rained destruction down on the Phraxguardians, but paid with an equal amount of blood. Here and there, sky ships were exploding in flames as glisterbombs and phraxfire globes were shot into the sky.
And all the while, Vartolius Xax's amplified voice boomed out over Riverrise.
"Attention, revolutionaries!" the dictator was bellowing. "Your feeble campaign of terror is too pathetic even to permit me to admire your misplaced bravery. Do you not realize that it is your actions, and not mine, which have doomed your cause? In choosing to attack me, you have decided to allow yourselves to be made a gruesome example of. Your destruction will be known throughout the entire Edge, a resounding message that will endure for eternity. The Phraxguardians are invincible! The return of the Mother Storm is proof! She will cleanse the Edge of its impurities, just as we shall cleanse it of dissidents!"
The approaching fleet paid Vartolius Xax no heed. But at the same time, for every ship that successfully bombed one of the circular white defense towers of the Phraxguardians, another vanished inside a glisterbeam or spun, burning, towards the ground.
Worse still, the oncoming glisterships were beginning to overwhelm the Edgesaver. Though most of the ships were being blasted out of the sky, a few of them had broken through the expanding aerial conflagration and swooped in close to the mighty vessel, pounding its hull with bombs and unloading swarms of Phraxguardians onto the deck. Most worrisome of all, some of the glisterships were assaulting the "escort" fleet protecting the flight-rock and the thermal phraxchambers. The closely-packed swarm of sky ships was putting up a tremendous fight, but the defenders couldn't hold out forever.
Up inside the enclosed helm of the Edgesaver, Tesener Burlix and Philbus Venvax made feverish adjustments to the ship's course, not saying a word to each other, beads of sweat trickling down their brows. Each of them feared for the thousands upon thousands of jeopardized lives, and ached for the thousands upon thousands which were already lost.
Yet they knew that every last academic would fight till the very end. And so would they.
v.
The Typhoonblaster
Celestia and Durix raised their heads. The darkness was thinning, giving way to the tops of clouds underneath the pink and purple shafts of a rising sun. Unlike the carnage below, this place was completely calm.
Leris adjusted the controls of the Typhoonblaster, and they began to head towards the peak of the Riverrise spring, protruding just above the cloud layer. The once-magnificent Garden of Life which had once rested at the very top, however, had given way to the base of a great, spherical, pure-white tower, just like those below it, which extended farther into the sky than the three of them could see.
At the top of this tower, they knew, was Vartolius Xax.
Shortly before the battle had begun, they had boarded the sky ship Typhoonblaster and separated from the rest of the fleet. However, they still witnessed the first few moments of the battle, which had erupted from nowhere and unfolded immediately into scenes of carnage and destruction. Mercifully, this moment was short-lived, and a few seconds later, they were too far up in the sky to see any more.
Under normal circumstances, no sky ship could have reached even half of this height without turning turvey and hurtling under the stinging frigidity of High Sky. But, once again, the Phraxguardians would prove to be victims of their own device. In preparation for the Mother Storm, they had engaged a network of turbines up and down the Great Phraxtower which circulated warm air around the structure. They believed that a higher temperature would be more conducive to the Mother Storm's sacred discharge. But it also made it possible for a sky ship to safely approach the highest point of the tower, countless thousands of strides above the ground.
Despite this, however, the flight-rock was still proving temperamental. The turbines did not distribute the heat perfectly, creating some pockets of freezing air. Every time the Typhoonblaster sailed through one of these invisible pockets, the flight rock whistled and shook in its cradle. Whenever this happened, Celestia seized the flight-burner bellows and pumped for all she was worth.
"So, what are we going to do when…when we get there?" said Durix shakily.
"Take him out," said Leris coldly. "You two are good with phraxpistols, and I am proficient at close combat, despite being a tad past my prime. But be warned that we are facing an opponent who is not only a brutal tactician, but also an exceptionally skilled fighter. They say that when his army first marched on Riverrise, he positioned himself at the front of the charge, and personally slaughtered more waifs than any one of his soldiers. Plenty of tyrants throughout the history of the Edge have been too cowardly to get their own hands dirty. Vartolius Xax is not one of them."
These ominous words echoed around the heads of the other two. Celestia and Durix patted the phraxpistols at their belts, and Leris drew an ornate cutlass.
"Brace yourselves," Leris said. "We're almost there."
Sure enough, the top of the Great Phraxtower was growing nearer and nearer. Soon, they could all make out a large, deserted balcony.
"He hasn't noticed us," said Leris. "That's good. We may be able to take him by surprise. If we are lucky, we might be able to end the fight before it begins, but I wouldn't count on it. The instant he realizes what's going on, he'll spring into action."
vi.
The Empty Range
With a roar, the Nameless One shook the Nimbuscleaver. Bron gripped the grappling rope for dear life, certain at any moment that it would be wrenched from his grasp and he would plummet to his death.
"The flight-burners!" yelled Raziel. "We can burn it! Pump the bellows, Nate!"
But at that moment, the beast shook the Nimbuscleaver again. With a scream, Nate was thrown from the flight-rock platform and only just managed to prevent himself from tumbling over the side by clinging to the balustrade just above Bron.
Trying to ignore the terrible tremors of the splintering sky ship and the Nameless One's roars, Bron climbed the side of the rock cage. He swung himself over onto the deck, seized Nate's hands, and tugged with all his might. The ancient lamplighter gasped and wheezed, and then lunged forward, coming to rest in a crumpled heap at Bron's feet.
Seizing the edge of the balustrade to hold himself steady, Bron pulled Nate to his feet and pushed him towards the flight-rock platform. The Nimbuscleaver suddenly tilted the other way, and Nate staggered uncontrollably forwards, crying out in pain as he hit the edge of the platform. Looking slightly dazed, he hauled himself up and grasped the bellows, wrenching them up and down.
Instantly the flight-burners flared hotter than ever, the flames licking the Nameless One's scaly hand. The creature let out a terrible scream that seemed to make the mountains themselves tremble. It recoiled, relinquishing its grip, and at once the Nimbuscleaver plummeted, the overheated flight-rock dragging it down. Nate released his hold on the bellows at once.
"Don't stop pumping!" yelled Raziel. "The wind will cool the rock in a matter of seconds! Be ready to stabilize the temperature or we're done for!"
Nate resumed his efforts, though more gently. And as the ground came rushing up to meet the Nimbuscleaver, the ship leveled out just in time and soared upwards. Nate's efforts soon brought the ship back under control.
"Damage report, Bron?" called out Raziel over the screaming of the wind and the still audible howls of the Nameless One behind them.
"The aft-hull is splintered in places, captain!" replied Bron, scanning everything by the still-brilliant glow of the distant battle. "And the starboard neben-hull weight was dislodged!"
As if to emphasize Bron's words, the Nimbuscleaver listed violently to port.
"Cut the port neben-hull weight, Bron!" shouted Raziel.
"Aye-aye!" yelled Bron, dashing to the aftcastle and entering the weight cable room. Drawing his cutlass, Bron severed the cable for the port neben-hull weight. Immediately the Nimbuscleaver righted itself as the weight fell away into the blackness below, though the loss of two hull weights was causing the sky ship to wobble insistently.
"We were lucky," said Raziel. "The damage could have been much worse. Sailing the Nimbuscleaver will be more of a challenge now, but we still have control."
Bron breathed a sigh of relief.
"We're nearly there!" shouted Raziel abruptly.
The west slope of the Riverrise Mountain loomed ahead, and its shadow plunged the Nimbuscleaver into darkness.
Raziel's hands became blurred as she wrestled with the flight-levers, steepening their descent and slowing their forward movement.
"Captain," said Bron, suddenly realizing something. "Once we disembark from the Nimbuscleaver, how will we keep her flight-rock warm? Without someone attending to the flight-burners, won't she tear free of her anchoring cables and be whisked away?"
"No, she won't, thanks to the Pirates' latest invention," said Raziel, as they came in to land on the rocky slope, throwing down the anchoring ropes and activating a mysterious device that Bron had not noticed. "It's a tiny phraxchamber that warms the flight-rock at a steady temperature. It's not as advanced as the Edgesaver's phraxchambers, so we can't use it to control the temperature in flight, but it will keep the flight-rock stable when the ship is docked."
The three of them climbed down from the Nimbuscleaver, and raced forwards. As one, they reached into the pouches at their belts, pulled out some sky-crystals and torches, and struck them together. They sparked and created a burst of flame, illuminating the vast tunnel stretching ahead of them into the side of the mountain.
"Here we are," breathed Raziel, just audible over the howling gusts surrounding them. "The Support Tunnel."