Unsleeping Patron - Flight Above the Ash Sea

Clear, thin, and freezing, air at ten thousand meters cut like glass.Below Silas, the Ash Miasma lay like an unbroken sea of grey wool, rolling silently toward the horizon in endless, suffocating drifts. Up here, above the ceiling of the world, the sky was a deep, bruised navy, devoid of clouds or birds.Silas twitched his right shoulder blade.Behind him, the ten-meter wings of translucent, crimson blood flexed with a sharp, wet membrane rustle. They didn’t beat like the wings of a bird; they cut through the thin air, the vein-mapped fluid humming with a low, spatial frequency.He tilted his chin downward and blinked.Space buckled. A hairline crimson crack tore open in the navy sky ahead, and in a fraction of a second, Silas vanished, reappearing three miles to the south. The wind didn’t catch him; the momentum of the spatial fold carried him forward smoothly, the crimson wings stabilization-flapping twice to hold his line.Beneath the sea of fog, ancient abominations roared, phantom fleets cruised, and spatial footprints crushed citadels. Above it, Silas flew at three hundred miles an hour, bypassing the dead wasteland in an unbroken, crimson glide.Two days.What had taken weeks of agonizing, crooked steps through the Ghost-Wall on foot took forty-eight hours from the high altitude.On the afternoon of the second day, the grey floor beneath him sloped downward. Through a rift in the Miasma, the massive, one-hundred-meter canopy of the Hollow Canopy emerged a dark, violet island rising out of the ash-colored sea.Silas folded his blood-wings against his spine, letting gravity seize his boots as he plunged through the cloud deck.He hit the violet canopy, his Mind-Light hands sprouting from his wrists to catch a massive limb, swinging his weight smoothly onto a lower branch. He dropped the last twenty feet to the forest floor, his boots sinking into the bed of glowing Purpur-Blossoms.The clearing was quiet.At the base of the ancient root structure where he had left the seven Pioneer candidates, the golden chrysalises were gone. Seven oval shells lay split open on the purple carpet, their amber walls shattered cleanly from the inside like hatched eggs.Silas knelt beside the nearest shell the one where Hester had been encased.The inner wall was smooth, free of blood or rot. On the soft dirt beside the fragment, a single strand of bright, golden guide-thread stretched out from the root, extending straight south toward the Miasma Wastes. The Slate of Names had pulled them home. All seven candidates had survived the ascension, unlocked Sequence 9: Mind-Light, and returned to Brierhold.Silas stood up, his amber-and-crimson eyes scanning the dark forest floor.He didn’t rest. He flexed his shoulder blades, the crimson wings erupting from his back with a sharp, wet tear, and launched himself back through the canopy, shooting straight into the southern sky.An hour later, Brierhold came into view.From ten thousand meters, the human settlement looked like a tiny, glowing golden coin dropped onto a black iron plate. The Relic’s Sanctuary Aegis had expanded the ten-kilometer circle was noticeably wider, pushing the grey fog back another two miles into the shale hills.But as Silas descended, his crimson wings catching the lower air currents, his brow furrowed.The waste surrounding Brierhold wasn’t empty.Beyond the golden perimeter fence, the grey gravel plain was swarming with thousands of dark, ragged shapes. They weren’t monsters or Sken-Demons. They were human beings tens of thousands of them, sprawled across the frozen shale, shivering in torn Earth clothing, their frightened faces turned toward the golden barrier that refused to expand fast enough to shelter them all.And surrounding the panicked crowd, marching in tight, disciplined lines of iron and steam, were three battalions of Fel-Cat soldiers.Steam-pipes hissed on the backs of their iron-mesh vests. Long, six-foot pikes tipped with crude forged steel gleamed in the grey light. At the front of the main column, mounted on an oversized, horned stag, sat General Wei, his long feline ears twitching as his officers dragged a screaming human woman toward the perimeter line.Silas’s pupils narrowed into two tight crimson points.He didn’t blink. He pulled his crimson wings tight against his ribs, angled his head toward the center of the settlement, and dropped out of the sky like a falling spear.