The wind was a living, breathing entity in the skies of Aethelgard. It howled through the canyons of the floating islands, whispering secrets of forgotten eras and carrying the constant, biting chill of high altitude. Caelen stood on the very edge of his home island, Zephyr’s Rest, his toes curled over the precipice. Three thousand feet below him churned the Miasma—a thick, roiling ocean of toxic purple clouds that had swallowed the surface of the world centuries ago. To fall into the Miasma was to die a slow, suffocating death. Caelen took a deep breath of the thin, crisp air, checking the leather straps of his canvas glider wings one final time.
Today, an island was dying.
About two miles out, a minor landmass known as Oakhaven was losing its buoyancy. The giant, glowing blue aerocore embedded in its bedrock was sputtering out, causing the island to sink steadily toward the toxic purple sea. For the wealthy elite in the capital of Highreach, a falling island was a tragedy to be ignored. For Caelen and the other scavengers, it was an opportunity. Before the island sank into the Miasma forever, there was a brief window to dive, raid its abandoned temples for magical artifacts, and glide back on the thermal updrafts.
“You’re cutting it close this time, Cae,” said a gruff voice behind him. It was old man Silas, the local merchant who bought Caelen’s salvaged goods. “Oakhaven is dropping fast. The structural integrity is gone. The bedrock is cracking.”
“The faster it falls, the stronger the updraft when it breaks apart,” Caelen replied with a brash, confident grin that masked his underlying terror. He pulled his heavy brass goggles down over his eyes. “I just need ten minutes in the Sun-Temple. Legend says they kept an Echo Stone there. If I find it, we eat like kings for a year.”
Before Silas could offer another warning, Caelen threw himself off the cliff.
The sensation of free-fall was an intoxicating rush of adrenaline. Gravity clawed at him, pulling him toward the purple abyss, but Caelen expertly angled his body, catching a vicious crosswind. He snapped his arms outward, and the canvas wings of his glider suit snapped taut with a sound like a cracking whip. His descent leveled out into a rapid, terrifying glide toward the sinking island of Oakhaven.
As he approached, the devastation was evident. Oakhaven was tilting at a severe thirty-degree angle. Massive chunks of earth and stone were breaking off its underside, plummeting into the Miasma below, kicking up silent plumes of toxic gas. Trees were sliding perfectly upright off the edge of the world. Caelen banked hard, bleeding off speed, and unclipped his grappling hook. He fired it at the marble columns of the ruined Sun-Temple at the island’s center, the brass prongs biting deep into the stone. He swung inward, crashing through a stained-glass window and rolling across the dusty, tilted floor of the ancient sanctuary.
He didn’t have much time. The floor groaned beneath his boots, a deep, tectonic agony. He scrambled up the slanted floor toward the central altar. The temple was stripped bare by previous generations, but Caelen’s scavenger intuition told him to look deeper. He pulled a small, iron tuning fork from his belt and struck it against a marble pillar. He closed his eyes, listening. Beneath the chaotic sounds of the crumbling island, he heard it—a faint, melodic hum resonating from beneath the altar.
Caelen shoved the heavy stone slab aside with all his meager strength. Beneath it lay a hidden alcove, and resting on a velvet cushion was a crystal the size of a melon. It wasn’t just glowing; it was singing. The sound was a complex chord that vibrated in Caelen’s very bones, making his teeth ache and his heart race. This was no ordinary artifact. It was an Aether-Core, a piece of raw creation magic.
As his fingers brushed the faceted surface, a sudden, blinding pulse of azure light erupted from the stone. The frequency of its song shifted, growing louder, more frantic. Caelen shoved it into his satchel just as a deafening crack echoed through the temple. The island was breaking in half.
The floor beneath him split open. Caelen scrambled backward, narrowly avoiding a drop into the abyss. He sprinted for the shattered window, diving headfirst into the open sky just as Oakhaven disintegrated entirely behind him. He deployed his glider, searching frantically for a thermal updraft to carry him home.
But as he caught a rising column of warm air, a shadow fell over him. He looked up to see the sleek, armored hull of a military Sky-Galleon cutting through the clouds. The sails were emblazoned with the golden sunburst of the Highreach Admiralty. A grappling net shot from the ship’s cannons, enveloping Caelen and his glider, collapsing his wings. As he was dragged upward into the belly of the warship, the crystal in his satchel continued to sing, its melody a grim premonition of the danger he had just invited into his life.