Skybound

Morgan Mackenzie was flying. The nature of her flight and the effects of her newest skill, however, beggared attempts to capture them in such a spare word. Urgency compelled her to discard caution and travel under the cover of night despite the risk; the magic she had sensed, and the danger it posed to her friends, drove daggers of fear through her spine. [Soar] wasn't fast enough, and she was burning too much stamina just to maintain her pace. When no new skill suddenly revealed itself, she turned to her unspent skill points, dumping most of them into the one entry that best fit her purpose.

You have gained the skill [Windcutter]!

Her new skill didn't increase her stamina or her innate speed; in her opinion, it did something far better: it allowed her to carve a cone of near-vacuum ahead of her as she flew. As the mass of air behind her rushed forward to fill the void, it carried her along on a personal jetstream, far faster than she could have managed on her own.

It wasn't without its downsides, however: it robbed her of nearly any control over her flight as long as it was active. It was all she could do to point herself in a direction and kick off the skill; from then until she turned it off, she was merely along for the ride.

Further, its cost was staggering; even considering her tremendous natural regeneration, she could only maintain it for a minute or two at a time before she started chewing into what she considered her safety buffer of half of her mana, and attempting to enhance it with [Spell Surge] simply failed outright. The mere thought of brute-forcing it into activation made her stomach churn, instincts revolting so hard she nearly vomited mid-flight.

There was another advantage to her new skill, though, that she hadn't considered when investing her skill points. [Windcutter] was almost certainly combat-oriented; not only did it invest her with incredible speed, the leading edges of her wings, all the way to their tips, sheathed themselves in azure light, afterimages trailing behind her like so many ethereal blades. Those foes unfortunate enough to find themselves in her way soon found themselves sliced effortlessly in two, as a pair of [Icetalon Harpies] discovered shortly after attempting to stun her with their [Terrifying Screech], the sound dying as quickly as they did.

Morgan had been aloft all night, sustaining herself through sheer will alone, and her inattention had carried her into harpy territory. While they were no trouble to deal with individually, they had massed into a collective and mobbed her after she incinerated one of their matriarchs. Though slaying the [Audra Nivia] had granted her her forty-ninth level, the ire of the harpies led them to chase her well outside their usual territory, far more doggedly than normal. Morgan had fought a running battle against them throughout the night and, now, well into the morning.

With the deaths of her most recent assailants, however, the remainder of the harpies had finally given up the chase. Absent the need to fire off spells and defensive measures, she finally felt safe enough to pour on the speed, tapping [Windcutter] for longer and longer at a stretch.

She could still feel the echoes of the distant magic she had sensed, and she was still desperately worried over the fate of her friends.

====================

Terisa Aras crept through a stone doorway into a building that should have been a crumbling ruin, yet wasn't. The brickwork that made up the outside of the structure didn't even seem old, and certainly not ancient like the outer walls of stone that surrounded the city. Clearly, this was the work of the silent golems that plodded through the city streets, which seemed either unaware of or apathetic to the adventuring party. Prudence demanded they take no chances, however, so it was with furtive steps and hushed voices that the party made their way.

Carefully placing her feet in the tracks left by the others, the huntress slipped across the alley and into the neighboring building. This one had an open atrium or large parlor, and Kojeg nodded at Terisa from his position at the archway as she continued into the room. Just inside, Raminez was using a low stone bench as a makeshift hospital bed to tend to Biggles, whose effort to bind the drakes' spirits had left him in such an exhausted state that trying to accelerate his recovery with potions or elixirs would have done more harm than good; only natural rest would help the man now. In the middle of the room, Terisa passed Foz and Kels'Miros, the men talking in hushed voices as they attended to a bubbling stew-pot, kept heated by rune-inscribed stones supplied by a small mana crystal. She waved to both as she headed up the stairs at the back of the room.

As the huntress entered a room on the second floor, she shied back as an insectoid device made of metal and glass and barely the size of her closed fist buzzed its way through an open window and flew to its mistress. Dana, the engineer, was standing over a flat stone table, grasping it with both hands as she studied a flickering construct that displayed a partial map of the city, dotted with symbols and presented in ghostly shades of blue and gray. She looked up at the drone and Terisa, acknowledging the latter's presence as the former settled onto her armor with a barely-audible click. A chain of runes lit up along her gauntlets, and a missing section of the map filled itself in.

"The signal is stronger inside the barrier, but so is the interference," said the armored woman. Dana tapped the edge of the image and it spun obligingly, bringing the newly-filled section closer to her. "It's generally coming from the southwest district, here, but there's a ton of noise coming from a sub-basement or something near the center of the city. I can't fix it much more precisely until we get closer and I can clean the noise from the signal."

"A small group would be able to make it through the golems without risking a major confrontation," Terisa mused, "but with Biggles in his condition, and my husband's lack of stealth…" She let the statement hang in the air, then shakes her head. "We've been lucky so far: there are only cleaning and maintenance golems in this district, but I spotted a golem clearly intended for combat patrolling the main thoroughfare between the gate and the palace. Where there's one, there's surely more."

"Was there any trouble getting back to the ship?"

Terisa raised a single eyebrow. "Not for me, no. They've got the outer hull patched up to keep the cold out, and your mana reactor is still putting out heat, so the snows won't be an issue. The nightstride and her cubs seem to be hibernating under the engine room where it's the warmest. Not that anyone will go in there and check, but the beastkin can smell them in there." Terisa sighed, letting her eyes sweep over the map. "I think the cats have the right idea, sleeping til spring. We're definitely not getting the ship flying again until after the snows end, at least not without a miracle – or you hijacking the city's artisan golems."

"If I were actually a [Golemancer] class, that would have been an option," replied Dana, as the insectoid drone took off from her shoulder once again, flitting out the window for another scouting flight. "I can make a few simple bots like the dragonfly and control them with my suit's interface, but I can't directly manage more than a handful of units. I'd have to wipe their cores and reprogram them from scratch, and that's just about as opposite from my specialty as it gets. All my skills, and my [Skills], either support my suit, or heavy systems and mechanical engineering. I don't code."

Terisa looked at the engineer blankly. "I'm not sure what that means."

"It means I can build the machine, but I can't script an intelligence. Even the bots we used at Castra Pristis weren't programmed by me: I built the bodies, sure, but it was the golemists at Thun'Kadrass who actually made their cores. I think I could learn the basics – I am learning the basics – but the best I've done are my dragonfly scouts."

Terisa gave the engineer a wry look. "Let me guess, they have a guild that won't tell you anything without a binding contract?"

The worldwalker snorted derisively, shaking her head. "Got it in one. Just like their cannon, their powder, and any of a dozen other industries." She let out a long, put-upon sigh. "In my world, dwarves are almost universally portrayed as short, grumpy bastards who love smithing and drinking. The stories didn't say they're all goddamn lawyers, too."

Terisa sat on a stone bench built into the wall of the room and let her breath out. "I don't understand this city. Golems simply don't do this, and there's not enough mana within the dome to allow for a natural dungeon environment. If I didn't know better, I'd almost think this place was Meadowspire's inner district, or Stormbreak Academy, and not the Wildlands."

Dana studied the map, spinning it idly. "Well, the barrier seems to be somehow filtering most of the ambient mana, while leaving enough for the constructs to function. I'm pretty sure there's a central intelligence controlling the golems, and I'm pretty sure it's damaged." Dana manipulated the display, and symbols in shifting colors that Terisa couldn't understand sprung up around the city. "There are repeating patterns, odd spikes in the background noise that aren't present outside the barrier. Whatever the source is, it might be stuck in a maintenance loop."

Terisa shifted uncomfortably. "If this city really was the source of the Steel Crusade, then we can count ourselves lucky that it isn't working…but that just makes me more nervous still. We need Biggles' new familiars, but we risk poisoning him if we give him any more potions."

The other woman slumped low as her suit's legs shifted to a more chair-like stance, staring absently at the map with her chin on her hands and elbows on the table. "Well, when Morgan gets here, she can help us lop off the sternward section of the ship and at least get her airborne again…but we'd be leaving behind a lot of the food, and most of the haul from the expedition." She slappeds her hand on the table, the display wavering as her hand passeds through it. "Not that leaving is an option anyway, right? At least until our friendly neighborhood [Necromancer] finds that crown the drakes want."

"[Anima Curate], now," mused the huntress. "It's a rare thing for a necromancer to reach a class evolution towards a form that doesn't rely on enslaving spirits. It's why there's so few of them at higher levels. Most fall to the temptation of the darker paths…and that's when the [Oracle] gets involved directly."

The engineer contemplated the words for a moment. "Curator of souls, huh?"

"Still uses necromancy," Terisa replied, nodding. "But with less focus on destructive death magics and a lot more oomph behind beneficial rituals. He'll not have his full power until he holds up his end of the bargain with the drakes, though."

The dragonfly flitted back through the window, interrupting their conversation to add more detail and symbols to the hard-light map. One final section of the city filled itself in, close to the center, and vastly different from any other section.

Trees, brush, and dilapidated, crumbling walls dominated a roughly circular section of the city nearly a mile across, a sharp demarcation separating it from the neat, orderly remainder of the city. It looked like nothing so much as a ruined, overgrown garden, with stone bones punching through nature's regrowth, lending it a wild appearance. A glowing symbol sprang into existence over the new region, similar to but larger than the others of its kind.

"There!" Dana said, spinning the map and zooming in. "The signal I've been tracking is here, smack-dab in the center of this section." She pointed at the symbol, then down at the representation of the district. "Okay. I've got…wards, I guess you could call them, but they're not quite enchantments like you'd understand – they're more like, well….enhanced versions of the sensors and tripwires I'd use on Earth, but–"

Terisa raised her hand, silencing the torrent of almost-meaningless words. "I understand, Dana. You have alarms in place to give us warning so Biggles can recover in peace."

Relieved, Dana nodded. "Yes. And he's going to be out for at least six hours; maybe longer. That zone's right in our path, and I want to get eyes on it before we go traipsing through looking for that crown."

Terisa stood to look down at the map, recalling the patterns and routes of the patrolling golems. The drone was only able to mark their positions at the moment it captured the images, but most of the automatons followed predictable paths – except for the obviously combat-oriented guardian models. "With just the two of us, we can get to this zone in an hour or less, unless one of the guard types picks up our trail. I wouldn't be worried about dealing with just one, but all the stories agree that they can sense when one is damaged, and will then converge on that unit."

"How long until you can use [Celestial Shot] again?" Dana asked, looking down at the woman's hip. "I'm confident I can deal with any of the smaller ones relatively quietly, but if armored or ranged units show up, it'll get loud."

"Another day, at least," the huntress replied, hand coming to rest on her holster. "It's not that I couldn'twon't be able to use it if I needed to, but if I do too soon, it'll kill my regeneration and sap my stamina. I may have mentioned this, but [Celestial Shot] draws on both me and Althenea. She doesn't recover like you or me, though, so I have to provide for both of us." She pats the butt of Althenea's pistol form almost affectionately. "If I use it too much, it'll pull more than I can give, and it might even permanently injure me."

Dana noddeds contemplatively, stepping away from the table and reaching for her side, catching a rune-inscribed cube that popped out of her armor. "Forget bags of holding," she saidsays wistfully. "Morgan's spatial enchantments blow them out of the water." She presseds on one of the cube's faces, eliciting a positive click, then droppeds it on the floor.

Several more clicks prefaced the runes lighting up with traces of Morgan's violet mana, and then the cube began to split and separate, new facets extruding themselves out of the not-space within the cube, clicking into place and then growing larger still until the cube approached four feet on a side, several rapid clicks followed by a ratcheting thunk heralding its full size. The top of the cube split into triangles and opened like a flower, and Dana grinned like a child at Terisa.

"Nifty little box, innit?" she asked, as interlocking sections of her suit disconnected and came away from the main structure. She set them down in the box and pulled out different pieces, in a different color scheme: soft whites and pale grays, blended in a chaotically-mottled anti-pattern. "If we can't rely on your [Celestial Shot], we need something heavy," she explaineds.

With a heavy clank, the stubby weapon on her shoulder disengaged and flipped forward to drop into her hand. Into the box it went, and out came a blocky octagonal cylinder of similar diameter to Dana's arm and a hand's width longer. The woman's improved stats allowed her to lift it with seeming ease, to flip it onto her back where it locked into place on the armor. A stack of metal disks covered in runes similar to those on the cube followed. An inch thick and four times as wide, half the disks had the outer edge banded in red, the other half blue. They slotted into gaps in the armor's sides, separated by colors. As the armor reconfigured to accommodate the new gear, the soldier tapped a rune on the side of the box and it began to close in a hypnotic reversal of the way it opened.

"And now I'm loaded for bear," stated Dana with a savage grin. "It won't take out something like the chimaera, but it'll chew threw anything lighter than an Abrams if we have to get loud."

=======================

The Horse Knight could sense familiar signals within the city, both new and old. The CORE's signals were still there, but they were broken, confused, and far weaker than they had been before the flying-bringers-of-flame had breached the dome and assaulted the city. Sometimes, they shut off completely only to spontaneously resume days later. Without the CORE's constant supervision, it had become much easier to patrol the area around Katherine-friend, and easier still as the days passed. Now, the servitors still obedient to the CORE no longer approached his demesne.

The new signal had broken the monotony of centuries – or, at least, it would have, had the Horse Knight been able to conceive of or understand the notion of 'boredom.' It could not, however, and it didn't care that it couldn't. What it did understand, however, was that it could no longer fulfill its directive: be Katherine's friend. It had lost the ability to do so the day Katherine-friend ceased moving, ceased climbing on its back to play. It required clarification of how to pursue its directive, but the Master was no longer nearby to provide it. What small parts of its directive it could still carry out – stay near Katherine-friend, protect Katherine-friend – precluded it from leaving her side to seek out the Master.

The new signal, however, had drawn steadily closer as winter's fury expended itself impotently against the city's walls and barrier. It contained words that were as the Master's words, and the Adaptive Determination Matrix that underpinned everything the Horse Knight was had performed as it was designed to, arriving at a determination: if the Master was unavailable, then those that were most like the Master, those who spoke as the Master spoke, must clarify its directive.

There were other things built into the Horse Knight besides the Matrix, and those things allowed the Horse Knight to understand many things: tThose who had generated the signal came under attack just outside the walls, and the attack ended with an overwhelming rush of death magic, along with a burst of wind and life magic, all of which rapidly dwindled to nothing. Following that, several entities passed through the northern gate, and then signals similar to that first signal had suddenly begun transmitting. A third type of signal, weaker even than the CORE's and different from the other two, had begun flitting about beneath the dome.

Now, the signal that contained no words but still seemed like the words-signal was coming closer, towards the Horse Knight's demesne. It was strange, however: along with things like mana, sound, scent, and other things it could understand, an unknown entity also approached, and this was not like other things. It appeared sometimes as metal, and sometimes as flesh; a heartbeat laced with metallic lightning, sharp and wary and lethal, but also curious and eager and inquisitive. It carried a faint shadow with it, as well, as though it were not alone. Inasmuch as the Horse Knight could feel emotions, it was eager to meet this new existence.

As the entity approached, however, something happened. It, or they, had swung into a garden district to avoid the wider, more heavily-patrolled main boulevards, but it must have been heavier than its footfalls suggested: as it crossed over a footbridge, the lack of maintenance caused by the withdrawal of the CORE's servitor golems made its existence known, and part of the footbridge crumbled away. The entity may not have even been aware of it, but nevertheless, the silence of the city was broken.

The CORE's servitor and maintenance units may have withdrawn from the Horse Knight's territory, but the guardian and sentinel units were under no such direction, and their senses were very nearly as astute as the Horse Knight's own. As the silence broke, several units switched from passive patrol to active scanning, converging on the entity's location.

The Horse Knight's Matrix hummed, flaring to life: it could neither calculate nor guess the combat capabilities of the new entity, nor its odds of survival against the units bearing down on it. It simply lacked the data, and without it, it was impossible to determine whether the entity could survive.

If the entity did not survive, then the Horse Knight may not be able to obtain clarification of its directive.

The Horse Knight must have its directive clarified.

The Horse Knight began to move.