The ship took off with the sound of leashed thunder. It reminded Wendell of nothing so much as an enormous muscle car, the sleek hull literally humming beneath his fingertips as he stood on the right side of the deck.

Or should I say starboard? Do nautical terms apply to skyships?

He wasn’t sure and everyone moved around with so much purpose that he didn’t want to ask. It wasn’t like he had any duties aboard the ship.

Other than the one.

Michael was off to the side, near a bundle of inscribed ropes and a knot of soldiers. He was talking—animatedly—about some sort of construct. The kid was really talented with those, even going so far as to mold sigils directly into a sword that he manifested from thin air. The thin blade expanded, filling in with black granite around its circumference until it was a greatsword even his son had trouble lifting.

“I can do earth Mana sigils more easily since my Affinity leans that way. Necromantic too, but that’s less useful in a weapon.” Michael—Beef, he reminded himself—handed the heavy sword to a Legionnaire. The man was big, but he struggled to lift it properly. “Earth adds weight and durability, and you can engage that inscription during the swing and really hammer the blow home.”

Wendell smiled. Watching his son talk to a ring of adults with so much authority was strange, but it kindled a warm fire in his heart. It was overkill, to be honest—seeing him alive was more than enough. After that lightning had struck them, he’d spent as much time worrying about his son as he did about himself, and Wendell had nearly died a dozen times.

Now though, his son was here. Healthy, strong, and with more confidence than he’d ever seen in the kid. It didn’t matter that he was a musclebound Minotaur, or that the crystalline creature that clung to him had a voice that was eerily familiar.

Michael is alive, Kennedy. I wish I could tell you that.

“Dad! What’d you think?”

Wendell refocused on the deck before him, where Beef stood surrounded by a simple archway made entirely of insect shell. A few of the purple-cloaked Legionnaires were inspecting it with sharp, powerful tugs but it didn’t so much as flex.

“Is that a segmental arch?” He stepped forward, his long, scaly legs eating up the distance between them. With a free hand, Wendell ran it across the chitinous curve before giving it a single knock. “That’s not entirely solid, is it? I can hear an echo.”

Beef pouted. “Only cuz you’re so strong. Everyone else says it’s hard as a rock.”

“How’d you make this?”

Beef’s pout morphed into an excited grin. “It’s cool right? I had to weave the chitin layers around one another to form a honeycombed solid. The layers are inscribed with durability sigils and a glyph that combines them with earth Mana.”

“In each segment?”

“It’s all one segment, just formed together.” Beef scratched his snout. “That took a bit to figure out, but I had some old books to help me form this properly.”

“Books? On engineering?”

“Architecture and engineering, yeah. Had to swipe them from Felix’s Librarium and then slog through a lot of tiny words, but it was worth it. Now I can use these as a solid structure to build larger constructs.”

“You’re right. This will hold a lot of weight.” Wendell pressed down, hard. The arch flexed but only until the middlemost segment locked against the rest. “Is there a limit to your constructs?”

“Hmm? Oh, Mana and Intent, I guess. If I can’t visualize it and don’t have the fuel, it doesn’t work.” Beef smiled sheepishly. “Adding too much sigaldry wears me out though. It’s better as a prep thing.”

“Beef is quite good at improvisation, but it costs more resources to iterate too wildly.”

The voice came from the side, familiar as ever. Beef's crystalline companion stepped into view. She was lumpy and not entirely human—though Wendell didn’t have much leg to stand on there, being a twenty foot tall lizardman. Hallow had the general shape of a person as if shed been hewn roughly from a slab of glowing blackened-green crystal. Her head had glowing green-black dots for eyes nestled in a face that had the faintest of gestures of humanity—the planes of her cheeks and chin were most apparent, though there was no nose or obvious mouth.

“His study of engineering had proven quite beneficial to his capacities in battle and outside of it, but the greatest extent of his constructs was definitely outside of immediate conflict.”

"Sure," Beef agreed, "but it's, you know—I can't plan for everything. I can barely plan for most things. So, the best I can do is—"

"The best you can do," Wendell interrupted, "is good enough."

His son smiled at him, a bright, uncomplicated emotion that sang against Wendell's Affinity. A similar song echoed from Hallow, which Wendell tried to accept. The strange Spirit construct was nice enough, but her voice unnerved him. If Michael hadn't previously admitted that she was an extension of his Spirit, Wendell would have thought his ex-wife had been yanked to the Continent too and stuck inside its crystalline shell. It made interacting with Hallow a little awkward, but he pushed past it.

Kennedy was safe back in Texas. She probably thought they were both dead, however. That, more than anything, pained Wendell. For all their disagreements, they both loved Michael with everything they had, and he hated the idea that she was mourning the pair of them.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

"Oh, Archie?" Wendell said, glancing past Beef and Hallow to the small form of the Delvin Unbound as he ambled past.

"Hmm?” Archie glowered at the chitinous construct looming over him. “Beef what the hell is this? Why’re you making doorways across the deck?"

"Oh, sorry. Yeah, I was just proving something." With a wave of his hand, Beef dismissed the chitinous construct. It dissolved away, wafting in the breeze that blew down the deck.

"Archie, you mentioned something about a banishment array when that woman spoke to Felix."

“Ugh. Mauvim. Right." The man sighed and leaned against the mast. "What did you want to know about it?”

“Is it really a way to send us home?"

Archie nodded and folded his arms. "It is. And they're messing it up. Breaking it down to use on the—It’s stupid, is what it is.”

“How exactly does it work?"

"Yeah, Archie, you never explained that to me," Beef said.

"Well, it's... It's sigaldry, right? Not my area. But it's a ritual and it's designed to send us back across the Void, doing the opposite of the Song of Arrival, which is what I understand the Hierophant used to bring us here." Archie ground his teeth together, his spade beard all but bristling. "I had been letting the Glyphmaster and his apprentices figure it out—I didn't realize the chanters got their hands on it. I’ve already chewed Felix’s ear off about that, believe me."

"Hmm." Wendell wasn't quite savvy on the inner workings of inscription. Spending months in the sewer fighting for his survival didn't lend him a lot of time to study, but he found the idea interesting. Magic through geometry and written Intent was fascinating to him. "Where did you find this array?”

“We liberated it.” Archie grinned. “From the inside of an enormous volcano Elemental the Dwarves were torturing."

"Oh yeah," Beef said with a shudder. “That place was awful.”

"Dwarves." Evie said, and Wendell started. She had appeared out of nowhere…and was holding a piece of bread and a bowl of steaming…soup? "Don't the Dwarves love Noctis? They'll be a pain if she gets to them."

Archie groaned. "They're not wrong. They'll definitely take her side." He blinked. "Where'd you get that soup?"

Evie tilted the bowl back, downing the dregs. She looked at Wendell over the rim. “You thinkin’ of leavin’?”

“What?”

“You asked about the Song of Exile, so I figured you’re interested in vanishin’. That true?”

“...Eventually.” He glanced at Beef. “Going back home was always the hope.”

His son looked at his hooves, but didn’t say anything.

“Damn right it is!” Archie took a bowlful of soup from a helpful Legionnaire. It slopped over the rim a bit with his enthusiasm. “The Hierophant brought us here to the Continent without even a ‘please,’ so I’m not particularly interested in being polite when I tell everyone to shove off.”

Wendell took his own bowl as another Legionnaire passed out the food, accepting a sizable chunk of bread along with it. Steam streamered into the night around them, whipped back by the wind as the crew ate a hasty meal. Soup was nice, considering they were in the height of summer. Night or not, it should be sweltering as it had been the previous year…but the dark clouds drove a chill across the landscape that couldn’t be denied.

Wendell wasn’t a geologist but he knew enough. A dust cloud like that was the kind of thing that started ice ages. Eventually, anyway.

The soup helped.

“You really want to leave?” Beef asked. He wasn’t looking at Wendell. “What about all the friends we’ve made here?”

“Look, I’m not saying I don’t like folks here,” Archie nodded to Evie who was busy sopping up her soup with a heel of bread. “But I’m not real keen on staying sub-four feet tall.”

“Ooh.” Beef nodded and Wendell understood as well. When he’d arrived, he’d passed on some of the more diminutive Races for that exact reason.

“Why do you think the Song of Exile will restore your original condition?” Hallow asked.

Archie’s hand paused, bread halfway to his mouth. “What?”

“The Song of Exile, as far as I understand, is a way to open a pathway between Realms. It is, at best, a boot in the rearend to send the Unbound back where they came from—We have no reason to believe it will undo what has already been accomplished.”

Archie closed his eyes, and a mingling of disgust and unsurprised annoyance rang from his small form. “Sure. Because why would it be easy?”

“Territorial border ahead!”

The Legionnaires hustled to their positions, hands to ropes and various battle stations. Evie straightened, dusting breadcrumbs off her leathers as several giants lumbered past. “Talk time is over. Hold onto your butts.”

Wendell lumbered to the prow and gazed toward the horizon. As dim as night had become with the sky so choked with smoke, he didn’t expect to see much.

He was wrong.

“My god. It’s like a wall of shadow.”

The hills of Gharion extended below them, dotted with forests and small lakes, but several hundred yards away they simply ended. A line had been cut across the world, demarcated by a plane of darkness that was impenetrable even to his advanced Perception.

“It’s like we’re flying off the edge of the world,” Beef said, a bit breathless. “Freaky.”

Arcie clambered up onto the gunwale. “What happens when we pass through that?”

Wendell hadn’t a clue, but they were about to find out.

The prow of the ship hit the darkness and slid into it, easily as anything else. Wendell sucked in a breath and grabbed his son’s shoulder as the wall of shadow swept over them—only to have the breath shoved right back out. An icy chill punched through him, as brutal as if he’d plunged into an arctic sea, and spots swam through Wendell’s vision. Only his hold on the railing and his son kept him on his feet, and from the thumps he was hearing around the deck, he was a rarity.

“It’s just some cold!” Evie shouted through the dark. “Shake it off!”

Lights erupted around the ship, the sleek lines producing streamers of clear golden radiance along railings, guidelines, and even the sails themselves. They glowed bright enough that the shadow was beaten back, revealing a chaotic swirl of smoke and dust held back by the spherical shields around the craft.

WARNING!

You Have Left The Bounds Of Empire!

Stability Greatly Reduced!

WARNING!

Anomalies Detected.

Proceed With Caution.

Which was, of course, when the monsters decided to attack.