Terisa Aras sat on the small bunk she shared with Foz, with Althenea’s gleaming, rune-etched form spread across a sheet of linen on the combination workbench/table next to the bed. The desk, and indeed the space to have a desk, was a luxury, but accommodations had to be made for the sheer size of some of those aboard. The Ursaran in particular were simply too bulky to stack in small bunks like humans or dwarves, or the few gnomes aboard. 

Early morning light shone through the spun glass window -- a fortune’s worth of work anywhere else. Dana’s golems had produced several hundred identical sheets in mere hours, simply by processing the sand found in abundance at the valley lake’s shore. The ship cracked and groaned, tearing her attention, as it always did, from the magazine she held in her hands. The lift tests Dana had performed the previous evening had proven the vessel could at least lift its own weight, at least for a few minutes. A few minutes after she started, she had lowered it back to the ground to perform a thorough check of its structure.

Slowly, almost reverently, the Huntress loaded another round into the magazine she held.  She had reached level seventy-five the previous day, while hunting and practicing with her sister, though only her husband knew it. While she hadn’t lost her skill with a bow, many of them didn’t translate to using a gun, and therein lay the blessing she had unknowingly received: she was levelling again.

For nigh on a decade, her advancements had slowed to a crawl; her skills long since mastered, and retirement on the horizon. The first of her skills to evolve had been a passive one: [Marksman’s Eye] had given way to [Sniper’s Gaze] the second day she had practiced with Althenea’s rifle form. Her staple skill, [Rapid Shot], had been replaced with [Double Tap] on the third day of her practice with the Colt form. Terisa hadn’t felt so alive, so eager, since her adventuring days. The approval she felt radiating from Althenea almost made up for the bitter taste of defeat that came from having failed to protect her gem, though she didn’t let herself dwell on that very often.

She felt thirty years younger, thoroughly enjoying the refreshing boost to her Vitality from the recent level gain. Long years of experience and finely honed instincts left her feeling sure of more levels on the horizon as well. She had many more skills themed around archery, and was working to figure out new ones as she adjusted to what Dana had called firearms. Every new Skill did have to start at the first level, but training skills was just as valuable, if not more so, than defeating enemies when it came to gaining levels overall -- and was a challenge to be relished even in its own right.

For archers, as with most classes, improvements to performance came from one of two angles: with her Ranger and Hunter specializations, Terisa’s talents had always lain more in the direction of her personal skills, with external magic being more of an adjunct. Her combat skills were built around increasing her own attributes: making her faster and stronger, augmenting her senses and reflexes, and giving her the endurance necessary to keep up a long pursuit. Success, she had almost always found, was helped best by planning ahead. What magical ability she did possess was focused on making or improving her equipment and ammunition. With Althenea’s Colt form, this wasn’t necessary: it fired condensed bolts of pure Mana. The Barrett, on the other hand…

Terisa moved over to the workbench, setting the loaded magazine off to the side and carefully plucking a small stylus with a delicate crystalline needle from a cloth pad. Dana had crafted it specifically for this use, and while it was different from the awl and other tools Terisa would have normally used to fletch and inscribe an arrow, it hadn’t proven too troublesome to adjust.

Once Terisa had explained her engraving process, Dana had also made a jig to hold the rounds steady while she worked, and it was this to which Terisa now turned her attention. She began carving at the bullet, the delicate rune for her [Piercing Shot] slowly taking shape, spiraling towards the bullet’s tip. Off to the side, two more bullets sported the [Piercing Shot] rune, and three more held the [Shatter Shot] rune.

The runic rounds were enough of a hassle to make that Terisa didn’t rely on them; they were useful, yes, but time-consuming to make. Althenea’s own abilities were more than capable of adding simple elemental effects or generally increasing the power of the shot; however, sometimes you needed the ability to pierce magical defenses, and sometimes you needed to be able to knock a wall down rather than blowing a hole through it. For these and other reasons, the Huntress had always kept a handful of special arrows in her quiver, and she would do no differently now.

The wind moaned against the outside of the ship, coursing through the valley as Terisa put away her tools, letting the enchantment settle into the bullet. The magazines, five rounds in a slim metal box, went into pouches at her thighs. The augmented bullets stayed loose, slipped into a bag of holding sewn into her belt. She secured the rest of her gear into a series of compartments built into the bunk, and picked up Althenea, who slipped back into her pistol form before being placed into her holster. Terisa exited the stateroom, suddenly conscious of the noises coming from the rest of the skyship.

Foz had left their bunk well before sunrise, shambling to the galley in order to intimidate the cooks into making something which might be called breakfast. Most of the expedition’s personnel was already aboard, the hold filling with the hides, lumber, and crystals they had gathered before the disaster at Castra Pristis. The communal kitchen was busy every day, and her husband couldn’t be happier -- nor the other cooks more terrified. On her way through, she snagged a honeyed pastry and a mug of kaffen, ignoring the pleading gazes of the cooks begging for respite as she made her way to the bridge on the upper decks. Softly glowing crystals lit her way, and the ship itself hummed with a power she could sense through the soles of her boots.

It came as some surprise, then, that halfway to the bridge, Terisa’s well-trained ears and senses picked up a new sort of creaking -- something new coming with the howling wind. She picked up her pace, not quite running as she hastened towards the bridge. Althenea thrummed at her side, picking up on the sensation.

As she stepped into the bridge, she glanced around. Not a stranger to sailing vessels, it struck her how similar the bridge of a sailing ship was to a flying one -- and at the same time, how dissimilar. The ship’s wheel was the same, and in the same place, but alongside it were brass gauges and dials whose function she couldn’t guess, despite Dana having explained them. The engineer stood beside the wheel, fussing with something Terisa believed was called the ‘alty-meter.’ Mentally shrugging, she stepped towards the windows, looking out over the deck of the craft. Below, the caravaneers and adventurers continued loading the ship, while a horde of loofahs worked underfoot, cleaning the deck and clearing debris.

It was what was on the horizon, however, that really grabbed her attention. The lift rings blocked her view of the tops of the mountains, but she could see a dense wintry fog roiling and writhing like a living thing as it descended the mountain, into the valley below.

“A snowstorm…” she murmured. “Seems early yet.”

“Aye,” said Kojeg, who had been working on something out of sight. He turned a brass dial, causing several crystals to brighten, pumping warmth into the room. “Hard ta say, though; nae man nor dwarf has ever come this far north; hard to tell what’s normal and what’s not.”

“...I don’t like it,” Terisa replied, shaking her head. She stared into the distance, despite her skills being useless at such a range.

“We’ll be launching soon,” Dana piped up. “Loading has gone faster than I expected, and we should be able to launch the DSS Are We There Yet this afternoon!”

“The cannoneers dinnae like training on the side sails at first,” added Kojeg, checking more gauges and adjusting one of the lift rings’ control levers. “But they are the most disciplined and best suited for the job.”

“I meant what I said, Kojeg,” answered Dana. “We built it to get out of the Wildlands, but I designed it for the Thuns. If your people are going to build them, your people need to learn to fly them.”

“Ha,” Terisa interrupted. “With how much witchwood it took to build this one, I doubt all five Thuns working together could fund one more often than every third year.” 

“This is just the prototype!” Dana objected. “Witchwood was simply what we had the most of to use here.”

“There are alloys and metals only a Great Forge can produce, lass.” Kojeg suddenly sounded saddened. “But they don’t produce much of them, and that little gets used for enchanted artefacts of the highest quality. Witchwood will still be cheaper than cloudsteel, and far easier to get than the greater mithril alloys.”

Teresa had looked away from the distant slopes on the far side of the valley for merely a moment, as Kojeg spoke of the Great Forge. She looked back out the window, and stepped back in shock. The mists had come closer by miles in mere heartbeats, and instincts honed over a lifetime screamed in her mind.

Kojeg grunted, tapping one of the dials next to the wheel. “Whadja call this one, lass?”

Dana barely had to glance over. “It’s called a barometer. Measures the pressure of the air, like the altimeter. We need to get airborne and get more data before we can rely on it, though.”

“It jus’ dropped over a hundred points by yer marks, and it’s still falling--”

“What?!” she exclaimed, and now she did look over.

Before Terisa could turn back around, the windows of the bridge frosted over and the wind fell silent. A dire cold crept into the room, outpacing the crystals’ efforts to keep them warm. Althenea’s sudden agitation was all the warning she had before a blast of wind struck the vessel like a fist, tearing railings away and leaving a spiderweb of cracks through the viewports. The vessel groaned, pitching up as the wind tried to lift it off the ground, before crashing back down. 

Terisa gripped the railing with both hands, her knuckles white. “We have to get above the fog, now, or we all die here.”

Dana made a noise of protest. “There’re still over a hundred men out there--!”

“They’re dead already,” Terisa snapped, pointing up at the figures abovedeck. They weren’t moving, and as Dana followed Terisa’s arm, the first tumbled to the deck, shattering with a very un-fleshlike sound.

She turned, and for an instant, thought Dana would protest again, as her eyes flared with sudden anger and the plates of her suit seemed to stutter in indecision. She took a quick breath, and to Terisa it almost seemed that something died behind her eyes, leaving something even colder than the winds outside in its wake.

An entirely different Dana, it seemed, spoke. “Understood.” She turned to Kojeg. “Kojeg, you have the conn, just like I showed you. I’ll overcharge the rings for a rapid ascent--”

Out of the approaching clouds, dozens of silvery orbs sailed out amidst flashes of white, slamming into the deck of the ship. Dana wasted no more time on speech, speeding out of the bridge on multiple legs as she made her way to the engine room. Kojeg was speaking, and it took her several heartbeats to realize he was talking into an orb that hung from the ceiling, his voice projected through the entire ship as he ordered hatches closed and gear secured.

“[Ice Wights]!” she shouted at the dwarf. “Anyone with fire skills or frost resistance, send them topside, with me!”

Althenea glowed red as Terisa drew her, fishing a resistance potion from one of her pouches with her free hand as she raced for the upper deck. Barely visible in the encroaching fog, the wights floated around the ship, bobbing and swaying with each gust of wind. They resembled nothing so much as giant snowflakes, whisper-thin vanes that partially disappeared as they turned in the opalescent fog. The vanes and protrusions sent blasts of raw ice magic at the ship, and everywhere they hit the witchwood, they left chunks of frozen sleet and condensed Mana in their wake.

Terisa burst up from the ship’s belly, and her opening salvo took out half a dozen wights, the blasted-apart fragments dissipating in the air. While weaker than her rifle form, the Colt required no ammunition apart from Mana, and Althenea could imbue the bolts with Terisa’s [Flame Shot] skill for practically no increase in cost.

The wights’ central cores fell to the deck, drawing in cold and mana from around them as they tried to regenerate.

They were interrupted by sudden, fierce wurbling, startling Terisa as several fluffy loofahs descended on the frozen cores. She thought she could almost hear them shrieking, like distant wails, as the loofahs exfoliated the glowing gems from existence. Two more shots, and two more orbs crashed to the deck. But then, on the third shot something happened that was so out of the realm of normal that, for the first time in years, Terisa missed.

She stared, shocked, as the fluffy scrubbies that had devoured the cores now began to glow with a soft white light. With the edges of their fronds now frozen and jagged, glimmering bubbles sprang into existence around each of them, and from the thin-shelled spheres of mana, each scrubby launched bolts of magic similar to the wights’ own attacks. Terisa may have missed her target, but the scrubbies did not, and even though their attacks were weaker, they were far more numerous, and wight cores suddenly began falling in greater numbers. Each core that fell gifted more scrubbies with glacial attacks.

The scrubbies started working their way across the deck and along the railings, devouring the ice where the wights had already attacked. The air grew colder still, however, and soon the puffballs began to suffer, slowing as their fronds hardened and they stuck to the decking.

The skyship lurched as Terisa dispatched another wight, nearly sending her off-balance as a dull thrumming built in the hull, the coils in the center of the rings overhead giving off creaking and popping noises as the heat suddenly built up. The vessel leapt a couple of feet, the mooring ropes growing taut as the ship surged against them. Terisa braced herself against one of the struts connecting the ring to the hull as the wind gusted again, blowing several frantically wurbling scrubbies over the rails.

The coil overhead took on a dull red glow, quickly growing brighter as Dana stoked the reactor to the limit of its ability. The ship surged again, the entire structure creaking as all of the lift-rings started glowing bright red. The winds died away as the runes along the rails lit up, tracing the perimeter of the ship. The old crawler’s shield, repurposed and much weaker than before, shimmered into existence around the ship, drawing energy from the reactor to push the wind and cold away.

The DSS Are We There Yet strained, held fast by the ropes connecting it to its platform. Suddenly, the deck tilted as the rope at its bow gave way, followed by the two at midships. As if able to sense freedom so near, the thrum of the engines reached a fever pitch, and the last rope finally joined its brothers. The skyship heaved, shooting straight up at a rate that nearly threw Terisa to her knees. Only the strength of her levels and her death grip on the support beam kept her upright as the ship and her occupants clawed for freedom.

The fog, unwilling to let its victims escape so easily, swarmed up, enveloping the vessel in the moment of its escape.