They lowered the vehicles down on a huge elevator, a creaking contraption driven by dozens of crimson birds turning an enormous wheel. One by one, the makeshift war buggies and the fox-riders came down, followed by rusting giant artillery rigs that crawled on six feet; Pike laughed when he saw them.

They were spider-like vehicles with large, dexterous claws originally meant for lifting cargo. Essentially, somebody had taken forklifts and strapped artillery cannons to them.

But then Maeve came down in her war-rig, and any thought of laughing was wiped away. It was an honest to god Titan. A lightweight, only a twenty-ton rig, but a damn sight more intimidating than anything he’d seen since landing here.

In a way it was like a taste of home. A memory of the time he’d stood, a boy, at the feet of parading metal giants striding triumphantly through the streets.

The gunner’s cockpit was a huge, triangular helm with two long breathing tubes descending from the warmask and over the shoulders to attach to a filtration unit on the back. Clearly meant for fighting in anaerobic environments. Its design was broad-chested and knightly, beautiful, except that original design was all but gone. The elegance of the mecha’s construction was eroded under years of modification and repair.

Rusty metal had been used to patch enormous war-wounds across the chest, and one arm had been cut off halfway, replaced by an enormous club-limb of scrap metal. Runes were braided down the half-ruined arm, glowing with a faint light. Honest to god wizardry.

It looked like the corpse of a knight, brought back by surgery and dark magic.

The triangular helm slid open, letting out a hiss of steam. Lady Maeve sat in the cockpit, her face painted with a white warmask, her people cheering as she raised her armored fist. From her seat on high, she rose and began to roar down to the crowd.

Hesperid reached out to touch his hand, and suddenly he understood.

“Ever since High Vigil lost her guns, I’ve heard a peeping. Little birds chirping away, saying, they don’t gotta respect us no more!”

The crowd broke out jeering, shouting, howling ‘no!’

“Saying, they don’t gotta pay their tributes no more!”

She was whipping them into a frenzy. Spears and swords were thrust into the air, stabbing at the unseen enemy.

“Well I’ve got something to say, and I talk in steel and fury! It’s time we put pain to that kind of disrespect! It’s time we show ‘em what High Vigil has. Today, we’re out for fresh blood and old glory! Do ya hear me!?”

As she spoke the final words, she grabbed and lever and drove it forwards. An enormous clank sounded, and an engine burst into thrumming, rasping life, growling a vicious rising stutter of mechanical noise. Smoke flared from the vents along the shoulders, the waist, wreathing the enormous metal figure in gray smog and floating cinders.

“Fresh blood, old glory!” The crowd echoed back, cheering.

Hesperid looked at him, seriously, sensing his thoughts. It didn’t sound like he was on Team Goodguys here. It sounded more as if he was in with a bunch of robber-barons, out to shake down the surrounding settlements. “No.” She said telepathically. “But if you’re looking for angels, Pike, you’re looking in the wrong place.”

“Take care.”

Letting go of his hand, she watched him depart. Lady Maeve’s helm slid shut, and her mecha’s fist lifted to the sky as she set off. Behind her rode war-chariots, fox-mounted archers, the strangest army Pike had ever seen.

And aboard the back of Jashal’s ferret-fox, him. Unable to understand the chatter of the men and woman around him, he simply dumped his free Riding Talent into Balanced Rider and held on as they lurched forward, breaking into a steady six-legged run that made the beast’s back ripple in long, bucking waves. The rest balanced so steadily in the large bed of the saddle he’d swear they’d been born there.

He felt every buck, his stomach lurching. He clung to the sides, looking green, and knowing it would only get worse.

Because they were going into the forest.

The ride turned vertical as the fox’s clever claws sunk into the bark of enormous, twisted trees, hurling itself from one to the other in a series of leaps that left Pike disoriented, sick to his stomach, and wishing it would be over soon.

For the riders in front of them, it was.

A piercing whistle split the air, and Pike found his bearings and identified ‘up’ just in time to see the shimmering brass after-image of a shell. It landed in the forest, amidst the pack of fox-riders, and white light scarred over his vision for a second, blotting out the world with the intensity of the flash. His internal lenses silently compensated, filtering down the light until he could see the ruinous crater left ahead of them, embers clinging to its edges.

Parts of dead bodies lay sprinkled through the trees branches, as if a giant hand had come, pulled the limbs off, and tossed him here and there. They charged forward, through the rising cloud of smoke and th smell of burnt hair.

Another shell slammed down behind them, and a flying piece of shrapnel sank into the fox’s side. It let out a low, whimpering growl, saliva clinging to its bared fangs.

The enemy had artillery.

Ahead, Maeve’s Titan was running. It left huge footprints stomped into the earth, its head lowered, steam gusting out like breath from a bull’s flaring nose as it charged.

A shell came spiralling out of the blue, heading right for the mech.

Maeve lifted her Titan’s club-hand and swatted it out of the air. Fire and shrapnel flowered out, engulfing the crude prosthetic, but when the bloom of light and flame had died she stood unmarked, the runic symbols on the arm glowing fiercely and spitting off crackling threads of electricity. She plowed through the trees, tearing them up in splintering collision after collision. Broken timber and snapped branches tangled at her shoulders, broken trunks pulled out of the earth in her wake.

Ahead, he saw a watchtower amidst the trees, a rickety wooden nest like the one Kadra had manned.

But he didn’t see the settlement until it was too late.

Ahead, there was a hole in the floating island. Pike had almost forgotten he was on a floating island, and to see the earth give way, to see blue sky and endless fields of furrowed cloud underneath, gave him an intense and dizzying sense of vertigo.

The settlement was on the far wall of the gap, a huge cluster of rusting metal buildings and skeletal cranes reaching into the air, like a long-decay dockyard. The guns alone stood above ground-level, lifted up in wooden towers, booming as they kicked with recoil and sent payloads of brass-jacketed death flying into the oncoming army.

They reached the edge.

Maeve’s Titan vaulted over, a huge beautiful leap - twenty tons of metal flying through the air under sheer momentum with a single fist drawn back - hitting the ground and swinging forward to demolish a tower in a single goliath punch.

They reached the edge and went over, turning fully verticle, running along the edges of the breach. Pike saw the sea underneath him, a distant flat plain of blue rippled by long silver threads where the sun reflected against waves he couldn’t see for sheer distance.

A bullet tapped the wall ahead of the running fox, sparking and making dust fly.

Lifting his gun and pumping Cosm into the battery, Pike prepared for the fight of his life. A fight on terms he didn’t understand, and couldn’t pretend to be ready for.

Days like these were gonna make him miss home.