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aila glanced out of the window of her airship, The Stellaria, watching as the sun-soaked shores of her homeland slowly disappeared from view. Her heart duelled between excitement and wariness, for though she had explored the continent of Vysteria extensively, she had never before travelled so far north. In the past she’d avoided the cold with prejudice, but she decided she would not pass her eternity without experiencing at least one good bone-rattling winter.

She fiddled with the collar of her white rabbit fur coat, its conditioned strands soft against her jawline. The garment had been a special order from her favourite couturier, lined with pink satin, which complimented splendidly her matching mittens.

How greatly it contrasted to her Soleterean wardrobe full of sheer, flimsy fabrics that often left her feeling more naked than if she was bare. Her higher body temperature offered her extra sensitivity to the cold, and thus she’d reluctantly traded in her silks and chiffons for the more substantial furs and fleece.

She’d agreed with her mother that air travel would likely be safer than braving the treacherous waters of the White Sea. Thus, after performing a quick aether-tracking spell to trace the exuding imprint of the Great Northern’s magically crafted hull, they were now well on their way to its last known destination.

Laila took off her mittens and picked up her amaranthum detector to feel its humming pulses. As she watched the throbbing glow of the crystal, her nostrils became tickled by the lavender, bergamot and mint notes of Lyra’s fougère announcing her arrival.

Her friend took a seat across from her and propped up both ankles on the table with an exaggerated sigh. “Not even a week we’ve spent airborne and already my limbs want off this accursed ship.”

“Be patient now, Lyra,” Laila playfully scolded, tucking one of her two thick canerows threaded together with gold cording. Her journey to a cold, brittle climate had demanded her delicate curls be styled into something protective. “The signal I have on the ship grows ever stronger still. It shouldn’t be long before we find land.”

“Let’s hope so, lest I feel inclined to start picking a fight,” Lyra responded, revealing her teeth in a vixen grin befitting her fox fur coat.

Laila needn’t guess who Lyra’s first target would be. Seated in the adjoining room from them was Dominus, closely guarded by two Lightshield chevaliers who never left his side. Their gilded meteorite cuirasses were engraved with the sun goddess Asemani’s likeness, burnishing brightly over their white wool tunics with epauletted shoulders. On Dominus’ neck was a golden collar designed to inject him with a current severe enough to stun an elephant with a single word spoken. One of her mother’s precautions.

“Well, if you are in need of a relaxant—” Laila unclipped her sterling silver flask chased with repoussé leaves and flowers; her initials monogrammed in the cartouche on the front. She unfastened the hinged cap and took a swig of Malakian white rum, passing it over to Lyra. “—managed to swipe some before we left.”

“You absolute star!” Lyra exclaimed in delight, snatching the flask with relish to take a long gulp.

“Steady on, you lush.” Laila’s laugh was warm and silvery. “Remember you’re still on duty.”

Lyra cringed at the strength of the liquor. “One time I envy a mortal’s more delicate constitution. This’ll put a fine fire in my belly but I’ll need a great deal more to be fully bladdered.”

“Pass it back here then!” Laila retrieved the bottle back into her care. “What do you think it will be like? Out there in the north?”

Lyra sat back in thought.

There had always been myths about the land of ‘ice and fire’ prophesied to have been the place where Calante had been imprisoned for his insurgency against Asemani. The Shadowlands, they’d called it. Little more than a campfire tale to send spritelings off to bed with.

“Besides being rather cold and gloomy?” Lyra smirked, before her mirth evaporated. “I can’t say, but if the tales are true then we may well be travelling straight to our certain doom.”

Laila shivered as though she could feel the sharpness of winter chill in spite of her many layers. Dominus’ ghoulish pictures were still tucked away in the drawers of her memory and it seemed the closer they reached the shores of Mortos, the more ominously they rattled.

“Not to worry.” Lyra took Laila’s hand. “If nothing else I can assure you I’ll be with you all the while. To the gates of the netherworld and beyond.”

The two laced their fingers together, sealing their pact.

As night settled Laila started a new journal entry, not wanting to skimp on any minor detail along her travels. Once done, she hoped to publish it as a memoir or at least have an appetising array of soundbites to relay at her next cocktail party. The faint scratch of her fountain pen was all that accompanied her before the swell of music outside her door disrupted her trance.

Curious, she deserted her task to step out into the passageway where she heard the tender strumming of lyre strings followed by airy, euphonious vocals singing Oh Morning Star. The voice was entrancingly nostalgic and soothed in the way a palm cradled at the back of a babe’s neck did. Laila found she was powerless but to follow in pursuit of its source.

She traced the enigmatic echo up the stairs into the lounge where she found Léandre seated, one ankle propped up on his knee as his lithe fingers made exquisite work of a silver lyre’s gossamer strings.

Laila crept forward on the balls of her feet, waiting patiently until he’d finished the last verse to make a sound of appreciation. “That was beautiful.”

“Thank you, madame,” Léandre said, a shell-pink blush staining cheeks obscured beneath long, ivory hair. “Shouldn’t you be resting?”

“I couldn’t sleep a wink.” Laila pulled up the chair beside him. “And you?”

“I volunteered to take over watch for this one.” Léandre nodded towards Dominus, transfixed in the corner by the window. “Who it appears doesn’t ever sleep.”

“You know that’s not what your duties entail,” Laila scolded lightly, though her smile was kind. “You’re too considerate.”

Léandre merely shrugged in response. “Fancy another tune while you’re here? If nothing else, he seems to like the music. Or he hasn’t made too much of a fuss.”

“I thought you’d never ask.” She rested her chin in both palms. “Do My Radiant Warden, that was always one of my favourites.”

“As you wish.” Léandre strummed the opening of the ballad on his lyre and permeated the room once more with the limpid beguilement of music.

Laila listened intently, funnelling out all sounds but the mellifluous croon of his voice until the song ended. Then she gave him hearty applause. “Wonderful! That troupe you used to travel with truly suffered a loss.”

Léandre chuckled. “Thank you, princess. I haven’t thought about that troupe in years. Still it felt nice to play.”

“Do you think you might ever return? When you retire from your Lightshield duties?”

“Perhaps, one day.” He placed down his lyre. “I really ought to be returning to my coffee though.” He lifted the cezve to fill his cup. “Would you like some?”

Laila’s nose scrunched in dismissal.

“Ah, of course,” Léandre said, then he reached for the milk jug. “You are welcome to whatever is left in this. It’s powdered goat’s milk I’m afraid, but it is warm and we even have some honey.”

“Please,” she said, laying hands upon the jug and the honeypot with relish as she filled herself a cup. She took a sip, eyes wandering over to Dominus.

“You can ask,” Léandre said, inferring her question. “Though he seems quite content as he is.”

Laila poured an extra cup of coffee anyway, negating any cinnamon or salep, thinking it advantageous to appeal to his better nature. Having his cooperation may well mean the difference between life and death for the passengers on this ship and she wanted them to have the best fighting chance.

She rose up from her seat to approach Dominus. Stood by the window he looked inhumanly still, poised like a sculpture, his skin shifting from copper to bronze under the moon’s silver glow.

Laila almost hesitated to near him as she presented the cup; an offering. She tilted her head coyly to one side, eyes large and inquisitive. “Would you like some?”

Dominus acknowledged the gesture with one thick brow arched, his pupils eerily lucent. He couldn’t understand how the same creature who had ruthlessly shackled a collar to his throat could come to look at him so sweetly with alms shyly extended. He decided he preferred it back home where such cruelties were not slathered in dulcet honey coats.

He grunted in dismissal, turning away from her.

Laila sighed heavily as she tapped the cup with her fingers. “I thought you could use this to keep you awake.” She scrunched her lips to one side. “If you sleep at all, that is.”

Dominus kept his eyes to the window.

“I suppose you must be excited to return to your home,” Laila continued, leaning her hip against the wall. “I couldn’t see much about your family but I know you have one. Your mother, especially. She seems to love you most fiercely. I wish my mother—” She stopped, for these were thoughts too embarrassing to voice even to someone who could not comprehend. “Never mind.”

She pivoted on her heel to turn away before Dominus’ hand caught her arm.

Laila turned back slowly in confusion, meeting his gaze.

Dominus stared at her with an intensity too acute to hold, but before she could inquire at his motives for stopping her he reached out and claimed the cup from her hands.

It happened so fast Laila almost couldn’t register it. For it seemed one moment she had the warmth of the coffee against her palms and the next, she did not.

She shook her head slightly in bewilderment with a smile. “You’re welcome.”

He guzzled the drink down without so much as a pause for the scorch in his throat, finding he liked that as well. Only when finished did he pause to let the brew linger on his taste buds—the rich, earthy notes and bitter afterbite.

“What witchcraft is this?” he asked in astonishment, now eyeing her with the suspicion that she might have handed him some malignant concoction under the guise of hospitality.

“If you like it, there’s more where that came from,” Laila told him, gesturing in the direction of Léandre.

Dominus glanced over at the guard, concluding against poison when he saw Léandre drinking liberally from the same pot. He looked down into his empty cup with longing.

“Come on,” Laila said, tugging firmly at his arm so he was forced to join her against his ambivalence. She seated him down at the table next to her, filling his cup before she sat.

“Princess,” Léandre cautioned as he watched Dominus’ cup be filled to the rim. “I would advise against overwhelming the occassi with coffee on his first try.”

“Oh Léandre, don’t be such a worrywart,” Laila scoffed in response, “what’s life without a little indulgence?”

Dominus slurped happily in agreement from his cup, making noises of appreciation.

Laila tittered behind her palm, suppressing it into a smile. And for the briefest moment, Dominus smiled too.

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Darius skulked through the bronze-tiled hall of the Citadel, his shadow magnified beside him like a spectral colluder. From surface to surface it slithered alongside him, matching Darius’ own furtive gait as he weaved through the corridors until he found the place he sought. The clocks were all striking midnight, having unlatched their throats to cry the hour; the full moon making even more a giant of his shadow than its original shape.

He stepped into a warm patch of darkness where his shadow bid him a brief farewell and pressed his hand against an unsturdy panel on the wall. With some nimble manoeuvring the panel clicked open to grant him entry and Darius climbed the steps of rotten wood all the way up to the Observatory.

He moved with a careful foot, for the tower had long become a vampire bat dominion and they didn’t take kindly to visitors. As he rose higher he could see the red-dotted eyes of his nocturnal companions as they watched him. They swarmed him in a maelstrom of flapping wings, their screeches echoing throughout the night.

Despite its name the Observatory was not employed for purposes of observation from a vantage point. Instead, it served as the command post for several watchers strategically placed throughout the kingdom in the form of grotesques and gargoyles. These grim statues would observe all from their decorative stance, inscrutable to the average passersby as they engaged in tawdry conclaves in its presence. This would be collected and then projected in front of him via use of an obsidian ball should he only choose to access it.

Darius approached the column where the ball sat, suspended upon its throne of raven skulls. His reflection became stretched and distorted over the globe the more he leered.

“All-seeing eye, I command you to show me the one who dares to trespass across our sky,” Darius invoked, watching carefully as the ball lit up with a ghastly white glow and projected an image of the sky. There he saw it, floating like a cloud caged in brass. The flying ship.

“So Balthus wasn’t spinning me a tall tale.”

For a long, indulgent moment he allowed his gaze to linger in fascination at the contraption, curious as to how such a thing was crafted; how it remained airborne. His fascination soured to disappointment when he realised he would never find out.

He sighed, massaging his temples. There was every chance this flying ship was yet another sent out in pursuit of the last he’d wrecked. If so, it would need to be dispensed with. Regardless of his own personal stirrings of intellectual curiosity.

Yet, a more subconscious impulse stirred—one deliriously seductive to a creature of chaos. Being so close to the edge of discovery emboldened Darius in ways he no longer thought possible. He almost felt he could turn away, allow the ship to arrive with the same surgical detachment as he took with his experiments and observe what it would do next.

The impulse was so strong that it took a brutal dousing of clarity to turn him away from it. Regardless of his desires, his father would know he’d failed to dispose of the ship and any benefit he could reap from studying it would be offset by the penalties from his rage.

Knowing this, Darius lamented his next actions as he reached into his pocket to retrieve a vial of cold fire—a blue-white essence extracted from the innards of a prehistoric draconid that burned hotter and more lethal than regular red-yellow flame.

He uncorked the vial and summoned the fumes with an elegant dance of his fingers, muttering a few malignant words that caused the bats to screech in excitement as they swarmed him in a black vortex the louder his chants grew. With the final word uttered, a jet of blue-white vapour ascended through the oculus of the Observatory in a geyser, provoking the clouds to gather in preparation for a great and terrible storm.

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The storm was brewing when most of the occupants had retired to their bunks for the evening.

Laila slept on the top bunk, that much closer to the sky—as though every subconscious gesture of her earthbound life sought to elevate her back up to her origins. Thus she scaled stairs, storeys and social ladders, adorning herself in her weight’s worth of diamonds that sparkled near as much as stars do.

She shifted from her stomach to her side, curved like a cat, entirely ignorant of the cataclysm now rapidly intruding upon her ship’s aluminium husk. The wind howled like a wolf on the hunt, the lightning booming like explosives. Its shockwaves rattled the walls and sent Laila catapulting upwards in alarm.

She stretched herself awake with a soft moan, pushing up the lace eye mask that blinded her. “What on earth?”

She shifted out of bed and scaled down the ladder to slip on her clothes, watching as Lyra remained snoozing. Merely a guise, for Lyra could awaken at the sound of a pin drop, and thus any slumber she was in was feigned for continued rest.

Laila decided against disturbing her and looked out of the window.

Usually the arrival of a storm excited her for she couldn’t help but find them eminently powerful and, oftentimes, erotic experiences. Lightning, as with all sources of electricity and incandescence, had only ever been a solarite’s natural ally. But this lightning was distorted—a wintry ice blue as opposed to the divine white she was accustomed to.

She drew back from the window with a clenched chest and went to shake Lyra’s shoulder. “Lyra? Lyra, wake up.”

Lyra made an indistinct noise into her pillow.

“I think something is happening outside.”

The note of consternation in her princess’ voice was enough to have her awaken. Lyra rolled herself out of bed to join her by the window at Laila’s ushering. “What is it?” She peered outside the window. “You woke me up for a storm.”

Her lack of amusement was evident.

“Not just any storm,” Laila cried in protest, “last I checked lightning doesn’t tend to be blue.”

“We’ve recently passed a pure white sea and a little off-colour lightning is what’s got you all hot and bothered?” Lyra scoffed as she rubbed at her tired eyes. “I’m going back to bed.”

Then they heard the explosion.

An alarm wailed through the ship as the husk rumbled, causing both to go rigid in fear.

Laila acted immediately by grabbing Lyra by the shoulders. “Go wake your uncle, quickly.”

“Wait, what about you?” Lyra called.

Laila blurred out into the corridor too fast for her to answer. She frantically sought out the source of the rupture. At the same time, the first spark from the lightning plumed into a mushroom-clouded flame.

The flame trickled down until it reached hydrogen, ballooning into an inferno. It engulfed the tail of the airship, churning directly into her path as a blue-white lake of fire.

Laila acted on instinct, erecting a field of aether to suspend the flames with a golden barrier.

“Fire!” she called out over the torrent of the weather, hoping the others might hear in time to escape.

Her warning hit Lyra’s ears first and she wasted no time hammering on the doors to wake everyone up. “Come on. Up and at them. It’s time to go.”

“Lyra.” Léandre appeared at his door with heavy eyes. “What is the meaning of this?”

“There’s a fire.” Lyra grabbed him by the hand and hauled him into the corridor. “It’s time for us to go. Now.”

Laila’s holler and the quick action of Lyra soon had the passengers of the ship scrambling in a panic. They were herded by Lyra and Léandre who led them down to the airlock to usher the sprites, one by one, into the sea.

Laila grit her teeth against the force of the fire, digging her heels into the floor to catch her grip. She refused to be conquered by whatever demonic conjury had attacked her beloved ship, nor would she let it have her crew.

However, her resolve weakened and she could feel the beads of her perspiration seeping down her brow. She couldn’t tell how much longer she could hold before the fire subjugated her and resumed its consumption. She could only hope by then, the rest of the inhabitants had evacuated.

Once the last of the passengers had descended, Léandre and Lyra looked among themselves.

“Someone has to get Laila,” Lyra said, the fierceness in her eyes showing she’d already determined it to be her.

“Absolutely not,” Léandre argued.

“We don’t have time to argue this, Uncle—”

“Quite right, we don’t.” He leaned forward to kiss her forehead. “I’ll find you on the ground.”

“No wait, Uncle—” her cries of protest were halted by him pushing her off the ledge. She reached for him instinctively, catching air, her stomach plummeting as she began her descent. She watched as his silhouette shrank further and further away with a resigned smile.

“Uncle!” was Lyra’s final cry as she plunged down from the heavens.

Laila descended to one knee as her legs buckled, tiredness wearing away at her arms. Though before her shield could deplete in exhaustion she felt arms encircle her.

“Let’s go,” Dominus told her, picking her up and speeding towards the airlock. Nary a curl rustled, he’d promised and he wasn’t about to break pacts now.

He launched them both out of the ship with his arms around her, their bodies plunging down from the heavens.

The ship was engulfed within a heartbeat.

And then Laila was falling, falling, falling as she had done in her celestial life before. She fell like a fledgling from a nest still fumbling to find her wings, curved into the arms of the monster who ensnared her.

Laila could scarcely decide what she found more treacherous—the hungry ocean that awaited beneath or the embrace of her captor. Her situation, however, left her with little option to protest. And so, trapped between a demon and the deep sea, she closed her eyes, held her breath, and allowed the ocean to take her.