A Perverted Path to Victory

Tinvel

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Lines of white rocket exhaust were capped by a bloom of black smoke, shrapnel drawing long spikes from within their flashing stem. All four rockets burst high above the squat fortifications, their detonation causing a concentric spray of deadly fragments zipping into the beach.

One and Two pulled up and away with plenty of room to spare, tan canvas briefly blending into the pale sand before they soared back out over the cerulean ocean, gently rolling their planes into an eastward curve. They began regaining altitude as they passed over the slowly encroaching Tulian fleet, their shadows flitting over decks populated by waving and cheering sailors.

“Chona, how did they do?”

“Decent,” she reported. “But I still see people moving around down there, and the wooden thing in the middle is still in one piece.”

Nodding, Tinvel switched to the crystal radio. “Good aim, One and Two. Three and Four, I want you on the same attack profile, but see if you can hold off a bit longer on triggering the explosion. I don’t want you following the rockets into the ground, but we need a closer burst if we want to knock those things out.”

As he watched the next pair of planes line up for their attack, Chona spoke up.

“Why do you think they built these buildings with an open roof? What’s the point of that?”

“I don’t know. To save money, maybe? Hells, they might not even be done yet. We haven’t exactly been keeping concrete top secret, but they’re still probably struggling to figure out how to work with it.”

“I hate how much shit we don’t know.”

“You and me both.”

Three and Four dipped into their dive, their long, brightly-painted rockets standing out plainly beneath their wings. Until the Air Force got its hands on some of the Army’s contact detonators, those used in the latest generation of bursting artillery shells, the rockets would have to be manually triggered. Though the rocket’s warheads were emcotton, their propulsive fuel was still the more primitive blackpowder, and that meant they spat out a massive fogbank as they flew. Tinvel had ordered the projectiles to be painted an obnoxiously garish black and yellow, figuring them a good contrast to the bright white of the exhaust. It still took real skill from the backseater to keep track of the flying projectiles, and even more skill to nail the ideal timing of their detonation.

As was proven by Three and Four. While both of Three’s rockets burst ten or so meters above the enemy fortification, Four’s rockets smashed pointlessly into the concrete walls, achieving little more than a splash of sparkly fire. The emcotton had burst into flames as it mixed with the spray of burning blackpowder that arrived a millisecond behind it, but that didn’t mean much. With the chemical conflagration not contained by a steel casing, the flames were barely enough to leave a black singe on the fort’s wall.

“Good job, Three. Four, you let it go too long. We need to work on that.”

Chona tapped his shoulder. Rather than switch masks again, he made a motion for her to speak.

“Tell one of them to write a report of what the forts look like from up close and drop it for the fleet.”

He nodded his acknowledgement, then spoke. Chona couldn’t hear him when he was using the radio mask. “One and Two, write up what you could see of those forts and drop a message capsule for the flagship. Both of you do it, just in case you saw something the other didn’t. Wing wave your acknowledgement.” He squinted at the distant planes. It was a bit hard to tell from a few kilometers out, but he felt pretty sure they responded. Satisfied, he moved on. “Alright. Five and Six, let’s have you attack from the opposite direction. Maybe you can catch them hiding in the wrong spots. Make sure to engage a different fort from the earlier attacks, then engage on Five’s discretion.”

The two planes circled around the island to find an eastward attack profile. Tinvel adjusted his orbit of the target accordingly, making sure Chona had a good view of the diving attack.

“We need bombs,” she said, even as the aerial attack began. “Rockets are decent for this sort of work, but bombs are what can actually take out a fort.”

Rather than respond immediately, he focused on the ongoing attack. All four rockets burst high over the enemy. Five had targeted the one on the harbor’s interior, with Six pounding the fort which neighbored the poor bastards that had suffered the first attacks.

Belatedly, Tinvel wondered why they had built multiple different square-walled forts instead of a single base. Maybe to prevent artillery from wiping out all the occupants in one go? It wasn’t as if Tulian had ever possessed a cannon large enough to do that, but it was slim odds that the designers of these harbor defenses had firsthand accounts of the war. He could easily imagine the rumors and hearsay of naval cannonades rapidly ballooning beyond their reality.

“How did the attack go?” He asked.

“Good. I can see a lot of red on the ground that wasn’t there before. In both forts.”

His stomach squirmed, but he nonetheless relayed his congratulations to the plane crews. Only once he’d finished that did he reply to Chona’s earlier suggestion about bombs.

“We didn’t even know we were gonna be attacking enemy defenses until a couple weeks ago, Chona. This is the first time anyone in the Air Force had to plan for hitting something other than infantry in the fields around the Star Forts. If you’ve got the spare iron, blacksmiths, and contact fuses we need for real bombs laying around, let me know. Until then, I think we’re going to need to make do with what we can afford. I basically had to kill for the steel used in these rockets as it is.”

“Boiling thermite would have worked on these, too,” Chona said. Then, cutting his incoming response off, “And yes, I know that we didn’t think these forts would be here. I’m just saying that we might want to carry some for the next mission like this.”

“You think there’s going to be another one?” Then, as an aside, “Also, can you start rolling in the crystal radio? It’s our turn for the dive.”

“Got it. And with the way Admiral B’Leary was talking on the crystal nexus, I think he wants to keep heading up the Sporaton coast until he runs out of cities to blow up. I bet he’ll want planes with his fleet while he goes.”

“We can’t follow them all the way there. We barely made it to Port Agrith.” He started to tilt the Sunrise’s nose forward, descending to join Affe at two kilometers of altitude.

“We could stay with the fleet if they convert one of the ships into those seaplane carriers Professor Brown floated the idea of. It wouldn’t be hard. Grab a steam winch from one of the mines and use it to power a crane to get the planes on deck and we’re good.”

“I’d fight against using our planes like that. The air force is supposed to be defending Tulian.” He leveled off beside Affe, speaking firmly. “I don’t want to waste my time— our time— attacking random ports the King barely cares about.” He turned toward his fellow pilot and lifted a hand, snapping off a series of gestures.

Both of us

Move north

Dive together

Target independently

Rejoin east

Affe touched a finger to his goggles in a lazy salute, which Tinvel knew was all the acknowledgement he was going to get. Affe was a good mage and good pilot, but there was a reason why he hadn’t yet found a permanent backseater. There weren’t many people who wanted to fly with the only mage who’d been too self-important to accept anything less than a pilot’s commission. The fact that he was good enough at the controls for Voth to approve the posting was all that kept him from not having a backseater at all.

“We’re attacking from the north—” Tinvel began, only to be cut off.

“I know all the hand signs too,” Chona griped. “And I can see you just fine from way back here. Let’s go.”

Rolling his eyes, Tinvel took the lead position in their two-plane flight, guiding the Sunrise northward, Affe off his left and slightly behind. He only turned about when they were well inland from the harbor, giving them plenty of time to line up and select a target.

“Which should we attack?” Tinvel asked. “I was thinking those two closest to the inlet, the ones that took the first rockets. If they’ve got mages or something, they’re gonna be the most dangerous to the ships when they try to go into the harbor.”

“Sure. I think we can do it.”

“Alright. I’m going to try for a steeper dive. Let Affe know.”

“On it.”

While Chona signaled the plan to their wingman, Tinvel straightened as much as he could in his seat, straining to keep the fort in sight. Though the other pilots had been following his instructions by using a 45 degree dive for their rocket launches, this was going to be the last attack, and he wanted to make sure the job got done. With Affe following close behind, Tinvel flew well past the point that the other planes had begun their shallow dive, waiting until the fort was almost directly below.

“Engine idle,” he announced, reaching into the cowling to cut the crystal power.

“Engine idle,” Chona echoed.

The rattling clank of crystalline spellcraft vanished. For a brief moment, it was quiet, only the rustle of wind in his ears.

He pushed the nose down.

The world tilted, the empty sky replaced by a flat diorama of the land below. The Sunrise began to pick up speed, the rushing wind rising into an ear-splitting whistle. He felt his shoulders dig into the harness straps as momentum tried to throw him up and out of the plane, red tinging the edge of his vision as the dive steepened. Ten, twenty, thirty degrees passed by in a fraction of a second, the plummeting descent stuffing his stomach into his throat. Soon he was pointed almost straight down, nearly eighty degrees, the wind whipping and tearing at his jacket, the exposed skin of his face battered by bitter slashes of air.

The control stick began to fight him as they continued to accelerate. It rattled and jerked in his hands, the cables connected to the Sunrise’s control surfaces groaning under the rising tension. He held firm, keeping the grey square just barely visible over the whirling propeller hub. They had no gunsights or anything of the sort. They didn’t have the rockets to spare for testing the aiming marks. Only a single practice launch for each aeroplane crew had been allowed before this mission.

The target ballooned in size. The precious altitude he’d greedily gathered was burned away at a prodigious rate, dozens of meters roaring by every second. Even as he fought to maintain a dead-ahead course, he counted them off in his head. Fifteen hundred meters. A thousand. Nine hundred. Eight hundred.

The crystal on his shoulder began to buzz. He heard loud, overlapping voices shouting back and forth, but couldn’t understand them over the shriek of struts and canvas skin battered by the wind. There was no time for distraction.

Six hundred meters.

Five hundred.

“Spark one!”

Twin rockets leapt from beneath the Sunrise’s wings, choking him with acrid smoke. Thin copper wires whirred as their spools spat out meter after meter of conductive cable, both tied back to Chona’s spell-readied fingers.

Four hundred meters.

“Spark two!”

Deep in the white fog, there was a flash. Tinvel jerked back on the controls, the Sunrise creaking in pained protest as its wings bent under the strain. Even before he finished leveling out, Tinvel was reaching into the cowling, shoving Intent into the engine crystals.

“Combat speed!” He barked.

“Combat speed!” Chona repeated.

The rhythmic clank of enchanted engines sounded once more. His body was crushed down into the seat as he finished returning to nearly level flight, though he kept the nose angled slightly downward, using the last of their altitude to regain as much speed as he could. The enemy hadn’t tried to reply to the earlier attacks with any kind of spell or weapon, but that didn’t mean they were incapable of it. He wasn’t going to take any risks.

“Tin!” Chona yelled. “Look! The fleet!”

He was too busy fumbling with his shoulder pocket, twisting up into an awkward posture as he tried to press the crystal to his ear without taking a hand off the controls.

“...repeat, air cover requested! Air cover requested!” Fleet Command’s crystal jockey was yelling frantically into the network. “Immediate reinforcement required!”

Even as he heard that, Chona was grabbing his shoulder and pointing up and to the east, indicating a V of black blotches whirling over the Tulian fleet.

They weren’t aeroplanes.

“Fucking hells,” Tinvel breathed. “They knew we’d be here.”

Fifteen dots were sweeping toward the ships like soaring buzzards. He could make out their flapping wings, two tiny dots riding each one. Imperial griffons.

And the wyvern.

The titanic creature was at the center of the enemy formation, wings barely twitching, as if it could simply float in the sky of its own accord, aerodynamics a measly concern of lesser creatures. Green scales glittered in the cloudless sky, ivory spikes rising along its spine, between which he knew were at least a dozen riders, each of them mages, archers, or soldiers of a high pedigree. The forward most figure, sitting at the base of the wyvern’s neck, raised their hand and pointed forward.

“It’s an ambush!” He cried. “Emergency speed!”

“Emergency speed!” Chona echoed.

Ahead of them, the rest of Tulian’s aeroplanes had already begun to race toward the fleet, fighting for every inch of altitude they could get on the way there. They were closing from multiple directions, each of them having originally been planning to either sit back and observe the naval assault or begin an early return to their launching point. They weren’t ready. Tinvel knew his pilots weren’t ready. But he couldn’t tell them to do anything else. Even if he had the radio ready to go, he couldn’t tell them to run. Those twenty Tulian ships were the entire Tulian Navy, and they had over a thousand crewmen between them. All of the sudden, without warning or time to prepare, this had become a mission worth dying for.

The griffons began to dive. Puffs of smoke from rifles and swivel guns peppered the air. The wyvern stayed high, its great shadow sweeping circles over the hapless fleet. Tinvel pulled even further back, urging the Sunrise to climb faster.

“Where’s Affe?” With both engines in emergency speed, the clattering was so loud that even the speaking masks required him to yell. “We need to fly in as wingmates!”

“Starboard quarter!” Chona yelled back. “He’s already in formation!”

“Thank the gods for that!”

A hand grabbed his shoulder. “I think he’s falling behind!”

Fickle thoughts flashed through Tinvel’s mind, each too fast to be formed as words. Affe was in formation. Good. But falling behind. Bad. Him falling behind was obvious to them both, which meant he knew Tinvel was at emergency speed, yet he hadn’t pushed his engines to the same point. Why? Had to be because he didn’t think it was worth it. Emergency speed would drain their engines of energy in ten or fifteen minutes, while combat speed could be maintained for at least another half hour. So Affe thought that the coming fight would last too long for emergency speed. There were a lot of griffons. The ambush outnumbered their planes twice over. And they had the wyvern.

Affe was right.

“Combat speed!” He yelled, the decision coming to him almost as soon as Chona had finished yelling.

“Combat speed!” She echoed, making the proper adjustments. That was something he and Chona had drilled relentlessly. If the pilot declared a certain speed, it had to be engaged then, no hesitation. Tinvel gave his rudder a few kicks, causing the plane to yaw left and right, killing their speed slightly. Checking the rearview mirror, he was satisfied to see Affe closing the gap.

“Griffons are coming around for another attack!”

“Shit!”

Straining against his harness to see over the engine cowling, Tinvel could now see that two of the Tulian ships were aflame. The two brigs, of course. The Backpay had spellflame racing along her port side, right at the water line, while a similar streak of eerie fire was crawling along the mast and mainsail of the Little Rake. The griffons were bracketed by watery splashes as they raced away from the fleet at wavetop height, flapping for altitude. No shots hit. Thanks to the line abreast formation that had been adopted, originally intended to get the fleet’s bow-mounted rifled cannons in action against the port, the griffons could only be targeted by the ship at the furthest edge of the line.

“Wait,” he breathed, watching them begin to rise, preparing for another beam-on attack run. “Wait, are there less of them?”

The plane rustled as Chona’s weight shifted. Her quiet mumbles were briefly carried to his ears through the speaking tube before she raised her voice properly.

“Eleven, twelve… thirteen! Yeah, there’s thirteen of them!”

“What happened to the other two? Did our planes get them?”

“No! Four and Five are just getting in position now, and they’re the closest!”

“You see any griffon bodies in the water?”

“Too much gunsmoke!”

Tinvel tossed a prayer to the gods that the fleet’s wild small arms fire had somehow, however improbably, shot down a pair of griffons. Then he leveled off, calling out to Chona.

“Signal to Affe that we’re going to make our attack from this level!”

“What about the wyvern?”

“It’s not attacking yet, and if it does, it’s gonna have to get lower! I don’t think it can spit fire further than two or three hundred meters. If it wants to do something useful, it’ll have to come to us!”

“Alright, signaling!”

With their steep climb concluded, the Sunrise began to regain some of its forward speed. It would be another thirty seconds of flying until they were above the fleet. At that moment, Tinvel felt thirty seconds sounded the same as thirty days. The griffons would get another attack run in before he arrived, and there were nearly as many of them as there were ships. Sara’s intel said that the Imperials didn’t consider griffons important enough to put mages on, instead reserving them for the wyverns, but he’d seen with his own eyes that Sporaton mages didn’t hold themselves to such a high standard. If every one of those griffons had a mage on their back, this could well be the end of the Tulian Navy.

Admiral B’Leary, at least, wasn’t going to go down without a fight. The ships were already turning hard to port, putting the wind at their stern as they tried to shift to a line astern formation. Tinvel knew from his enchantment work that the Navy carried timed fuse bombardment shells. If their cannons were unmasked, able to fire without striking a fellow vessel, they’d be a far more intimidating target. Not more dangerous, necessarily, considering how unlikely it was for a 24 pounder muzzle-loading cannon to strike a flying target, but they’d definitely be more intimidating. It took a lot of bravery to fly down a track that was being filled with the bone-rattling thunderstrikes of detonating artillery shells.

“Holy fuck!”

“What?”

“There!” Chona’s pointer finger appeared over his shoulder. “That griffon just fucking exploded!”

All he could see was a wide splash in the ocean, slightly behind the enemy’s main V formation. Whatever happened, it had ended with a griffon hitting the water fast.

“What do you mean, it exploded?”

“The fuck do you mean ‘what do I mean’? It exploded! Blood and guts everywhere!”

“What did it?!”

“I don’t know! I guess maybe a cannon could have hit it, but— shit, the wyvern’s diving!”

Tinvel jerked his eyes away from the mystery, instead focusing on the wyvern. Its great wings were bent inward, as if it had collapsed in midflight, but its long, sinuous neck was fully straightened, its serpentine tail straight as an arrow. It fell at a truly breathtaking rate. Faster than the griffons, faster than the Halfeyes, plummeting toward the ocean faster than Tinvel had ever dared push the Sunrise. He knew at a glance that trying to equal its speed would have ended with wind scattering the tattered shreds of his airplane far and wide.

Just before it would have collided with the sea, the wyvern’s wings snapped open, a hundred feet of armored scales filling with wind in the blink of an eye. The white-capped waves beneath it were briefly flattened by the sheer weight of the descending creature, a spray of foam rising up, only to be blasted apart by the first powerful downstroke of its wings.

The wyvern was heading for the twin brigs. The centerpiece pride of the Tulian fleet.

“Emergency speed!”

“Emergency speed!”

They fell like lightning through the sky. He barely noticed the shake and rattle of the plane in this dive, ignoring it entirely. His vision narrowed to a single bright dot, the green hide of his target consuming all his focus. The wyvern’s mouth gaped wide, a bubbling flame boiling up deep within its throat as it bore down on the brigs. The two ships were turning as hard as they were able, heeling into the wind, but it hardly mattered. A few puffs of gunfire from the deck added themselves to the black torrent of smoking magefire still consuming the vessels, achieving nothing. Behind him, Tinvel noticed, Affe was keeping pace. He’d kicked it into emergency speed too. Even in all the whirling chaos, the two of them were a brilliant beacon. Affe’s name was painted boldly across his plane’s wings, top and bottom, and Tinvel and Chona’s plane still had its right half painted a glistening, shining red. It marked their two planes as the commanders of the force, the most experienced fliers in the nascent air force, and made sure that everyone who saw them fly knew it.

The wyvern’s dive had given it a truly incredible speed. It tore through the fleet from left to right, flying first at mast-top height, then below that, not even bothering to avoid one ship’s sails. One of its thick shoulders crashed straight through the wooden pole, shattering it more thoroughly than a lightning strike could have managed, causing the entire ship to lift a few degrees. The wyvern barely flinched. Its fire was blindingly bright now, held and dripping from its jaws like molten iron.

“We’re not gonna make it!” Tinvel yelled.

“Two planes coming in!”

“What?!”

Chona’s shout turned shrill. “Wait, it’s fucking—”

Too much happened at once. It would only be later, after the battle, when he had time to discuss the events with other witnesses, that Tinvel would be able to put together everything that had happened in a scant few seconds.

The aeroplanes Four and Five had reached the battle. One and Two had gotten there first, but that had been before the wyvern had chosen to dive, which meant they’d been going after the griffons. Four and Five simply had the good luck to be in the right place at the right time, zipping down on a textbook interception angle, their backseat mages holding their spells primed and ready, aiming straight for the wyvern. With Tinvel and Affe having no hope of achieving their own interception in time, it was the kind of luck that made people spend a week at an altar thanking the gods. Yet, in the mass confusion of the moment, even that luck failed to matter.

The wyvern’s right wing dipped low, one edge slicing a line through the sea as it wheeled around until it was heading straight for Tinvel and Affe. Mustering all its strength into a single momentous wingbeat that threw itself up to their height, the creature filled the battlefield with a single, furious cry.

“FOR DIKARA!”

Talking to other soldiers, the ones who fought on the ground with musket and bayonet, he was often told that there would come a moment that instinct alone ruled their body. That training was so essential because, at the moment of contact, strikes occurred too fast for any meaningful thought. But Tinvel didn’t have that luxury. People didn’t fly. They didn’t fight in the skies. There was no slot in his brain hollowed out by some primordial ancestor that kept a tidy, consistent response ready for the possibility of a wyvern’s gaping jaw bearing down on you.

He had to think his way out of this.

Tinvel’s threw his entire weight against the control column, the metal digging harshly into his thighs as he wrenched to the left. The moment the pale blue sky was replaced by the dark ocean, he threw himself back, teeth gritted and his legs trembling as they shoved against the wooden cockpit floor, until the screeching engines were driving them straight toward the sea.

Fire erupted.

The back half of his body was awash with heat. He smelled a mix of rotting flesh and crackling ozone, the same scent that came with storms and their lightning. Every inch of exposed skin on his body felt as if it were pressed to a plate of glowing iron, hair curling and smoking, filling his nose with yet another terrible scent. He added a right rudder input, turning the perfectly vertical descent into a dizzying corkscrew, trying to avoid a searing death. As the Sunrise spiraled down, down, down, he struggled to keep his goggled eyes focused through the whirlpool of shifting colors, beaming sunlight and roaring firelight whipping across the cockpit, interspersed by the dark pillars of his plane’s shadow shifting across his field of vision.

He only pulled up when he could make out individual bubbles of the white cap waves. His body, still strained by the madcap descent, ached in protest as he once more heaved on the control column. The port and starboard wingtips creaked as they were warped upward by a foot or more, fighting to take triple or quadruple the weight they usually carried. His control stick juddered twice, both twitches signaling the snapping of something within the aeroplane’s wooden frame, but the plane survived.

They were roaring over the sea at wavetop height. He could taste salt in his mouth and feel splashes of it stinging his face, leaving distracting blots across his goggles. Both engines were still screaming away at emergency speed, but he didn’t dare take his hands off the controls to change that, not for an instant.

“Is it still behind us?” His scream was shrill, but he didn’t have the thought to spare for embarrassment.

“We’re on fire!”

“WHAT?”

He felt Chona’s shoulder jabbing into his lower back as she dived under the seat for something, then heard a hissing whoosh.

“Fire’s gone!”

The glint of a shining something disappearing overboard. He brought his attention up to the rearview mirror just in time to watch a pressurized water canister, a primitive fire extinguisher kept for just such an emergency, hit the waves with a tall splash.

The wyvern’s snarling head broke through the spray.

A bolt of lightning took it in the neck.

“FUCK!”

“Holy shit!”

A concussive BOOM! tore through the air, loud as the bursting of an artillery shell. The wyvern answered the blast with a guttural, furious roar, its smoking neck swinging its head up and to its right.

Affe was still with them. Through it all, through Tinvel’s most desperate maneuvers and the attack of a wyvern, that smarmy piece of shit was still with them.

You’ve gotta trust him.

That thought, far more than the flight maneuvers of earlier, was borne of the kind of ingrained instinct that he’d heard other soldiers speak of. With stick, stone, or plane, the question was still the same. Do I trust the man at my shoulder?

He called out to Chona.

“Signal thatch weave!”

He gave her a single second, maybe two, to wave her arms in the back-and-forth crossing motion that represented the thatch weave, then threw his plane in a rightward turn.

Across the wyvern’s line of sight.

Another bestial snarl filled the air as lungs the size of oxen were filled by fury. He kept turning, turning, turning, his chin resting against his right shoulder. He could see rising swells sliced open by the wake of his wingtip, which floated mere inches away from their rising peaks.

The heat begin to build at his back once more. He saw, through his peripheral vision, the maelstrom of fire that was being summoned in the wyvern’s throat.

Affe was nowhere to be seen.

Gotta trust him.

The wyvern’s jaw stretched wider. Its wings rose, bent tent pole bones raising a stretch of hide that could have sheltered entire buildings in their shadow. Then the wings came crashing down, angled back, driving the wyvern forward in a single rush, as if it had taken a great leap through the sky itself.

It was smart. He’d known that, but he saw it for himself now. It could have caught them then and there, could have beat its wings again and been easily upon them, crushing their plane in its jaws or driving them into the sea with brute force alone, but it didn’t want that.

It wanted to watch them burn.

Tinvel had other ideas.

“Get ready!”

He gave the left rudder a tap, giving them the barest fraction of altitude required to not crash into the sea as he rolled the plane around its center axis. Their right turn became a leftward one, tracing the shape of an S over the tumultuous ocean.

“Ready!”

Behind him, he felt the flickering of his sixth sense as a spell was cast. The wyvern’s flames began to emerge like rolling hellfire past the massive gates of its ivory teeth, but this time, the air they spilled into wasn’t empty. It was already occupied by a spiraling tornado of wind and the dark flecks it carried, Chona’s spell having sent a flurry of blackpowder out to envelop the creature’s maw. Normally, she would have had to give it the final spark herself.

Not this time.

On this battlefield of naval gunfire and spellborne lightning, another titanic explosion should have hardly been worth notice. Yet to Tinvel, one of the closest to this particular thunderclap, it seemed all the world should have been rejoicing.

The moment its flames tried to spill into the air, the wyvern’s thick skull, sinuous neck, and hulking shoulders were enveloped in a pink-white flash, hiding them from sight. Tinvel knew better than to expect the thing to die from such a blast but still whooped for joy as the explosion struck, raising a fist in celebration even as his other hand maintained them through the turn. When the creature emerged from the debris with nothing more than soot-stained scales and bloodshot eyes, howling in indignant fury, even those minor injuries were more than his wildest dreams could have summoned up. He’d already seen bent and torn scales in the area of its neck that Affe’s lightning bolt had struck, and now it was worse, the exposed flesh left raw and bloody while viscous, fist-sized drops of crimson splashed to the sea below.

He heard it then. The rattling clank of spell-battered steel drawing closer, closer, at an impossible rate, and then there was a rush of tan passing him by, granting him the briefest image of a hunched leather-capped pilot and mage with a single raised arm zipping past.

If these planes had truly been Tinvel’s own invention, as so many tried to falsely claim they were, things would have gone differently. Worse. He would have had no idea how to fly, much less fight, and they would have died then and there. But the aeroplane wasn’t Tinvel’s invention. It came from another world, one which had used these weapons for a century, and Professor Brown had gifted him with the tactics that so many had died to develop. The thatch weave was one of those. Shockingly clever, yet simple enough that inferior pilots in inferior planes had used it to win the most important battle of their lives.

Affe’s plane ripped past the wyvern from above, engines pushing themselves to the limit as the combined closing rate of wyvern and plane exceeded three hundred kilometers an hour. There was no second bolt of lightning, as that sort of spell was far too exhausting for Affe to cast more than once, but his backseater sent their own attack the wyvern’s way. A pillar of ice thick as a man and two stories tall leapt out of the ocean, unsupported and toppling forward, like a lance coming down to await charging cavalry. The wyvern jerked aside and pulled up, narrowly avoiding crashing head-first into the obstacle, but it couldn’t heave its entire weight around fast enough. The flat side of the pillar crashed into the root of its wing, impacting with a cataclysmic burst of sparkling ice, pure and transparent, spraying blinding rainbow beams as the sunlight was refracted through the spinning fragments.

Tinvel rolled back around to the left.

And saw Affe ahead, racing toward him, readying another spell.

That was the thatch weave. Planes criss-crossing across the sky, charging one another like jousting knights as they tore through the air. Every time they crossed in their figure eight dance, each pilot would have the opportunity to attack whoever was chasing their wingmate. Simple. Shockingly simple. But it worked.

The wyvern roared. He laughed back at it. He and Affe raced across each other, less than a plane’s width between their wingtips, and another glittering pillar leapt from the sea. The wyvern was no fool; it tried to avoid it, to flap up and away or to turn around, but the entire fight was happening too low. Its massive wings couldn’t tuck into a roll without burying themselves a hundred feet into the sea, and it couldn’t flap them for that freakish burst of speed without first raising them high, which it didn’t have time to do.

The ice broke again against it, the same wing, nearly in the same spot. Tinvel allowed himself the optimistic delusion that he heard a note of pain in this particular cry. Even such a massive creature couldn’t have taken those blows without suffering some kind of injury. It was being hurt, little by little.

But not enough.

Having suffered three unanswered attacks from Affe’s plane, it switched targets, peeling away from Tinvel to chase his wingmate’s plane.

“Our turn!” He yelled.

“Already on it!”

Affe did exactly what he was supposed to. He flipped his plane around in a hard, sweeping turn, mirroring the exact path that Tinvel was taking. As their turns converged, both planes facing each other nose-to-nose, the wyvern on Affe’s tail saw him coming. Unwilling to be caught by the same trick again, it strained all its muscles into pulling upward, leaping away from the sea in a graceful, arcing rise.

Got too used to that ice, didn’t you?

Flung from behind him, Chona’s two-part spell swirled around the creature’s belly. Like a swarm of buzzing black bees, but far smaller and far deadlier. Chona had no care for ice, nor exceptional skill in lightning spells, but she did know one thing with exacting precision: how to make things burn. With both arms raised, palms facing down and tendon-straining fingers spread further than seemed possible, sparks leapt from the beds of her fingernails. The iron filaments hidden amongst the blackpowder drank down the energy greedily, electricity leaping from piece to piece in a rippling cascade that heated them to a cherry glow, like the short-lived embers that fell from a blacksmith’s pounding hammer. More than hot enough to set off the first grain of blackpowder they brushed against.

Ba-BOOM!

The explosion wasn’t as singular as Affe’s thunderbolt, nor as rolling and enduring as artillery. Instead it was a great, whooshing fire, a sharp whistle of inrushing of air that rapidly reached its explosive crescendo. The center of the wyvern, from the bottom of its belly to its most prominent spines, was enveloped in that great crash of flame.

“NO!” The voice that shook the skies was deep and bestial, yet held the hysterical notes of budding panic. “No, no, no!”

The wyvern wasn’t maneuvering anymore. Tinvel was beneath it, flying beneath its left foot, the claws of which were each longer than he was tall. Chona, breathing hard and eyes unfocused, was recovering her breath in preparation for another spell. The wyvern’s body writhed in a strange motion, wriggling up and down. He didn’t know why it would do such a thing. Not until he saw something fall.

A smoking body. A limp woman, limbs all in a tangle, with her clothes nothing more than cinders dotting her peeled, seared flesh. She hit the water with a small, unremarkable splash. The wyvern screamed.

“NO!”

Instinct ruled again. Tinvel spoiled Chona’s budding spell as he ripped the Sunrise away from the wyvern in the tightest turn he felt its battered frame could handle, fighting for distance while the beast raised its wings high. It let loose a final, agonized screech, and then it flung those wings down.

The ocean dented. As if an invisible monolith had come crashing down from above, a semi-circle some hundred and fifty feet across was pressed into the sea, flinging up a bow wave in every direction. The wyvern was propelled upward as if the gods had jerked it into the sky on a string, gaining almost a hundred meters of altitude in that single stroke. The wind of that unfathomable wingbeat hit the Sunrise a moment later as the worst kind of turbulence, the kind that he would have expected to have felt only in a storm, if he’d ever been stupid enough to fly into one. Then the wyvern did the same thing again, throwing itself another hundred meters skyward, and then yet again, this time angling the stroke more forward, sending itself flying toward the land at a rate he never could have hoped to equal.

It’s retreating?

Ripping his eyes from the sight, Tinvel turned his plane around, searching for the fleet. He’d gotten completely turned around in the dogfight, having no idea where they’d ended up, but thankfully spotted the ships easily enough. More of their decks were smoking than had been the case when he last saw them. He started to call out to Chona, asking her if she had another spell in her, only to choke on his shock.

The swarm of griffons were retreating. He counted nine of them, in no particular formation or pattern, all flapping away from the fleet. They were following the wyvern, of course. Without their monstrous leader, they’d decided to retreat as well. He didn’t know why he was surprised. If they had relied on the wyvern for protection, they’d know better than to—

The forward engine sputtered out.

“Fuck!” He reached into the engine cowling, pulsing the command for the crystals to Soar. No response.

“Shit, Tin!” Chona yelled. “Did the engine just die?”

“Cruise speed!” He yelled back at her. “Cruise speed, right now!”

He felt the cockpit structure beneath his feet, the supporting bones of the entire plane, wobble like a loose tooth as Chona whirled around in her seat. Something important was clearly broken. Maybe a lot of somethings.

“Cruise speed!” She announced.

“We’re heading for the beach!” He tore open his shoulder pocket and shoved the communication crystal into her hands. “We’ve got no power left! Get us a boat or a ship or fucking something over there or else we’re gonna get captured!”

She barely caught the crystal. “Which beach?!”

“The one with the fucking forts!”

“Shit!” She pressed the crystal to her lips, started to stammer something, then screamed “Shit!” again, shaking her head. Taking a deep breath, she yelled into the crystal. “TCA to Naval Command, mayday, mayday, mayday! We are making a crash landing on Port Agrith island beach! Send support immediately, repeat immediately, enemy not fully suppressed, capture possible!”

Rather than wait for a response, Chona shoved the crystal into her chest wrap and jerked a package out from under her chair. She withdrew two glass vials filled with gritty red slurry, popped the cork off both, and downed one for herself while pressing the other into Tinvel’s back. Too terrified by the growing wobble he felt beneath his feet to release the controls, he instead stretched his neck around and took the potion with his teeth, throwing his head back to swallow it.

The cold flush that raced through him was perhaps the most concerning thing that had yet happened. The icy sensation of healing began working its way through far too vast a swathe of his body, prickling heavily in every limb, coldest deep within his chest. Blinking several times as the healing rushed across his face, Tinvel saw that there was blood on the instrument panel in front of him. Experimentally, he took a deep breath and spat. What sprayed across his hands was pure blood.

Must have breathed in some of that fire.

The clinical assessment did nothing for his jittery panic. He could feel the engine behind them dying. They’d kept it in Emergency Speed for too long. Even if the central geode still had energy, the emeralds couldn’t suck it up fast enough to keep themselves running. Almost all of a flight was done on the energy stored within them, which then might take hours more to replenish fully from the geode. They were running out. With no sense he could define, he could feel it.

“Your jacket!” Chona yelled.

“Huh?”

Her arms came around his shoulders. “Take the fucking jacket off! It’ll drag you down in the water!”

He batted her hands away. “We’re gonna make it to the beach!”

“But if we don’t—”

“We will, but not if I take my hands off the fucking controls!”

Her arms, reluctantly, retreated, but they didn’t go far. He felt them come to rest on his shoulders near his neck, hooked under the leather jacket’s edge, ready and willing to tear it off him in an instant. He didn’t argue about that.

“Come on, come on,” he whispered to that rear engine, keeping the plane pointed at the encroaching beach. “Come on. Come on, you’ve been with me for two planes, you can be with me for the third. You don’t want to get in the ocean, it sucks. Rust and fish and crap, it’s nasty. Make it to the beach. Just the beach, only the beach, I know you can do it. Come on, come on.”

He’d kept the plane with landing gear for this mission, not bulky floats. That extra margin of maneuverability had saved their lives in the fight against the wyvern, but now it was a liability. He wondered if any of the other pilots had to make crash landings. He wondered if any of them had survived at all.

“Almost there,” he whispered. He’d kept them on a gentle gliding slope, trying to use the barest tatters of remaining altitude to help the Sunrise’s lone engine reach the beach faster, but now he had to pull up slightly. Any lower and they’d hit the sea. “Almost, almost, almost.”

The engine’s clanking gained a strange rhythm. For the first time ever, even after all his tests with the University, one crystal failed before the others. It created an uneven clu-clu-CLUNK, clu-clu-CLUNK pattern to the once-steady engine’s roar.

“Just a bit further. Couple hundred paces, that’s it, that’s all I need,” he prayed. “Can’t swim like this. Fucking hells, Talavan, you know that potion wasn’t enough, we’re not gonna make it if we go down in the sea.”

Another crystal failed. The gaps between the working crystals were even more noticeable, a heart-stopping silence where there should have been something painfully loud.

“Come on, come on.”

With the border of the sandy beach disappearing beneath the forward edge of the engine cowling, Tinvel pulled back. The plane rose, speed falling.

The last crystals died.

“Holy fuck,” Chona quietly squeaked. In that windless instant, it was loud as a gunshot.

He pushed the nose forward. They began to descend. Descend. Descend. Pointed at the beach.

“Brace!”

Tinvel clenched every muscle in his body and closed his eyes as they hit. There was a gut-wrenching splash of water, enough that he thought they hadn’t made it, but even as he began to hurriedly undo his seat buckles, the sinking plane thumped to a stop.

He looked out to his left. He could see silt clouding up the waist-deep water. Lapping waves tenderly pushed the plane forward from behind.

Tinvel slumped forward, blowing out a long, exhausted breath.

A rustle of wind carried furious shouts to his ear. His head shot up and to the right, misty eyes focusing on a group of people some few hundred meters down the beach. Twenty or thirty of them. Marching forward, holding spears. Some had bows.

“Out!” Chona yelled, smacking his shoulders with both hands. “Out, out, out, and grab your fucking pistol! We need to go!”

He fumbled beneath his seat for the weapon, felt its cool wood slap into his palm, and then threw himself over the side.

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