Aluma Tarina Kestrel was used to being looked down on – odd for a princess of the royal family, but her life had not been normal by any standards. When she had been born, her red hair brought wild accusations that she was a bastard. The accusations had died down once royal advisors had drawn up the pedigrees for her mother and grandmother and proved that it was possible that she was, as her mother swore, her father’s daughter. But the whispers never stopped. She had no friends at court who were not family, and not even all her family was on her side: her sister Nadia and her cousin Logan held her in contempt, while a barrier of awe largely separated her from her vapid cousins on her mother’s side. Court was not her world.

The Royal Academy was better, but only just: most of the old scholars looked on her, at least as first, as a spoiled child indulging her whims, and it had been a long and uphill battle to earn their respect as well as the tolerance they had to grant to a member of House Kestrel. Only the Sparrow family had given her a fair chance at first, and that made them as close to her as her brother, father, and uncle were.

Between her birth among nobles and long fight for the acceptance of scholars, Aluma Tarina Kestrel was very used to hard glares and withering gazes indeed, but what she was unfamiliar with was receiving one from eyes far larger than her own head – the eyes of the mighty Roc.

It was a gorgeous creature – tawny feathers shining in the sunlight, talons that could carry off a baloth or snatch a whale from the ancient seas glinting like polished steel. Beautiful enough that Aluma almost wished, for all its fearful countenance, that the great bird could actually be real.

Instead, the majestic sight of the long-extinct beast told Aluma she was dreaming, and that alone gave her the strength to stand tall and look back into the massive eyes that seemed to judge her every move.

She had dreamed of the Roc before, but a rude awakening had cut the vision short.

“All right!” she called, “I’m back! What am I here for?”

Unlike her mother and sister, Aluma put very little stock in dreams as portents or omens or whatever either of them would call it. She did, however, feel it was best to humor them – both the dreams and her relatives.

The Roc shrieked – the cry of a mighty bird, but in its echoes, Aluma thought she could make out words. Dreams were strange that way.

You must… dissent?

She couldn’t quite make out the last word. It didn’t matter, but somehow the confusion irked her all the same.

“I don’t understand!”

You must 'dissent'. It was no clearer than last time... perhaps 'descend'? There is no rhyme. No, that was probably time. There is no time.

“You can do better than that!” Aluma shouted, realizing she was talking to herself, “You…”

Aluma Tarina Kestrel awoke to light filling the sky outside her window – the sun was not yet high enough to shine through directly, but it was light enough to rouse her from slumber. The bitter chill of night was still in the air, and the constant whistling of the wind that filled Liron Kadus, at all hours. She walked to the west-facing window and opened it, letting the gale into her chamber. It blew with the clean scent of the haze and bit with a cold that made her whole body awake and ready for the day ahead.

It would definitely be a good day to fly.

Liron Kadus, the City that Travels Ever Westward, essentially belonged to the Royal Academy. It was smaller by far than Liron Sosta, the Royal City where Aluma was born and raised. It was also smaller than most of the towns that provided it with its food. Liron Kadus consisted of an academy enclave, a temple dedicated to Serra, and a few poor homes for the workers and permanent residents. That was all that would fit upon the back of the tiny hunk of wind-swept cloudstone as it traveled through the sky.

What made Liron Kadus unique was what the Royal Academy had done to it. It had taken a hundred years to assemble all the spare sunstones, but now the roofs and spires of Liron Kadus glittered, and the city flew under the command of its architects, a moving home far grander than any skyship.

Of course, it was almost impossible to steer, and no one even bothered unless catastrophe was the other option – the city just kept flying in its path, chasing the sun from east to west across the sky. During the day, the engines were very swift, and it would be difficult to catch Liron Kadus with a mere glider. The constant westward flight made its days longer than any other in Altrium, and when the sun finally escaped the city and night fell, the sunstones also fell silent and Liron Kadus slowed to a mere shadow of its former pace, waiting for Serra’s light to escort it once more.

It was not a kind place to live: the artificial winds of its great daily speed made staying outside in its streets difficult at best, and having to chase down your bed after a day in the sky was unpleasant to say the least. But for just over a hundred days Liron Kadus had been Aluma’s home, and it was starting to grow on her.

Two of its lengthy days ago, however, the summons had come that her presence was requested in Liron Sosta once again. Aluma could not fathom what it might be for, but the fact remained that this would be her last day at home in the Westward City. The next time dawn reached it, it would be getting farther from the capitol and she would have to go back to that other world.

Reaching for one last day of freedom from the bitter blessing of being royal, Aluma found her way through the windswept streets to the hangar where her thopter was kept, only to see Orin was already waiting for her.

Sometimes Aluma felt that Orin Prestor Sparrow was the only person who understood her – friend, colleague, and fiancée. That a man like Orin existed helped Aluma keep hold of some faith in humanity. That was not to say he didn’t have his flaws, at least as some would reckon them: Orin was meek which did not serve him as a speaker and he was useless with subtlety or deception which while commendable for an Academy scientist meant he would not make a good politician, a role their marriage would soon force him into.

“You’re early.” Aluma said, deliberately poorly pretending to be put off by the fact.

“Well,” Orin said with a smile, “I wouldn’t want to keep you waiting.”

They went inside, and Aluma gave her thopter a cursory check up while Orin did the same for his own.

“Nothing interesting out there today.” Orin called, “I checked the charts, it’s pretty much empty unless we run into travelers.”

“I know.” Aluma replied, “I figured we’d just chase some clouds in the lower sky and call it a day.”

Orin smiled. “I think I’d like that.”

Aluma jumped into the cockpit, and took the controls. At her urging, the Thopter rose gracefully towards the broad opening in the hangar’s roof.

“Keep up with me if you can!” she shouted, recalling childhood races, and bolted into the sky.

Aluma tapped on the glass covering the altimeter. The needle inside didn’t stop shaking wildly, as it had been doing since just a few minutes into her flight. The faulty gauge wasn’t a danger on its own, at least not when she was flying with Orin nearby, but the Thopter was less than a year old, and Aluma had serviced it herself just seven days prior and not flown it since. There shouldn’t have been even the least part broken.

She knew it was something that shouldn’t bother her, and for an hour here or there she had just managed to enjoy her time out in the open sky with Orin, putting her machine through its paces and otherwise just experience clean air and cloud. Flying was a chore for most people, but it was Aluma Tarina Kestrel’s pleasure. Not that Orin didn’t seem to enjoy it, but Aluma’s grandfather, the king, often said she should have been born with wings.

She checked the broken altimeter again, then her position. No debris in sight, Orin’s thopter a little low and to the left. It was safe enough… she leveled out her craft, closed her eyes, spread her arms, and imagined for a second she really was flying on her own.

Aluma was broken from her imagining by a violent shudder, her hands snapped to the controls and her eyes open in an instant. There was something more wrong than a broken altimeter.

“Come on,” she whispered to the machine, “What’s wrong?” It shuddered again, this time worse than before.

“Hold on!” she cried to the deaf metal of the thopter, “I need you to hold on!”

There was a sickening crack, and the thopter began to fall. A glance back told her why, as her rapid fall left a trail of debris from the engine behind, like the tail of a comet. There would be no regaining control, no pulling up. If Aluma Tarina Kestrel wanted to live another day, her only choice was to try to fly.

As quickly as she could, she undid the straps of her harness, freeing herself from the falling thopter. Hesitantly, she ‘stood’, though she felt nearly weightless while falling. For a second, she crouched, then with all of her might leaped away from the thopter.

On her own, she could at least do something to slow her descent. Lay forward, she remembered being told, and spread your limbs apart to catch the air and float like a falling leaf… That was the conventional wisdom of what to do in such a terrible situation. Aluma had never heard of anyone who had been saved just by falling the right way, but as she watched her thopter plummet towards clouds below her she hoped that she would be the first.

Then, a second Thopter darted past. Was Orin to share her fate, and fall to the accursed surface below alongside her? As much as Aluma did not want to die, or to live alone she wouldn’t wish that upon anyone, least of all her love.

But as his thopter approached the cloud banks, it leveled out, and though it was still falling, began falling slower than Aluma herself. He wasn’t crashing, he was trying to catch her!

Now that was hope indeed. But they had to be precisely aligned, and she had to trust him to match her speed, hopefully before they dove into the thick clouds and could no longer see each other.

Closer and closer she came, but the clouds were approaching faster than the thopter. Aluma reached out, her own speed increasing as she silently prayed she wasn’t coming in too fast. There was only so much either one of them could do, only so far you could push a thopter or slow a fall…

As she closed with Orin’s thopter, Aluma straightened herself out again, until they were barely coming closer together. She reached out with one hand, towards the passenger seat and its safety straps. If she could just grab ahold… Once, twice it eluded her, the Thopter descending just a little too fast for her to catch it. A third time – cloud consumed all the world before her, like a dire wall. One more chance, all she had to do was reach.

Aluma’s hand grasped one of the belts, and an eye-blink later she was blind, lost in the swirling clouds.

But she had her hand on her lifeline, and was able to pull herself into the seat, quickly pulling one of the belts around herself.

“Pull up!” she shouted, but her words were lost to the wind “I’m in! Pull up!”

Then, after an all too-long moment, light. The world beneath the clouds came into view, a world of brown flatlands and dark green cracks between them. Orin looked up, and saw Aluma safe behind him. Their descent slowed, and then stopped as they leveled out to a glide across the unfamiliar, if beautiful, landscape of the surface.

“Are you alright?” Orin asked.

“I think so,” Aluma replied, “Thanks to you at least. I don’t know what happened, I maintained that Thopter myself.”

Orin was silent in a grave, heavy sort of way.

“Orin?”

“My father sent a message with the skyship that came from Liron Sosta.” He said, “It… dad has a new theory.”

“Orin, this is hardly the time for any science other than engineering!”

“Aluma, really-”

“I almost died!” she gasped, “And it’s my fault, though I have now idea how I could have failed so-“

“Aluma, I think it was sabotage.”

The words sank in, cutting through Aluma’s swarming thoughts.

“Sabotage?”

“My father’s theory wasn’t academic… it was that someone in the court was going to make a move against House Kestrel, though he didn’t know exactly who or didn’t want to commit it to writing. This wasn’t an accident: someone tried to kill you.”