The city of Teisel was always a beautiful sight as it drifted through the clouds. It moved constantly, heedless of wind and rain, even occasionally going through the stormzone itself with an almost obsessive regularity. It never diverged from its path and it always followed the sun.

  That meant—as far as Ruirel could tell him—that he wouldn’t see the nighttime during his entire stay on Teisel unless something went horribly wrong. Keshel wasn’t sure if he was alright with that. On the bright side that he hadn’t even considered, it would make it much easier to sleep whenever he sparking wanted to.

  The five noble and patchwork aircraft approached Teisel with the perpetual dawn on the horizon. Keshel would like to have said he was excitedly trying to think of all kinds of ways his ancestors might have built the floating cities and wondering what great knowledge he might grasp from such a thing. But in reality, he was just… daunted as he observed the rooftops of Teisel.

  The niortak expected him to help them. They’d agreed to give Karbion all kinds of things in exchange for even a chance that Keshel might be able to do something. In the end, Keshel would say that he just wanted it to work. He just wanted to be able to see their smiles and relief as a burden was passed from their shoulders.

  He just wanted to be useful, and he was precisely selfish enough to admit that.

  Teisel was made up of thousands of ancient blue-roofed buildings that towered on themselves into a central point. There were vast green fields that attached themselves to the city walls, but after that, it was simply a pure empty sky accentuated with hundreds of little dots moving about like frantic flies. Keshel gazed on in awe as the city quickly grew larger.

  But the closer they got, the more obvious it became that something was very, very wrong. It took a while to notice, in fact, they were almost on top of it before the realization hit and the explanation was made.

  It was losing altitude.

  The city was shaking, the sky around it was filled with people flitting about on their spectral wings, aircrafts were taking off in a chaotic mess, and practically every square inch of sky was filled with one thing or another just trying to get away from the city.

  Ruirel swore under his breath once they were close enough to see the problem, taking in the aircraft for a hover, “Teisel is… falling.” He said quietly, as if in realization and disbelief. A moment of hesitation later, he grabbed a device from the side of his control panel with a tight chord dangling from the bottom. He held it to his mouth and yelled without a second thought, “Teisel is falling! Remember your training, men!”

  He let go of the device and it zipped back to its place, pulled by the chord. He grabbed the handles ahead of him and pulled the airship backward, moving it laterally downward as he shouted for someone to prepare the passenger door to be opened. He was expecting them to pick up some of the fleeing residents.

  “What’s happening?!” Keshel finally asked after a long moment of shock, he was this close and… what, the city was just going to fall? All of this for nothing?

  “The city AI initiated self destruct,” Ruirel hastily explained, his focus was more on the trajectory of his ship than anything else. “There’s no way to stop it, not even the metalfolk can do anything about it. We have to do damage control, which means getting these people to safety.”

  Keshel stared at the shaking city for a long, terrified moment, “Is it because it hasn’t had anyone try to…” he paused, searching for the word that Ruirel had spoken quite a lot over the last day, “interface… with it for so long?”

  “We don’t know— Keshel what are you doing?!”

  He’d started walking toward that passenger door, which had been unbarred, “The city isn’t falling very fast yet, right? That means I have time to try to… uh interface; you don’t think that anyone can stop it but stars, I’m not going to just let it fall without at least trying. Isn’t this why I’m here?”

  Ruirel looked at him for a long moment, the rest of the crew also staring at him. Eventually the leader nodded, an appreciative look in his eyes. “Alright. Tosono, take Keshel down there, and in the name of Sacrifice himself, keep him safe.”

  Ruirel’s second in command nodded and headed toward Keshel, who was already in the middle of opening the door. The wind was strong of course, but for some odd reason it was more than Keshel had expected it to be. However—especially this close to the buzzing spectral wings on the side of the aircraft—he really shouldn’t have been surprised. He swallowed as he peered downward; the ground was… so very far away. Tosono, the man that Ruirel had sent with him, didn’t seem fazed at the idea of jumping out at such a height. He nodded at Keshel, two spectral wings forming on his back. “Alright, let’s go.”

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  He then unceremoniously shoved Keshel out the door.

  Keshel couldn’t help it, he screamed. You would have screamed too. Even I’ve screamed every single time I was shoved off a similar height—it’s happened once twice if you care about numbers.

  But a moment later, something grabbed his shoulders mid-fall, jerking him upward sharply. Tosono wasn’t incompetent and neither was his catch, in fact, he was baffled that the suiki was freaking out about this. Keshel kept screaming for a moment, but eventually his panic tapered off and he started to catch his breath again.

  They came in for a landing near the docking bay. Keshel spotted several important looking niortak watching from the ground curiously as they landed, clearly waiting for an airship to pick them up or perhaps they were waiting for news, it didn’t matter at the moment.

  The second his feet landed on the surface of Teisel, it was as if his senses had been shut off entirely from the world up until that point. Keshel ended up on his knees, partially from the fear from falling not so long ago but mostly from the shock of a connection. The unfurled tendrils of his antennae told him of life. He couldn’t find a mind yet but at the moment that was a secondary concern. It was so… big… so mind bogglingly big.

  Tosono gave him a worried look and Keshel shook his thoughts to the present. He got to his feet and started running, the niorta right behind him.

  The city was littered with metal creatures that wandered around, going about various tasks as if nothing at all was the matter. Whenever they spotted Keshel though, they started chattering with what looked like excitement. They didn’t seem concerned at the shaking ground or the panicking of the hundreds of niortak.

  One of them intercepted the running duo after spotting Keshel. The metal creature fell into step beside them, “The zuki hav returned!” It said, something was a bit off about its voice, “Teizel will zbe lighter!” It nodded its head, the gears squeaking painfully, “Comez with me! You can zave Teizel.”

  Keshel blinked at the creature warily, glancing at Tosono, who nodded, hardly even breathless which was perfectly unfair, though not because Keshel himself was struggling. It was like cheating because Tosono is just that cool in general. Everything he ever did was like that. “That’s the chief of the metalfolk.”

  Without hesitating any longer, the two of them followed the whirring metal creature. “So—huff—how do I save the city then?” Keshel asked. His lungs weren’t used to talking and sprinting at once, because he wasn’t as cool as Tosono. However, the suiki figured that the question was worth it.

  The metalfolk whirred a bit louder for a second, “Teizel willz exzplain, do notz worry.”

  Keshel didn’t find that very reassuring, but he followed anyway with Tosono behind him. They moved through buildings and streets, slowly making their way up through the city and into the central tower. Near an inconspicuous side door, the creature tapped a few numbers into the wall.

  The metal creature paused for a moment and then shook its head at Tosono, “Zuki only, downz here.”

  The door opened and together they peered down at a dark ladder and even darker corridor. Keshel usually liked dark cramped places, but when the entire area was shaking, he didn’t feel like that was such a great idea. He glanced at Tosono.

  The man frowned slightly but nodded, motioning for Keshel to go ahead as he leaned against the wall. “Try to be fast. If it doesn’t seem like it’s going to work then please just come back, I’ll wait as long as I can.” In that case it couldn’t be that dangerous down there. Keshel wasn’t particularly thinking about that part at the moment, all he could conceive to wonder was if this would help him to feel needed. To feel useful.

  Keshel nodded and started down into the depths of the city. He hardly even paused.

  -

  “Zzze is zleeping, zo firzt we muzt wake her.”

  “Her?” Keshel echoed, following the creature down another ladder and past some wires that sparked against each other in time with the shaking of the city. If he’d seen the blinking star at that moment, he might have realized that it was that same beat. The shaking, the sparking, and the blinking of a star farther away than anything else he would ever know.

  He watched the wires warily as they passed them, eventually deciding that the metal creature wasn’t going to respond to his earlier request for clarification. The chief, I suspect, had thought it was a stupid question. “Are you sure this place is safe?” Keshel tried instead.

  The creature nodded this time, clearly deeming this question far more worthy, “very zafe, Teizel will not harmz you unlez zze haz to.”

  Keshel hesitantly passed through another doorway after the metalfolk creature. On the other side there was a seemingly empty room, but floating in the middle, as if just to defy the laws of gravity as he knew them, there was a metal plate with two indentations in it. It was hanging at about eye level, or… slightly above. Keshel recognised it as a metal plate Ruirel had shown him drawings of. This one seemed more squat though than the one Ruirel had seen.

  Still completely unsure of what he was doing, Keshel leaned down slightly—being tall for a suiki, which is completely unfair considering how much taller they already get than I do—and pressed his antennae against the smooth, clean surface.

  He felt a mind there. It connected to him without hesitation, it was vast, impossible, strong, and practically leaking pain. But immediately after Keshel absorbed just this fraction of it, the entire world… stopped moving.

  Keshel felt a sharp and horrible pain in his antennae as the mind pulled him into the depths of somewhere else.