49 – Boarding Party

Another mountain was hanging over them, upside down.

The city blotted out most of the sky, its underside a vast expanse of white stone suspended impossibly above the clouds. Concentric foundations disappeared into the distance, so large that their curves were almost imperceptible. Massive arches crossed beneath the structure, joining colossal supports that had no business hanging in empty air.

“What’s that?” Ashley asked, pointing toward the underside of the city.

Pipes as wide as towers crisscrossed the stone, disappearing into enormous tunnels carved directly into its foundation. From below, they looked like the roots of some impossible tree spreading beneath the capital.

“Those are the upper levels of our hold!” Gomp shouted, louder than necessary, his voice balancing neatly between professional excitement and absolute terror. “The tunnels connect the hummie city to our glorious home. We use them as roads, and the piping carries water, steam, waste, and everything else from the upper city down to us.”

“You were living directly beneath the capital?” Simon asked. “And the king knew about it?”

“Certainly.” Gomp sounded almost offended. “Our kingdoms have had treaties since ancient times. Yours offered protection. Ours offered knowledge.”

He pointed upward toward the labyrinth of pipes and tunnels beneath the city.

“Humans could never have built something this large alone. We designed the foundations, carved the bedrock, diverted rivers, built the sewers, the steam network, the support galleries…” His chest puffed out despite the dragon racing through the air. “Every great city stands because someone made sure it wouldn’t fall.”

Ashley’s eyes remained fixed on the floating capital.

“So when the city was torn from the ground…”

She looked down at the frozen land below.

“…the sky collapsed on top of you.”

Gomp’s expression lost all its pride.

“Exactly.”

His voice grew quieter.

“Everything came down. What wasn’t crushed was left open to the surface.”

Smulknefire kept climbing.

The city grew larger with every wingbeat until its outer walls no longer looked distant but immense, stretching across the sky like the ramparts of a mountain carved by human hands.

They entered the clouds.

Gray mist swallowed them whole. Moisture beaded across Ashley’s hair and tunic, and the world became nothing but the steady rhythm of wings and the rush of wind.

Then they broke through.

Sunlight spilled across them.

Above the cloud layer, it stood in its entirety.

Its outer walls rose hundreds of feet above the foundation, crowned with towers, battlements, and banners that snapped in the wind. Behind them climbed countless rooftops, spires, domes, and bridges, layered one behind another until they converged on the palace at the city’s heart, its highest towers disappearing into the brilliant morning sky.

Smulknefire flew on, climbing toward the walls.

Ashley stayed low against his spine, one hand locked around a ridge of scale, the other braced near the horn stowed in her inventory space. The wind tore past them so fast it flattened thought into pure tension and movement.

“I don’t see the Eternal Flame anywhere,” she said, her voice forced through the rush of air.

“It is there,” Smulknefire answered immediately. “I can feel it.”

He did not slow.

The whole mass rotated beneath them as he adjusted his climb, and with that shift the center of the capital finally came into view.

A castle rose from it.

It dominated everything.

White marble terraces stacked upward in massive layers, each one broader than the last, as if the structure had grown out of the city itself rather than been built upon it. Towers pierced the air in dense clusters, their peaks thinning into sharp points that vanished into drifting clouds. Between them stretched vast bridges and flying buttresses that connected entire sections of the fortress like ribs around a heart.

At its core, a single spire climbed higher than the rest, pale marble threaded with gold, vanishing into the cloud layer above, as if the sky itself had swallowed it.

As Smulknefire moved, the castle did not sit still in Ashley’s vision. It shifted, re-centered, and filled her field of view as they closed the distance.

Stolen novel; please report.

And the dragon never looked away from it.

“I don’t see it. The crystal is too big to fit in there.”

“It is there,” he said again, lower this time. “I know it.”

“Watch out!”

Simon’s shout cut through the wind.

Smulknefire reacted before the warning fully landed.

His bulk snapped sideways in midair, a sudden correction of wings and weight that dragged all three riders with him.

Ashley flattened against the ridge of his spine, fingers locking tighter into scale. Simon was thrown hard into a raised plate along the shoulder and only held on by reflex. Gomp made a strangled sound and clamped both arms around whatever he could reach.

The air where they had been earlier tore open.

A ballista bolt screamed through it.

A harpoon of iron, wrapped in faintly glowing pressure bands, tore through the air, compressing and splitting it with a sharp, cracking hiss. It passed so close that Ashley felt heat rake across her face as if the wind itself had been burned.

Somewhere on the outer defenses, something big had fired again.

The bolt vanished into the open sky.

Other bolts followed, coming from the towers on the outer city walls.

Smulknefire threw himself into another steep bank, tilting his frame forty-five degrees. The skyline swung across the horizon as he shifted his mass to slice sideways through the slipstream.