The Emissary
Fall of Blackspire
Chapter One
No sky. No stars. No horizon.
Only fire and metal twisting, groaning, like a god in its death throes.
Gilin woke to the floor rising to meet him.
One moment he was lying on the bunk, the next his body was airborne, flung from the thin mattress by a force he hadn’t felt coming. He struck the metal plating hard, the impact driving the breath from his lungs. For a long, disorienting second he couldn’t remember where he was at all, couldn’t separate the ringing in his skull from the ringing in the walls around him. Somewhere distant, an explosion rolled through the hull, its vibration travelling up through the deck and into his bones. A second followed close behind, then a third, violent enough to throw him forward before he’d even managed to find his feet.
He hit something unseen and stopped dead.
A barrier. An energy field. A cage.
Six walls shimmered around him, hexagonal panes of light projected from crystals mounted at each corner, their glow pulsing lavender and violet like circuitry on the verge of failing. Somewhere above him, or perhaps below, metal screamed. His heart was hammering so hard he could feel it in his throat, and for a moment the fear was almost worse than the danger itself, a formless panic with nothing solid to push against.
His vision blurred. A stabbing pain settled behind his eyes, and his own pulse hammered loud enough to drown out his thoughts. He tried to steady himself, tried to work out how much of it was the crash and how much was the cage itself, but the two blurred together until there was no telling one from the other.
The floor sloped, steeply, as though the whole room had decided to lean into a fall. He was somewhere deep inside a vast metal construct, buried in a hull that no longer felt entirely stable.
He opened his mouth to call for the guards, to ask what in the Breath was happening.
Nothing came. His throat was scraped dry, his tongue foreign in his own mouth. He couldn’t even manage the simplest word.
Then came the first true moment of terror.
The ship tilted hard, and somewhere close, something enormous tore free. The shockwave rolled through the hull a heartbeat later. The crystals dimmed in response, one of them stuttering, its glow flickering off-rhythm like a heart straining to keep beating.
He pressed both palms flat against the barrier, the light catching briefly against the rough brown leather binding his forearms and the short, unkempt beard he hadn’t had the chance to shave in days.
Pain snapped through his hands, sharp and immediate. He looked up. The field held, but it trembled as it did, the light rippling like disturbed water. He turned to the other crystals. They glowed steady, untroubled, giving him nothing to work with.
The ship screamed again, louder this time, closer.
Then the wall opposite the cell’s only door burst inward in a thunderclap of fire and sheared metal.
A figure staggered through the smoke a few seconds later, sidearm raised, sweeping the room. Commonwealth armour, blackened and scorched down to its weave, the dark green of the uniform beneath it only visible where the fire hadn’t reached. Sweat cut clean lines through the soot on his face, and his collar had come loose at some point, the top of his shirt torn and hanging where a blade or a piece of shrapnel had caught him and, by some mercy, missed the skin beneath. His hair was black and cropped close, his jaw clean-shaven despite everything, as though habit alone had kept a blade to it that morning. A leather bracer sat on his left wrist, its surface worn smooth from use, a small protective cover clipped over something beneath it. His eyes were sharp despite the exhaustion behind them, and his voice came out low and rough, adrenaline pushing the words faster than he likely intended.
“Anyone alive? Make some sound if you are.”
Then he saw Gilin and stopped, frozen for half a breath.
“There you are,” he muttered, mostly to himself.
He stepped closer, wary of the cage’s edge, lip curling as he circled it. “Mage-locked. Well. Looks like they knew exactly who you are.”
Doran crossed to the control panel beside the entrance, rifling through a pouch on his belt until he found a jagged copper tool. He didn’t hesitate before jamming it into the slot, glancing back at Gilin as he did.
“Don’t twitch,” he said. “Or we both die messily.”
The pulsekey flared hot blue. The cage shimmered, then shattered inward like glass folding backwards on itself. A hiss curled through the air as the crystals along the walls died, one by one, until the room was dark save for the fires burning beyond the breach.
“Did you get what you needed?”
Gilin nodded, the cylinder warm in his palm. “He wasn’t here,” he said, quietly enough that it was mostly for himself. “Kael. He wasn’t on this ship.”
Doran’s expression didn’t change, but something behind it did. “We’ll deal with that later. Right now we need to move.”
Doran pressed something hard into Gilin’s palm. A small metal cylinder, warm rather than cold, throbbing faintly against his skin. Not a tool. A limb, waiting to remember what it was.
“Come on,” Doran snapped, already moving through the second breach in the wall. “We’ve got maybe five minutes before this whole sky-cursed coffin turns us into ash.”
Gilin followed him through, finding several others waiting beyond it, all wearing Commonwealth colours, all watching the corridor behind them with the particular stillness of soldiers who expected an attack. One of them, young enough that his uniform still looked a size too large across the shoulders, kept shifting his rifle from hand to hand, wiping his palm dry against his thigh each time before taking it up again.
“Sarge, get your team out. We’ll meet you at the rendezvous,” Doran said, glancing back at Gilin as he spoke.
“How exactly are you planning to manage that?” the woman asked. Her face was streaked grey with ash, a shallow cut open above one eyebrow that she hadn’t bothered to wipe clean, as though there were more pressing things to attend to than her own blood.
“I’ll figure something out. You pack up and drop, we’ll see you on the ground.” He offered her a crooked smile that didn’t reach his eyes.
“Yes, sir.” She nodded, already turning to tap one of her men on the shoulder, the young one with the too-large uniform, who managed something close to a nod of his own before falling in behind her.
“This way,” Doran said, heading off in the opposite direction from the others. “Stay low. Follow my lead. If you hear ticking, run. Don’t think about it. Just move.”
Gilin accepted the instruction without a word and fell into step beside him, jogging down the corridor. His legs barely obeyed at first, unsteady beneath him, but Doran didn’t slow to accommodate it. The pair moved at a steady combat jog, sidestepping corpses and debris the way a person might step around puddles on a familiar street, an old, practised avoidance rather than a conscious choice. Spent casings rolled underfoot, and somewhere beneath the wreckage a single glove lay abandoned, still holding the shape of the hand that had once filled it.
The air pressed close, thick with heat and the acrid stink of arc-burnt plating. The walls pulsed with dying light, some lamps still glowing weakly, others long since surrendered to the dark. Beneath every groan of the hull ran a thinner sound, high and metallic, a failing rune-lamp caught somewhere in a loop it couldn’t break, the same broken note repeating over and over until it became easier to ignore than to notice.
“Do you think they’ll be alright?” Gilin asked, shifting the cylinder in his grip.
Before Doran could answer, the tilt that had been present since the moment Gilin woke grew worse. The floor slanted deeper, and the hull groaned with a judder that seemed to pass straight through bone.
“She’s going nose-down,” Doran muttered. “Command crew’s probably abandoned ship, which means there’s no one left flying her. She’s falling.”
A body slid past them a moment later, Commonwealth colours, limbs twisted at angles a body shouldn’t allow, blood smearing across the deck behind it like spilled oil. Gilin flinched, small and involuntary. He hadn’t thought about the casualties until now, hadn’t let himself.
Doran glanced down at the body only once, and something in his expression flattened before he looked away again. “Barely more than a kid, that one. Nineteen, maybe. Signed up thinking it’d be over before he ever saw a Sky Carrier up close.” He stepped over the corpse, boot knocking aside a shattered helmet, and continued towards a heavy-looking door ahead, his voice gone flat and businesslike again, as though he’d already decided grief was a luxury for later.
“Locked,” he growled. “Figures.”
He slapped his palm against the access plate. Nothing happened. Whatever power remained in the ship’s veins wasn’t enough to drive the mechanism.
“Cover me. This is going to get loud.”
Gilin turned, scanning the corridor behind them. Empty, for now. Doran fixed a flat, triangular charge against the door’s seam, its small display blinking down from three.
“Doran.” Gilin’s voice came out brittle, rasping against his dry throat. “Was Sera upset?”
Doran gestured towards a small alcove and pulled Gilin into it before answering, the two of them pressed together as the countdown ran out behind them.
“Took me the better part of an hour to talk her down. She wanted to come herself, but they need her in the city.” He paused, glancing sideways. “She didn’t shout. That’s how I knew it was bad. So be warned, she might have some choice words for you when you see her.”
Gilin said nothing, though the thought of her sitting through that particular quiet stayed with him longer than he expected. They’d only been partnered a matter of months, hardly long enough to know someone well, and yet the idea of her waiting on word of whether he’d come back at all settled somewhere in his chest he hadn’t expected it to reach.
The charge detonated before he could answer, the door blowing inward with a deep boom, metal cracking apart as smoke rolled through the new gap. Doran stepped through first, pistol raised, and Gilin followed a half-step behind, the question still sitting unanswered in his chest.
“So I take it intelligence was at least partially correct?” he managed, once they were moving again.
“Yeah, Morn Sky Carrier. We came in from Kharan Ridge, planted charges on the engines, then got made before we could get to you. I had to blow them early, as a distraction.” Something flattened in Doran’s voice. “Now she’s burning into Blackspire like a falling star, and we’re still inside her.”
The corridor beyond was worse than the last. The ceiling sagged under its own weight, wiring hanging like burnt vines, the walls scorched black. Somewhere deep in the hull, the warning klaxon had begun to slow, as though it too were struggling to survive whatever was happening around them.
As they moved, Gilin caught sight of a nameplate bolted to the wall, bent nearly flat but still legible.
Harrow.
The ship responsible for so much death across this war, now folding in on herself, minute by minute, deck by deck. He thought of a name he had heard years ago, an Emissary called Maren Harrow, older than him by a decade. She’d gone to fight the war. Rumours said that she had faced the leader of the Scorvari Clan Sel in single combat during the Varel campaign and never came back. Nobody had recovered her staff. Her name had stayed with him, like so many from that time, in the particular way that losses did. Not as grief exactly but as a weight he’d never quite put down, the shape of something unresolved. He wondered how she’d feel knowing her name was being used to identify a tool of oppression, then pushed the thought aside and kept moving.
Either way, this ships end hadn’t come soon enough.
