It had been half a moon since Anhchoi returned to this village with the golden relic suspended from his crane. Since then, he’d had the tribals construct him a scaffolding of vines and wood in the center of their town. He’d started the arduous task of breaking up the great statue of their savage god, carting the quarried coral to be dumped into the bay. He would leave only the central hump of the beast, a coral hill that would serve as a dais. Makani raised a single objection, but Anhchoi put her at ease. After all, the statue of a false god was far less important than the relic of a real one.

  The scaffolding was made of several trees, lashed together to form a sturdy framework, buried to a man’s height in the dirt. A webwork of ropes kept the idol aloft. They appeared strained to a breaking point, but Anhchoi knew from experience to trust the weave of the rope. For now, the golden idol was caught in his web.

  Anhchoi crawled along the top of the prize. A real skyborn artifact, fallen to the sea. He knew it could be nothing else. And it proved the skyborn were factual. He had never believed, truly believed, before now. He had always assumed the ruins were merely remnants of earlier nations. Civilizations wiped out by war. But this idol made of sunlight had fallen to the oceans barely a week before.

  It had called to him from the skyborn. It confirmed the legends of his people, pointing to a glorious heritage in the heavens. It was also further proof of the blessing of the nations over the tribals, and the responsibility to civilize as many of them as possible. That Zhao-Chi had the largest concentration of these ruins spoke to their rarefied heritage.

  Perhaps the defeat of Chuichan and Anhchoi’s present exile was written.

  His thoughts returned to the ruins in the highlands of Zhao-Chi, where the nation’s borders grew nebulous and the runaways and bandits lay in wait for the unwary. He had ignored his mother and played near the ruins anyway, pretending to be brave sailors with his friends. The ruins were unlike anything the nations could or would make now, with their perfectly geometric shapes formed of stones, stones unlike anything found in any quarry in the nations. Most of what was left were mere foundations, but the occasional building still stood, after thousands of years. He'd thought until recently those ruins were taken from him forever. With Chuichan’s rightful revolution broken and the remainder of his noble forces scattered to the winds, Anhchoi thought his would be the life of a sailor. Perhaps find another country willing to take him in, but the places of his youth were irrevocably lost. Everything changed with the recovery of the idol.

  He couldn’t help but see the will of the skyborn behind such luck.

  He didn’t know what the object was—he’d never seen anything like it. Vaguely animalistic, its craftsman having done an admirable job of capturing a singular bestial grace. It had a stern countenance, complete with eyes made from purple jewels, and of course there was its strange beak.

  The sleek “head” of the idol moved back into a body about the size of a tribal house. Two sails, flat on the fore end and arcing on the aft, gave the idol a sense of forward motion even when it was at rest. It looked like it should be swooping down through the clouds. At the bottom, two legs, with splayed and clawed feet, were tucked close to the body. In back, a fan-like protrusion reminded the warchief of a rudder.

  Which is why he eventually reached the conclusion he did.

  At first, he assumed it was little more than statuary. Likely a holy relic, a god worshiped by the skyborn. Elegant, but ultimately nothing. It could have been out there in the heavens, only to fall to Waiola when it sensed a man ready to accept it for what it was.

  That was arrogance speaking, and Anhchoi knew it. To be a warchief required a certain amount of arrogance, and when a town’s worth of men looked to him as sovereign, when he had life and death power over them all, arrogance was an easy trap to fall into. Though the burning current of loyalty for Chuichan tried to deny it, the warlord himself had been a victim of his own hubris. He had taken the vanguard into the teeth of the usurper’s fleet and had met his fiery end. Chuichan was a great man who would have made a great warlord. Who would have taken Zhao-Chi back to the time of the skyborn, but a singular flaw sunk his charred bones to the bottom of Zhao Bay.

  Anhchoi would not fall into that trap. Until he had evidence, indisputable evidence he was chosen, he would fight to take the idol’s appearance as happenstance. Luck was a well-known phenomenon. A great man didn’t wait for luck, didn’t count on it. A great man capitalized on it. Written or not, he would treat it as fortune.

  So if it wasn’t a message from a long-forgotten god, or at least not an easily-read one, it left a few other options. He’d spent the first days going over it as closely as he could. His old days as a simple crewman had given him the agility to scuttle over rigging like an insect, and he used those old talents now. His joints protested a few times—he was no longer a young man—but he acquitted himself admirably. Soon he was crawling all over the idol, tracing the lines of the sculpture with curious fingers.

  He came to the conclusion that it was metal, though one completely unfamiliar to him, like none he had ever seen before. It was smoother than the most masterfully-worked bronze, and far harder. As an experiment, he took his shortsword—a gift from Chuichan himself—and scratched it against the idol. He was entirely unable to mar the surface, and succeeded only in blunting his weapon. While he would have taken it on faith that the skyborn had miracle metals, to actually see it, to touch it, was to caress the divine.

  His second, and far more substantive conclusion came when he was exploring the underside of the idol. In the space behind the “head” and just in front of the “feet,” he found a line. At first he took it to be moulding. There was a great deal of these lines, especially on the bladelike protrusions along the top and the fanlike bit on the back. This line stretched around a mostly-flat area in a roughly rectangular shape. Anhchoi realized then that it was not a line but a seam. A seam could mean a door.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  Which made the idol a dwelling.

  Or a craft.

  While it had no way to move, no oars, no sails, nor anything else recognizable to Anhchoi, he also knew the skyborn had wonders. They had, after all, come from the sky. Sails didn’t cause the warjunks to take flight. Oars didn’t put their vessels into the ether. So maybe there was another wonder waiting to be discovered.

  More importantly, it meant there was likely a skyborn inside. Possibly dead by now, but even a body would be a religious relic of unimaginable importance. He imagined the person would look much like those from the nations. Smaller than the tribals, with the elegant features of the most well-bred of warlords. Deeper inside, Anhchoi imagined they would have the distinctive almost-black eyes of the people of Zhao-Chi, as opposed to the mahogany of those of Wailao-Gen, or the tawny yellow of Fu-Zhang.

  Now he had to figure out how to open the thing. He sat on a flat lava rock, his body aching from clambering all over the object. Sweat pricked out over his skin, but he declined to strip off his shirt and vest, throwing them in a heap with his sandals. In front of the tribals, he would show how a civilized man dressed. At the moment, the tribals were making an awful racket as they continued to erect the palisades, and wouldn’t care to see the warchief so disrobed.

  The fortifications were important, but this, this held the key to the world. If Anhchoi returned to Zhao-Chi with a new skyborn object, with a skyborn body, he could claim legitimacy. The usurper warlord would be toppled and Anhchoi could rule as Chuichan would have. Better, the revolution would be a bloodless one. He would preserve the lives of all the sons and daughters of Zhao-Chi, united in a golden rule.

  He only needed to figure the thing out. Until that moment, he had a very large objet d’art. Useful in what it could make men do, but he wanted it to be useful in and of itself.

  “Boat!” It was the voice of Waifun, perched in the newly constructed lookout tower. He called out the warning again, pointing out to sea.

  Anhchoi sprang to his feet, ready to sprint to the skiffs, but found he couldn’t move. Since he had settled in next to the object, he found it difficult to leave for more than a few moments. His men brought him food from the fire, and he only left to relieve himself in the latrines by the north wall. He glanced at the Kwailoon, sitting in the bay of the island, surrounded by its escort skiffs. It wouldn’t be swift enough to catch one of the tribal scouts, but their skiffs would. He should be in command. But he couldn’t leave the idol. Not with it about to give up its last secret. He could feel it.

  A runner came up from the tower, breathless from his sprint. “Sir, Waifun says there are three scout boats on the ocean. Probably come from a nearby tribe. They know we’re here.”

  Anhchoi looked back at the object. It didn’t sway in its elaborate rope cradle. It was far too heavy, too present. It hung there with the promise of Zhao-Chi inside. Or even, if Anhchoi allowed himself to think it, even more.

  “Makani!” he called.

  “Master?” Makani was never far, and she just seemed to materialize from nothing when he called for her. Even in the normalizing light of day, she was a frightening, inhuman figure. The cloak took away any human outline to her body, the mask obliterated her human features. He thought of her face before, ugly and scarred, but comfortably human. When she had fallen overboard many years ago, he assumed she had died. But she returned. As this creature, no longer quite human, covered in her wooden mask and kalao-ribbon cloak.

  “Take the skiffs. Bring me that scout.”

  “Yes, master,” she said with a nod, then ran down the beach, calling for sailors. The men whose names she called peeled off from whatever they were doing and sprinted to the shore. Soon they had boarded the skiffs and were filling the sails with wind and the oars with water. Anhchoi nodded to himself, satisfied that his quartermaster would resolve things, and returned to his seat on the lava rock, watching the idol in its place.

  He didn’t know how long he waited there, learning nothing new in his meditation. He felt a hand touch his shoulder, and he turned. It was Makani. Behind her, the men surrounded a wounded tribal. A giant like all the others. Though he was injured, he would make a fine slave. Blood trickled from his temple, and he cradled a wounded arm. The men around him all clutched weapons, waiting for an excuse to use them again. The tribal stared down at Anhchoi in misguided contempt.

  “Two other boats escaped,” Makani said. “We caught this one.”

  “Where do you come from?” Anhchoi asked the man.

  “Kamo’loa,” he sneered.

  “One of their silly names,” Anhchoi said to his men. Some of them cracked smiles. “Where?”

  “Not far. They know you are here now. They will be coming.”

  “I know,” Anhchoi said mildly. He turned to Fuandai, who had been one of those Makani took. “Widen the slave pit. It seems we will be needing the room.”

  Fuandai offered a bow, and after a distrusting glance at the tribal, made his way in the direction of the work crews.

  “See to it that this man’s injuries are tended to,” Anhchoi ordered his men. “Have him placed in the pit today. He’ll do no work until his wounds close.”

  They nodded and escorted the glowering tribal away.

  “Master,” Makani said.

  “What is it?”

  “We should leave. The tribals know we are here. They’ll be sending a war party. They don’t have our skills, but they have ma’hanu.”

  “I know,” Anhchoi said. Makani’s worries were almost amusing.

  “We have enough slaves for entry into any nation we choose. With this thing,” she pointed at the glittering idol, “you can buy a rank. We will be more than itinerant mariners.”

  “I know this too.”

  “You don’t let us go.”

  “Send the kalao.”

  “Send the kalao where?” Makani demanded.

  “To the other warchiefs of Chuichan’s fleet. Send them with urgent summons. Have them join us here.”

  “Master—”

  Anhchoi turned to face his quartermaster. Despite her marked height advantage, despite her attempt to become a creature of nightmare with her cloak and mask, it was Makani who quailed. Anhchoi met her eyes without fear. Faith gave him power.

  “You do not see what we have. This is from the skyborn. We are no longer raiders. No longer mariners. This is a chance to create a new nation. Anh-Chan, a place among the tribes as a waypoint between savagery and civilization. We have the key to it. We need the vision to recognize it. Send the kalao. Call the warchiefs.”

  Makani’s eyes were so human. Almost weak behind the mask. She broke the eye contact first, and bowed. “Yes, master. I’ll send the kalao.”

  She trudged off to the shore, calling to one of the skiffs. As it took her across the bay to the warjunk, Anhchoi watched the work crew. As confident as he sounded, he knew he’d need the fortifications. It would be a hideous battle, and he would need every advantage.

  But now he had a reason to fight for this ground. He put a hand against the flank of the idol, and felt the strength of the skyborn bleeding into the palm of his hand. The metal was warm, as though telling him it approved of his plan.

  A moment later, he heard the bladelike cry of the kalao. He looked upwards and saw the creatures streaking through the sky, their fluttering wind-streamers scintillating in the sunlight. They wheeled and split off from one another, heading in different directions to find the remnants of Chuichan’s fleet.

  Although, if they came, they would be Anhchoi’s fleet.