I struck the deck hard; the impact rattling up through my palms and knees as I slid across the slicked wood until my head rested against the base of the mainmast. The mast itself hummed faintly beneath my skull, not from wind, but from something else. Something alive in the air around us.

  A roar cracked the air like lightning, and I saw a shadow in the depths of the cloudsea. It moved the way a storm moves; not fast, but with a terrible and patient certainty, displacing the mist around it in slow, rolling waves.

  Whatever it was, it was enormous.

  As I pushed myself up to stand, Captain Roan was there beside me. He offered a hand, and I took it. He pulled me up. “I thought I told you to get some rest.”

  “Couldn’t sleep,” I replied sheepishly, barely able to keep my eyes from the long shadow that trailed through the mist below. “What is that?”

  “You’ll see—”

  As Roan replied, bright spears lit up from the dark: three in total. With a roar and a screech, the spires of blue light left the greater shadow, coming straight towards the ship. They left trails of violet and white behind them.

  “Get down!” Roan said, shoving me to the side. He reached out into the smoke of his pipe and pulled free a pure black sword and pistol. They radiated power, lightning sparking and coiling within them.

  The three glowing spears came closer and closer. I watched Roan take aim. As soon as they emerged from the mist, he fired on one. The shot cracked the sky, and it exploded in a spray of lightning and fire that briefly lit the underside of the clouds in brilliant orange.

  The other two kept coming. They appeared as two large spines from some sort of creature, and each glowed white and blue with power. They struck the ship, one on the starboard side with a crack of splintering wood, and the other landing on the deck itself. The second landed only a few feet from me.

  I felt power radiating from the thing. It pulsed like a heartbeat: slow at first, then faster. The hair on my arms and legs stood on end, and the air around the spine shimmered faintly, warping the shapes of the crew members beyond it. The glow was getting brighter and brighter by the second.

  Captain Roan stepped into its path as lightning sparked from the quill. It blackened the surrounding wood, setting fire to barrels and rope. The stench of burning tar and charred wood curled thick through the night air, and one particularly large spark cascaded towards us.

  Roan slammed his sword into it, and there was a tussle of power between them, his blade hissing and spitting where the energies clashed. Roan stepped forward towards the spine. It was as if it were alive and trying to overcome him, resisting with every inch he gained… but it failed. Eventually Roan closed in and slammed his blade into the spine.

  The light dimmed as the power faded from it. Roan raised his sword into the air and expelled it; a bright bolt of lightning sparked from the tip of the sword into the sky, dispersing harmlessly into the clouds above with a distant, fading rumble.

  All was silent, except for the crackling of flames.

  “What are you standing around for?” Roan barked. “Put out the flames. Replace the lines. Fix the rigging. Get to it.”

  The crew burst into action, each falling into place like a well-oiled machine. Boots met wood, ropes snapped tight, and orders passed in low, sharp voices. I felt like an anomaly among them. A loose piece in an otherwise solved puzzle.

  “Get yourself downstairs, lad,” Roan said. “This one is beyond you.”

  I ignored the Captain’s orders and stood my ground.

  The Claws of the Cockatrice appeared around where my hands had been, and so did the Mask of the Wendigo. Both powers rose within me, as naturally as breathing now, and settling into place with that familiar weight I’d grown to trust.

  Roan stared at me for a moment, his eyes wild with surprise. Then they hardened to the task at hand. “You’ll catch a flogging for disobeying,” he said, smiling despite himself. “Ah, the passions of youth.”

  The spine, cracked where Roan had driven his sword in, hummed once again. The sound of it was low and resonant, and I felt it more than heard it, vibrating in my chest like the beating of a drum. I ran to it and began slicing. It was hard, but not as hard as some of the creatures from the Glassblown Spires. Eventually, I managed to slash through. The spine, a good few feet taller than me, fell to the deck with a heavy, hollow clatter, and whatever power it had been gathering dispersed into the night air like smoke.

  There was another roar, and this one was closer. So close and so loud that the force of it cracked the bone mask of the Wendigo I wore. A second screech followed, even closer still, and my mask shattered entirely, pieces of it falling from my face like broken shells. The crew held their hands to their ears. Even Raela seemed bothered by it, a rare crack in her composure, but she remained steadfast at the bow, keeping pace with the looming shadow below.

  The creature left the safety of the cloudsea, rising above the Skycutter like a monster pulled straight from a nightmare.

  Long, longer than the ship itself, its scales ran blue, green, and deep purple, lining its body in intricate patterns that shifted and shimmered as it moved. And spines; hundreds of them, littering its back like a crown of thorns stretched the length of its enormous body. It had no arms or feet to speak of. It simply twisted and twirled its massive form, moving as if pushed by magic alone, coiling through the air. It opened its mouth wide enough that it looked as if it could devour the entire ship in a single swallow.

  It screeched its rage at us.

  The air itself vibrated. Wood broke. Ropes snapped. Multiple crewmates fell, blood dripping from their eyes and ears, their legs giving out beneath them. But I… I was fine.

  Why?

  I coughed. I was covered in smoke, thick and misty white. It dispersed, and Roan was standing nearby, down on one knee, one hand braced on the deck. In that instant, he had covered as many of the crew as he could with a cloud of dense smoke, blocking out the worst of the screech. His jaw was set tight with the effort, the knuckles of his sword hand white.

  Hundreds of spines began to glow on the creature’s back again. They brightened in sequence; slow at first, then faster, until the whole writhing length of it blazed. Soon they separated, fired out like a cannon. Hundreds of cannons. They were beautiful in the sky, trailing arcs of purple mist in their wake, each one humming with terrible purpose as they descended upon the Skycutter.

  “Raela,” Roan yelled. “Tell the helmsman to begin evasive maneuvers.”

  “Already done, dear,” she called back. Her voice was perfectly even. Apparently her hearing, being made of wood herself, was protected against the worst of it.

  The ship lurched, changing direction on the spot. I had never felt a ship capable of doing such a thing. I had never felt anything move that way. Speed surged beneath me, and the ship turned ninety degrees in an instant, throwing me off my feet. I grabbed a stray rope, wrapping it twice around my arm. Roan’s mist centered around his boots, seemingly grounding him in place as the deck tilted wildly beneath everyone else.

  Then I heard a terrible noise; more than a few crewmates screamed, unable to catch anything as they fell into the mist below, their voices silenced by shadow.

  Roan turned to look at each and every one of them, reaching out as if he could catch them from across the deck.

  He couldn’t.

  Roan continued to look all the same, and I could see that he memorized each of their faces and names, carving it into his mind. He felt he owned them that much. He would remember them and carry the burden of their loss forever.

  Such was the duty of a Captain.

  Roan’s arm dropped. He stood there for half a second longer than he should have, watching the mist where they’d gone. Then he turned back and yelled, “Anyone who cannot fight, get below deck. Tell anyone who can to come and help.”

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  A few more of the crew disappeared downstairs. Roan grabbed one by the collar, and I could barely hear him whisper, “And get the First Mate.”

  “The First Mate!” the man gasped, eyes going wide.

  Roan nodded once.

  The man’s face went through something: surprise, and then something harder than surprise. He nodded in return and disappeared downstairs without another word.

  The spines still glowed as they descended from the sky, and Roan aimed his pistol and began to fire. Lightning streaked from the pistol into the sky, causing explosions of blue and red to burst outward, illuminating the night in flashing, strobing colors. It was a marvelous sight to behold: the clouds lit from below; the ship bathed briefly in crimson, and then dark again.

  And it wasn’t enough.

  The spines hit the ship, and each began to spark out with power. The ship’s speed decreased suddenly, throwing me forward. Luckily, I still held the rope, and I bounced back hard against the mast.

  “The helmsman says the ship is damaged, dear,” Raela said.

  “It’s Captain when we’re in the middle of a fight, love,” Roan replied through gritted teeth.

  She smiled wickedly; the firelight catching the grain of her wooden cheek.

  I narrowed my eyes. Those two were going to get everyone on board killed.

  There was a spine to my right, already smoking, the wood around it beginning to blister. I let go of the rope and rushed it.

  “That’s it, Torren,” Roan said. “Cut them down before they become a problem.”

  Once again, I slashed forward, my claws bouncing off this time. These spines were just a bit harder than the last. Denser. A different type, or maybe the creature had already adapted.

  Then an idea crept into my head. I turned my focus inward, and the System flickered into view at the edge of my vision, the familiar translucent grid of numbers and categories appearing before me. As quickly as I could, I allocated my one remaining stat point into strength and closed it.

  I slashed again. My claws cut. Just barely, but they cut. I hacked away, more and more, each strike finding a little more meat than the last, until the spine finally gave with a grinding crack and fell, tumbling off the side of the ship and down into the mist.

  A scream drew my eyes upward. A crewmember still in the crow’s nest. It was an old man. A smaller spine had landed at the center of the mainmast and had set it ablaze, cutting off any way down. Flames chewed up the wood toward him with alarming speed. The man had nowhere to escape, and in a moment of desperation, he jumped. His foot snagged a loose rope. His body flipped as he fell. He landed on his head, his neck snapping audibly over the noise of the fire.

  I almost vomited.

  “By the clouds, man,” Dragus said, appearing from inside the ship as if he had simply materialized out of the darkness. “Be careful next time.” He reached down and touched the man’s face. Nothing visible happened for a moment. Dragus cradled the man’s head in his arms, and then he snapped his neck back into place.

  I did vomit that time. Not much, but enough. I spat and wiped my mouth.

  The man’s eyes popped open. He jumped up, looking around as if surprised to find himself still on a ship. “Oy, thought I was a goner that time. Thanks, Dragus.” He put his forearm out.

  Dragus tapped it lightly with his own. “Get downstairs. The cavalry is coming.”

  It was as Dragus said. Soon, a multitude of other crewmates arrived from below, emerging from the hatch. Some I recognized, some I didn’t. There was a woman with a bow as tall as she was, already nocked and half-drawn before she’d fully cleared the steps. There was a man snapping his fingers, small sparks of fire appearing in different colors: red, green, pale gold. All told, around seven or eight in total joined. Not many, but each of them moved with the quiet certainty of people who had done this before.

  Captain Roan stood straight, aimed his pistol at the creature’s face, and muttered, “Let’s get to work.”

  He fired, and the crackling snap of it was the signal. Those who could attacked the creature itself, and those who couldn’t began destroying the spines still embedded throughout the ship. Some began working on the fires, including me. Surprisingly, my scales protected me from the heat, and I could generally pat smaller flames out with my hands. For the larger burns, I found buckets of dirty mop water nearby and threw them onto the flames, each one hissing violently into steam.

  The creature couldn’t gain an inch. Slowly, reluctantly, it began to retreat back into the cloudsea, its massive body coiling downward, purple mist closing over it.

  A cheer rang out from everyone on deck, ragged and breathless. I found that I was cheering along with them, my voice raw in my throat.

  Finn suddenly appeared, climbing through the hatch with a lopsided grin and something in his hand. It was an odd sort of object. It looked like a pistol, only made of strange colors: grays, blacks, and an orange so bright it almost glowed. It reminded me of a child’s toy, but I wasn’t sure why, as I had never seen anything quite like it before.

  Finn held out the pistol-like item and spun an orange cylinder. “Look what I found. It was the anomaly from that fun building. Raela identified it for me. You see this?” He flipped the orange cylinder open to show that inside, a dark fluid filled it. Blood. Probably his own.

  “I can shoot my own blood like a bullet. I heard we were getting attacked, so I came to test it out.”

  “A little late for that, coward,” Dragus said, cutting into the conversation. “Typical of you to show up when everything is dealt with.”

  Finn went to reply, but Dragus had already moved on, crouching beside an injured crewmate.

  Then another roar cracked the sky from the depths of the cloudsea below. The shadow of the creature grew and grew, swelling outward through the mist, and then the mist itself seemed to thin around it, pulling inward as if…consumed. It was eating the mist. Powering itself up. Slowly, its head was revealed again, pushing up through the surface of the clouds. Its eyes were pinpointed on all of us standing aboard the deck of the Skycutter. There was nothing in those eyes but rage.

  Finn stepped forward into the middle of everyone. “It’s alright. I got this.” He took aim with his new weapon and fired. There was little noise to it except for a sharp, wet crack. A red streak echoed across the sky and hit the creature directly in the eye.

  Finn jumped up, hooting in delight. “You see that shot? It doesn’t want none of this—”

  The serpent sprang from the clouds, its full length revealed for the first time as it lunged. It looked as if it would engulf the entire ship at once. As it did, it volleyed the deck again with spines, one narrowly missed crushing me, the displaced wind of its passage staggering me. Most dodged in time. A few were unlucky. One man I didn’t recognize had a missing leg where the spine had torn it clean off. Dragus moved to him immediately, literally grabbing the severed limb and reattaching it to the man’s body.

  Was there anything that man couldn’t heal?

  Finn began firing again, the blood-bullets doing little good against something that size.

  Roan took point and fired as well. The lightning bullets gave the creature pause, crashing against its scales in bursts of white light. Then something odd happened. The creature stopped moving, and its scales began to glow. Roan fired and fired, but the creature no longer looked hurt by it. No, the opposite in fact. It seemed empowered by it. It was absorbing the energy, drinking it in the same way it had drunk the mist.

  The serpent opened its mouth, not to devour us, but purposefully. At the center, an orb of pure energy began to form and spin. It spun and grew, and spun and grew, and the light of it washed the whole deck in cold white and pale blue, casting our shadows long and sharp across the wood. Soon, the orb looked to be half the size of the ship itself, rotating in perfect, terrible silence.

  Slowly, the orb left the creature’s mouth and began to drift towards the ship.

  “Raela,” Roan said, and for the first time I heard something close to panic in his voice. “Tell the helmsman to move.”

  “I already did,” she spat. “We are down. They are working on it. We have no control.”

  Everyone began firing into the orb. Finn slit his wrists, filled his toy gun, and fired again. Nothing was stopping it. Nothing was even slowing it down. The orb drifted toward us, and there was nothing any of us could do.

  “Brace yourselves,” Roan said, and there was something final in it. A bracing of his own.

  “Honestly,” a voice said; one I didn’t recognize. Unhurried. Almost amused. “What would you do without me?”

  Flash.

  In a moment, my entire body was encased in ice. It was as if I were looking out from behind glass, yet I couldn’t move at all. I couldn’t breathe. Outside the frozen shell, I saw a woman: hair long, silver, and flowing freely in the wind. She wore an oversized red coat with gold buttons lining it in two neat rows, and she strode forward as if she hadn’t a care in the world. Her coat trailed behind her like a signal of her arrival. Looking around, everyone had been frozen; well, everyone except Raela, who stared daggers at the silver-haired woman.

  The orb of energy was nearly at the ship, and yet this woman stood at the railing and snapped her fingers.

  In an instant, a monstrous barrier of ice sprang up in front of the ship: massive and jagged. The orb hit the barrier, and a brilliance of light that I could never have imagined sprang into existence. It was as if the sun had been transported to the deck of the ship. Yet it was brief. Light hit my eyes; the ship rocked; a wall of air hit my ice encasement and shattered pieces of it away. Then it was over. The energy was gone. The silence after it was profound.

  The barrier of ice still remained, steaming faintly at its edges.

  The woman stared up at the serpent, which glared at her with a hatred that was unmistakable even in those beady, distant eyes. The creature’s vast body coiled above us, hesitating. Then it raced forward, aiming to engulf the ship entirely.

  The barrier of ice broke, splintering outward. Those splinters hit the creature. Ten times. One-hundred times. One-thousand. Countless icicles pierced the creature from every angle, finding the spaces between its scales with precision, and then the woman, with a single snap of her fingers, encased the creature entirely in ice. Silently, it fell. The enormous frozen serpent dropped into the mist below, disappearing beneath the cloudsea.

  The silver-haired woman turned to address us all. The firelight caught her bright green eyes, and she looked us each over with something between amusement and disappointment.

  “Looks like you’ve gotten the crew into a fine bit of a mess, eh, Captain?”