Erin Hoffman - Sword of Fire and Sea

A pulse of wings on air drew his attention back to the here and now. Beside him, out in the air, Isri hovered. Her feathers were lifted in what he'd learned meant excitement in a gryphon, and her breathing was fast but steady. Watching the glisten in her eyes, Vidarian found a sudden jealousy for her and the gryphons’ direct experience of the exhilaration of flight.

“May I?” she called, her wings beating twice every few seconds to hold her in the hover.

“Please,” Vidarian answered, doing his best to hold the craft steady in the high wind.

He thought the mechanics of landing on a ship that floated in the air would be complex, but she must have done this before, and he stopped himself from the dizzying contemplation of when that might have been. With an ease she hadn't shown on takeoff, she dove and then looped in a quick arc, bringing herself directly on top of the Destiny . Then she folded her wings and dropped, one foot outstretched and the other ready to brace for impact, into a neat landing on the bench beside Vidarian. She gave one quick flap to steady herself, mantling like a hawk, and then her wings flipped back and closed with a whisper of soft, sleek feathers. With a lightness that spoke of birdlike bones, she hopped into the bench seat next to Vidarian. Her feathers smelled of sun-warmth and spice.

Vidarian was looking at the sun, staring into the sun where it now sunk into the sea in a pool of searing, liquid light, and for a long time Isri followed his gaze silently. But as the spots it burned into his eyes turned deeper and darker, he realized he was trying rather pathetically to punish himself and looked away, tracing his returning vision up the coast.

In the distance, a flash of unnatural lightning that came from near the ground revealed the location of one of the seridi that had flooded out of the gate, wreaking havoc wherever they passed.

“Why are they doing this?” Vidarian asked, his throat dry from the altitude.

“They're mad,” Isri replied. “For every year that my people remained trapped with the Starhunter, it seemed one of us lost the battle to retain our sanity. Her massive and chaotic mind eroded our own.”

“Why would you give yourselves to such a thing?”

“We didn't know we would survive the passage into the gate,” she said. “When we lured her through, we thought it was to certain death. None had ever survived passing into the gate when a destination had not been opened on the other side. The Starhunter kept us alive-we were her bargaining chip if she were to ever be released again.”

“And I fell into her hands,” he said, remembering Ariadel's silence like a knife between his ribs. “The gryphons and magic-users here insisted that the gate should be sealed, not opened.”

She turned to him, her pupils pinning like a gryphon's with shock. “And leave us trapped there for eternity, all condemned to the slow descent into madness?” When he didn't answer, she said, “You have set us free. Whatever paths lay ahead of you, you must know that you have the gratitude of an entire race, trapped for untold time between worlds.”

For the first time since the awakening of his magic-and it now felt to be wholly his magic, as it never had-the weight of the Starhunter was lifted from his mind. A hollowness he felt in the world itself said that she was there-her ambiguity, her truth-but she was no longer his alone to bear. And he wondered if it was this relief he had sought all along. Had he really opened the gate for Ariadel? Had the Starhunter herself contaminated his thoughts?

In the quiet that had settled on his mind, he knew the singularity of purpose that had filled his being for that one moment. It was Ariadel's life that had compelled him, for good and for ill. And he knew that if it were left to him again, he would again release chaos into the world if it meant correcting an imbalance that he'd known in his heart threaded reality itself without her.

“It's beautiful,” Isri said, looking out at the sunset spilling light and brilliance across the distant ocean far below and to the west. She closed her eyes, and the gentle wind lifted the feathers around her face.

The future was nebulous-two thousand powerful magic-wielders released into the world, the disruption of healing magic, ships that could fly-but suspended as he was among the clouds, the deep blue sky filled with fire and light, the richness of a new land spread beneath them…in that moment, at least, Vidarian agreed.