The Effaced: Chapter One

“… best in Airship Core Technology, brought to you by Elucidate Labs. Power, Performance, Perfection. Accept no substitutes.”

My hand slapped onto my alarm clock, and I sat up with a groan. My back was twinging slightly, my fingers, knees, and ankles were all stiff and inflamed, 

I rolled, flexed, and stretched as I got out of bed. It had been a long time since I’d pratciced many of my more serious stretching routines, but over the past year, the aches had gotten worse, and I’d fallen into the old patterns.

“Looking out over the skyways…” the alarm clock blared from the small enchantment on the back that connected to the radio in my living room.

I glared at it, then poked at the smooth copper stop button again.

“…moderate traffic in the streets and undercity…” 

I sighed and raised my hand. 

My steely gray aura flexed, shaping into a familiar spell, giving me a sense for the location, composition, and shape of metals nearby, which I began to feed into the copper clock. 

Ah, there. The spring under the alarm had cracked. Running on long honed shaping instincts, I slapped together a spell on the fly to fix the metal and adjust the spring’s tensile strength. 

The alarm beeped a warning at me for using magic on it, and I did my best to ignore it. If the alarm scrambled its internals, he’d need to buy a new one, and that would be… a pain. But while I might have been out of practice with physical conditioning, my magic was as sharp as it had ever been. 

Mostly, at least. 

I pressed a couple of buttons, then fed a trickle of aura into the back of the clock where the smooth network of spellcraft and small crystal sat. Once the crystal was glowing a dull gray color, I twisted my alarm for tomorrow morning, then clicked the radio back on and put it on the dresser as I started to go through my morning ablutions, then dressed in some brown slacks, cream button down, darker vest, and a gray overcoat.

I paused, then took the vest and overcoat off. I should have eaten before I put those on. With a glance at the clock, I thought I probably had enough time, so I headed into the kitchen and took down some bread while slapping together another spell with a flex of aura. 

My toaster pushed open the cabinet door and floated up onto the counter, plugging itself in, and I slipped the bread in, then turned and measured out some coffee, while my kettle floated to the sink, the handle nudged itself, and water poured out. I turned on the stove and then wandered to the icebox and retrieved some jam. 

A quick coffee and toast later, and I cleaned up the kitchen, then re-suited myself, grabbed my work case, and stepped out of the tenement, nodding to one of my neighbors as we entered the lift together. 

“Morning, Nelly,” I said to the young woman. 

“Good morning, Axel,” Nelly greeted me, glancing up… and up… and up… to my face. I didn’t have any inhuman blood as far as I knew, but given that I was well over two meters tall, a lot of people seemed to think I was a giant-kin, even though my skin wasn’t blue.

The brass grate shut in front of us, and with a puff of the pneumatic system, we started to rise up. The lift rumbled to a stop on the thirty-first floor, as someone else boarded, and then it was off again. We exited onto the rooftop, where each of us split off in different directions. 

The man from the thirty-first floor headed towards one of the taxi-ships, smaller vessels directly piloted by mages – usually force and gravity sorcerers. 

Nelly headed towards one of the skybridges, probably going out to shop for the day – her wife was the breadwinner, one of the designers for the city’s construct defenders. I wouldn’t be happy as a house husband, even now, but then again I’d always tried to…

I shoved the thoughts out of my head as I clicked open my briefcase and tossed a collapsible metal ring to the ground. It expanded out to about a meter in diameter, and its enchantments hummed slightly. I stepped on, and a moment later, rose into the air and flowed into one of the skyways, letting the swirling area of altered pressure and wind magic encase me and support my flight.. 

I suddenly wished that I’d paid a little more attention to the traffic report, because they were a mess today. I wasn’t exactly clear on how it was that aerial traffic jams could happen, but the city managed to make them anyway. 

It was tempting to flood the aura channel with power and blast across the city. If I was moving fast enough, I could make it to the upper skyway and onto my ship before the constables managed to catch me…

But no, that would draw too much attention to myself, and I didn’t want to risk getting a fine, so I stayed on the ring of glowing script, waiting as traffic finally started moving again, and I flowed through the skyways, making my way upwards and onto the upper skyway, where airships floated overhead. Above us was the peak skyway, where the pleasure cruisers of the wealthy, residential airships of the ultra-wealthy, and the heavy, armor clad airships of Elderglass’ military floated.

Above them all, the crowning jewel of Elderglass and Elucidate Labs, The Malapert, floated, watching over everything but the tallest of mountains that ringed the city. 

The Malapert was not my ship.

My ship, The Gleam, was one of the smaller ones in the upper skyways, only about a hundred meters long, and I smoothly banked the flying disc onto its landing pad and let it collapse back down before tucking it into my briefcase.

I strode through the outer door, then let it seal behind me before passing into the inner door and into the ship’s interior. The captain and several of her crew were staring over a map of the southern end of the continent, and several spots were marked off. 

I ignored them. Even though I thought of The Gleam as my airship, that was in the same way someone would say ‘my office’ or ‘my job’. I wandered over into the halls, where the head of the department glared at me. She was a tall, imposing woman, and her enchanted gear was all faintly glowing.

It was, thankfully, the friendly sort of glare. Her glares were multifaceted and nuanced. 

“Axel. You’re going to be making repairs on The Dancer.” 

I glanced at her as I picked my card off the wall and fed it into the ticker, punching in for the day.

“Aren’t there about four of those?” 

“Yes,” she said, her glare transforming into one at the annoyance of captains who named their ships generic things, then turning back into a friendly glare at me. “Its ship ID is one-one-nine-seven.” 

“Got it,” I said, nodding as I repeated the ship ID back to her. “Know where it is?” 

“It was forced to make a landing atop the Earl Hart building,” she said, “something about being attacked.” 

“Saxum pirates again?” I asked, and her glare transformed, this time conveying the annoyance born of her not knowing something. 

“I’m not sure,” she finally said. “But I’ll leave it with you.” 

I nodded, then turned around, pulled out my flying disc again, and flew over to the Earl Hart building, before landing atop it. 

There were three airships that had been grounded on the roof, but through process of elimination, it didn’t take me too long to actually figure out which one was The Dancer. 

It was a slightly larger ship, with the kind of light armor that high speed trade airships often had. There were six canons scattered around it, but more impressive was the massive spell-spike that roasted around the front of the ship. I was no master of offensive ritual magic, but even I could admire a spell as impressive as this one. It looked like it was a siege level blast of force, fire, and lightning, all woven together. 

For all that I admired the ship, it also set me on edge.

That was some serious firepower for such a lightly armored ship, and that meant that the crew had an unusually powerful mage with the auric-copy archstar on board, they had spent a small fortune to hire a truly impressive enchanter that was capable of binding all of that into an artifact, or they were willing to spend a small fortune to fire it. 

Either way, they either had power, they had money, or worse, they had both. In my experience, either of those things meant trouble alone, and both together meant I was practically walking to my doom.

I didn’t let that show on my face as I approached the person I presumed to be the captain, given the way he was loitering around the ship.

“Axel Font, engineer, metal sorcerer rated at five hundred and seventeen auric capacity,” I said, smiling broadly and extending my hand. He shook it and then gave me a dubious glance, taking in my broad frame, the slight hitch in my step, and the scars on my hands.

“You sure you’re an engineer? You look more like a military brat.”

“Bronzelight University certified,” I said, doing my best to keep the smile on. “But I did a stint in the military.”

“Ah,” the captain said. “Come on in.” 

He opened the outer door of the airship and we stepped into the decompression chamber, then he led me inside the ship itself. 

“What happened?” I asked. 

“Isn’t that your job to figure out?” the captain asked. 

“No,” I snorted. “It’s my job to fix what’s wrong. I’m not an investigator or constable. But if there are remnants of some sort of curse, or there are explosive spells attached to the ship, then I need to know.” 

“Nothing like that,” the captain said. “Just some pirates.”

“Pirates can have witches,” I pointed out. 

“Elemental attacks,” the captain said with a firmness that suggested the topic was closed. 

I gave him a sideways glance, but didn’t press the topic. I did, however, reach into my briefcase and draw out a charm bracelet to protect against incorporeal threats, tucking it into my coat pocket. The item was only a single use, which was why I didn’t normally wear it – I didn’t want it to break because I happened to shake hands with someone who had been mildly cursed by a vengeful ex-lover, or something. 

But now felt like a good time to have it on. 

Just in case. 

“Of course,” I said agreeably, slipping on a one use shielding enchantment as well. “Just outer hull damage?” 

“Maybe a few cracks to the frame,” the captain said. “You’ll figure it out. That’s your job.” 

“Sure,” I agreed, then glanced around. “Where’s the core access point? I’ll fix that first, since it’s more critical” 

The captain frowned. 

“Do you absolutely need that?” 

I stared at him. He stared right back, then grunted, and walked over to a hatch. He popped it open, and I climbed into the hull, then winced. 

In some of the earliest models of airship, a tarp had been stretched around a metal frame, and filled with specific blends of gasses in order to give it some lift. That design hadn’t lasted long, for multiple reasons: it had a tendency to explode violently, it was difficult and expensive for mages to extract the specific blend from the air, and even a small hole in the frame could cause a leak or crash.

Modern airships still retained the frame, but they were now covered in enchantments that would read the air and alter it, allowing it to mimic the lighter than air properties of the gaseous blend without actually using it, while also making the frame lighter than aluminum and stronger than steel. This allowed the frame to now act as a storage hull, as well as allowing for improvements on the ship’s speed, power, and maneuverability. 

Those enchantments all drew their power from the core, a powerful aura generator , which also held a backup copy of all of the spells, allowing the ship to re-ignite the enchantments, so long as their physical structure was repaired. The exact mechanisms of how the core worked were an enigma, and any lab that managed to design a core kept it incredibly secret. Stranger still, the cores were simple, resembling only a smooth gemstone the size of a human, with a twisting mechanical heart. 

The combined effect of the glowing core and dozens of runes, lines, sub-enchantments, and more created a beautiful display of swirling lights…

Normally. 

The frame of this airship was in rough shape. The enchantments that had been worked into the metal were cracked and fraying, and one of the beams was actually drizzling sparks. The metal plates that made up the armor were in even worse shape, and I could actually see the outside in several spots. 

Strangest of all, however, was this airship’s core. It was still a large crystal, this one a light cyan color, with a clockwork heart, but there were strange bands of brass encircling it. Each band of brass had spikes that jabbed into the crystal structure, and all of them were glowing a faintly mint green color. It was also much larger than average, easily a full meter taller than I was. 

I’d repaired many airships, and while I’d seen various labs attempts at cores, including larger or smaller ones, I’d never seen anything like those brass bands and spikes…

“Stop staring, that’s confidential,” the captain snapped, and my hands shot to my waist to draw a weapon that wasn’t there. 

“Of course, that’s a part of our wavers,” I said, then put down my briefcase and started to let magic spiral out of my hands. This job was going to take a while.