Descent and ...
**
The Valkyrie soared, cutting through mist and fractured light. For a heartbeat, Khalen felt infinite. The airship hummed like a living thing, its runes pulsing in rhythm with his heartbeat. OH's voice was a low murmur of satisfaction.
"See? I told you. All it takes is belief."
Khalen smiled faintly. "For something built a thousand years ago, it flies smoother than most ships I've owned."
"Credit where it's due. The carpenter had vision, and I might have whispered a few design tips."
The laughter that followed was short-lived.
The light along the hull flickered. The hum turned ragged. A deep shudder ran through the spine of the ship.
Khalen frowned. "What was that?"
"Hm," OH said, suddenly quiet. "That... shouldn't happen."
The deck bucked. Crystals along the ribs dimmed one by one until only a faint red glow remained. The nose pitched down. Gravity vanished, then slammed back in a rush. The sky inverted.
"OH!" Khalen roared.
"Right. So... small detail I might have overlooked."
The Valkyrie screamed, wood groaning under impossible strain. Breath flickered like dying embers as they plummeted through the cloudburst.
"You forgot something?" Khalen snarled, wrestling the tiller.
"Technically, I didn't forget. I never had it. The ship's core crystal, it's missing. I was planning to borrow one from the city vault during the cataclysm, but, well, everything exploded."
"You're telling me this now?"
"We were having a moment!"
The world became light and water. The Valkyrie tore through a cascade, smashing through rock and ruins that glowed faintly from ages past. The hull split, fragments spinning away into the dark. Khalen's body slammed against the deck, pain flaring bright, then gone. Too gone. He knew that trick. The skull stealing the edge.
Through the ringing in his ears, he heard OH's voice, strained now, desperate.
"Hold on, Captain. I've got you."
Violet light poured from the skull, coiling into runes across the shattered wood. Breath surged, wrapping the wreck in a shimmering veil. The fall slowed, still crushing, but survivable. They struck hard, carving a furrow through the ancient ruins until the ship came to rest half-buried in dust and crystal shards.
Khalen coughed, chest heaving. His body ached, but not enough. He glanced at his stump. It didn't throb. It didn't bleed.
"Did you—"
"Dull the pain? A bit. You'd be useless screaming."
Khalen pushed himself up, glare sharp. "You almost killed us."
"Correction: I saved us after we crashed."
He barked a laugh despite himself. "You forgot the heart of the ship."
"There's a difference between forgetting and never possessing," OH said, far too pleased with himself. "And you should be thanking me. You're standing, breathing, and in one piece, which, statistically, is a miracle."
Khalen leaned against a fractured beam, surveying the ruin around them. The air shimmered with faint motes of blue Breath drifting through collapsed arches. Ancient pillars jutted like teeth, half-swallowed by time.
"Where are we?"
"Below," OH said, voice quieter now, almost reverent. "The old city vaults. I used to power these halls. Somewhere beneath this rubble lies what we need, the core that once fed this entire district. And if it still breathes, Captain, it will wake for us."
Khalen looked around, the broken light glinting in his eyes. "You're sure of that?"
"I'm never sure," OH replied. "But I've been wrong spectacularly before. It usually works out in the end."
Khalen snorted. "That's not reassuring."
"Neither was the fall, yet here we are."
Khalen glanced toward the violet-lit ruin ahead, its door half-collapsed, whispering with faint energy. He rolled his shoulders, still testing the edges of his body's numbness.
"Then let's find your missing heart."
"Our missing heart," OH corrected, smug as ever.
**
The Valkyrie's wreck settled in the dark like a wounded beast. Steam hissed through the splintered hull, glowing faintly with trapped Breath. Khalen staggered upright, ribs aching, vision swaying between violet and blue. The air here felt different, heavy, old, alive.
"Nonsense," OH said, bright as ever. "You're mostly functional. The ship, however, is ninety-three percent ruin and seven percent optimism."
Khalen coughed out a laugh that scraped his throat. "You call that optimism?"
"It's what kept me sane for a thousand years," OH said. "Give or take the centuries I spent arguing with my own echoes."
Light shimmered across fallen masonry, catching on crystal veins that pulsed faintly under the dust. Statues lay half-buried, faces eaten smooth by time. A river of light trickled along a cracked floor, Breath still flowing after centuries.
"Below the vaults," Khalen murmured. "You weren't exaggerating."
"I rarely exaggerate. I simply leave out context."
Khalen kicked aside a splintered beam, uncovering a cluster of tools fused together by heat. The Valkyrie's ribs creaked overhead, leaking thin lines of steam that glowed blue.
His eyes caught on the cradle where something should have been seated. Empty.
"Can she fly again?"
"Eventually," OH answered. "She needs a new core, a big one. The original crystal fed an entire city sector. Without it, she's a wooden corpse pretending to be a ship."
Khalen squinted into the fog curling beyond the wreck. "And where do we find a crystal that size?"
"Conveniently nearby," OH said as if announcing a sale. "Deep within the main vault. I remember the heartbeat of the thing, hotter than fire, louder than thunder. If it still breathes, it can wake the Valkyrie again."
Khalen flexed his shoulder, wincing at the dull stiffness instead of pain. "You dulled the nerves again."
"Of course. Can't have my pilot collapsing from drama."
He ignored that. "So repairs first, then we find your missing heart."
"Our missing heart," OH corrected. "I'll guide you. Try not to break anything sacred; some of these wards still think they're alive."
Khalen stepped through the shattered arch, torchlight chasing the blue shimmer ahead. The walls thrummed as if recognizing him, or perhaps the voice within the skull.
"You powered this whole place once?" Khalen asked.
"From the beginning," OH said quietly. "The Titan found me useful. It harvested my skull and made me its conduit. For centuries I lit its streets, drove its machines, powered its vanity while it built a golden cage around the dying world. When it fell, I was buried with its glory."
Khalen glanced at the skull on his belt, its faint glow mirrored in his own tired eyes. "Maybe it's time the world remembered."
"Careful," OH said, amusement returning. "Flattery makes me reckless."
A long silence followed, filled only by the creak of cooling metal. Khalen adjusted the torch, its flame painting the corridor ahead in amber light.
"Direction?" he asked.
"East," OH replied. "Toward the vault artery. The air currents bend that way. If the core crystal still exists, you'll hear it before you see it, a pulse beneath your ribs."
Khalen nodded once, starting forward. Behind him the Valkyrie groaned, settling deeper into dust. For a moment, it almost sounded like the sigh of a creature dreaming of flight.
"Come on then," he said. "Let's go find your heart."
"Our heart," OH reminded again, smug. "Though yours seems slightly more combustible."
Khalen smirked. "Only slightly."
They walked into the ruin, torchlight shrinking behind them until the wreck was only a glimmer in the dark, the blue Breath-river whispering beside them like an old map that still remembered.
**