Airlean Tales

The bell tower was still lowing when Azalea leapt onto the terrace of the Hunter’s Guild, her windsoles humming hot and ready. Hunters brushed past her, already heading out in pairs, and took to the sky like twin stars with flashes of their windsoles. Grim satisfaction was hardened onto their faces, highlighted briefly by the ethereal gleam of overhead lightning.

They were looking forward to the fight, Azalea realized. They lived for it. She wished she could feel the same, but she only sensed the pinch of nerves deep in her belly, rattling about like a jug of worms.

She pushed into the guild. The warm, crackling tavern, once full of life and chaos, now lay deserted, empty tankards and abandoned card hands scattered over round tables. Guildmaster Nicolina, who was standing next to a woman shrouded in shimmering silk, waved her over from the far side of the room.

“Hunter Fairwen,” she said crisply. “Good timing. We’ve been called for an emergency dispatch.”

The woman next to Nicolina was a lovely sight. Ice-blue silk speckled with sugary stardust hung over her shoulder and trailed behind her like the tail of a comet. Her creamy white tunic, trimmed with plum pink, seemed to glow with a soft, pearlescent allure in the dark like a moonstone.

“Fairy,” Azalea whispered. Then she clapped her hands over her mouth, flushing. This was no fairy, though she came close as any human might. She was none other than the Second Hunter of Airlea, Karis Caelute, in the flesh.

Karis smiled and saluted at the shoulder, graceful and flowing to the tips of her fingers. “You must be the Fiftieth,” she said. Her voice was melodic and touched with a clear warmth, like ringing bells on a snowy night. “Hunter Azalea Fairwen, was it? We’re to be dispatched to the Midsummer Parallel.”

Azalea stared, unmoving. She’d been a Hunter for nearly two weeks now, but she’d never seen the Second Rank with her own eyes. She’d heard the stories, of course—Hunters were Mythaven’s heroes, and tales of their daring feats were a favorite topic of gossip in the city square. Karis had amassed a considerable horde of admirers, many of whom waited overnight on the street corners to catch a glimpse of her mysterious smile, or begged for the chance to feel the sole of her boot on their foreheads. And with the Second Hunter standing before her, Azalea could see why. Karis radiated confidence and strength, wrapped up in a form as elegant as night and sharp as quicksilver.

“Yes,” Azalea said faintly. “Azalea Fairwen. That’s me.”

Nicolina clapped her hands sharply. “You’ll have plenty of time for hero worship later, Fairwen. For now, business.”

Azalea blushed.

“Where’s the surge?” Karis asked.

“It’s less of a matter of where it is, and more where it isn’t.” Nicolina gestured to a map laid out on the nearest round table, pinned at the corners by throwing knives. “We have strike zones reported on three outposts, four villages, and ten estates, as well as a wave from the coastal side.”

“Surely Hal has the coasts covered,” Karis said.

“The ports have only estimated Class Twos. Yuden can better spend his time elsewhere.” Nicolina’s finger trekked down a red line that marked the Midsummer Parallel. “We need major cover in two areas: on the boundary of the Bone Canyon, and by the leyline. I’m thinking of sending you two to one and Yuden to the other.”

Karis looked at Azalea. “What do you think of the leyline?” she asked.

“Me?” Azalea blurted. “Oh, anywhere’s fine. Wherever you think is best.”

“Then we’ll take the leyline,” Karis said with a nod at Nicolina. “Fairwen’s Stabilizing is well-equipped to handle the chaos saturation.”

“I’ll mark you down.”

And no further words needed to be said. Karis gestured to Azalea, and with a flash of their windsoles, they were out.

Karis was fast.

Azalea had been at the top of her class in windsole races, taking to the mana boots like a fish to water. But the Second Hunter was nearly unmatchable. Karis darted spryly on the rooftops like a hummingbird, silk scarf glimmering behind her like fairy dust. Her figure was a blur as she tore across the sky of Mythaven, reaching the great gates in the matter of a few bounds. Azalea flared her manawell to keep up—and cover for her fumbled landings. It was like trying to outrun the wind, each step more desperate than the last.

Karis checked behind her and pulled back her speed into an easy, loping pace. “My apologies,” she said. “I must be rushing you.”

“Oh, no,” Azalea gasped. “I don’t want—to slow you down. If you—go on ahead, I’ll—catch up.”

“The fault is mine. You’re very fast for a newcomer, so I forgot myself.” Karis smiled encouragingly. “How long have you been at the windsoles?”

“Nearly three years.”

“Only three?”

“Yes, Lady Hunter. I started at the Academy.”

Karis’s eyes glimmered in approval. “You’re a natural, then. You’ll be one of the fastest in the Guild by next year, mark my words.”

A distant spot in Azalea’s chest warmed with pride, then was suddenly weighed down. It didn’t matter if she was fast next year. She had to be fast now. This was a surge—one of the many premonitory quakes before the Storm’s ultimate strike. Lives were at stake.

Karis led them over the vast agricultural fields on the outskirts of Mythaven, down the flatlands that arched up to the receding line of the Talebloom Woods. If they proceeded north from here, they would encounter Azalea’s childhood home—the once quaint, now deserted village of Lumber’s Hollow that lay at the edge of the forest. Instead, Karis turned south, heading straight for the leyline settled between Airlea’s capital and the crooked line of parched desert rock known as the Bone Canyon.

As they approached the leyline, the burbling coat of blackened clouds in the sky thickened. The mana in the air was turning raw, electrifying Azalea’s skin and making it difficult to breathe. She knew the symptoms would only worsen as they drew closer. Leylines were the powerful veins of pure magic braided throughout the world, saturating the air with raw, chaotic mana for miles. They were both a blessing and a curse—a limitless source of energy that powered Mythaven’s relentless pursuit of magitech, and a turbulent beacon that could resonate with Storms, intensifying the damage to the surrounding region.

“Have you ever fought around a leyline before?” Karis asked. Her voice was light and lilting as ever, completely unaffected by the stifling weight of the leyline’s power.

Azalea fought for a deep breath before she could respond. “No, Lady Hunter.”

“Please, call me Karis. We’re peers in the same Guild.”

“Understood, um.” Azalea’s tongue tied into a knot. “Ka—um. Lady Karis.” It just didn’t feel right, speaking her first name as if they were colleagues. It made her feel sick. Or maybe that was just the leyline.

Karis sighed. “That will do for present.” She bounded forward and drew her sword. They must be close to arriving. “You can likely feel the resistance in the atmosphere.”

“Chaos saturation.”

“It’s not so bad here, but it worsens the closer one approaches. Mind your distance.”

“Yes, Lady Karis.”

Leylines were bearable from afar, but deadly in close proximity. Azalea had read plenty of tales in her class on Magick Phenomena on the dangers of a leyline. Surrounding plant life ballooned to fat, distended sizes. Ghostlights fed on the fear and regret of weaker minds, manifesting as unspeakable illusions and phantoms of the dead. Sometimes, the chaos saturation was all too much for the human system, and those who strayed too close would grow mad, or seize up and die from mana sickness.

In a way, the dangers of a leyline were good fortune. They acted as an effective defense system for a vulnerable seam of the world’s heart. Nobody knew what would happen if someone managed to break through a leyline’s magical barriers and corrupt its flow directly, and nobody sane wanted to find out. Azalea shuddered at the very thought.

“When you use your starshooter,” Karis was saying, and Azalea shook herself to pay attention, “burn a little more mana when you Stabilize. Say, fifty percent more. And should you ever Form something, you’ll need to invest about fifty percent more into the structural component. Chaos saturation is not friendly to manacraft.”

“Yes, Lady Karis,” said Azalea. It was just another disadvantage that Storms sometimes liked to inflict: by filling the air with so much instability, piecing any mana together became a struggle. Ordinarily simple Forms, like a basic fireball, could fall to tatters—or implode on the manacrafter if they weren’t careful. “Shall I reinforce your Forms as well?”

“Perhaps if things get tight,” Karis said. She smiled. “Though I hope that I wouldn’t be so sloppy.”

“That would never happen.”

“You never know.” A hint of shadow touched her eyes. “Everyone makes mistakes.”

There was a story behind those words, but not one that Azalea felt privy to.

They pulled to a halt at the lip of a hill, and gangly, winged forms beaded into focus below them. Vultures. A dense lot of them too, from the looks of it. Azalea squinted at the mass, trying to pick out any larger shapes—Class Twos or Class Threes—but she could only see the uniform sizes of Class Ones. Odd. Surely Nicolina wouldn’t have sent the Second Rank out for such easy pickings, even if there were an endless amount of them.

The leyline’s aura was growing as thick and suffocating as a blanket, so Azalea burned her manawell low, gently pulling at the tangle of mana that was smothering her. The relief was immediate. She gulped in a breath of sweet air and relished the lightness on her shoulders, then turned to Karis and did the same.

“Oh,” said Karis quietly as Azalea peeled away the unstable threads from her skin. “That’s quite pleasant.”

Azalea straightened. “I can sustain it, Lady Karis.”

“You wouldn’t run dry?”

Azalea stilled, taking a moment to gauge her manawell. It did take work to constantly unravel instability in the background, but the air around her was thrumming with energy. She felt vibrant, alive—more powerful than she’d felt in ages.

“The task is low-resource enough for me to sustain it indefinitely,” she confirmed.

Karis exhaled softly. “Remarkable. You must be over ninety percent efficient in Stabilization.”

“The Exam claimed ninety-five percent,” Azalea admitted.

Karis’s smile widened. “Then, if you wouldn’t mind. It’s of great help.” Her sword flashed as she held it upright. “I shall engage. Stay at a distance with your starshooter.”

And she darted off like an arrow, streaking down in a bolt of retribution.

Even Azalea’s keen eyes strained to follow her movement. Karis cut from shadow to shadow, carving a tidy constellation between the mass of vultures with a spangle of diamond dust. They shrieked and slashed at her with their talons and beaks, but she always waltzed just out of reach.

Then she pulled away, straightened, and snapped up her sword like a conductor’s wand.

The mass of vultures split into pieces with a fat squelch. Their silent remains fell to the ground in a shower of severed wings, talons, meaty chunks of body.

Azalea clapped her hands over her mouth, revulsion turning over her stomach. It had happened so quickly. One blink, and forty Class Ones had been downed. How? How was that even possible?

Karis gestured up to the hill, and trembling, Azalea slid down. She continued burning her manawell to ease the encroaching burden of the leyline’s chaotic aura, but it felt mostly pointless in the face of the sheer power she’d just witnessed.

“Is it over?” Azalea asked hesitantly.

“Mythics forbid, no,” said Karis. There was an eerie touch to her smile. “That would be so very bland.”

Azalea shivered. She kept her eyes averted from the sea of feathers and flesh scattered over the ground.

“This was just the first wave of fledglings,” Karis continued. “We call them ‘heralds,’ because their number will often signify how large the alpha is. The more heralds swarming the area, the larger the pack—and the more powerful the alpha.”

“So, forty heralds...”

“We’re looking at a Class Three or Four.” Her eyes glimmered. “I do hope it’s a Four. They’re far more interesting.”

Azalea swallowed. Nothing about Karis’s demeanor had changed since they’d first met in the Hunter’s Guild. She was still ethereal and graceful in the evening light, standing like a silken candle that burned brightly in the darkness of the surge. But now Azalea saw that her fire blazed a little differently. It burned with harsh edges, with vengeance.

“Do you see that?” said Karis with relish. “Fun on the horizon.”

Azalea turned. A large shadow eclipsed the sky, looming over three times her height with a wingspan that blotted out the stars. In the low light, she could just make out its hefty body gleaming with hardened feathers, massive scimitar talons, and twisted horns projecting from its skull. And the heralds—there were even more vultures flocking around it, ambling birds swarming like a mass of bees around their queen.

“Only a Three,” Karis said with visible disappointment. “Ah, well. Not much to be expected from a surge.”

Azalea’s head whipped to her. This monstrosity was only a Class Three? What in the Mythics’ names was the scale of a Class Five?

“Have you ever killed a Three, Azalea?” Karis said mildly. The blade of her rapier seemed to gleam with a cold thirst.

“No, Lady Karis.”

“Would you like to?”

No. Nonono. Azalea had memorized the dimensions from books, of course—Class Three Gyps fulvus, four meter height, nine meter wingspan—but seeing it for herself only made her feel sick, faint, and nothing much like a Hunter. Her book diagram had not successfully conveyed the crackling aura of the beast’s corruption, the murderous bloodlust in its bulging eyes, the wild rage of its keening roar. Just being in its presence made her want to flee.

“Yes,” she said aloud. Her hands drew out her starshooter, clicked off the safety.

Karis’s eyes flickered from Azalea’s ramrod spine to her white-knuckled grip to the faint tremble in her knees.

“Well, too bad. This one is mine.” She turned her eyes to the giant vulture. “But you can have the next one.”

She leapt forth. The tip of her rapier darted up. A speckled line glittered under the moonlight, dainty as sugar, and pierced a wave of Ones through the heart with pinpoint precision. They crumpled to the earth in a flurry of feathers.

Thread. That was her secret. How she’d slain creatures with the barest drop of mana, carved apart a field of vultures like a culinarian through a pot roast. She spun thread from her manawell, fine as spider silk and strong as steel, and punctured enemies at their weakest point. If that wasn’t enough, she could slice through them simply by pulling the thread.

Azalea had never considered such a small, mundane thing as a deadly weapon, but now she could see its advantages firsthand. The thread’s slight Form was only a tiny tax on the manawell; Karis could probably spin miles of it without pause. And since it didn’t require any flares of mana, it was stealthy. If she ever turned her thread on another manacrafter, she could sever their head from their shoulders before they even noticed she’d been burning.

Azalea pulsed her windsoles and followed Karis into the swarm. She kept mostly on the defensive, dodging around swooping wings and talons and parrying with her short sword. The last thing she wanted to do was become an obstacle, or accidentally hit the Second Hunter with a round from her starshooter.

She trailed close behind as Karis cut through the flock on her web of sugar silk. She seemed impossibly fast, searing over large stretches of ground quick as a moonbeam, changing direction with the whimsy of the wind, dropping from the sky like a meteor.

Windsoles, Azalea realized, sensing the little bursts of mana from Karis’s shoes. She uses her windsoles ten times more than the Academy graduates ever did.

Karis used a drop to fall faster, a half-drop to pivot harder, a quarter-drop to give her blows more force. She was not afraid to use it as another resource, another weapon. She did not treat it like a method of transportation, but a stimulant for her abilities.

Ingenious. Azalea never would have thought of using windsoles in such a way.

At first, she’d wondered why Nicolina had chosen to pair her with Karis—the Fiftieth with the Second, a terrible gap in rank and experience that would only drag Karis down. But now, watching the unflinching bloodshed before her eyes, Azalea understood.

Nicolina hadn’t sent her to fight. She’d sent her to learn.

Azalea watched carefully as Karis reached the towering Class Three. She stood proud as the beast descended with an unholy shriek, a diamond looking up the face of a mountain.

“Hello,” she said softly. “Might you stop bellowing about? You’re frightening the Fiftieth.”

The beast struck with a deadly swipe of its talons. With a drop in her windsoles, Karis rocketed into the sky, plunging her rapier into the fat of its chin, then flung herself onto the crown of its head. Blood spurted from the open wound and showered over its breast. It released a gurgling roar that shook the earth beneath Azalea’s feet.

Azalea swallowed, but kept her eyes fixed on the scene.

The beast writhed, beating furiously at Karis with a leathery wing plated in razor-sharp feathers. She darted away and swept her sword, and a hail of glittering lines blazed from the sky, threading between each bone of the wing and driving it to the ground.

Azalea almost cheered, but the beast barely flinched. It tore at the threads with its beak and immediately freed itself, then plunged down towards Karis faster than should have been possible for its size.

Karis calmly raised her sword, but before she could do anything else—

—a crest of water arced from nowhere, slamming right into the side of the beast’s head. The beast was thrown to the ground, skittering a few feet at the raw force of the wave.

A figure landed just beside Karis with the lightest swell of windsoles.

He was tall, broad shoulders framed in a feather-topped cloak, silken tunic brocaded with gilded lines and ocean waves, high cheekbones lifting bronze skin. Azalea placed his striking features immediately: Halcyon, the First Hunter of Airlea, revered hero of the nation. There was a polearm in his grip, a handsome glaive with a moonlike crescent blade—Swansong, his signature weapon.

The First and Second Hunters, in the flesh, standing right before Azalea. She felt faint.

“Hal,” Karis greeted. She smiled dangerously thin. “Are you here for a mere Class Three?”

A One swooped down from behind Halcyon. The tip of Karis’s rapier flicked, and a line of sugar sliced it in two, coating the ground below with inky blood.

“How thoughtful,” she continued coolly. “A pity we already have it handled.”

Halcyon turned and swept his glaive in an arc. The blade flushed blue, and with a rush of water mana, a roiling wave burst from the ground and bore him up. He tore down with all the force of his windsoles and plunged his weapon into the Class Three’s head. The glaive dug in deep, throttling into the crown and piercing right through its thick skull.

Halcyon exhaled. His manawell pulsed.

Water exploded from within the beast’s skull, sloshing out of its beak, its eye sockets, pumping out chunks of flesh and grey matter on the ground in a foamy red wave.

Its body swayed, then fell dead, a giant mass of bloodied feathers.

Halcyon looked at Karis. “Just passing through,” he said.

And with a light flare of his windsoles, he arced into the sky and was gone.

Silence fell over the corpse-ridden field, unbroken by the whisper of evening wind.

Karis looked at Azalea, then sheathed her sword. Her face was fixed into an unnervingly disarming smile.

“Excuse me,” she said sweetly, “while I take my leave to scold him.”

“Scold him?” Azalea said, surprised. “But he helped us.”

“He helped himself.” Karis’s manawell was already humming, reaching towards her windsoles. “If he takes the kill, he takes the credit. It’s how things work at the Guild.”

“That doesn’t sound so bad.”

“It wouldn’t be,” Karis agreed, “if he hadn’t taken it from me.”

And Karis blazed into the sky, faster than Azalea had ever seen—a plum-pink firebolt that disappeared in the blink of an eye.

Azalea was left in the barren flatlands, ghostlike silence from the sea of corpses around her.

Eventually, she straightened her cloak and looked over the battlefield. She would dutifully count up the bodies—or what was left of them. It was somewhat hard to tell with parts strewn all over the place, but an official count was needed for Nicolina’s report.

But first, there was another matter that she needed to address.

Azalea turned around, facing the large and rather unsightly remains of a fallen Class Two vulture. It was much harder to detect in the congestion of the leyline’s mana, but still she felt it, a speck of gold in a sand bowl.

Someone was burning their manawell.

There was a living human being among this mess of corpses, and they were watching her.

Instantly, Azalea raised her starshooter and trained it right above the vulture. “In the name of the king, reveal yourself,” she commanded.

For a moment, there was only silence.

Then, fluid and unhurried—movement.

A pale shadow bedecked with ivory bone knives rose to its full height, and a roguish smile lit from underneath a grey-green cloak. One undamaged crimson eye surveyed her from the darkness.

Azalea’s grip faltered. She stared at the newcomer, jaw slack.

“Well,” said Echo placidly. “This is awkward.”

 

KARIS Sugar Plum Fairy

As the Second Hunter of Airlea, every word and motion from Karis is elegance and beauty—but her pleasant smile belies a dark, brutal thirst for revenge.

 

HALCYON Ugly Duckling

From humble beginnings as a discarded beggar, Halcyon rose to become the revered First Hunter due to his combat prowess, quiet confidence, and dry humor.