"Charlie, quiet," Jess hisses. Behind her, Sasha, her cousin, snickers, earning an equally penetrating glare from Jess. I mumble an apology, picking up the garden tool from the stone pathway and setting it against the wall once more.

Overhead, the stars twinkle, somehow looking closer tonight than they have before. Jess' parents always take forever to get into their beds. Staying up tonight was trying, with Sasha and Jess continuously falling asleep and needing me to wake them back up. Finally, just a few hours before dawn, the house was truly quiet, and we could sneak out the back.

I blink, trying to see the warshed in the inky black, but the yard behind Jess' home might as well go on forever. They seem to know where it is, slipping forward in tiptoes into the dark like it wasn't even there. Sometimes I am jealous of them, the lizardkin; they seem to have an advantage at everything. The warshed appears from the dark, first just an indistinct shadow that Jess leads up toward, gradually becoming a rectangular shape that looms. Jess stops us at the entrance, looking us over with a seriousness far too advanced for a nine-year-old.

"Don't touch anything," she says.

Sasha rolls her eyes, and I can't help but agree. What was the point of coming to the warshed if we weren't going to touch anything?

"Fine," I lie in agreement.

"Say it," Jess pushes, poking her cousin.

"Sure. Fine," Sasha answers, folding her arms.

"Good." The stern look on Jess' face breaks into a wide grin as she starts digging in a pocket. She produces a triangular key, flipping it in her hand, dropping it, and scooping it back up again. "Let's take a look."

The ancient lock on the door doesn't creak when Jess grabs it and eases it forward. Rather, it clicks, each inch she moves the padlock sounding like a heavy weight skipping over a metal ridge. I flinch at each click, can't help it, and whip my head back and forth, looking between my friend and the back of the house. No lights come on, thank the gods, but all her parents need to do is look out the window to find us. I can't even imagine the trouble we will get into.

The key turning in the lock is silent. The ring of iron releases from the door, pulling apart like two metal fingers breaking a pinch on the door. Jess sets both the key and the lock down in the grass next to the warshed, easing the door open for us. The portal is a solid wall of nothing, but Jess and Sasha slip inside ahead of me. I linger on the doorstep, wanting to follow but being too afraid of the darkness. Sasha's hand reaches out of the black, grabbing a hold of my wrist, and tugging me inside.

I squeak as I am drug forward, the door swinging closed behind me to bathe me in total darkness for a moment. The door clicks in the frame, closing, and I hear nothing. A light blooms in the shed a moment later; Jess stands with a lantern held in her two hands, waddling over with the heavy thing to set it on a metal box near the middle of the shed.

For a moment, my fear is banished entirely as I stare around at the room. With wide-eyed wonder, I am lost for a moment, my eyes roaming all of the gleaming steel set about the single room. I've never been inside here; girls aren't allowed into a man's warshed as a rule, and the word shed always made me think that this would be like the toolshed we have back on the farm. I couldn't have been more wrong.

A plush, green carpet spreads across the floor of the warshed, the individual strands glistening with a metallic sheen. The walls of the interior are lined with wooden frames and shelves, each holding some deadly instrument, all except for the north wall, where an altar stands. There must be two dozen weapons lining the spots on the shelf, each with a labelled plaque nailed into place beneath. The names are in a language I don't know, but that's fine, I can make them up easier than trying to read them.

"Tits and honey," I mutter.

"Hey," Jess says. "No cussing."

"What? Why?"

"Because this is my dad's holy spot," Jess says, like it is the most obvious thing in the world. "You can't cuss in holy spots."

"Ass," Sasha says. Jess turns and glares at her, but Sasha just glares back, pointing to a two-pronged shortsword on the wall. "It says that one is called the Badass Butcher."

"What?" Jess asks, entirely unconvinced. She walks to the wall, pushing onto the tips of her toes to take a look at the plaque on the wall. "What in the hells?"

"Ah, now you are the one cussing," Sasha says, pointing at Jess.

Jess shoos her, looking at some of the other weapons as she starts bickering with her cousin. I ignore them, my attention pulled toward a huge sword on the wall opposite them. The thing is too long to be used by anyone that wasn't a giant, but the wicked-looking prongs rippling off the blade are so captivating. My eyes flick down to the plaque, finding the words written in the familiar Castinian script: "Coffin." I blink and find the engraved word changed, back to the unfamiliar letters that are written beneath all of the weapons.

"Jess, what does this…" My words trail off as I turn around. Sasha and Jess aren't near the wall where I left them. They aren't anywhere. "Hello?"

A rattle shakes through the floor of the warshed, the wood beneath the carpet bowing like some great weight moves beneath the ground. The weapons arrayed on the walls rattle in their housings, issuing bouncing, metallic sounds as the sharpened blades cut against the prongs that hold them in place.

"Where did you go?" I ask the air. "Guys?"

A dull thud stops the rattling of the shed, the sound of a single drop falling into the carpet at my feet. I look down, seeing dried red on my fingers, a stain standing out against my skin. Yet, the dried blood drips from my fingertips, falling and turning the emerald carpet dark where it lands. I scratch at the blood, raking my thumbnail against the flaking red, compelled by an itching sensation that clouds out even the fear.

"Guys?" I say again, scratching. "Jess. Sasha."

Something across the shed falls, the hard thump bringing back the fear that had just started to fade. I jump, screaming and throwing my hands up. Against the opposite wall, a long dagger stands, sticking up from the carpet, the ornament attached to the hilt slowly rocking back and forth. I don't see the movement, just notice that the wood of the warshed's wall is pressing into the dagger's side all of a sudden, the metal whining as it is slowly bent forward and deformed by the advancing wall.

I scream again as the sword I had been looking at falls from the wall next to me, the handle clipping my shoulder and ripping the sleeve of my shirt. The huge sword rattles on the ground, forcing me to back away. Then the wall is grinding into the side of that blade, scooting it forward toward the center of the warshed. More blood drips from my fingers, leaving a purple trail behind me as I back toward the middle of the room.

"Jess, Sasha!" I am yelling now, panic in my voice. "Help!"

The warshed starts to rattle again, more weapons falling loose from their mounts on the walls. They fall into the soft carpet, the sound like hailstones hitting wood. I jump with each that falls, hugging myself with bloody fingers. The walls move a little closer with each blade that falls off the walls, closing in on me, pushing slicing lengths of metal across the floor toward my bare feet.

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"Jess!" I shriek. "Dovik! Jor! Help! Someone help me!"

The walls close in. Thud. Thud. Thud. The cold of steel makes me jump. I'm not cut, just the side of a hilt pressing against my foot, but it hardly matters. I shake, screaming, calling for anyone to save me as the walls press in. No one answers. No one ever does. The blades keep falling toward me, cutting, never finding the exact spot that might end this torture. But I keep yelling, I can't stop. I'll never stop.

When I wake, I don't shoot up in bed; I don't pant with panicked breath. My eyes open, finding the vault chamber where my bed is exactly as I left it. The sheets beneath me are sticky with sweat, clinging to me, but I can't bring myself to move. I linger, one leg hanging off the side of the bed, half my face pressed into a plush pillow, staring at the various pieces of equipment I have set out on the long table that runs almost the entirety of one of the vault's walls. A tear slips from my eye, falling and rolling over the bridge of my nose to disappear into the fabric of the pillow.

Then, I find the strength to move my arms, pushing myself up on the bed. The vault is a mess, piles of unsorted materials lie in the corner, surrounding and buried inside a deluge of black sand. I lack containers to put it all away, and it looks as if some evil beach dumped its shoreline across the floor of the room. With a grunt, my presence expands across the vault, the black sand floating away to condense into a single pile once more. It is like this every morning, scattered across the floor.

I find Dovik asleep when I leave the vault to head onto the ship's platform, curled up in one of the cots on the side of the ship, a blindfold tied around his face to keep the sun out of his eyes. Corinth is at the fore, standing at the edge of the disc. This is all expected, but what stands out as different is the fact that clouds aren't whipping past the ship. No, we stand stopped in the air.

Ever since teleporting us across the world, Corinth has been doing something to make us speed faster over the land. He hasn't changed the ship, not from what I can tell at least. Rather, it appears that he is changing something about the world outside of the ship to allow us to cut through the sky far faster than we should be able to. We spent two days of travel this way, flying past rolling hills and mountains with a vague western heading.

I step up next to Corinth, following his gaze down toward the world far beneath us. A road cuts through the countryside beneath us, a winding path of gravel that cuts through endless fields of grassland. There is a speck standing beside the road, a wooden rectangle surrounded by a few moving figures that I think are probably people.

"We're stopped," I say, clenching my jaw to suppress a yawn.

"Just for a moment," Corinth says, his eye turning to look at me for a moment before looking down once again. "I'm trying to decide on something."

"What's that?" I squint at the shapes beneath us, trying to pick out detail. "Who are they?"

"Highwaymen," he says, clicking his tongue. "They have a scout up the road northward. Five men will wait here until they spot someone coming. Then, they will rob their victims, taking everything that they have."

"The lord just lets people do that?" I ask. Lords might be good for very little, but the one thing that they are generally sworn to do is stop robbery and murder.

Corinth sighs through his nose. "Some fool deposed the king here, got it in his head that it would be a good idea to give the people freedom. Well, they got it. Then, as soon as everyone with power was out of the picture, things turned sour."

Turning my head, I look at him for a long moment. "You make it sound like freedom is a bad thing."

"No," he shakes his head. "Just something to learn from. If you are going to break a thing, the aftermath becomes your responsibility. I didn't get that at the time. Now, I'm prohibited from interfering with anything in these lands."

"What could prohibit you from anything?" I ask, but the immediate answer arrives without him needing to say anything. With how strong Corinth is, I imagine there are very few beings on this world capable of restraining him. At least, I hope that is the case. If it isn't, the world is far more dangerous than I ever thought it would be. "There has to be some kind of authority that can punish bandits."

"Maybe," he says. "There are towns and cities remaining, but authority has crumbled. The nearest place with any kind of law is more than a day's travel to the east. Not that I could accost these people in either case."

"They are thieves? They might kill someone," I say.

He nods. "Maybe." He grinds his teeth, sneering down at the problem.

"So, if nothing is done, then some people might die," I say. My voice sounds dispassionate to my ears. Maybe I'm still waking up. "What happens if you do something?"

"Then, people will certainly die. A lot of people."

Movement to the north catches both of our attention. A cart rumbles along the road, two nags at the head, barrels wrapped tight in the back. Two riders sit on the driver's bench, one big, one small. I can't see more detail from so far away.

"If you can't do anything, are you wanting me to?" I ask my brother.

"I wouldn't ask that," he says. "Most people don't turn to banditry because they like it. They are pushed off course by the world. Those are some older men down there, likely with families they are trying to feed. Without an authority to issue fair punishment, us doing so wouldn't help much."

"Yet, we have stopped to look at this." The cart at the head of the road continues to rattle along. Vaguely, I can see a figure running through the grass, racing toward the men huddled around their cart, likely to warn them of the approaching score.

Corinth doesn't reply, just stares down.

I'm not naive enough to not understand his words, not anymore. He hints at the thing, but doesn't say it. If there are no jails around, no place to hold criminals, then the only certain way to stop them would be with their deaths. Something restrains him, but not me. Yet, he won't ask me to kill these men.

There would be other problems. If their families are counting on them to find food on the road, even at swordpoint, then they might go hungry if we interfere. Potentially, these men might never kill anyone, might avoid it at all costs. Our interference could introduce death, could make things worse. Still…

A ball of churning fire descends from the sky. Down below, I see the five figures sitting around the cart on the side of the road begin to scatter in the few seconds before the dragonfire collides with the cart. The explosion is brilliant, knocking the tiny figures to the side as the cart is torn to pieces of flying debris. None of the fire catches the men, but two don't rise in the aftermath of the explosion. To the north, the cart on the road rattles to a stop. The lone figure cutting through the grass pauses in his run, standing still in the green as smoke starts to rise into the air.

"It doesn't really matter why they were doing it," I say, turning and walking away from the edge of the ship. I fall into the throne in the center, leaning back against the cold metal of the chair.

Corinth lingers at the front of the ship, looking at me with his one eye for a long moment. There is something unreadable in his expression, disappointment, maybe. I can't bring myself to understand the reason for it.

"You said we would get there today," I say to him.

"Today or tomorrow," he confirms.

"Then, let's go."

Corinth does something, shifting the air in some way that forces the ship to start moving once more. We travel like that for the rest of the day, the chaotic land beneath us eventually giving way to a sea of clear water that spreads out past the horizon. There is little to do as we travel other than to amuse ourselves with pastimes, simple games, or one of the myriad of novels that Corinth seems to carry around with him. I have far since read all of the books that I have in the vault.

Toward the middle of the next day, land begins to emerge on the horizon. As we approach, my confusion grows. From all of the stories I have heard about Faeth, I expected a land of high knowledge and magical technology, but all I see is a jungle running away from our approaching ship into infinity.

Dovik clicks his tongue next to me. "I thought Faeth was supposed to be some impressive land of inventors. Are we coming at it from the wrong side?"

Corinth laughs. "No." He points to the jungle. "That is Kael. It is an unclaimed land, full of dangerous monsters and more than a few beast kings. Stay away from there if you know what is good for you. That," he says, pointing into the sky, "if Faeth."

Far, far away, tens of thousands of feet in the air, a shadow moves across the sky. As we near, and as the clouds begin to break, I finally understand what I am looking at. An island the size of the Mari Duchy drifts across the clouds, so massive that it casts a huge shadow across the land of Kael below. Faeth is a flying continent, and our ship begins to make its approach.

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