Nexin ran his hand along the metal again. Yes, definitely metal. Thick, heavy-plated metal. How did a ship made of metal even float? Magic? Could somebody’s Spark be used to do this?

  He shook his head, and spoke into his communicator. “Sol, you there?” he asked quietly, something about the intimidating ship pressing down on him like a physical thing.

  “Where else would I be?” Sol said. “Inspecting a series of fountains shaped like wonderous animals I’ve never seen? With water flowing in different colors from their mouths, and yet somehow all ending up perfectly clear when it lands in the pool at their feet…?”

  “Sounds like that’s exactly what you’re doing…” Nexin said evenly.

  “Perhaps. I can confirm with some confidence this is not the Ember’s shrine.”

  “That’s… great, I guess. Listen, you said Vestis started as a port town, right?”

  “It did. You found the docks?”

  “Not yet,” Nexin said, though he did a look to his left and right. Even if he was at the docks, it wasn’t like he could see them. “Their boats, the Vestis…ians? Vestisese?”

  “Vestish,” Sol supplied.

  “Thanks. Okay, the Vestish ships, were they different from normal ships?”

  “Hrm? Well, I guess you could say that,” Sol said, and Nexin’s strange anxiety at stumbling across the giant metal ship eased. “The bay around here is relatively calm, so the Vestish used long, narrow boats that were very low to the water.”

  “Uh, were they made of metal?” Nexin asked, the anxiety coming back.

  “Metal? No, I don’t think so. I didn’t get particularly close to them…”

  “How about that trading partner you were talking about? The island nation, were their boats metal?” Nexin interrupted.

  “Wirock? No, their ships are the opposite of the Vestish ship—large and bulky—but made from the thick timber found on their island,” Sol said. “The only metal ships I can think of belong to the Isles of Pili. I believe the Pilish had several brutish monstrosities they called warships. I only saw them from a distance as my storm passed over them, but… why are you asking?”

  “I’m out in the bay now, and I’ve got a huge, metal ship bobbing in the water right in front of me. Actually, it’s not bobbing. It’s hardly moving, but it’s floating, which already seems impossible enough.”

  “Is there anybody onboard?” Sol asked.

  “That’s the next thing I’m going to check,” Nexin said, floating up—and up—until he crested the edge of the ship. Dark metal extended ahead of him, and he gently set down on the deck. Beneath his boots, the metal was slick—almost slimy—and he quickly exchanged his large wings for a pair much smaller. They wouldn’t offer the same speed or power, but they gave off a lot less light. No need to completely announce his presence until he knew more.

  That done, he smoothly glided with his boots just an inch above the deck, head swiveling left and right, looking for any sign of life. As he moved away from the back end where he’d landed, the ship drastically widened until it extended well beyond what he could see in the fog. Nexin squinted to try and make out the railing, but his eyes just couldn’t penetrate the mist, and he turned his attention back ahead of him. Then stopped cold, something in his gut feeling like it dropped into his feet.

  Directly ahead of him, almost entirely hidden by the shrouding fog, a bulky, massive shape loomed. Almost as big as a house, with six, long, thick…tubes on either side?

  Golem!

  A flashback of getting almost completely pulped by a titanic blow flicked through Nexin’s mind at the same time he ignited flaming swords in each hand and strafed hard to the side. Out then up, so fast it would’ve looked like he’d teleported, Nexin refined the flames in his hands. Focused them. Forged them. Condensed them, over and over in the blink of an eye, until the roaring flames became searing plasma. Almost like he held two swords of molten metal in his hands, he zig-zagged once more, than dove at the side of the golem before it could react.

  His weapons practically hissed in the air, the cool mist exploding into steam as he passed, and he brought both swords down and across. Metal or not, he’d…

  Stop.

  Nexin jerked to a halt, his weapons so close to the unmoving cannon-barrels, the metal started to bubble. Strange, slick plants running along the top of the barrel dried out before his eyes, shriveling up and falling to the deck. The golem hadn’t budged at his appearance—or disappearance—and even as he hovered next to it with his sword ready to cut it to ribbons, it still didn’t react.

  No controller? El had told him all about the possessed golems in Guld—this obviously wasn’t one of those—so did that mean the controller hadn’t noticed him. No, that wasn’t it; his first assumption had been wrong. He wasn’t looking at a golem. There was no head. No legs. And, as he looked closer, the whole thing was attached directly to the deck of the ship. The six huge barrels were deck-mounted cannons.

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  Warship indeed.

  Was this what happened to the Vestish people? Could they still be on the ship?

  Nexin let his swords vanish—the cannon wasn’t an immediate threat—and lowered himself back down to the deck. His boot crunched softly on the dried-out plant, and he looked closer at the metal of the cannon. It was not in good shape. Rust and discoloration marred more than three-quarters of it, and inspecting where the barrels connected, there was no way they’d be able to move. Not unless the ship used rust-magic.

  Squatting where he was, he examined the deck at his feet to find the whole thing rusted and flaking as far as he could see. While, arguably, that wasn’t very far, it didn’t seem like this was a ship that could’ve made an entire city’s population vanish.

  Then again, if there’s one, there could be more. Still, this looks… old.

  Standing back up and lifting a few inches into the air, Nexin circled around the massive cannon, planning to find a way into the ship, but stopped almost immediately. Directly behind the immobile cannon, a huge chunk of deck and hull was simply missing. Like something massive had just leaned down and taken a bite out of the metal ship.

  Water sloshed in one section of the inner chambers he could see, while the room right next to it had a clear floor. Water-tight sections? Still, a relatively dry floor didn’t lessen the devastation. Whatever had hit the ship had done catastrophic damage. More rust and twisted metal extended beyond the shorn hull, and given how far down he could see, much of the damage went well below the waterline. Light flickered off something darting below the surface—fish?—while crabs crawled along coral that’d had time to grow within the bowels of the ship.

  The metal monstrosity was still floating, sure, but from the looks of things, it was barely doing that.

  “Ship is empty,” Nexin finally said into the magic of his communicator. “Almost like some kind of relic. How far from here did you say the Isles of Pili are?”

  “Thousands of miles. We could fly there, but it would take days, and finding a place to rest would be difficult. There’s a reason El took the others through the In-Between,” Sol said.

  “So how did this ship get here?” Nexin asked nobody in particular.

  “I’m guessing the fog is still just as thick as it was before where you are?”

  “It is.”

  “We’ll get a better look at things when it clears, then,” Sol said. “Maybe there are more ships, or clues as to how they got here. Could be trade ships from before the storm.”

  “Could be,” Nexin said, though a glance back at the huge cannons spoke of anything but trade. Then again, maybe the sea between the two nations was dangerous enough they needed to protect themselves. Or, this ship could’ve been here as protection for the Vestish city. No need to jump to conclusions before he had more evidence. “Either way, no Ember shrine here. I’m going to continue on to the shore.”

  “No shrine in the fountains either,” Sol replied.

  “Glad you checked them so thoroughly,” Nexin deadpanned.

  “Can never be too sure.”

  With a shake of his head and one last look at what little he could see of the ship, Nexin re-ignited his larger wings and lifted himself from the deck. He’d gotten turned around a bit inspecting the boat, so instead of flying off in a random direction, he instead shot straight up. The dark silhouette of the metal warship grew vaguer by the second, until the fog once again swallowed it up. A few heartbeats later, he burst free from the fog, mist still clinging to him in winding streamers until he stopped fifteen feet above.

  Almost like it was hesitant to let him go, the tendrils of lingering fog burned off in the strong sunlight, and Nexin turned in the air until he spotted the library. He really had gotten twisted around down on the deck. If he’d flown straight off where he’d thought the library was, he would’ve ended up out at sea.

  Still, taking into account the direction he needed to go, and what he’d noticed about the fog moving over the anchored ship, Nexin spotted what could be the area where land met shore. “Good enough place to start,” he muttered, starting up and then swooping down to skim right above the sea of white. There, with his face just a foot above the fog, more of the different eddies and flows of the moving mist became clear.

  His guess about where the docks would be looked like he wouldn’t be far off, and he dipped down beneath the top layer of fog. From there, he reined in his speed—the last thing he needed was to dive headfirst into the water—and coasted until the first silhouettes appeared ahead of him. Another long, narrow shadow resolved in front of him, though this time it wasn’t a monstrous, metal warship. No, just a simple dock; much of the wood rotted and broken. It had to be a good thirty feet wide—made for larger ships—and Nexin angled himself to fly towards shore directly beyond it.

  Bird droppings and bright green moss decorated the wood, though he hadn’t even seen a bird yet. Another dock meeting the first pulled his attention away from questions of wildlife, and then he was at the shore. Blocky, dark shadows emerged from the white mist—warehouses to hold the port’s trade-goods during better times. Now, though, several of them stood wide open, while others… others had clearly been damaged.

  Nexin’s boots clacked gently on the cobblestone street as he stopped to inspect the nearest warehouse. This one’s door wasn’t just open—it had been completely torn or blasted off the hinges. Igniting a flaming sword in his right hand, Nexin stepped through the gaping hole in the front of the building. Bricks littered the floor at his feet, and a quick check of the wall showed more bricks hanging inwards, like something had smashed its way into the building. Further back, the heavy, bent door lay at the end of white gouges in the stone floor, twenty feet in from the wall.

  Whatever had hit it, hit it hard.

  Nexin turned back to look in the direction of the ship he’d found. Those big cannons it had could’ve done something like this. Or, had the warehouse been locked and full of food, starving citizens resorting to smashing in the door to get to the needed supplies? Again, too many possibilities and not nearly enough evidence. Turning back to the warehouse, the fog was much thinner inside, but the building itself was almost empty.

  He spotted a few piles of what were probably once crates, but the remains had decayed so much, they were little more than dark smears on the ground. Chains and pulley systems dangled from the roof, but there weren’t any clues to what had been stored in their before. Or what had been taken out.

  “Nexin,” Sol’s voice came over the communicator. “I don’t know if you’ve made it into town yet, but I’m starting to see evidence…”

  “The city was attacked,” Nexin said. “Yeah, I’m seeing it too. And it probably wasn’t those little wolves we saw.”

  “Definitely not,” Sol agreed. “I’m seeing signs of struggle inside the university. Like something came in looking for the people,” Sol said. “Upturned furniture, broken down doors, even dried blood. No bodies, though.”

  “Something or somebody?” Nexin asked, head again turning in the direction of the warship.

  “Impossible to say for sure. But, Nexin, whatever occurred here, I think it happened since the storm left. You should be careful. Whoever or whatever did this may still be around.”

  “Wonderful,” Nexin said. “Just wonderful.”