Pirin started by walking back and forth down the axial catwalk. He wrapped a length of envelope fabric from the cargo hold around his eyes and layered it tight enough that he could no longer see through it, then stuffed his hands in his pockets so he couldn’t instinctively use them to feel his way around.

  The first time he tried, he just walked down the catwalk, lifting his feet and resisting the instinct to drag his toes. He couldn’t walk carefully, like he was trying to traverse an unfamiliar house in the dark. He needed to train himself to walk normally, even without any sight whatsoever.

  But that meant he needed to understand his surroundings.

  Gray was still in the cargo hold, still recovering and nursing her wing back to health, and Pirin couldn’t use her sight to create an image of his surroundings. G?ttrur would be of no use; they couldn’t share thoughts through a Reyad.

  Only his sixth sense, his spiritual sense.

  Nomad said it was about the feelings of his surroundings. But that was hard to do. The sense of a threat was almost ever-present, an innate element of life. That was probably why even the weakest people, those with no spiritual potential to their name, could still feel when someone was watching them, or get a premonition of doom in their stomach.

  But the Featherflight wasn’t a threat. It wasn’t even alive.

  But he was a part of the world, and so was it. They were interacting with it. They were interacting with the Eane, even if he couldn’t see it.

  He considered the walkways. They pressed up against his feet, stopping him from falling through. Sturdy, steady. The railings? They were useful. Not just as a handhold, but for tying up the ballonets’ cinching ropes to. Usefulness was perceivable, and it was certainly something he could feel.

  He knew the feeling of usefulness, or lack thereof, well enough.

  He took a shaky step down the walkway, but nothing felt different. It was like taking a step in the dark.

  Taking a deep breath, he began a steady, low cycling pattern. He drew in the raw energy of the world and pulled it in a slight, small loop that kept him active, kept him aware of the Eane around him, but didn’t overwhelm his concentration.

  But he traced the lines of energy backward with his perception. The same perception he used to envision his own channels, he pushed out along the routes of Eane trailing into his body.

  It made an invisible mist in the air, but appeared golden in his blind perception. He traced the mist down to the walkway, and let it push against the sturdiness of the walkway. Following it with his mind, he then flooded his perception up to the handrails, envisioning their usefulness and the ropes tied to them.

  Next step. Then the next.

  He walked down the catwalk until the railing fell out of his perception.

  The ladder down to the crew quarters. But he wasn’t ready for that yet.

  Instead, he followed the walkway to the front of the ship. A rope spanned haphazardly across the walkway, and he sensed it enough from the tension it put on the railing and the way it made the mist of the air swish around it.

  It was like walking through a forest. Roots protruded from the ground, and if he wasn’t careful, he’d trip. But it took a single glance, or even just a glimpse in his periphery, to register where it was. Without consciously thinking about it, his mind created a model of his surroundings and deployed it expertly, telling his legs just where they needed to step to not trip himself.

  Only this time, he was consciously creating the model.

  He had to be getting close to the end of the walkway. He reached out with his senses and called for the gasbags. They weren’t as sturdy as the catwalk. They were made of dried, leathered wyvern intestines, which held and contained lifting gas perfectly, but also were susceptible to rips, and if they tore, the ship would lose altitude.

  And, Pirin had to admit, the thought of factory-farmed wyvern innards still made his stomach shudder a little, no matter how cleaned and cured they were.

  But still, the gasbags erupted up the edges of the three-dimensional model he was creating in his mind, forming slightly flexible walls on either side of the walkway and arching overtop his head.

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  At the end of the hallway, the gasbags constricted on the walkway, sloping upward to the nose cone of the ship.

  Pirin stopped before he hit the end of the axial catwalk. Two…two inches from ramming his face into the gasbag.

  He reached out to check his work. Three inches.

  For a first attempt, it was good. And he had three days to practice.

  ~ ~ ~

  Myraden walked through the gates of her childhood home. The two blackened doors lay wide open, and they swayed in the breeze. The skeleton of an unfortunate houseservant laid right in front of the doors, bones picked clean, with only shreds of his original robe.

  Myraden stepped into the foyer and turned in a slow circle. It was two storeys, with a staircase at the opposite end and a high, arched roof. Holes let sunlight and snowflakes trickle down to the cobblestone floor.

  There used to be wooden pillars, banners, and rugs all throughout the hall, but those had either burned or been scavenged.

  She knelt in the center of the hall, trying to resist the memories. Flashes of flame rolled through her mind. Her father had returned home only hours before the soldiers arrived, and he’d instructed them to gather their things and make for the port. It was such a frenzy, and she’d been tired and confused, but she’d done what he said.

  Myraden blinked, then cycled Essence, pushing the memories away. She took the stairs up to the second level of the manor and walked around the perimeter walkway of the foyer until she found her room.

  In her childhood, it’d seemed small. Only a bed, a dresser, a tiny, foot-wide square window. Maybe it was because the dresser had crumbled, then ever-ice window had been smashed, and the bed burned away, but seemed bigger.

  Since she’d left home, all she’d ever known were cramped ships’ holds or shared barracks. The only time she’d lived in comparable luxury was when she’d trained under the Red Hand at Pliath Castle.

  Footsteps thudded behind her. The Red Hand stepped into the room as well. “Have you come to any conclusions yet? Any breakthroughs?”

  “Nothing. The Heart revelation is…the why, right?”

  “Correct.”

  “But shouldn’t that be the same as the spirit revelation?”

  “No.” The Hand shook his head. “What you want to achieve is different from why you want to achieve it.”

  “But I only realized what I wanted when I thought of why I wanted it.”

  “Then this revelation should be easy. Myraden, we are products of our past, and it informs our every decision in the present.” The Hand crossed his arms and leaned on the doorframe. “It doesn’t matter if it feels too easy, as long as it feels right.”

  “By virtue of it feeling too easy, it feels wrong. Unnatural.”

  “I understand. Nothing about magic should be easy, so neither should this. But you must trust yourself.”

  “I will try,” she said. “If you do not mind, I will try once more. Here.”

  When the Hand didn’t argue, she folded her legs beneath herself and sat cross-legged in the center of her old bedroom.

  ~ ~ ~

  Pirin sensed Kerstel before any of the others saw it.

  He didn’t think he would. He didn’t think his senses would reach so far, or that they’d be strong enough to pick out an island. He didn’t think he was trying to sense it.

  But, at the very edge of his perception, many miles away, a stub of rock poked out from the waves. He sensed the difference in texture, the sheer presence of the island as it parted the waves, and only then did he realize that he’d been sensing the waves far below the Featherflight as well.

  It’d been three days. For the past two, he’d kept his blindfold on the whole time, navigating the ship only by touch and feel. Naturally, he had stubbed his toe plenty of times, not to mention bruises on his hips and thighs where he’d accidentally walked into tables’ corners or kicked the edge of a railing.

  But today, he hadn’t hit anything. He started on the upper platform, sensing the winds and wheeling seagulls above. The moment he registered Kerstel at the edge of his perception, he navigated down to the gondola, taking the ladder and envisioning every rung before he set his foot on it, then traversing the axial catwalk at a light jog before descending down to the crew quarters and gondola.

  Without walking into a single object. If he reached out, his hand should’ve been right above the navigation table.

  It was exactly where he thought it was.

  He pulled off his blindfold and grinned. It had worked.

  “What’s that smile for, elfy?” Alyus pestered.

  “My senses are…working a lot better now.” Pirin tucked his hands into his pocket. “Not to mention, I’m pretty much all healed up. Once we’re back in Sirdia, I should be good as new. As long as nothing attacks me—”

  An impression of speed and pressure washed across Pirin’s left side, and, without turning his blind-spot toward it, he raised his hand to his head and blocked with his forearm. A wooden crack rang out, along with a sudden thud against the new leather vambraces.

  He glanced up, then over at Nomad, finally dragging the man out of his visual blind spot. “You hit me.”

  Nomad lifted his staff, then tucked it behind his back. “In fact, you blocked it.”

  “Did you know I would?”

  “You seemed pretty confident you could.” Nomad paused, then said, “And your confidence was warranted, I’d say, seeing as you did block it. But your enemies don’t know that. Lord Three thinks you have a blind spot, now. He doesn’t know that your senses will cover it and nullify it. Use that to your advantage, as you always have.”