Ch. 1 Crash Landing

A/N: This will likely be edited in the future, but will likely be my next major project

Broken spars jutted up to the sky. Jagged splinters of wood that had once been one of the great sky ships that had patrolled across the land. Danson crawled out from under the ruins. Fires licked at his tender flesh and he had to bite back a cry of pain as his fingers dug into soft loam. 

A distant ringing echoed in his ears blinding him from any other sound in the great forest. Otherwise he would have heard the screams of men cooking in the flames he had just escaped. The sailors never having a chance to escape the bowels of the ship. 

Danson staggered away and towards the edge of the forest. He only had a single boot on, the other lost as he crawled through the wreckage. Blood smeared the moist soil, the earth drinking it easily. His page boy uniform was scorched and torn, hanging off his thin body in threads. 

He looked around with a wild gaze, taking in the vast forest. Towering pines that reared overhead and brushed the underbelly of the sky. Thick ferns that covered the ground and the myriad of eyes that watched cautiously from the trees. 

Danson was hyperventilating, gulping fast as he tried to understand what had just happened. He looked back and the burning ship and hoped to see someone, anyone, come climbing out of the wreckage.

He waited.

And waited

And no one came. 

As the sun rose high in the sky, the fires began to burn themselves out. They hadn’t been fierce enough to draw forth flame elementals, but they had been strong enough to keep any other wild elementals from approaching. He thanked the stars for that. 

The last thing he wanted to do was face down an angry water or earth elemental. Without the Knights or wranglers on board, it’d be a death sentence. More so than being stranded in the Wild Forest. 

“Mothers, may you guide me, please show your mercy on a lost son.” The prayer was rote and familiar, a comforting weight that he drew over himself. The sun high above baked the land and he began to feel how thirsty he was. 

The storm that had caused their demise had left the land soaked with various puddles across the crash site. By now they were gone. Absorbed by the soil or evaporated by the sun. 

Thick black smoke wafted off the ruins of the ship. Such a sharp contrast between the periwinkle blue sky that Danson worried about their attackers finding them again. Flashes of the night before played through his mind. 

Bolts of lighting. The deafening blast of the cannon. The ringing of steel on steel and the cry of mortally wounded men and women. He had hid in his small cabin, barring the door as the ship bucked and danced in the storms embrace. 

As the hours trickled by, the pulsing heat from the crash faded and Danson risked walking towards the crashed ship. He needed supplies and the downed ship was his only recourse if he was to survive. 

He approached the ship as if it was a dangerous beast. Slowly and with an abundance of caution. The hole he had crawled out of had collapsed during the fire, and he was forced to climb the ribcage of the ship and land on the ruins of the top deck. 

The ship had come down on her steel plated belly, shattering the more fragile superstructure. It had tilted and fell to the side, canting at a forty-five degree angle. It was hard for him to walk across the charred deck, dodging holes where combat or the subsequent fires had left violent passage towards the lower decks. 

The bodies were gone, though there were signs of their passage. Charred clothes, a burnt hand, a melted sword. Danson looked down and towards the rented earth and saw more bodies. The crew and attackers had slid off and into the divot the ships landing and turning had caused. 

Danson pushed past them, heading towards the captain's cabin at the back of the ship. Captain Gregory had kept a fully supplied cabin, filled with travel rations, water purifiers, spare weapons, and multiple changes of clothes and boots. The Captain had been much larger than Danson, but his clothes would be better than walking around in his ruined uniform. 

Splinters littered the deck where heavy boarding axes had smashed apart the Captain’s cabin door. The once thick door was nothing more than strips of wood hanging from bronze hinges. Danson poked his head inside and looked at the devastation. 

Bottles lay in broken shards. Clothes strewn about with abandon. A short service sword lay in three pieces and the Captain himself was pinned to his cabin wall with a wooden spear. Danson bit back a cry of pain at seeing his former master pinned to the wall like a specimen in a scientists collection board. 

Danson forced himself to ignore the body and searched around for anything that he could use. There were plenty of clothes and he quickly changed, having to tie a belt around his waist twice to hold the pants up. A shirt hung like a dress to his knees and he took another belt to that around his belly to hold it tight. 

There was a long dagger still in its sheath and he placed that on his hip. A partially torn rucksack was found and he scavenged plenty of hardtack and filled the sack with the dried meat. A few of the warded bronze pitchers sat in their locked cupboard and Danson stole all of them. They would clean water with just the ambient energy in the air, helping him avoid the sickness in impure water. 

He looked about for anything else of value and could see nothing. He couldn’t carry the bed or sheets. The heavier weapons were beyond him. The Captain’s binding amulet caught his attention at the last moment. The heavy torc of bronze with runes engraved in it and a wide amber stone that sat in the middle. 

It was what allowed one to face and capture an elemental. Whether for assimilation or for a binding. It was worth a small fortune and the fact that the attackers had left it on the Captain’s neck was baffling. Danson needed everything he could get and reached over to pluck it free. 

It was heavier than it looked, and when he put it around his neck he had to resist the pull of it toward the earth. Looking at the Captain’s booted feet, he took the boots even if they were overly large on him. Taking a quick glance around, he bowed his head toward the dead Captain and quickly left the cabin.

He crossed the deck in reverse and worked his way down the broken ribs to touch soft earth again. There was a reassurance to it after walking across the halfway destroyed timers that had threatened to spill him to an early death with the wrong step.

Danson looked at the forest and then the sun again. Fort Dentrick was in the Far North-East, through the Wild Forest. It was the closest piece of civilization to him and it would likely take weeks to make it there. He tightened the straps on to his back and started forward and into the forest. 

The dark canopy shielded him as he climbed over fallen trunks, felled by the crashing airship. As he walked further into the forest, he saw remnants of the battle hadn’t been as localized as he had thought. Corpses were strewn about, above him in the limbs, on the forest floor, in the forest floor. 

An armored knight lay in two pieces, split at the waist. Her young face was slack in death, her helm nowhere to be seen. Danson bowed his head toward her and looked around for any weapons the knight might have been carrying. 

Whatever it was that had split her in two was nowhere to be seen. Her own personal weapon also missing. Danson cursed and continued on, looking frequently at the sun and using that to keep himself moving in the right direction. It was nearly ten minutes later that he found the next corpse. 

Dressed in a wild assortment of leather, their face graceful even in death. Long cheekbones and pointed ears, a golden hue to their skin and their soft crescent moon shaped eyes open, showing beautiful emerald orbs. The elf had died from a massive strike that had charred their chest to the point it was impossible to tell their gender. From the neck down they were charcoal. 

A slender, silver, curved blade lay just past their outstretched hand. There was no sheath for the blade, but he would not leave the weapon laying in the dirt. He plucked it up and continued on. 

The elf was expected though not wanted. He had heard their warbling war cries as they boarded the ship during the storm. Heard their musical language as they fought the knights and crews, butchering anyone who stood in their way. How could poetry be so drenched in blood? 

It was good to see that at least one of the knights had managed to strike back before being felled by the elf raider. Danson didn’t know much of the greater politics of the Empire, but he did know war was coming. The elves of the Wild Forest and the Purple Stone Mountains had made a deal, their royal families marrying each other.

Danson had heard the Captain crying about it, how it would mean war for humanity. The two elvish people stood firm and united for the first time in millennia. Their cruise had been meant to replenish the garrison at Fort Dentrick, but instead they had been ambushed and slaughtered on the way. The longer he thought of it, the less that Danson liked the odd of the garrison still at the Fort.

It was the only hope he had though. He couldn’t cross the Sulfur Sea on foot. He could theoretically cross the Wild Forest on foot. At least it had been done before. There were many things to worry about in the forest, with the elves being the least of them. Danson plunged deeper into the shadows of the forest, the canopy hiding him from the sun's warm gaze.