Maledictus Aether

Maledictus
Aether

Sydney Alykxander Walker

Copyright 2013 Sydney Alykxander
Walker

Smashwords Edition

You can never make the same
mistake twice –

Because the second time you make
it, it’s not a mistake;

It’s a choice.

Steven Denn

For Daniel and Brooke
who always manage to make me laugh.
Thank you for your ceaseless interest in my work,

and for keeping me motivated to
finish it.

I – The Prodigy

II – Sky Pirates

III – Cracking the
Code

IV – Aboard the
Calypso

V – Tools of the
Trade

VI – Fugitive

VII – The
Atlas

VIII – Touching the
Sky

IX – Asius, the Forgotten
Skyland

X – Looking for the
Legend

XI – Tearing the World
Apart

XII – Giving the
Alitis
her
Wings

XIII – To Lead the
Lost

XIV – The Glory of Bitter
Defeat

XV – The Curse of
Aether

Not all heroes do the right
thing. In fact, most of them often do the exact opposite, but
history only keeps a record of the ones who’ve never hurt a soul.
The truth of the matter is that heroes are only human, and humans
are prone to mistakes.

Mistakes are a part of human
nature.

There once lived a man who
learnt this lesson through his failures – crippling mistakes of
death, hope and despair. Of lies and secrecy, and of humanity. A
man who spent his life searching for the father he never knew, for
the roots of his ancestry through his father’s footsteps.

Once the truth was known,
nothing was the same.

Truth is something that has the
power to destroy, to break apart someone’s entire world and way of
life with a single uttered phrase.

It also has its ways of
revealing itself.

This is the story of a young
man that searched for the truth of his father’s demise through his
past, who brought a world of people together with a common goal,
and righted a wrong that was executed over twenty years ago. A man
who did a thousand wrongs for a hundred rights.

The story of an outcast, who became the world’s most
notorious
Sky
Pirate.

• I
  –
  The Prodigy
  

It went a little something like
this.

I was named after my father,
the late Cephas Kennedy Watkins, who died shortly before I was
born. Growing up, my mother used to tell me stories about his
adventures, and I grew up wanting to follow in his footsteps. I
started pouring over his old books about engineering and machines,
got my own toolkit and started taking apart anything I could get my
hands on, and put them back together.

At sixteen, I joined the
Forces. Soared through their tests and entered the flight division,
and was also put into the engineering section.

It was there that, eight months
after my promotion to assistant chief engineer, I had the
accident.

I don’t remember much other
than going into the auto shop that morning, but I’ve reconstructed
the memory of the event through the accounts of those who were
there.

The chief engineer had given me the task of fixing the
clockwork system of the
Arachnidan
, one of
our automatons. As the system is one of the harder pieces to
recreate, he didn’t trust just anyone to fix it.

The system had a fault, and a
flyaway spark blew the entire system to bits. I was underneath at
the time, and the system’s pieces tore through me as if I wasn’t
even there. My left arm and both my legs were torn to ribbons when
I instinctively curled a little to protect myself, and another
piece tore through my chest, destroying my heart.

I was pulled out of the rubble
and they hooked me up to an artificial heart that gave them enough
time to save me.

They started by transplanting a mechanical heart,
and then grafted an arm and two legs
in the place of my other ones. I was left in the ICU for about a
week before I stabilized and they could pull me out of the
drug-induced coma, where I was forced to make a deal with the
Generals.

You see, my mother could ha
ve never afforded the surgery – and my wage was not very
extravagant, either. Hell, I barely got by – so I sold them my
services. I told them I would work for them for the rest of my
days, without pay, as long as they did not fine my mother for the
surgery.

They agreed.

To this day I ha
ve
put off reconstructing the
Arachnidan’
s
clockwork system, the automaton sitting in the auto shop collecting
dust. Not because I am afraid it will happen again and this time I
will not come back; just because the design plans are so bloody
complicated.

Plus, the scale they a
re drawn at is about a thousand times smaller than the
actual automaton.

Of course, as it was our best war machine, the pressure’s
rising for me to actually fix it
. Even the chief engineer does not understand it that
well.

“
How’s the
spider coming along?”

I turn my head, in the middle of fixing one of the cogs in
place, and look over my shoulder to the man leaning against the
railing of the domed room. The giant spider dominates the space,
its eight legs having a span of half a football field
each and its insides are spilled
within that area as I work.

“
Ashe, I thought you had a ray gun crisis to tend to,” I
call, my voice echoing through the room as I turn around to push
the cog in place. Holding it there with one hand, I use the other
to tighten the bolt, screwdriver held between my teeth. Speaking
around it, I answer his ques
tion. “Maybe a week more and it will start moving. The
blueprints are kind of misleading.”

“
So, you’re
basically winging this,” he comments while the red-haired man walks
down the metal steps to the hanger below, and in the meantime I
grab onto the spider’s throw-down ladder and climb up into the
cockpit. There, I grab a different tool from my toolkit strapped to
my thigh and take apart the metal display to the left, so I can
access the innards.

“
Basically!”

The chief engineer laughs at my response, the spider
swaying slightly as he climbs up the ladder to see
w
hat I am up to. I have half
my body swallowed up by the mechanics, fingers flying at the cogs
and wires to double-check for any fault lines. Finding none, I pull
out and connect the driver to the control mechanism.

After screwing the panel back,
I sit back and stretch out my arms a second. Ashe leans against the
side of the cockpit, still standing on the ladder, and watches me
with a bemused expression.

“
What’s there left to do?” h
e inquires, and I slip my screwdriver back into my toolkit
before I answer him, ticking it off on my fingers.

“
I have to finish wiring the engine and stabilize the
clockwork. Other than that... I think the
Arachnidan
is
just about ready to go back on the battlefield,” I state, smiling
at my friend. His eyebrows shoot up.

“
Great, then
you’ll absolutely love this one: they’re transferring you the
moment you finish working on this monstrosity,” he tells me, and I
get to my feet, frowning.

“
Where?” I
ask, rolling up the sleeves of my uniform a little so I can have a
bit more freedom of movement. “I actually like working in the
shop.”

“
I’m fully
aware of that, and I’m quite upset at losing my best engineer,
trust me,” he says, shrugging. “I don’t get to decide – besides,
you and I both know that your passion is the skies.”

I hold up my hands, guilty.

“
That’s why you’re going to be the engineer on the
Charybdis
,” he announces, and my eyebrows skyrocket.
“
Chief
engineer, I should add.”

“
Is that
not the
vessel the team was building from scratch all over again?” I ask,
leaning forward until we are practically nose to nose. He nods,
smirking. “
That
Charybdis
?”

“
The very same. She’s on her maiden voyage in
a fortnight, and I seem to recall
that a handful of automatons you’ve had a hand in fixing will be on
board as well – so, you see why you were chosen.”

“
I do no
t know
anything about the ship, though – I will never be able to fix
it!”

“
Relax!
” Ashe shoots,
grabbing me by my shoulders to try and calm me. “You’re not going
on board blindfolded – I’ve overseen its construction from ore to
wood. I’ll personally take you on a tour of the ship before its
departure; though I do suggest you hurry with this
machine.”

I grin at him.

“
Ashe, I wi
ll have
this done in two days.”

“
I
’ll believe it when
I see it!” he calls, climbing down the ladder. A rung away from the
ground, he looks up at me as I lean over the cockpit’s edge to
watch him go. “Although it
is
you we’re talking
about, so I have no doubt you’ll make well on that promise. Call me
when you fire her up! I’d like to see this old brute in
action!”

I salute the chief and he
returns it quickly before he walks off to do whatever it is he does
around here.

A fortnight later, I a
m boarding the
Charybdis
.

It i
s an amazing
vessel, the kind of airship that the Fleet has coveted for decades.
Honestly, they did an amazing job with building it – let us just
hope it can fly.

The crew on the ship are given permission to don anything
they want, so of course we gladly wear something
othe
r than our uniforms – a
thing I have been wearing for the last six years. When I announced
my departure to my mother last week, she showed up two days later
with a parting gift – my dad’s old tailcoat, his favourite,
adjusted to my size. With it, she gave me his old pocket
watch.

I drop my carry-on onto my cot, looking around the room –
as the c
hief engineer, I am
given the gift of my own private quarters, unlike the quarters I
shared with the other engineers back on land.

It i
s an impressive
room, a mixture of wood, copper and gold. The wood is mahogany, the
walls giving a free view of the outdoors through the portholes.
There is a desk and a chair along one wall, sitting beside a
dresser and a wall-mounted mirror, and a simple bed with a deep
green bedspread pushed against the wall with the portholes. Other
than that the room is bare, but it is still rather nice – and far
more welcoming than the stares of my peers I was subjected to day
in and out.

I suppose that i
s the
problem with having a father that was rumoured to have been the
best airship flyer in the history of the Fleet.

I store my belongings in the dresser before I go topside,
taking a moment to fix the lapels of the tailcoat I now wear. By
the
sheer quality of the
fabric, it is obvious to me that he was not in the financial
situation we are in now – his death, I reckon, is one of the
reasons why we barely scraped by until I joined the
Forces.

The coat itself is black with golden accents, holding
together with various cinches at the stomach. His pocket watch sits
comfortably in the left pocket inside the fabric, the gun belt
issued to me hanging comfortably over my waist as it loops around
my right should
er. Beneath
the open vest there is a simple white button-up, a short-sleeved
shirt that gives me enough room to move around the way I need
to.

Suffice to say, I ha
ve never quite owned something of its kind.