Disclaimer: Blah blah blah sex and violence blah blah blah 18 and over.
The most pivotal moment in human history came when the Sorceress of Sonea opened portals between the worlds and sent forth her winged black ships to blot out the skies above the motherworld. Years of fire and blood followed, the old empires shattered and scattered beneath the onslaught of Eumenides hosts who harnessed fire and thunder to rain down death from above. It was during the darkest moment of that age that the Scholars of Roshik and the Magi of Warna developed flame projectors, heat rays, crimson beams, and other weapons to lay waste to the enemy fleets and turn the tide of war.
In time, surviving remnants of humanity would learn the ways of the sky-ships and began their counter-assault upon the world of the Soneans. Further years of war followed, their foes fought undeterred by the hopelessness of the struggle, and to a woman preferred death to captivity. The Sorceress stood defiant in her citadel as her defending fleet was burned away and her walls were felled around her. She battled on alone in her throne room until her very body fell to pieces beneath the blows of pikes and swords and axes. Her remains were burned to ashes and her world was soon abandoned, the chaotic wild magics making it undesirable for human habitation.
Ages have passed since that time. Vines now grow across the broken stone and shattered crystal that litter haunted continents, savage wilderness covers a landscape where strange cities once reached to the heavens and beyond. Man has started to recover what was lost on his own world, and with the gift of the portals has even made his first small steps upon others. But, as of yet, the world of the dread Sorceress remains the realm of ghosts, seldom trod by human foot.
That is about to change.
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The only "honorable" way to become wealthy, it has been said, is by inheritance. The only honest way to do so, then, is by robbery. For what is inherited wealth if not, more often than not, the accumulated booty of pirate or bandit ancestors who got lucky?
Word had spread from world to world and port to port: the Dread Pirate Benji Bilgeman had died by mutiny in the middle of a sky portage! His barque had been destroyed in the fighting. Wreckage from the Brass Raven had been found in the seas below the portal, a message had been carved into a floating cask in testament to her fate. Her priceless portolabe and her captain's kingly treasure trove, among the greatest ever pilfered by any reaver of sea or sky, were surely lost forever.
Baron Herkul Bellfont would be born a few days later, at the time of his purchase of the sky-carrack Gelt Chimaera. Originally bearing twenty-four broadside guns and three basilisks, more lighter guns, with three masts and six wings, one thousand tons burthen and with an original complement of three hundred sailors, one-hundred gunners and eight hundred marines, few world-bound vessels could compare in size or power.
Thirty-five years ago, it was among the greatest vessels to ply the skies of any world. Now, it was an aged and obsolescent design, with most newer ships being smaller yet faster and stabler. Bellfont's purchase of such a vessel, renamed the Calm Heritage and running on a skeleton crew of only two hundred men, albeit two hundred oathsworn men of his own hand-picking, would help to sell his identity as a minor nobleman who had taken to the merchant trade after some legal yet disreputable career which he wishes to put behind him, perhaps a captain of mercenaries. That, of course, is why he's reluctant to speak overmuch about his past, and surely no one would be so crass as to associate a merchant gentleman with the scarred, black-bearded brute of unlamented memory. And, if he traded out most of his shot-firing guns for those which brought flame and heat and magic to bear upon the enemy, there were reasons to do that didn't involve a desire to place his sails about forgotten worlds.
¶
The new, cylindrical tower for Celsina the Wizardess was built of an arcane material which her associates had taken to calling flowstone. It was like a flowing slurry of pulverized rock which could be hardened and shaped into needed dimensions. The tower stood one hundred and one square feet in diameter and rose an astounding two hundred and six feet above the ground. From a window of her palatial top-floor apartment, she watched the sullen-looking sailors offload the last of her possessions from the panniers of the donkeys. They let loose the creatures into a stone-walled paddock and eagerly withdrew from the premises, trudging quickly down the narrow footpath cut into the spongy soil, through bamboo thickets and beneath the beech tree canopies.
Probably hoping to make their camp on the shore before the coming of darkness, as well they should. Skyfaring men were seldom at ease in this dense foliage, and the worsening weather only heightened their apprehension. A chilling mist was flowing down from the mountain pass and dark clouds gathered in the skies above. This local climate had much to recommend it, but drawbacks certainly existed. Cold rains would be Celsina's constant companion for the coming winter, and snow was not out of the question.
The statuesque woman pulled the dark, thick velvet robes tight against her voluptuous pale-white skin. Firewood had been laid in store, along with all the other provisions she would need until the return of her compatriots. The sea beyond the treetops was now shrouded, but she had earlier glimpsed the lines of the carrack that was anchored in the bay, its first mate having finished the last of his scouting missions in the scallop.
The captain of that ship would sail away tomorrow, though now he stared inland from a window on the far side of her room. His lithe and tall, wiry body seemed to stand unoccupied as his mind roamed out over the mountain pass and through the miles of murky, sunless wilderness beyond. He suddenly shook his golden mane like a beast awakened, his eyes shown with a dangerous glint that seemed profoundly at odds with his clean and deceptively youthful face. They fell upon the blood-red locks and jade-green eyes of the Wizardess and his glower softened. Then he looked down at what he was wearing and blushed.
Gone was the practical shipboard dress of linen shirt and hose. He now wore gilded leather riding boots and fur-lined houppelande over flamboyant silken breeches and doublet. A silver-buckled and gold-embroidered belt was bound around his waist with a jewel-encrusted scabbard affixed, though the plain and venerable old falchion within was unchanged. He had also refused to part with the blue eyes in his readjusted visage, claiming them as gifts from his mother.
"I can't believe that I'm going to go out in public like this. I'll look like a fop." he muttered.
"You'll look like a nobleman, and one of the humbler ones at that." she said smoothly.
