Burning Night: A Tale of the Everburning City

Epilogue III: Tabitha

(Note: If you have the chance, pop in some headphones and let this song roll out as you read this chapter. It seemed appropriate enough that it carried me through writing this bit in a haze)

Tabitha could hear the craft even before she sat down in the cable car.

It came in irregular, short bursts. Always a brief, sharp burst of will, little more than a flick of a finger to someone of Tabitha's strength.

Of course, to someone of her strength, a flick of the finger was easily lethal.

There was no discernible pattern to it. The increments seemed random, ranging from two to fourteen seconds. And as many as four crafts were used at once.

But every time, the strength of the craft was exactly the same. Half the length of the blink of an eye, impressively swift, and narrowly focused.

And to Tabitha's senses, it seemed carefully restrained.

Tabitha turned to the soldier closing the door to her cable car and asked, "do you have any idea what Sergeant Varnell is doing down there?"

"I was actually instructed to not find out, madam crafter," the soldier replied. "I was only told it was a special training regimen for the last of her recruits."

The soldier smirked, and added, "poor burning fool."

"Why do you say that?"

"Master Sergeant Varnell is a harsh teacher, ma'am. I've never even heard of conditioning training done daily. And since he's the only one in his class she didn't graduate yet, I don't even want to know what kind of remedial training he's being put through."

Just as the soldier finished expressing his schadenfreude, Tabitha felt another sharp crack at the peripheries of her awareness.

And she suddenly had an idea of what that training regimen entailed.

The cable car took off a moment later and began her several mile journey. She idly wondered as she started off, how long she could wait before she snooped.

To distract herself, she extended her will gently and drew as close a schematic of her airship design as she could.

A gentle ball of flame for the lift bag, tendrils extending below to connect the ship. A straight platform, with an extended rise on the back, and a few decks below. The closest design she could conjure were the derelict cargo ships currently rusting in the nearly abandoned dockyards in lower Central.

Rusting in part because of her successes with floating scaffolding for making bridges. Recalling that put a smile on Tabitha's lips.

But as the minutes passed, and began drawing logarithmic formulas for the buoyancy ratios required, she ran headlong into her ongoing problem with the ships.

To carry a platform capable of hauling people over long distances, for days or weeks, she needed a lift-bag so large that entire districts would have to do without clothes or so much heat the bag would need to be coated with Coldstone just to survive.

Another crack of fire nearly distracted Tabitha, and she let her thoughts fade into smoke. Just as the cable car reached its end, and she stood up to open the door, the let her awareness extend out into the fields, and see what her fourth apprentice was doing.

As she seized the nearby torches, her flame-given sight found the old soldier from the Cavilla Incident, practice sword in hand, duelling with her apprentice. She saw them exchange blows twice, three times, their movements disciplined and fierce. Efficient, even.

But just as Gerald turned aside a vicious swing of Varnell's practice sword, the old woman shouted, "twenty eight!"

And Gerald's free hand pointed towards one of the nearby practice dummies, and even as he thrust his sword forward to drive Varnell back, a short blast of bright blue fire punched through one of the dummies.