Dreamcatcher | ONC 2020 Honourable Mention | ✔

Chapter One

Even before the gondola door slid open, the air of the port of Dakshin Tat crept over Rav like a wet, soiled blanket left too long in the sun. He shot a nervous glance around him. The burly mechanic beside him remained asleep, snoring like an engine with a loose bolt. The engineer across the gondola shuffled his drawings into a dapper leather briefcase, then stood, triggering a collective shuffling and rising as the ferry coasted down. Rav copied the other passengers. By long habit, his shoulders curled down to render his small frame even more inconspicuous.

Grime papered the windows of the ferry, but experience told Rav the moment the dockhands below grabbed its mooring ropes and swung it around. It bobbed with the sudden tethering. Over the slowing engines came the squeal of a rusty winch, and the foggy ground out the window crept up to meet the gondola. A ladder fell to the dock with a clunk. The door clunked a reply and was hauled ajar.

Hot, humid air scented like coal smoke and rotting fish rolled through the cabin. Mechanics, dockhands, engineers, flight marshalls, sailors, and a man with the uniform of a captain jostled to be first to spill out onto a wood landing deck. Rav found himself last to disembark. He scurried past an impatient serviceman waiting for the ladder to clear. The man swung himself into the gondola and pulled up the ladder.

The ferry's ballonets exhaled over his head, and Rav clapped a hand over his thick black hair. The winch on the landing deck squealed in protest as the pressure dropped in the airship's gas envelope. It strained to rise. Dockhands released the ropes. The dingy brown ferry turned as it ascended, and its ropes were slowly sucked up into the gondola. It puttered away across the backwaters, back towards the mainland.

The landing pad sat in the middle of a lake, around which the patched, soggy islands and many waterways of the backwaters brooded. Houseboats strung with colourful lines of laundry dozed in shadowy corners, and a fisherman punted a wooden canoe along the shoreline. Rav turned to find a long boardwalk leading away across the water. It bobbed as the crowd traversed it. From here, they looked like automatons, their feet almost in sync, their faces all tipped down against the liquid heat of the rising sun. A bird's crackle pierced the silence. Fog lingered on the water, which was muddied with silt from the inland rivers that offloaded their cargo here. Floating plants sprouted from it like heads of green hair.

It would look bad if he arrived late.

In a panic, Rav dashed down the boardwalk after the other workers. Fat ripples whooshed from the floating boards, startling waterbirds that carried their indignation away into thickets of palm and banana leaves. A worker glared at Rav as he skidded up behind the others. They rounded a corner into another lake, and the boy's feet froze him to the spot once again.

Up ahead, a great curve of tan had appeared over the tops of the trees. That could not be an airship. That could not possibly be an airship. The anxiety that had plagued Rav since his Father had broken the news of his new apprenticeship liquified through every vein in his body. He wanted to throw up over the edge of the boards. He wanted to run back, all the way to the landing pad, and catch the next ferry home.

The sound of his Father's voice kept him rooted.

I raised a man, not a parakeet, Father would growl. You'll get a proper job and carry the family name, or you won't have that name any longer.

Tears beaded in Rav's eyes. Father had put him on airships since he'd been a child, but those had been small ones: Tugs and Breeze-skippers. He hugged his bag and swallowed back the sting in his eyes. Then he trudged after the workers again. Step by step, towards his doom. 

A/N: The journey begins! For those unfamiliar with the subject matter, a glossary of terms and diagrams can be found in the last published chapter of this work. It is there for your use, so if you spot something ship- or setting-related that isn't on it, let me know and I'll add it.

Congrats to sarahwentaway for being the winner of my geographical mini-competition: the first person to guess (correctly) what part of our world inspired the setting of the Fantasy port of Dakshin Tat. The answer is Kerala, India. Check it out if you've never heard of it before!

The dedication on chapter two will go to the runner-up spacetodream who was hard on the right trail when the answer was guessed. 

Thanks to all who participated  :)