It was golden hour, and the sky to the south was filled with the indigo nav lights of the local fighter jet patrols. The weather was bad in Truscasia. Muted flashes of lightning illuminated the murky depths of the towering thunderheads over the ocean. Below, the blanket of clouds was a mix of black and white. Spire Sophia rose from the chaos like a gigantic bird bath, wide-brimmed, thin, as black as the storm clouds. The upper surface was marred with a dizzying cacophony of runways.

  "My airplane," Fiona announced.

  Claire let go of the controls. She had been sitting in the copilot's seat for the entire flight, happily flying the airplane as if it was an autocar. Kiera sat in the jump seat watching. At first, Fiona had explained airspeed, an arcane and terrifying concept that Claire seemed to grasp immediately. But now they settled into a familiar sequence: passing into the sub-conduit, air brakes, flaps, the metallic grind of the landing gear. Symbols on the runway getting bigger and bigger, a slight upward tilt to the nose, weightlessness, a violent thud.

  They left the airplane with the engines still running. Two oculomancers were waiting for them at the bottom of the stairs, ready to take the craft somewhere. Just off the edge of the runway there was a deep hole with a rusty metal rim. Suspended over the hole was a boat-like machine made of shining brass resting on a piece of bright yellow railway. They boarded the strange machine through a narrow portal at the top of a grated metal staircase. The interior was cramped and completely undecorated. Everything was raw metal except for the bulbous forward window. There were no chairs, only a single standing console with three levers. Fiona closed the door behind them.

  "Spire Sophia is a bit different than the usual spires," Fiona explained. She pushed the middle lever forward and the whole craft jolted. "The runways here need to be very long, so the city was designed to be as wide as possible. You do not travel by foot here. This particular machine happens to be an old submarine, and the track was once part of a roller coaster."

  The rusty metal rims drifted upward as the old submarine descended into the hole. It was very dark in the tunnel below, but thankfully there was a spotlight above the forward window. A few more pulls on the levers and the whole affair rotated until the tip of the yellow track aligned with an identical track extending off into the darkness. With a hiss and some chugging, the thing lurched forward. It started very slowly, but it kept on accelerating long beyond what Kiera thought was reasonable.

  "It's okay," Claire said. She grasped Kiera's hand. "This thing is probably safer than an airplane."

  The machine began to decelerate as they approached some sort of junction. There was a violent hissing sound as the brakes brought them to a complete stop. Fiona manipulated the levers and the nose began to rotate again, until they were facing a different track. This continued for some time, with Fiona navigating through the tunnels either through rote memory or by unseen markings. Eventually one side opened up to reveal the interior of the spire city, glowing pale blue with ethersteel stalagmites and stalactites as big as buildings. The submarine came to a halt at a loading platform. They left.

  The station was located in front of a building that resembled an underground airplane hangar, with the near face replaced by a lattice of glass windows. The huge glowing sign read: "Museum of Flight." Fiona led them inside.

  There were airplanes everywhere. Small flying machines made of wood and cloth, not unlike the contraptions made by Seth and Quinn, were suspended from the roof of the hangar by long cables. A fighter jet was parked by the door, painted white everywhere except the tails, which were painted black and decorated with a sigil that resembled a white raven. In the center of the hangar there was an odd machine that resembled a much larger version of the submarine outside. It was very long, bulbous around the middle and pointy at either end. It did not have wings, but instead it had huge fins on the tail end.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  "What is that thing?" Kiera asked.

  "Oh, that is Renna's starship," Fiona replied. "It is sort of like an airplane, but it is designed to fly through the space outside the conduits. Back before the war, Renna used that thing to fly to the witchstone. In spite of multiple flights, she was unable to open the Founder's Tomb. However she documented the surface of the witchstone. Follow me, I'll show you."

  There were several exhibits surrounding the strange craft, mostly ship's logs and engineering diagrams. The largest and most prominent was a landscape painting. It depicted a waterless, treeless desert of pale gray sand and jagged rocks. The subject at the center of the painting was clearly a Founder's Tomb, complete with the round stone door, an altar shrine, and a Memory Plate. There were two worlds in the sky, one blue and foggy, one pale yellow. They were connected by an airy conduit.

  "This is what she saw," Fiona said. "From outside that window, right up there. This is how our worlds looked from the witchstone."

  "Looks pretty boring," Claire observed.

  "The whole trip must have been terribly boring," a female voice added.

  The clattering of high-heeled shoes approached from behind. It was Sophia the Engineer, the Purple Dragon whelp. Her bob-cut purple hair was done up with a pair of long pins. She was wearing a white lab coat instead of the witch outfit Kiera had seen at the top of Spire Erika.

  "The flight lasted over a week," Sophia continued. "Most of the internal space was used to store dream-ether candles, so there wasn't much room to do anything fun."

  She turned to Kiera, then nodded.

  "Remembrancer. Welcome to my spire. Is there something you need?"

  "I can use dark-aspect weaves!" Claire announced excitedly. "Watch!"

  With a flick of her wrist, a hand of pure shadow extended straight up into the air, connected to Claire's own hand by a lanky, twisted arm of smokey blackness. When Claire closed her fingers into a fist, the shadow hand did as well. It made a choking, gurgling sound, fuzzy and electric, until Claire dismissed the weave and the thing vanished.

  "Impressive!" Sophia said. "And what about you?"

  "I cannot use those weaves," Kiera said. "No matter how hard I try. Lyn had an old book that explains why. There is a tenth aspect that can only be used by Remembrancers. We figured that it would be a complement to the ninth aspect, and at first I was hopeful. Watch."

  Kiera claimed a small amount of ether, then fed it into the only light-aspect weave that actually worked. It created a small ball of light in her palm, weak and cool, glistening with a rainbow sheen. It made a very gentle sound, high-pitched like windchimes. She released the weave and the light vanished. By then Sophia had frozen, eyes wide, mouth agape.

  "That's all I can do," Kiera said.

  "That's because you don't have the language," Sophia said.

  "Language?"

  "Yes, the Elemental Syntax Tree, or est."

  "A tree?" Kiera asked.

  "Like a family tree," Sophia explained. "Inverted, growing down like roots. You see, the woman who designed the magic system in our world was an engineer, like me. She thinks like an engineer, and that fact is reflected in the way magic works. We communicate with the Elementals in the Founder's Tombs through a certain language, structured as an est. There are terminal weaves, like the one you just demonstrated, as well as non-terminal weaves."

  "That makes perfect sense!" Claire said.

  "I don't quite follow," Kiera said.

  "It's not something they teach at the Eight Color Monastery," Sophia said. "It's easier to just memorize all the useful weaves because there is a finite number of them. You can think of weaves as being a request, or a command. The Elementals in the Founder's Tombs listen for these requests. They consume the dream-ether or spirit-ether, depending on the weave, and then they provide Elemental Power in return."

  "Wait," Claire said. "What happens if two people use the same weave at the same time? Also, what happens if you are very far away from the Founder's Tomb?"

  "Excellent questions. Elementals can be anywhere and everywhere in their respective Elemental Planes. They generally stay very close to their mothers, the Elemental Queens. The exception is the Elemental Queen of Darkness. She can travel anywhere in any Elemental Plane, but it takes twelve of Ingrid's heartbeats to do so. But.. that's not important. The Elementals do not necessarily share our perception of time."

  "Let's try to stay focused," Fiona said. "Can you help design a suitable language that will allow Kiera to use the new aspect?"

  "I can," Sophia said. "We will need to develop the non-terminals manually. But once that's done, we can start exploring the est space in search of weaves that work."