“Good to see you on your feet, Captain,” said Bloodmoon, looking up from a report as Adeena moved onto the bridge. Her entire body was still aching from the after-effects of passing through the holy barrier. The wounds were long since closed, but that must have been a particularly powerful shield, not only because of how badly it had messed her up, but because of how it had stopped a fey lord.

  She’d been laid out for the better part of two periods, but thankfully nothing seemed to have happened, and she’d woken to find them passing over an area of Elysium – which, thankfully, seemed to be indifferent to their presence above it.

  “We’re still heading south?” asked Adeena, peering out of the windows. “And… we’re moving slower?”

  “Yes – we’re down to one sort-of working engine,” said Bloodmoon. “Miracle that the Lady was able to get it going as it is. We need to set down somewhere for proper repairs, can’t do them underway.”

  “Shouldn’t we be heading back to the Imperium, then?” said Adeena.

  “I did the maths, we wouldn’t make it back before the Night,” said Bloodmoon. “But that sorceress of yours, she says there is a safe place – a grimalkin town: ‘Meowlington.’”

  Meowlington was a legend, a folk-tale that stretched back far before the Wyrdcoming. Apparently it was located somewhere in the Moonwood, a large stretch of forest a few leagues north of Crowncourt that had been renowned for its monsters – often of fey origin. No one, however, had ever found it, and Clawdia had always been evasive and vague about its existence – until she’d confirmed back in Draz Lorcha, out of the blue, by saying that areas of the Wyrd could be anchored to a place in Ruvera by a sufficiently powerful being. Apparently, it seemed, Meowlington was such a place – perhaps aided by the fact it might have existed partly in the Real before the Wyrd.

  Bloodmoon signed the document and handed the report back to one of her crew. “Fancy that drink now, Captain?” she said. “You don’t look like you shouldn’t be standing, and things are quiet for now.”

  Adeena shrugged. “Sure,” she said, following the goblin off the bridge and to her nearby cabin.

  It was similar to the one Adeena shared with her crew-mates, but not quite as crammed full of beds and all of Clawdia and Heidi’s seemingly endless junk.

  “I’ve got some good rice-wine here,” said Bloodmoon, holding up a bottle as Adeena lowered herself onto the couch. “Three hundred cycles – gift from the Skyrender’s crew when I ‘retired.’ Shall we?”

  “I make it a policy never to refuse good wine,” said Adeena.

  The goblin poured two glasses, and offered one to Adeena. She sniffed it, before smiling and sipping at the clear liquid. It was very good, a bit icy, as was the fashion in the Imperium. “Mind if I smoke?” she asked, pulling a cigar from her pocket.

  “Only if you don’t share,” said the goblin.

  Adeena smiled and pulled out a second, lightning them with a snap of her fingers before handing one on.

  “So, gone as you expected?” said Bloodmoon.

  “I mean… sort of?” said Adeena. “I was expecting danger, but not going this far south when I signed up. What about you?”

  “Knew it could get hairy,” said the goblin. “But a Pandemonium Sky-ship? Being shot down by Godlings? No, I didn’t see that coming. We’re damn lucky you got that diamond too.”

  She paused.

  “What injured you?” she asked after a moment.

  Adeena raised an eyebrow.

  “No one can figure it,” said Bloodmoon. “Sorry, I guess it’s some secret, but it’s all anyone’s talking about. You walked off a Pandemonium sky-ship after crippling the damn thing without a scratch – made me wonder if those stupid books I read about you as a kid were actually true.”

  “They’re not,” said Adeena. “And as ever the truth, in both cases, is less interesting than the stories.”

  “And…?” said Bloodmoon. “Why’d you just fall over in the snow? Some people say you had burns? But by the time they got you to the infirmary you weren’t hurt.”

  Adeena shrugged. “Apologies, Captain, but I’m afraid you’ll have to keep wondering – it’s personal, not something I share,” she said. “It isn’t a threat to your ship, if that is your concern.”

  “Didn’t ever think you were the threat,” said Bloodmoon, somewhat disappointed. “Those damn priests though. You know that bloody Dragonsworn didn’t even tell me they were the ones who got my ship shot down? Not until after I’d agree to captain this damn mission.”

  “That does sound like something she’d do,” said Adeena.

  “Woman’s a menace,” grumbled Bloodmoon. “Still, guess we’ve no choice, we’re on ‘her side.’”

  “With any luck it was just some stupid spat,” said Adeena.

  “Lady ordered them to cut it out, so let’s hope it’s over,” said Bloodmoon. “Still, don’t like having them aboard. Even if they seem to be behaving themselves.”

  They lapsed into a brooding, but somewhat companionable silence.

  “So, repairs in Meowlington, then head back?” said Adeena after a while.

  “That’s up to the Lady,” said Bloodmoon. “She was shaken by going down, but dragons don’t think like we do – I have no idea what she’ll decide to do. Think we’ll be safe, landing somewhere in the Feywilde?”

  “Grimalkin can be annoying, but they’re not malicious,” said Adeena. “And they must have some protections around their town to keep the nastier stuff out.”

  “Fingers crossed,” said Bloodmoon. “I-”

  There was a knock at the door.

  “Yes?” said Bloodmoon.

  “Captain,” said one of the crew, poking their head in. “We’re approaching a fey forest – Ms. Clawdia says were getting close.”

  “Ah, duty calls,” said Bloodmoon, setting her barely touched rice-wine aside, but keeping her cigar.

  Adeena finished her glass, and then followed the goblin out, back onto the bridge. Below them, the golden fields and white stone of Elysium had given way to the Feywilde. A lush, vibrant green forest rolled away beneath them, punctuated here and there by a massive red-capped mushroom the size of a house, or flowers so large they competed with the trees for sunlight. Glittering ponds poked through here and there, along with the occasional roof of what was probably a hag’s hut as well as stone dolems and other almost certainly weirdly cursed landmarks.

  “There,” said Clawdia, who was pressed against the glass. “We see it, by the river.”

  “Can you give me a heading, Ms. Clawdia?” asked Bloodmoon.

  “There!” said Clawdia.

  Bloodmoon sighed and pulled a compass from her pocket, moving over to Clawdia and trying to see what she was staring at. “Where?”

  “There!”

  “Clawdia, we can’t see where you mean, point,” said Adeena.

  The feline woman yowled and pulled back, gesturing wildly. “There!”

  It took a while.

  In fact, it took so long that the ship had to adjust course by almost forty-five degrees before they were heading towards the barely visible settlement. They slowed as they approached, coming to a stop directly above the town and beginning to descend. The air shifted as they passed from the Ruveran sky into the Feywilde. Whereas the Shadowmeere had seemed to suck the light and colour and emotion from everything, the Feywilde was the opposite: Adeena felt her mood improve, the world around them appeared brighter, and the air took on a kind of crispness it was difficult to really describe.

  A very excited Clawdia raced out of the bridge, and Adeena followed her up onto the deck, holding onto her feline friend’s body to make sure she didn’t pitch over the side of the vessel.

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  “We’ve never seen it from the air!” said Clawdia excitedly, pointing. “Look, there’s our tower!”

  Said ‘tower’ appeared to be some kind of rickety treehouse, suspended precariously on a branch half-way up an unusually large maple tree. Well, if not that one, it was presumably one of the dozens of other ramshackle buildings built in and around a collection of trees beside a bend in the river. There didn’t seem to be any real theme to the ‘buildings,’ except perhaps that they were all painted bright colours. There were hundreds of grimalkin, more than Adeena had ever seen in one place before, lounging about, napping curled up, yowling and batting at each other, fishing with rods in the river, or wandering about. There were no obvious defences for the town, but nonetheless it felt safe, sleepy, and incredibly comfortable.

  Many of the grimalkin looked up as the Firestorm slowly descended towards a large open area beside the river where a herd of cows with tinkling bells were munching on grass. The Firestorm came to a very careful stop perhaps a meter above the meadow, and before Adeena could stop her, Clawdia had hurled herself off the side of the ship and landed on the ground.

  Adeena took the less insane way down, and descended a lowered gangway along with a very excited little dragon, a worried looking Ser Samara, and Melicende.

  They were met by a small delegation of grimalkin dressed in an eclectic rainbow of different clothing, but amongst which cravats, scarves, smart coats, and hats featured prominently.

  One of them, a grey tabby-coloured grimalkin stepped forward and drew his rapier with a flourish.

  “Who goes there?” he demanded. “Identify yourselves at once, in the name of the Meowlington Militia!”

  “Meowlington doesn’t have a militia, go away, the Lord Milktongue,” said Clawdia, batting her paw at the air. “These are our friends, they need to make some repairs to their ship-thing.”

  “Ha ha! The Marquess Sorceress First Lieutenant Clawdia Bobblewhisk has been away too long!” he said. “Meowlington does have a militia, and we are its Captain! The Captain Lord Milktongue!”

  “The Lord Milktongue got the rotating chair last phase,” said one of the other grimalkin, hissing at him. “The Lord Milktongue is the only member, no one else wanted to join.”

  “And as its only member, the Earl Purrcy, we are the Captain!” said ‘the Lord Milktongue.’ “And as the Captain, we demand to know what these people are doing here!”

  “We just need to make some repairs, Mr. Captain Lord Milktongue,” said Aeviexisitrixia politely. “We won’t cause any trouble, really. I’m Aeviexisitrixia, and this is Sammy and Melly and Addy – oh, she’s a Captain too!”

  Adeena blinked. Addy? Since when was she ‘Addy?’

  “Well… we suppose that’s alright then,” said Lord Milktongue, sheathing his sword and tipping his feathered hat, which was more feather than anything else, to Adeena. “The Captain Addy.” He looked up at their ship. “Say, do the Aeviexistrixia, the Sammy, the Melly, and the Captain Addy, have lot of soldiers on that ship, perchance?”

  “A few, why?” asked Adeena.

  “Ah ha!” he said brightly. “Better come to see the Duchess-Professor-Archwizard-Doctor Jennifur then. The Duchess-Professor-Archwizard-Doctor Jennifur will want to converse with the visitors!”

  “OK!” said Aeviexisitrixia brightly.

  “This… place seems harmless enough,” said Melicende, turning up her nose at the ramshackle town. “I shall leave the Lady in your capable hands, Ser Samara.”

  Ser Samara didn’t seem too enthused to explore the grimalkin’s home either, but little Aeviexisitrixia was bouncing in the air with delight as she floated after the waddling, swishing tail of Lord Milktongue. Adeena followed after them with Clawdia, looking around with interest at what was apparently Clawdia’s home.

  The grimalkin sorceress had been with Adeena a long time, but in between jobs or when they were travelling had often wandered off for a while on a feypath – presumably back here – and met up again with the company at a later date. Occasionally, very occasionally, she’d even been useful and used the paths to deliver letters across the world quickly and the like – although that had normally taken a lot of cajoling and bribery.

  There were a few market stalls set up beneath the canopy along what seemed to be the central road, with signs in Sylvan that Adeena could sort of hazard out: one sold fish, another milk, another ‘shiny rocks.’ No currency seemed to be changing hands, however, and instead the stall owners seemed to just argue with their customers for a while before handing over something – perhaps in exchange for some favour owed.

  Clawdia peeled off at the fish stand.

  “Hey, the Viscountess Anne Chovey, give us a fish!” she opened with.

  Adeena passed from earshot as the two were arguing about how Clawdia was, or alternately wasn’t, a ‘rotten grimalkin who stretched her promises.’

  The path wended this way and that through the charmingly chaotic town, past a bar that seemed to serve nothing but shots of milk, a workshop named the ‘Meowlington String and Yarn Cooperative,’ and a large ‘good scratching tree’ that had clearly been gouged by hundreds of thousands of claws.

  Eventually they reached a house that was a bit larger and grander than the others – although just as chaotic. Unlike the others that had been built on branches or in the lee of trees, this one was actually made out of a still living tree – something that presumably required quite a lot of tricky magic. It had bright blue shutters painted with stars which were opened wide, and tinny Althaean music was playing on what was presumably some kind of magi-tek device.

  Ser Samara had to stoop to very low to get through the door as they followed Lord Milktongue, and they found themselves in a large circular room lined with shelves that groaned with thousands of books on sorcery. There was a small kitchenette, a basket with a star embroided blanket near the window, and a large pond in the floor at the centre, over which stood a Grimalkin woman with long brown fur dressed in a blue cloak embroided with stars and a massive wizards’ hat of similar design that had holes cut for her ears.

  The female grimalkin was staring intently into the depths of the pond, where there were fish swimming, her head cocking this way and that.

  “Honoured guests,” said Lord Milktongue. “Allow me to present the Duchess-Doctor-Professor-Archwizard Jennifur-”

  “The Duchess-Doctor-Archwizard-Professor Jennifur!” corrected the other Grimalkin woman grumpily, looking up and yawning. “Who are these?”

  “This is the Lady Aeviexisitrixia of the Dragons, the Ser Samara of the Dragonsworn, and the Captain Adeena Yassin,” he said, having worried their proper names and titles out of them on the walk over. “The Duchess-Doctor-Archwizard-Professor-”

  “The Archwizard-Professor-Doctor-Duchess!” ‘corrected’ Jennifur.

  Ser Samara sighed and rubbed her face with a gauntlet. Adeena heard her mutter something that might have been ‘I hate grimalkin.’

  “Our apologies, the Archwizard-Professor-Doctor-Duchess! But, listen, these ones have soldiers!” said Lord Milktongue excitedly.

  “Hmm,” she said, sniffing at them. “What’s the dragon doing here?”

  “We’re investigating the Wyrd!” said Aeviexisitrixia brightly. “I’m trying to locate the point of origin.”

  “Hmm,” said the grimalkin turning and peering at them more closely, and in doing so revealing a brightly gleaming ring on one of her paws.

  Adeena was mystically sensitive; she could feel magical energy around her in a similar way to people could feel heat and cold. Her senses weren’t particularly well honed, certainly not as well as a sorcerers’ had to be, but she could still immediately tell that the ring on the grimalkin’s furry ‘finger’ was an immensely powerful object, one of the strongest she had ever encountered.

  What it did, she had no idea, but if it was indicative of how powerful this grimalkin was, then she was the kind of being that might be able to stand up to the likes of the King of Crows. She might even have counted as a ‘fey lord’ herself.

  “Then perhaps these ones can be useful,” said Jennifur, pulling a book from the bottom of a pile. The other books toppled and fell, but the grimalkin seemed indifferent as they crashed to the floor behind her. “The Lady Aeviexstrixia of the Dragons is interested in the Wyrd? These are the notes we made and readings we took, documenting the phenomenon during its early stages. It contains an estimated point of origin.”

  “Oh wow! From this place?” said Aeviexisitrixia. “Can I have a look?”

  Jennifur sniffed. “No,” she said. “Not yet. We want something first.”

  “Oh! A trade?” said Aeviexisitrixia. “That’s what fey do, isn’t it? Hmm… let’s see, what I can offer? Well, you’re also a sorceress, right? I could trade you a pass to the library at the Imperium’s College of the Arcane? We have the biggest collection in the world!”

  Jennifur sniffed again. “No,” she said. “Useless. We can’t leave Meowlington, not until the problem is solved.”

  “What’s the problem?” asked Aeviexisitrixia.

  “Does the Lady Aeviexistrixia of the Dragons know of the fey-courts? The Queens of Dreaming and Night?” said Jennifur.

  “Yes! I’ve read several books,” nodded Aeviexisitrixia. “Ways of the Fey by my cousin Resiltrarius, and of course The Twin Courts by the elvish scholar Gascon-”

  “Then the Lady Aeviexistrixia of the Dragons understands enough to know that the Queens of Dreaming and Night are rulers who ever vie for power within the Feywilde,” said Jennifur.

  “Oh, um, yes – the eternal conflict,” nodded Aeviexisitrixia. “Why?”

  “Because there are those who do not wish to indulge in their idiocy, who only wish to be left alone – such as us, we Free Fey,” said Jennifur. “We founded the Commune of Meowlington to be a refuge from them, long ago, and phased it into a part of Ruvera. For a long time, we were left in peace. But this Wyrd changed that, opened permanent rifts to the Feywilde again.”

  She held up her ring. Now that Adeena looked it at, it did seem to be projecting some kind of aura that made her feel safe and comfortable.

  “This protects the town from any aligned with the Courts,” she continued. “But it does not protect against Wild Fey. The Queen of Dreaming know this, and has made court in the human city of Crowncourt. The Queen of Dreaming uses hunters to drive ogres and trolls and the like into Meowlington. We have been forced to stay here on watch ever since, and we grow tired of it.”

  Adeena wasn’t sure if Jennifur was referring to herself as needing to remain on watch, or the town more generally – speaking in the plural was one of the annoying things about the grimalkin.

  “And you want us to try and get them to stop?” said Adeena.

  Jennifur nodded. “Yes,” she said. “In exchange, we will give the Lady Aeviexstrixia of the Dragons our notes.”

  “Well, that does sound fair,” said Aeviexisitrixia.

  “My Lady, convincing such a powerful fey may be… beyond our means,” said Ser Samara. “Our ship is damaged, and even once it is repaired, surely it would be better to return to the Imperium rather than continue our journey – it is almost the Waxing. What is more, until we effect repairs, we would have to send any party overland to Crowncourt, through a fey forest.”

  “We would not advise flying the… machine close to Crowncourt,” said Jennifur. “The Queen of Dreaming would likely see it as a threat, or perhaps an impertinence.”

  “Even more reason we should steer clear of her,” said Ser Samara.

  “But Sammy, we’ve come so far!” protested Aeviexisitrixia. “And if we go back now… it will be ages until I can launch another trip! Mother and Father were ever so cross with me, and after they hear about the Pandemonium ship attack, and the crash… they’ll nag me so!” The small dragon turned to Adeena. “Addy, you have a grimalkin in your party –Ms. Clawdia– she could guide you through the forest to Crowncourt, could she not?”

  Adeena shifted uneasily. “She… could,” admitted Adeena. “She once guided my company and I through a feyroad. It is rather dangerous though…”

  “Wonderful!” said Aeviexisitrixia, clapping her hands. “Then Addy will go and convince the Queen to leave Meowlington alone, and then we will find out where the Wyrd began!”

  When it was put like that, Adeena could almost believe it would be simple. Almost. Why had she signed up for this trip again?

  A.N. Supporters on my can now read four weeks ahead on all my works!

  , a Doctor Who-esque, episodic space-fantasy adventure, which is available to read here on Royal Road, and a Portal Fantasy/Isekai story, which is currently only up on my Patreon.