The air in Hangar Seven always tasted of three things: ozone, rusted metal, and the faint, sweet decay of old canvas. For seventeen-year-old Elara, it was the smell of home. Not the cozy, flower-box-lined cottage perched precariously on the lip of the Aetherian cliffs, but the sprawling, echoing cavern where her family's hopes—and income—had gone to die.
Aetheria was the pinnacle of human engineering, a city carved directly into the sheer face of the colossal, black-stone cliff known as the World's Spine. Below them stretched the endless, blinding white ocean of the Cloud Sea. Above them, nothing but the thin, clear blue sky. A century ago, Aetheria was the hub of the Skyfarer Age, when massive, wind-powered vessels—Sky-Galleons—sailed the upper air currents, charting floating islands and carrying precious, crystallized light known as 'Aether-Crystals' down to the surface world.
But the currents had shifted, the Sky-Galleons were grounded, and the technology was deemed too costly. Now, Aetheria subsisted on tourism and Elara's family, the Keldons, ran a modest but struggling map and chart shop.
"Elara! Are you down there still?"
The shout, sharp and slightly exasperated, belonged to her mother, Mariam.
Elara winced, brushing a thick layer of soot from her cheek. She was tucked into the smallest, dustiest corner of Hangar Seven, a space so neglected it hadn't seen a broom or a customer in fifty years. Her task was simple: clear out the 'junk' so her father could lease the prime space to a new, highly profitable Aether-Crystal souvenir vendor. The Keldon family needed the money. Desperately.
"Almost done, Mama!" she called back, her voice absorbed quickly by the cathedral-like ceiling.
The airship hangar was immense. Its centerpiece was the rotting, skeletal remains of the Wind-Dancer, the most famous of the Sky-Galleons—and the vessel her grandfather, Captain Jax Keldon, had last piloted before his mysterious disappearance thirty years prior. The ship was a monument to failure, its enormous canvas sails shredded like cobwebs, its hull a skeleton of blackened timber.
Elara hated the Wind-Dancer. It wasn't a romantic relic; it was the anchor dragging her family down.
She kicked at a pile of brittle, salt-encrusted rope, sending a puff of fine, grey dust into the single shaft of sunlight penetrating a high, grimy window. The rope had concealed a chest. Not a large treasure chest, but a small, heavy wooden box, bound by iron straps that were less rusty than everything else in the hangar.
Curiosity, always her primary weakness, overcame her dutiful task. She knelt, wiping the lid clean. The wood wasn't local pine; it was a dark, impossibly dense material, and etched deeply into the center of the lid was an unfamiliar, looping symbol: a stylised comet with wings.
"Please be something valuable," she muttered, trying to pry the iron clasps open. They wouldn't budge.
She reached for the heavy iron wrench she'd brought for leverage, but paused. There had to be a trick. She ran her fingers over the iron binding. It felt cold, almost too cold.
Then, she noticed it: a small, almost invisible indentation near the lock, shaped like a teardrop. It looked like a keyhole, but far too small for any key she knew. It looked… familiar.
She dropped the wrench, scrambling to her pocket. Among the worn pieces of charcoal, compass needles, and scrap paper she carried as part of her mapmaking apprenticeship was a small, polished piece of blue glass. It was her only heirloom from her grandfather—a trinket she'd worn on a leather cord since she was five. It was a perfect, almond-shaped drop, the color of the Sky Sea at twilight.
Elara had always assumed it was just cheap, colored glass.
With a sudden, nervous energy, she pressed the glass teardrop into the indentation.
There was no click, no grinding sound. Instead, a low, resonant hum filled the immense hangar, a sound that vibrated not in her ears, but in her bones. The blue glass suddenly flared, radiating a cool, soft light that traced lines of energy across the wood of the chest. The iron straps didn't spring open; they dissolved back into the dark wood, as if they were never there.
Elara caught her breath, her mind racing. This was no common lock. This was Aetherian technology, and it wasn't supposed to work anymore.
She lifted the lid.
Inside, nestled on a bed of faded velvet, was not gold, nor jewels, but a rolled-up blueprint, stiff and yellowed with age, and a single, heavy object wrapped carefully in oilcloth.
She unrolled the blueprint first. It was a highly detailed schematic, penned in her grandfather's unmistakable, meticulous hand. It depicted a ship—but not the Wind-Dancer. This was smaller, faster, and utterly unique. It had no sails. Instead, its propulsion system was centered around a spherical apparatus that glowed with intricate, spiraling runes. The blueprint was titled, in bold, sweeping letters: THE ORB OF AETHERIAL FLIGHT.
Beneath the title, a single, scribbled note read: Jax—For my Heir. The Path is Above. The Time is Now.
The realization hit her like a punch of cold air. Her grandfather hadn't just sailed the skies; he had been an inventor. And this wasn't some abandoned junk box—it was a message.
Her hands trembling, she unwrapped the heavy object in the oilcloth. It was a navigation tool, unlike any she had ever seen in her mother's shop. It looked like a standard brass sextant, but where the sighting telescope should have been, there was a shallow, bowl-like depression, and the arc was marked not with degrees of latitude, but with a complex celestial map she didn't recognize.
Most remarkable of all, resting in the center of the compass rose, was a solid, perfect sphere of crystallized light—a genuine, softball-sized Aether-Crystal. It wasn't the cloudy, manufactured kind sold to tourists; this was pure, humming energy, pulsing with a pale silver glow. It was worth more than their entire shop, hangar and house combined. It was the heart of the schematic.
Elara stared at the Crystal, the Orb of Aetherial Flight schematic, and the unique, heavy sextant. Her grandfather's map wasn't of the known world; it was a blueprint, a key, and a power source.
Her life, spent measuring the distances between known harbors and marking the borders of charted clouds, suddenly felt impossibly small. Her grandfather hadn't vanished; he had built a final, impossible pathway.
The Wind-Dancer still loomed over her, a decaying shadow, but now Elara looked beyond it, her eyes tracking the lines on the schematic.
The Path is Above.
She tucked the Aether-Crystal securely into the chest and rolled up the blueprint. She knew, with a certainty that chilled and thrilled her, that the 'junk' her family was trying to clear out wasn't the ruin of their legacy—it was the launchpad for a new one. The real clean-up job had just begun.