1 – The Wreck of The Glory of Tyria

[Author's note: I really enjoyed writing The Engineer and the Ingenu, but I started it back in 2014 and the game has changed (and expanded) a lot since then. Even Von Ffeldy has matured somewhat (whether the author has is questionable, however). There's so much new material to mine, so I hope you don't mind if I have a little fun. This picks up roughly four years after the end of The Engineer and the Ingenu, but feel free to jump in here if you'd like. Special thanks to Tiffany for encouraging me to pick this up again. As before, all song lyrics are my own, though they may be based on tunes from elsewhere.]


The Glory is an airship, for Maguuma lands she's bound,

There to kill an Elder Dragon who lays waiting on the ground.

The Commander gives the order to sail into the sun

And the Pact fleet it will not return 'til Mordremoth is done.

.

Raise your glass to the Endurance, and the Lady Livia too,

Raise your glass to Sword of Smodor, Whitebear's Pride, Scortchrazor II,

The Legacy of Owl, Cryptonym and Slice of Sky

We're off to kill some mordrem, and to watch a dragon die.

.

~ A recording of this airship shanty was recovered from the strongbox of The Glory of Tyria in the Heart of Maguuma. Many of the voices heard singing perished only minutes later, during Mordremoth's attack.


Dusk came early to the Heart of Maguuma. Shadows lengthened in the early afternoon and flocks of birds rose flapping from the jungle canopy, confused by the sudden darkness. A curious young eagle ascended on an updraft, wings rippling, to challenge the strange black cloud that blocked out the sun. Her feathers scraped the sides of a strange wooden gondola that floated over the forest, and she realized this was no cloud.

Airships. Hundreds of them.

They scudded silently through the muggy air, all moving together like an encroaching fogbank. The eagle swooped up over the nearest airship, her wingtips skimming the surface of its huge fabric hull. Thunderbreaker was painted on the side in fancy white lettering. She couldn't read, yet she heard voices from the gondola, carried on the wind.

"Pact Engineer Ffeldy!"

"Aye Captain!"

Beyond the glazed gondola window, a female sylvari stood at the helm, her telescope trained on the canopy below. "We're about to drop a kitten-ton of munitions on Mordremoth. Ready the release valve on balloonet one, so we don't launch into the stratosphere when we lose our ballast."

"I'm on it." A youngish human double-timed along the deck, then nimbly climbed to the roof of the gondola and stretched up to fit a wrench on the balloonet valve. "Ready to maintain neutral buoyancy!" he shouted.

The eagle had seen enough. She tucked her wings and dove through the canopy to alert her forest allies.

Pact Engineer Ffeldy braced himself against the warm, invigorating jungle breeze and clutched the valve's handle, ready to throw his entire weight on his wrench the second he felt the gondola buck upwards from the impending ballast dump. In his head, he calculated how much air to release, based on the exact weight of the munitions—a number slightly more accurate than "kitten-ton."

The jungle air smelled of heady exotic flora and rotten fruit, and the humidity made him sweat. Ffeldy's aetherblade skyfarer's coat—captured during the battle for Lion's Arch—flapped around him, and his golden Seraph wing shield shuddered against his back where it was firmly strapped. A pistol with the telltale crystalized finish of asuran design rode the holster on his thigh.

"Steady on! Hold your positions!"

The order came from a gilded greenish Sylvari standing on the deck of the massive airship floating to the left and slightly below Thunderbreaker. It was Glory of Tyria, flagship of the Pact fleet, and it carried an assortment of VIPs, to include Pact Marshal Trahearne and the re-formed Destiny's Edge. Ffeldy had only met Captain Logan Thackeray in person, but he'd glimpsed the others in passing, and easily identified the figures of Zojja, Eir, and Logan on Glory's deck. Trahearne stood at the pointed stern.

"Hold, I say!"

With a whoosh, the hundred-odd airships extended their fin-like airbrakes and coasted gradually to a halt, where they bobbed gently in sky, reminding Ffeldy of sleeping quaggans riding the swells in Frostgorge Sound. He glanced down at the peaceful green canopy. Threads of doubt squeezed his insides. Fear cottoned his mouth, making his tongue feel thick and dry. Was Mordremoth—or some vulnerable part of him—really hiding down there in the forest? Perhaps they were about to unleash an inferno on some unsuspecting Hylek village by accident and he'd have to live with the guilt for the rest of his life.

Too late to turn back now.

"Fire!"

Thunderbreaker lurched upwards. Her lethal payload rocketed downward into the forest canopy. Thin contrails of smoke streaked the sky where, all around Ffeldy, the hundred airships fired in unison at Mordremoth. Hopefully. Ffeldy hauled on the valve with all his strength as air hissed through. He counted: one, two, three…and shut it again as Thunderbreaker's altitude stabilized.

A whooshing sound made him turn. Huge thorny vines shot from the canopy like grappling hooks, ensnaring many of the lower airships around him. Thunderbreaker bucked again in the turbulent air, her tailfins flapped, and she rotated slowly around—too slowly, blast it—until her needle-sharp nosecone pointed directly at the vulnerable fabric hide of The Glory of Tyria.

"Not good," Ffeldy murmured as a strange chill blew past his neck, despite the heat. "Against protocol. Bad. Bad!"

Thunderbreaker's nose dipped as she slid into a dive towards the bigger flagship. Ffeldy threw himself off the gondola's roof and rolled to his feet on the tilting deck. He hadn't thought to put his wrench back in his tool belt, and brandished it like a weapon as he charged into the cockpit.

He slipped almost immediately and slid on his knees across the floor, streaking some dark, slippery substance behind him. Blood. He glanced over his shoulder. Agenixx, the asuran first mate, slumped in a dark puddle near the door.

Oh [kitten].

Wulfgrr the charr navigator should have been at his map table in the corner, but all Ffeldy could see was a charr-sized hole smashed through the glass. Sylvari Captain Diarmid still stood stood at the controls on the upper deck, her purple foliage tinted a dark, bloody red in the flame-light from the sky battlefield all around them. As she turned her head, clearly expecting him, a sickening green glow filled her eyes. Mordremoth had turned her. She had killed the crew. All but one.

"Captain? You look a bit...stressed. Let me fetch you a mug that rosehip tea you like…" Ffeldy prayed to Dwayna that he'd completely misinterpreted the situation. Through the broken cockpit window, he saw the canvas hull of The Glory of Tyria growing closer at an alarming rate. Captain Diarmid, who until moments ago Feldy had respected as a cheerful, ambitious officer, raised a dagger and hurled it at his head.

Ffeldy threw himself flat on the blood-streaked floor, and the dagger thunked into the wood near his shoulder. He chucked his wrench at her before he knew what he was doing. It bounced off her temple, stunning her long enough for him to strap his wing-shield to his arm and leap onto the platform, using the shield's pressure blast to send her careening against an unbroken frame of the window.

Ffeldy grasped the controls and forced Thunderbreaker into a tight turn away from The Glory of Tyria. "Climb, you kitten, climb," he said through gritted teeth, pumping the altitude peddle for all he was worth. He knew Captain Diarmid wasn't finished yet, and doubted the concussion he'd given her had vanquished Mordremoth from her body. Not body—just an empty husk. The Captain Diarmid he'd known was already dead, though her husk groaned, her green eyes flashed open, and she came whirling at him like a dagger tornado.

Ffeldy sidestepped the onslaught and blinded her with an electric blast from his pistol. He hadn't used anything lethal against her. He couldn't kill his captain. Except that he had no choice.

"She's already dead," he whispered to reassure himself. "A husk. A husk inhabited by the enemy." He wasn't entirely sure if that was true.

Thunderbreaker rose above the fray, nose pointed safely at empty air. In his peripheral vision, Ffeldy glimpsed The Glory's gondola splitting in two, engulfed by vines. Then the flagship vanished behind a curtain of flames and smoke. Only the Six could help her now.

Captain Diarmid struck blindly at the air, then recovered enough to thrust a dagger into Ffeldy's shieldblock. He abandoned the controls—let the ship drift where she would—and dashed for the outer deck, hoping Captain Diarmid would chase him, which she did. At some point he'd summon the courage to kill her, but for now he hoped she'd tumble off the precarious gondola edge without much assistance.

As Ffeldy headed for the stern, he saw that all was not well. Another damaged airship had swooped in out of nowhere, dragging dangerous loose ropes that caught on Thunderbreaker's right sail-fin. The ropes sagged as Thunderbreaker coasted past, then grew taught and jerked the craft hard. Ffeldy lost his balance and hit the deck face-first, nearly breaking his nose. Behind him, Captain Diarmid, through some dark dragon power apparently, kept her feet.

"Ahoy, friend!" shouted an incongruously cheerful voice from the other airship. "You're still alive, good man! Well done. Keep up the good work! It's been an entertaining show, but we've got a banquet back at Lion's Arch at eight, and it'll take a good five hours sailing to arrive in a timely manner. Tally ho, charge on, etcetera etcetera."

Ffeldy squinted up at the other airship, simultaneously blocking another attack from his former captain and stunning her with a resonance wave. That was no Pact airship. It was a civilian model from Kryta, an air-yacht for nobility, and a crowd of gaily-dressed voyeurs were lounging on the deck. Faren's Flyer.

Balthazar's Balls.

The civilian airship strained against the tangled line, but it was stuck fast to the larger Thunderbreaker.

"Say, my good peasant, would you haul yourself up on that fin of yours and cut us free? We seem to be a bit stuck…"

Feldy faced the speaker—it had to be Lord Faren himself—and held his hand up in a rude gesture. Then he fired a few ineffectual darts at Captain Diarmid, dodge-rolled away from her next attack, and hauled himself up onto the gondola roof.

As Thunderbreaker's engineer, he'd climbed over every inch of the aircraft and now clambered up a flimsy rope ladder that draped over the top of her inflatable canvas hull. As much as he yearned to disregard Lord Faren's humiliating order, he knew cutting the line was their only chance. With neither ship able to maneuver, they were slowly sinking towards a burning ridge in the Mordrem-infested jungle.

"Let me dominate you, you cowardly skritt!" the captain hollered behind him. "Submit to Mordremoth."

"I'm good, thanks." Ffeldy climbed on as best he could while she jiggled the ladder from below, trying to dislodge him. His knuckles white, his collar drenched in sweat, Ffeldy clawed his way to the top of Thunderbreaker's inflatable hull. His lungs burned but he couldn't pause to catch his breath, and sprinted across the top, bouncing with every step. Faren's Flyer had wrenched Thunderbreaker's tangled fin off her hinges, though the steel supporting cables still held. Even if he cut her free, he'd never get her home in one piece.

Home. His cozy rented flat in the Salma District of Divinity's Reach, with hooks in the ceiling for hanging his hammock when he wasn't bunking in an airship's hold. The shelf of trinkets he'd collected from his travels. The communal kitchen outside where he cooked butternut squash soup and veggie pizza alongside his neighbors. The pub that had thrown him out for dancing on the tables. His friends from the training academy, scattered to the winds across Tyria. It had been years since he'd seen them. Maybe he never would again…

"It's over, filthy human. I will send you into the Domain of the Lost." Captain Diarmid had arrived at the top of the airship, but she had changed in the moments Ffeldy had lost sight of her. Her violet foliage had stretched and grown so that she appeared taller, her arms more powerful, even her daggers were now the length of swords and appeared fused to her hands. Ffeldy didn't even consider trying to block her attacks now. He could tell by looking at her that she could now kill him with a single blow.

He should have just killed her when he had the chance.

Diarmid raised her massive blades and whirled them around her head, then rushed Ffeldy with a windmill attack.

"Any day now!" shouted Lord Faren from his flyer. "We're going to miss the hors d'oeuvres."

Ffeldy didn't have the breath to curse either of them out, so he took a running jump and landed on the broken fin. If only he'd remembered to bring a knife. He stabbed the rope fibers with a screwdriver, the sharpest tool in his belt, until they at last began to fray and unravel from the tension.

A familiar-sounding whoosh made him wince. Mordremoth's thorny tentacled vines whipped upward from the jungle and smacked Thunderbreaker like a toy. The fin wrenched free just as the line to Faren's Flyer snapped. Ffeldy tumbled head-first down into the void of black smoke.