The white-uniformed marines of Roskvir's platoon swayed like blades of grass in the wind as their airship lurched. He could feel their descent, though he couldn't see it, in the steady rise in his stomach always matching opposite a fall through the clouds. It was a familiar sensation, across every unfamiliar sky.

He made out nervous expressions of the soldiers all around him, as uniform among them as their white coats. The only exception was Thjali, standing beside him. Or at least, more so beside him, than she was to anyone else. Despite the hold's cramped space, each of the rank-and-file marines kept a healthy distance away from the vizeadmiral.

Her silver-blonde hair was drawn back into a bun, baring her trademark cool indifference to all in full glory. Not that he was nervous, himself. It was far from his first time plummeting toward battle. But she was almost inhuman. Her blank smile was twice as unsettling, basking in the presence of so many she made so afraid.

A bell rang in short trills.

"Action stations, action stations! All hands, ready for landfall!"

The soldiers around Roskvir made last-minute mental preparations, their eyes hard and distant.

The air thickened as they continued to descend, making the turbulent rumblings of the hold ever more intense and frequent. Roskvir could hear the approach of gunfire then, a dotted rhythm far away but quickly growing louder. It was more subdued than he'd expected.

Roskvir sensed the distant manifestation of a sjaelsvaben. At first, the character of its aura felt similar to that of Thjali's. 

He glanced down, and saw rapacious curiosity twinkling in the dark eyes that met his. She felt it, too.

It felt far away, yet somehow still intense. After a few seconds, the aura disappeared, before he could further explore its sensation. 

Something else had taken its place, though, even as faint as the first presence had been: a feeling both expected and unusual. 

Not unlike the tension of an airship's hold of soldiers before a battle. That was present too, of course, but distinct and separate from that new feeling. It was some much grander, distant thing, great and terrible. Like a vast, consuming fire, only waiting for the moment to catch.

But then another sequence of ringing trilled, different that time. The hold quaked as the ship arrested its descent, then rocked and bounced with uncaring violence as they landed. The doors of the hold opened, gunfire at once roaring loud and ever present, and Roskvir's boots hit the sand of a beach of an unknown shore.

* * *

High in the thin air, floating with the clouds, began to descend a chariot of white.

Tall and wide as an island, it hung aloft in the sky almost indifferent to the turbulence of air pressure, the violence of the great winds, or the petty squabbles of those mortal beings below.

Deep in the great hull of that airship, past its batteries and barracks and engines and observatories, sat a man in a chamber of glass. 

Eyes closed, incense burning, fountain trickling, he sat alone in his opulent privacy. His vessel's flight like polished tile, without the slightest interruption or imperfection, refusing to disturb the serenity of his meditation.

Cross-legged, breathing slow, cloistered within his own thoughts, he was still, as was his ship of ships.

But far away, the world shifted.

A shockwave tore through the air, passing his throne on its circuit, thundering across the whole of the world and then back again.

The great ship swayed as the wave passed, moved from its formidable silence. The hull shook ever so slightly, reverberating for a single moment, like the very end of a held note.

Then the airship settled still once more, and he sighed, utterly content.