Certified Wookiee Enthusiast

„Aislinn had been suspicious from the moment Marni led her onto the small airship without offering a single explanation. “Are you going to tell me what this is about?” she asked as Delesyia grew smaller beneath them. “Patience, darling.”

She gave him a deeply unimpressed look. “You dragged me several thousand feet into the air for-” “Turn around.“

Still frowning, Aislinn turned toward the railing and froze. Something enormous was emerging through the clouds behind them. First came the long metallic beak, then the angular head, and finally two colossal mechanical wings spreading against the blue sky. Sunlight flashed across steel and brass as the machine swept closer, its engines rumbling like distant thunder. A giant metal bird, soaring as though it were alive. Aislinn’s mouth fell open. “No…” Marni stepped up beside her, watching her rather than the machine. “Is that-” “The Ironwing REN-X.

Her head snapped toward him and immediately back again. “YOU FINISHED IT?!” Whatever composure she possessed vanished instantly. She rushed forward against the railing as Ironwing approached, leaning so dangerously far over it that Marni immediately slipped an arm around her waist and pulled her firmly back against him. She barely seemed to notice.

“Look at the wings! You actually solved the articulation problem! Is that the stabilizer we discussed? Oh my God, you actually used it- wait, let me see-” She tried to lean forward again. Marni’s arm tightened around her waist.

“Perhaps you better admire it from inside the airship.” “But I need to see the lower mechanism!” “You also won’t see much of it while plummeting toward Delesyia.” “Oh, stop being dramatic.” She gave back while being halfway over the railing. His grin slowly softened into something far more genuine. He had imagined this moment countless times while building it, wondered what she would say, which details she would notice first, whether she would understand just how much work had gone into making the impossible fly.

Of course she did. She always did.

„The grand hall of Castle Delesyia glittered beneath countless chandeliers, their warm light dancing across polished marble and gilded balconies. Noble houses from every corner of the country had gathered beneath its vaulted ceiling, their voices blending into the steady swell of music and celebration.

Tonight was held in honor of Marni’s latest invention. As always, the people admired him. They toasted his brilliance, praised his vision, spoke his name with admiration that bordered on reverence. And, as always, Marni found every minute of it exhausting.

The only tolerable part of the evening was the woman standing opposite him as the orchestra struck up a Deleysian waltz. Aislinn. His Foxy.

The room seemed almost painfully aware of them. Whispers followed them as they stepped onto the dance floor together. Curious eyes lingered a little too long. Courtiers exchanged knowing smiles behind crystal glasses.

So the rumors are true…

Look at the way they look at each other.

Neither of them acknowledged it. Marni rested one hand lightly against her back while the other enclosed hers. Effortlessly, they fell into the rhythm of the dance, moving with the practiced ease of two people who had long since learned how to anticipate one another.

Foxy disliked crowds. He knew that. He could feel the subtle tension in her shoulders despite the composed smile she offered the watching nobility. Her fingers tightened ever so slightly around his hand whenever applause erupted somewhere nearby. Without thinking, he drew her just a fraction closer. Not enough for anyone else to notice. Enough for her. She relaxed.

His gaze settled on her. On the copper-red hair that caught the candlelight like living fire. On the pale grey eyes that, for perhaps the first time since he had known her, avoided meeting his own—not out of uncertainty, but because she seemed almost… embarrassed.

It suited her terribly.

She had never been embarrassed by anything. Not by failed experiments. Not by explosions. Not by challenging him in front of an entire council meeting when everyone else simply nodded along.

She had never treated him like Deleysia’s great inventor. She had treated him like he was just… Marni.

His equal. The only person who could follow every impossible leap his mind made without asking him to slow down. The only person who argued because she genuinely believed she was right. The only person clever enough to prove it often enough to keep him humble. The only person whose disappointment he feared.

He had built machines that reshaped cities. He had solved problems scholars deemed impossible. Yet somehow, somewhere between endless nights in the Laboratorium, bottles of old Delesyian red wine, impossible theories and ridiculous arguments over machines that absolutely should have exploded… she had quietly become the one thing he wanted more than all of it.

Not because she admired him. Everyone admired him. But she understood him.

There was a difference.

The music continued. He stopped. Aislinn looked up, confused. “What are you doing…why did you stop?” she whispered. He didn’t answer immediately. He simply looked at her. He slowly lifted her hand to his lips, pressing a gentle kiss to her knuckles

“I want us to be something real.” His voice was quiet enough that only she could hear it.

Aislinn was stunned. Heat rushed to her cheeks before she could stop it, and she felt her heart beating far faster than it had any right to. He… he hadn’t just said that. Not here. Not now.

For once, her brilliant mind failed her.

Normally, she would have met a confession like that with a teasing remark, some clever quip to hide the sudden rush of nerves threatening to betray her composure. She searched desperately for one now.

Nothing came. For the first time in her life, she found herself completely at a loss for words.

Marni smiled. She didn’t need to say anything. He could see in the way her brilliant mind—usually so quick with a clever retort—had fallen completely silent, and in the unmistakable look in her eyes as they searched his. He already knew.

And somehow, that was all the answer he had ever needed.

“You are insufferably dramatic.”

„I’ve been told.”

„And terribly full of yourself.”

“I’ve also been told.”

„(…) Aislinn‘s relentless desire to learn, experiment, and push the limits of what could be built eventually led her to Delesyia, where she began working alongside Valgash, Faust—and Marni.

For all his fame, Marni had always been strangely alone in his work. Delesyia adored its greatest innovator and the wonders his mind produced, but admiration was not the same as understanding. Few could follow his thoughts once they began racing ahead, let alone challenge them or add something he had not already considered. And so, more often than not, he experimented alone.

Aislinn changed that.

They recognized something familiar in one another almost immediately: the same restless curiosity, the same hunger for the impossible, and the same tendency to become hopelessly consumed by a question simply because neither of them could stand not knowing the answer. Where others eventually lost Marni somewhere along the way, Aislinn kept up. For perhaps the first time, Marni had found someone whose intellect he not only respected, but whose company he genuinely enjoyed.

What followed were years of shared work that frequently ceased to resemble work at all. The two could disappear into a laboratory for days or even weeks, emerging only when an experiment demanded something they did not have—or when somebody reminded them that food and sleep were, regrettably, still necessary. They argued, competed, built upon each other’s ideas, dismantled them again, and pursued increasingly absurd theories simply to see where they might lead. Two brilliant minds and, beneath all the titles and reputations, two absolute nerds who had finally found someone willing to be just as obsessed as they were.

Naturally, Delesyia noticed. Rumors about the exact nature of their relationship spread quickly, helped considerably by how much time the two spent alone together. Whether there was ever any truth to them was another matter entirely. Only a handful of people knew what truly existed between Aislinn and Marni in those years. Which only made Aislinn’s eventual departure from Delesyia more puzzling.

Years passed, yet Delesyia never disappeared entirely from her life. Neither did Marni. The two remained in correspondence long after she had left, exchanging letters across the distance—until, one day, his letters abruptly stopped.

Then came the rumors from Delesyia itself: unrest, instability, strange developments, a city slowly slipping into chaos.

Aislinn knew Marni well enough to know that silence was not nothing. So, years after leaving, she returned to Delesyia. Officially, perhaps, to discover what had happened to the city she had once called home.

„He was not born with hate inside,

But with a heart both soft and kind.

The world gave only wounds to hide, Until it broke his gentle mind.

Then love appeared like morning’s glow,

A fragile dream, a fleeting flame.

It let his weary spirit grow,

Then stole it all and left him maimed.

Now through the reeds the lost winds cry,

Their mournful whispers never cease.

They sing beneath the storm-dark sky

For one denied a life of peace.

His soul may fade, his flesh may fall,

Yet wrath remains where hope has bled.

The reeds still speak when nightbirds call-