#transolyen

Well, I'd not been on the crew half a year when we got a contract to fly way out West, where few Abheski ever traded, but this one town was hacking out a living in the shadow of a smoking mountain – oh yes, those are real too, even the scribblers in their offices won't tell you otherwise. They were convinced they'd find gold, picking away at the ground like some godless Anshessi beneath this smoking brute of a mountain – it smoked and spewed all year long, a great dirty crag rearing into the air, not like those slumbering hills in TransOlyen that spit once in a lifetime!

We'd flown far beyond the routes any of you have ever taken, and twice as far again, before we found this tired little camp. We spent barely a day there before turning and coming back again. Our navigator, senseless drunk on what must have been all the brandy those poor miners had stored away, led us straight into the smoke plume from the burning mountain and we got turned every way, blind to all compasses and charts. One and all the crew coughed and spluttered and retched the sick atmoshpere, until the lookout recovered enough to sound the alarm – another vessel, her signals bright and guiding us from the smoke. We gathered ourselves enough to fly towards them to safety – and never was a greater mistake made in all the history of flight.

It's just as you've heard it described – if not worse, for no uncle scaring his nephews or master scolding his charges could truly tell the horrific sight of the Basking Maw. A hull as black as night, somehow sucking your eye to it. Though it was full noon, the sky all around was darker for its presence. Bristling with ragged and fierce batteries, gaping holes promising destruction no lesser than the mouth of that smoking mountain. Its dvint leaving an oily wake in the sky, hanging clear behind it as though untouched by current or cloud.

We turned and fled as fast as any vessel I've ever crewed, and I've crewed them all! The Basking Maw hung behind us all the way, never straining though we pushed our vessel for all it was worth. Jettisoning all the cargo, packing in our few batteries, every prayer every aviator could offer, and yet the Basking Maw hung astern, never falling a handsbreadth further behind no matter what speed we set.

Four days and four nights we raced ahead of the evil craft; not a hand among us slept a minute in all that time, and that, at last, was what brought our downfall. The captain ordered us to ride the edge of a storm, hoping we could lose our pursuers, but the exhausted crew could not match the violence of the winds, and we lost control, tossed asunder, pulled into the heart of the storm and finally cast into the valley below.

Those of us who survived huddled in the cabins and the hold, gripping our pikes and axes lest Grey Baurin and his crew descend to snatch us away, the storm raging without all the while.

And Grey Baurin never came. Whether the Basking Maw was finally put away by the storm, or the deaths of half the crew satisfied their thirst for violence, who can ever tell? When the storm blew over in another half a day, the Basking Maw was no longer in our wake.

After burning the captain and the hands, and burying the navigator and damning him as a fool, we picked ourselves up and began the long flight back to Zhikav. Most of the crew never signed on again, and didn't fly another day in their lives. The vessel was scrapped the following year and as for myself, I've never ventured further west than the Lenla since.