41. Borne Away

Amid Thumos’s hammer-shaped ash cloud and unleashed chaos—giants rampaging, molten rock advancing, and slave revolts—Kinch targets a cloud-ship likely heading for the palace. He and Galva reach the palace, but the ascender is frozen at the roof. Galva summons Dalgatha and uses the war corvid’s beak to sever the chain, sending the ascender crashing down and opening their path up the shaft.

On the roof, Kinch spots goblin ambassadors and three Moth Knights of the Deepest Hive lying in wait for the arriving ship. To avoid scaring off the crew, Kinch restrains Galva and Dalgatha until the ship lands. The goblins ambush five half-giant crew; the Moth Knights’ poison fells three quickly, while the pilot kills a goblin before being overwhelmed. Kinch, Galva, and Dalgatha then strike the ambassadors, butchering them as the three Moth Knights cut the moorings and brace aboard the rising ship.

Kinch hooks aboard with a goblin spear while Dalgatha yanks a loose line, tilting the deck. He kills one Moth Knight, but in the lurch Dalgatha lands on the remaining two and is mortally speared. Galva boards, and in the melee the ship clips a spire; Galva’s ancestral shield, the Mouth of the Storm, is knocked overboard. Kinch thrusts a blackglass sword through the last goblin, but the blade carries through and grievously wounds Galva.

After Kinch kills the final foe, the cloud-ship slowly turns and climbs. Kinch tries to stanch Galva’s bleeding, but she grows too weak to hold a farglass. Wanting to see the city’s end, she asks Kinch to describe it. Through the lens he recounts molten rock consuming the palace and Pulhu, the freed geigon, rescuing a beloved cuttlefish from the garden by filling Medrena’s statue-urn and bearing the creature away toward the underground sea.

As ash falls and the ship drifts, Kinch tenderly narrates Pulhu’s flight and vows they may meet again, while Galva, calm and smiling, slips toward death. Dalgatha lies dead, the shield is lost, and Kinch is left with grief and the stolen ship over a dying city.