Incline 5: Wing-Head Vapooliar

Soaring above the wrongly marching armies, I settle myself down before the Valkinvar Gates. My eyes take in the beauty of the carefully crafted bronze and the endless art bedecking it. Our history and our greatest successes and names. Sword and armour are hammered into the stone to outline the gates all the more.

A masterwork of architecture and engineering. The kind we used to be able to find all over the country, let alone the desolated plains before the city. I turn around, stepping aside so as to get out of the way of one of my sisters. She doesn't even pay me mind, heading on in with that magic staff of hers keeping her attention.

My lips shift at the sight of the Valkinvar-Staguiffmani and I set aside my babe thoughts. I have enough perplexions frustrating me at the moment. I do not need to add to the mess. Whatever happened on the Cycle of Screaming Witches is their issue to handle. Still, I'll benefit from the Valkinvar Gates opening for her.

I zip into the city with the power of flight, running ahead into a gentle skip. I slide to a stop with mixed feelings. While it feels good to be within the periphery of my home, the emptiness of it all is daunting. The loss of so many of sisters and brothers to this damned war is not even the issue... It's the lack of soldiers mustering at all of the points.

I walk over to one, my memories repeating on me as the eyesight of a decades older version of me replays. Before I went out to the south, long before I ever ended up as I am now. I was something of an optimist compared to these cycles. There I was, on a platform like this, my weapon planted into the special stone sheath... Ready to march out at the head of an army. Ready to fight. 

And now there is no one here like this. No triumphs are in play, no victors returning for rest and reward in equal and grander measure. Barely anyone is walking the Parade Ground. Only Valkinvar are coming through our namesake gates and barely any of them are, too.

The strength in my body fades and a lonely shyness overtakes my posture. I keep looking around and it never changes. It's all empty for too far and for too long. What happened to my home? What happened to Thurn's Forge...?

The spirit that created an empire thousands of years ago is gone. The spirit I could find a mere ten grand-cycles ago is gone, too. During the height of the Siege of Thurn's Forge, this place was filled with troops. Men ready to make their final stand at the very edge of the city. 

Now you would wonder if that ever happened. I'm barely able to keep myself sane through the presence of the gun platforms and other barricades. Somehow, someone thought to dismantle most of it. The idiocy makes no sense.

We're not attacking with enough aggression, and we're not rebuilding with enough determination!

At the rate we're going, there's not even going to be a Second Siege of Thurn's Forge. It's simply going to be the Fall of Thurn's Forge. An impossibility not that long ago. Before the airships came.

My chest rises, and it bursts with another heavy sigh. I spot proud banners fluttering on gentle winds that still blow as they always have. The sky is alight with the purest emeralds and greens and lesser. A spectrum of all the colours of wind magic. All the powers of the people of Thurn's Forge are here. The Valkinvar's shine the brightest, but it is the city itself which draws most of this light.

The power is here. Our source of greatness still blows about, unimpeded even in the face of those airships and the Seven-Peaks Union of Jherikra. They might make their capital at the Wind-Mountain, but they cannot stop the will of magic and its attraction to mortality. The magic flowed to us even at the height of the First Siege of Thurn's Forge.

The dull colours of sea, laurel, fern, shamrock, sacramento. Middling beauty found only in aquamarine, turquoise, opal, peridot, and serpent. Prehnite, olivine, onyx, chrysolite, andalusite, and more! The shimmering greatness with the ironically low Breezing Star to the grandest Gyearian Emeralds.

It's all here in Thurn's Forge. The people of the city live. All four of the Valkinvar Ordoars live. Our blood pumps with life, still, the blood of the gods and goddesses which gives us our mortality... Our command over magic, it's all still here!

"So why...?" I can't help but speak, my thoughts breaking out into the quiet open. One that does not even have the decency to be silent because of the dead. We are alive, all that Waionr's Chosen Theocracy is remains in this city. And we're not fighting. 

I don't understand why we're not fighting?

The capital of an empire that has refused to give in, but we might as well. What good is carrying on if we're not going to cling to what is ours? Our grip might be slippery, but so is our great enemy's! We need to go out and fight and I don't even have the right to speak up about this...

My head turns slightly, catching hints of Valkinvar Staguiffmani on the approach. A pair of sisters whose power is reaching out to me, prickling my lungs. My next sigh defies their show of force and each moment they're in the air only makes their armour clearer. Veterans of more than several centuries. Robes blackened by the symbols of chains and clipped wings.

As many would mistake them, the military police of the Valkinvar.

"Name and rank," the lead of the pair asks, her voice heavy and thick with disdain. Her hair shimmers with distinct highlights of Returning Gale Emerald. Long locks that threaten to cover her shoulders should she dare. I reach for my helmet, taking it off and announcing myself before their mockery.

My face remains plain and straight, though my mind is burning with a passion that can only be satiated with the same behaviour back...

"Wing-Head Vapooliar. Valkinvar-Imdvarce." I announce to them as is proper.

"As brainless as the stereotype is, Vapooliar." the lead says, her smirk growing as my snarl breaks out into the open. She slips her hand into her robes with an unusual manoeuvre. Her arm goes across her matrimonial scar, almost as if to hide what is intentionally before a slit in her robes. Her arm comes back out and she twists away, a pair of enriched cuffs in hand.

"Valkinvar-Imdvarce Vapooliar, you are hereby detained for violation of the First Law of Waionr." the other Valkinvar-Staguiffmani explains, her voice not all that enthusiastic for what should be religious righteousness. I hold my arms out, awaiting my pathetic excuse for a punishment.