Chapter 16: Broadcasting to the Empire

I eased myself into the faux-leather chair. My entire body tensed. While the bulging cushions appeared plush from a distance, they dug into my back and held their shape like stones. Sitting in the Foreman’s chair made my heart pound as I stared at the door across from me rather than the guest I needed to extract answers from: answers to the mysteries everyone at the University would call fairy tales until I returned with the truth. I needed to put Ludger at ease, but my shaky smile and wavering eyes were inefficient for the task. “Comfortable?”

Ludger threw the tarp off its shoulders and lowered the hood of its robe. The creature scampered around the office. The tip of its beak hovered over everything.

"Perfect.” As I tried to ease my face into a more becoming smile, I felt my lips twitch. “Well, why don't we tell our lovely listeners your name, where you come from, and unveil the mystery behind how you molded a mile high palace without breaking a sweat?" A lovely factoid to learn in case Ludger loses consciousness transforming something like an oak door in front of the Headmistress.

Ludger was completing its lap around the office when the broadcasting equipment’s speaker crackled. The creature scampered within three feet and leaned forward. It cocked its head to the side and reached for the machinery with its beak only to give a shaky hiss when the radio’s speaker emitted a voice.

“Freighter 37, we request that you leave your message to the assigned channel. Your clearance to land has already been ensured. In the case that you have an emergency related to volatile cargo that has not already met Freylor’s code of intercontinental passage and safe, public use, a request must be submitted to the University chairman of foreign management. Hello, are you—”

I clapped a hand over my mouth before I could yelp and snapped off the radio. I turned my narrowed eyes on Ludger who edged closer to the radio: its threads of light reaching for the device. "Do we go tinkering with what doesn’t belong to us? No, because what you're doing now is the incorrect response. Remember how I sat with my back high and my chin held up when you sat me in your armchair? Never before have I been graced with such hospitality, and the guilt for having been unable to repay it has weighed upon me since our fateful meeting. Seeing how you will soon be adored by every citizen of Freylor and learn enough about the Headmistress to be as good as family, would it be too burdensome to honor me by taking a seat?"

Tom's wide eyes snapped to me, and it bowed vigorously: tapping its beak incessantly on the hardwood. Then, prodding the stool with a talon, Ludger narrowed its eyes as the seat rattled before it shrugged before leaped atop it. However, the creature’s threads of light remained poised at the radio.

It felt like all the air in my lungs left me when I sighed. I slowly leaned close to the broadcasting equipment’s speaker, Winced as though it were a wild animal, I screwed my eyes shut when I spoke. “Ladies and gentlemen; brothers and sisters; my fellow Freylians, it has been an honor to serve you during these eleven, glorious years of intercontinental exploration.”

During my permanent expulsion from the University, my mind had been flooded with thoughts about how “if anyone would listen to my theories, they’d realize how silly they were for making me some random airship captain’s secretary.” However, when the speakers scattered throughout the airship carried my voice, I felt gazes of hundreds of deckhand-shaped silhouettes from beyond the curtains pierce me from all sides. The buzz of their collective muttering transformed into clear shouts in my imagination: “Well, I suppose it has been some months since she has rambled on about her birdman theories. Best get it over with.” I swore I swallowed my tongue under the suffocating presence of the untold listeners beyond the radio’s iron panel. Everyone who happened to be listening to their radios hundreds of miles below would hear my next words. What am I fretting about? I have evidence this time. If the Headmistress doesn’t like what I’m about to say, at least she’ll have a hard time convincing herself that this birdman and its magic are mere fantasy.

“I am pleased to inform you that we have returned with meat to fill your stomachs, harvested foreign herbs to heal your sick, and, most importantly, what we could salvage from fallen cultures too weak to survive in these unknown wildlands beyond the Walls even I rarely dare to set foot upon. Yet, I have kept my head high these past few months knowing that I might provide you all, my family, with everything you need to flourish within our lofty walls. Only the thought that I might keep you all safe to pursue the noble work of developing in ways those fallen peoples never had the chance to gave me the courage to journey beyond what little defense this airship provided and face the Floating Isles. Words alone will never be enough to thank you all: every one of you down to the licensed brick masons to the esteemed headmasters and headmistresses.” Now that I’ve flattered them, let’s start with the small matter of questioning everything they thought they knew about the world outside the walls.

“Except, it wasn’t just any fallen civilization we visited.” I couldn’t hide my grin as I imagined thousands of Freylians inching closer to their radios with bated breath. “I’m sure you’re all familiar with the colony our ancestors threw together in the Floating Isles of all places to make some kind of point. They claimed, ‘Why have walls? Only when we can tame the most desolate of lands as effortlessly as the home we’ve made within our walls can we call ourselves humanity’s eternal bastion against a dying world.’ Were they right? Are we the rightful inheritors of this world: free to set foot wherever we see fit? If so, I don’t see why that colony would’ve gone silent for over 50 years now; unless they’re having too much fun in that unbearable frost to respond.” I shuddered as I remembered how my legs had ached after hours of marching through snow that reached my waist with blizzards that cut through three layers of faux leather and fur. I took a deep breath until I trusted myself to speak without any shakiness entering my voice. “I knew I had to find that colony: some small sliver of what our ancestors had built. I had to know whether we, the last human civilization in the world, could survive there. Well, I am sorry to report that the commonly-held belief that only the ruins of our colony stands in the Floating Isles is far from the truth. No, I couldn’t believe my eyes until I walked inside the ivory palace that appeared from the Floating Isle’s ever-raging snowstorms nor the creatures that lorded over it. A creature like this one I had ‘convinced’ to accompany me home.”

I stood so abruptly, my chair crashed into the wall, and Ludger tumbled backward in its stool. I wrenched the cord that dangled from the curtains, and they hoisted from the windows that encircled the Foreman’s cabin: flooding the office in orange light from the airship’s landing lights. I paused for effect and smiled when the deckhands clambered onto each other’s shoulders and leaned far over their walkway railings to peer inside the Foreman’s office. However, my heart stopped when many deckhands, once their eyes landed on Tom, staggered backward and pressed flush against the iron-plated walls. Others loaded shotguns.

Resuming my easy smile, I strode beside Ludger before it could fall off the stool that rattled with its trembling. I placed a hand over its shoulders and paced the deckhands.

Shotguns were lowered, and the deckhands stared dumbstruck.

“Some might tremble before birdmen with beaks and talons sharp as daggers, but it was actually quite charming.” Yes, a deckhand might know enough to pull a trigger when a carnivorous plant starts gnawing on their leg, but none of them have ever shot a person before. They might have dared to leave the walls, but would any of them wish to be called murderers in this age of innovation and peace? “All I had to do was propose having a civilized chat in front of a roaring fire, and the issue resolved itself. Some ‘monster,’ eh? But how, you ask, have these charming little devils remained a secret from us? Well, why do we know nothing of the stars apart from them being bright and beyond even our reach? Because while I might have frozen my hide off for proof, all you were left with was this." I delicately unfolded the University record and extended my arm in a wide arc as I presented it to everyone who gaped through the three, wall-length windows. "By allowing myself to be wrenched from my University, I have saved this first scrap of truth for you, dear listeners. A truth the Headmistress doesn't want you to know, and here is why.”

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