Chapter 843: Mother of all ships

Noah soared high above the treeline, Storm’s wings beating steady beneath him, and let his mind drift the way it tended to whenever there wasn’t a fight demanding his attention.

Sophie would be handling the faction right now. She always was, honestly, even when he was actually there, and he’d made his peace with that a long time ago, watching her step into that role like it had been waiting for her the whole time. Most of Eclipse already treated her as the real leader anyway, whatever his name on the letterhead said. ’She’s fine,’ he told himself. ’She’s always fine. That’s not the part I worry about.’

Lila was the part he worried about. He hadn’t seen her before he left, hadn’t gotten the chance, and something about that sat unresolved in his chest every time he let himself think about it too long. He could check on her, technically. Shared Awareness would tell him more than enough in a heartbeat. He didn’t reach for it.

’Trust them to handle themselves,’ he thought. ’That’s the whole point of trusting people.’

"You ever wonder," he said aloud, raising his voice over the wind, "what kind of weird stuff Sera’s picked up since I left? Last update I got, she was still figuring out different types of toppings on her pizza and she thinks ice cream should be one." Noah said with a broad idiotic smile just thinking about her.

Storm’s ear flicked back at him and that was all he was getting as a response.

"And Angel." Noah smiled to himself. "Acts like she doesn’t need anybody, hardest exterior in the group, and she’s probably the softest one of all of them underneath it. Bet she’s been quietly checking in on everyone else this whole time and pretending she isn’t."

Storm rumbled low, something that might have been agreement.

"Anyway." Noah patted his neck. "Let’s go take another look at those ships before we call it."

---

They came down at the edge of the clearing where the six dropships sat exactly as they’d been for five days now, hulls scorched, half-buried under creeping vegetation that had clearly had time to establish itself.

Noah walked the perimeter slow, hands in his pockets, doing the thing his old EDF training had drilled into him before any of the faction contracts or bloodline quests had ever entered the picture.

Which was to look first. And think before you touch anything.

The ships were big. Bigger than he’d properly registered his first pass through here, each hull easily the length of three transport shuttles stacked end to end, cargo bay doors wide enough to march a column of Harbingers through six abreast.

’Scout pods are small,’ he thought, crouching beside the nearest ship’s landing strut, running a hand along scorched metal. ’One horns drop in single-occupant pods, sometimes twos. Fast and disposable. Even Harbingers take into account feasibility. You don’t build something this size for reconnaissance.’ He straightened, looking down the line of them. ’This is an invasion footprint. This is the kind of ship you use to put boots on the ground at Cardinal scale.’

He thought about the numbers doctrine, the thing every EDF briefing hammered into recruits from year one. Harbingers rarely fought individually dangerous battles at the low end. Their real threat was mass. A dozen one horns working together could level a settlement that would shrug off a single two horn easy. Six ships this size implied hundreds, maybe more, all landed here at once.

And then just gone.

He walked the length of the nearest hull again, checking for anything he might have missed the first four times he’d done exactly this. Scorch patterns consistent with atmospheric entry, not combat damage. No blood, no bodies, no wreckage debris scattered outward the way a real firefight would leave behind. Just six ships, parked, empty, abandoned mid-plan.

He came up with nothing new. Same as every other pass.

He exhaled, rubbing the back of his neck, and looked toward Storm, who’d settled a short distance off, watching him with mild patience.

"One more day," Noah said. "Or we leave now."

Storm didn’t move.

"Yeah." Noah managed half a smile. "Thought so."

---

They flew back to the hut, and Noah settled onto a flat rock near the fire pit while Storm circled once and dropped down beside him, immediately alert, tail already flicking with anticipation the second Noah reached for the leftover cooked meat from the night before.

"You want to play instead of eat this properly, don’t you."

Storm’s whole body practically vibrated.

Noah grabbed a large chunk, hefted it, and threw it hard, straight up.

BOOM!

The throw cracked the air with an audible pop, and the chunk of meat rocketed skyward, spinning, and Storm launched after it before Noah had even finished the motion, wings tearing through the clearing in a blur.

Noah counted under his breath, watching Storm chase the arc down, catch it cleanly at the peak, and come screaming back toward the ground in a controlled dive that ended in an actual clean landing for once.

’Faster,’ Noah thought, genuinely impressed. ’That might be faster than the Vanguard clock.’

He remembered that day clearly, three years back now, back when he was still technically EDF, Kelvin organizing an informal race between Noah’s Void Striders, Lucas in full lightning form, and Storm, mostly as an excuse to settle an argument that had started over time. Storm had won without seeming to try, and it had taken everyone a solid minute of stunned silence to realize the wyvern hadn’t even understood it was a race, he’d just been keeping pace out of boredom and casually broken Mach four doing it. Half the recruits stationed there had been fans of Storm specifically ever since, more than they were fans of Noah.

"You’ve gotten faster," Noah told him now, scratching under his jaw. "Or I’ve gotten slower at counting. Either way, good boy."

Storm preened, actually preened, chest puffed out.

They played another round, and another, until the light started shifting gold through the canopy, and Noah finally stood, brushing dirt off his hands.

"Keep watch," he told Storm. "I’m going to go check on your brothers and sisters."

Storm’s tail thumped once in acknowledgment, already settling back down near the fire.

"Domain."

A portal opened, violet and swallowing, and Noah stepped through into a world of soft grass and warm light that had nothing to do with the alien planet he’d just left.

And as he expected, the shrieking started almost immediately.

Then went dead silent.

Every dark head among the scattered hatchlings turned toward him at once, some of them caught in genuinely absurd positions, one upside down against a rock, another halfway through what looked like an argument with a tree root, and then the silence broke into a wall of sound as roughly thirty juvenile Hollow Blizzard Monarchs launched themselves at him simultaneously, shrieking with pure delight.

Noah blinked twice in quick succession, dodging two incoming bodies that would have genuinely knocked him flat, catching a third mid-leap before it could faceplant him into the ground.

"Okay, okay, I missed you too, I missed all of you, please, some of you weigh as much as a car now, gentle—"

They did not do gentle.

He spent the next several minutes just absorbing affection, hatchlings climbing over each other to get close to him, nudging his hands, his shoulders, one particularly bold one attempting to sit directly on his lap despite being roughly the size of a small horse now.

"You’ve gotten huge," Noah said, scratching behind the ears of the one currently trying to occupy his entire lower body. "All of you. Genuinely, is this normal growth or is the domain just steroids for baby dragons?"

None of them answered, obviously, but he found himself wondering it seriously anyway, filing it away as something to ask Kelvin eventually, whether wild wyverns grew at anything close to this rate in their natural habitat or whether something about the domain’s ambient energy was accelerating all of this.

Of course kelvin has no dragons but if anyone had any idea of what the answer would be, he figured it was his bestfriend.

He tried, briefly, to name them.

"Okay. You’re Ash. No wait, I already used Ash for the Drake couples, speaking of which, where are they always hiding?" Given Ash and Amber were fond of digging around into the ground and didn’t seem too keen on mingling with their larger sized dragon kins, Noah figured he let them be.

He pointed at a different one. "You’re Bolt."

Bolt immediately wandered off mid-naming to go chase a burning leaf floating through the air that must have fallen off a tree close by.

"You’re—hold on, are you the same one from a second ago? Did you two switch places?"

Two nearly identical hatchlings stared back at him, betraying nothing.

He got through maybe eight names before he genuinely lost track of which was which, three of them having rearranged themselves entirely while his back was turned, and he threw both hands up, laughing despite himself.

"Alright, forget it, you’re all just going to be whoever you decide to be when you’re older, I clearly can’t keep up with you."

He made his way further into the domain after that, past the hatchling nursery grounds, toward the quiet clearing where Nyx’s cocoon still sat, wrapped in slow-pulsing light that had barely changed shape in weeks. He crouched beside it, resting a hand against the warm surface.

"Still cooking, huh." He exhaled. "Take your time. I’m not going anywhere. Well. I am, technically, but you know what I mean."

He stayed there a while, just sitting, listening to the distant shrieks of hatchlings still playing behind him, letting the quiet of the domain settle something in his chest that the alien planet outside never quite managed to reach.

Eventually he stood, brushed off his knees, and called the portal back.

"Alright. Back to it."

---

He stepped out of the domain into the hut, the alien evening air cool against his skin after the domain’s warmth, and looked around for Storm.

No sign of him.

"Storm?"

Nothing. No rustle in the brush, no telltale crash of a wyvern being generally too large for his surroundings.

Noah frowned, scanning the treeline, then closed his eyes and blinked.

He reappeared mid-air, landing hard and immediate on Storm’s back, wind tearing at him from every direction, and it took him a full second to register that they were flying through the middle of a thick bank of dark clouds, visibility down to almost nothing.

"Storm. What are you doing up here?"

Storm didn’t answer, obviously, but banked slightly, and a portion of the cloud cover peeled back just enough for Noah to see what had drawn him up here in the first place.

A ship.

Massive, easily dwarfing the six dropships sitting empty on the ground below, its hull dark and angular, running lights pulsing along a length that stretched further than Noah’s eyes could comfortably track in the dim light, descending slow and deliberate through the planet’s atmosphere.

Noah stared at it for a long moment.

"So that’s why you’re up here," he said finally. "You found the mother of all motherships, huh?"