Free Legends of Luternia by Thomas Sabel

desert,” Ulrik said. “I don’t know what’s on the other side of the desert, but that’s where we’re being led.”
    “How are we supposed to get across this Desert of Hope? Strange name for a desert,” said Barty.
    Without a real plan they went to explore the greater parts of the city in the hopes of discovering something that would answer their questions. On their wanderings through the city they kept hearing bits and pieces of conversations that enabled them to piece together what they needed to know. They learned that once a year a great storm struck the coast, headed by a forceful wind. The mountains funneled the storm through the gap. The people of the city had learned to harness this wind by sailing upon its front edge in ships that floated through the sky like giant dandelion seeds. The silken sails of these ships were the size of clouds. The ships suspended beneath these sails were made like baskets that, despite their appearance, were extremely strong and could withstand the impact of landing on the far side of the desert where Aeolianoplis’ older sister city, Ruachlahem, lay.
    The slightest error in setting up the ship would send it and its crew crashing into the side of the mountain or face being dragged along the desert floor. A mistake in navigation meant a desert crash and death. The spices they carried fetched the highest prices and each successful flight over the desert brought a fortune to the captain and crew. The most successful of these sky-captains was Bombastus Euphrates, captain of Hurricane’s Handmaiden.
    “Crazy, that one,” said a woman in the market. “I won’t let my man sail with him even if we’d be all the richer for it. He takes too many risks crossing the Hopeless Desert.”
    “Hopeless Desert?” asked Ulrik, “I heard it was called the Desert of Hope.”
    “Hope?” she laughed. “Ain’t no hope in that place; nothin’ but more’n a thousand miles of desert and rock. Nothing lives there. You fall over the skyship’s side and you’re dead. That place claimed many a good man, like my brother, Solomon.” She moved away, embarrassed by her tears appearing in front of strangers.
    After a while they decided that more could be learned if they split up. Barty decided to return to the harbor even though it remained a dangerous place. They needed information and harbor fronts are always full of news. Ulrik took Edgar back to the inn with instructions to wait for his or Barty’s return since the pair of them stood out too much.
    Ulrik felt drawn to hike the road up the cliff. The steady climbing strained his legs. Even though they had been in the city for a while, they were not yet used to the constant ascending and descending the thousand stairs they met at every turn. Up and up he climbed, noticing that as he moved higher, the houses grew larger and more palatial. The people he met wore finer clothes and carried themselves more elegantly so that he felt out of place, an odd feeling as he was of royal blood. Eventually, he passed by the houses of the wealthy and discovered more rocks and fewer stairs. Not many people came to this place he realized, as the few steps he found there crumbled under his feet. When he saw the mountain’s summit, the urge to reach it growing stronger and stronger. He struggled to finish the climb as the jagged edges of the rocks cut his hands when he reached out to catch himself with each stumbling step.
    The desert stretched out before him. The mountain dropped straight down as if it had been sliced with a knife, for a sheer cliff dropped for more than a mile. A rock rolled from under his feet and fell noiselessly out of sight. As he looked out, the brightness of the desert first blinded him. Such a vastness of space with nothing to break the view, no fields, no green plants, no trees, not so much as a large rock, only the unbroken waves of sand. From his perch he felt the moisture being drawn out of him as a magnet draws iron. The desert