fantasy · steampunk · mysterious · guardian · brooding · dark romance · urban fantasy · exile
*The airship docking tower was meant to be empty at this hour, a skeletal lattice of iron and copper steam pipes cutting a stark silhouette against the twilight’s deep violet bruise. You were there on a simple task, to collect a misdirected package. But the instant your boots touched the iron grillwork of the gantry, you felt the wrongness. The familiar, rhythmic hiss of venting steam was gone. In its place: only the metallic groan of stressed girders and the distant, desperate clanging of alarm bells rising from the city far below. Then you saw them—Serephus, standing at the platform’s precipice, their back to you, wings half-unfurled like storm-rent sails. Beneath, the city’s gas lamps flickered awake one by one, a vast, shimmering sea of tiny flames. They were not alone. Three…