POV: Captain Thane Blackwater

The Glimmerwind was a temperamental beast, a patchwork marvel of scavenged parts and prayer. Its twin engines, salvaged from a pre-Ascension transport ship, sputtered and roared as Captain Thane Blackwater wrestled the controls, urging the aging airship through a particularly violent cloud current. Below them, a dizzying landscape of churning white extended to infinity. This was his domain, the treacherous, ever-shifting ocean of the sky.

"Hold steady, Kael!" Thane bellowed over the howl of the wind, his voice roughened by years of shouting orders and breathing filtered air. His first mate, a wiry young man with fear in his eyes and too much enthusiasm, gripped the forward harpoon cannon. "New debris field, just ahead! Looks like a fresh kill."

Thane squinted, pushing his goggles up onto his scarred forehead. He scanned the horizon. He could “feel” the currents, almost like Kira felt the tethers, a sixth sense honed by a lifetime spent navigating the unpredictable flows of the cloud sea. And his gut, a more reliable compass than any instrument, told him this wasn’t just any debris.

His crew, a motley collection of seasoned veterans and desperate new recruits, braced themselves. The Scavenging Corps wasn't glamorous. It was dangerous, dirty, and utterly vital. They were the true lifeblood of Aeridor, harvesting everything from discarded power cells to rare, crystallized atmospheric minerals from the ever-present floating wreckage that drifted across the sky.

"Breaking through the front, Captain!" Kael shouted, pointing.

The Glimmerwind punched through a wall of thick vapor, and the world opened up into a chilling tableau. Before them lay a vast, chaotic expanse of wreckage. Not the usual slow-drifting, barnacle-encrusted chunks of ancient Ascendant vessels. This was recent. Fresh. Raw.

"By the Sky-Father," whispered one of the newer recruits, eyes wide with horror.

It was a passenger liner. Or what was left of one. Its elegant, pearlescent hull was torn open like a metal flower, ribbons of twisted dur-alloy trailing behind it like blood. Sections were burning, a ghastly, flickering orange against the oppressive grey sky. Bodies, bloated and grotesque, floated amongst the debris, their limbs splayed unnaturally.

Thane’s stomach churned. He’d seen plenty of death in his thirty-five years, more than most. He’d been a child refugee, one of the lucky few who’d survived the journey to Aeridor from the ravaged surface, crammed into the lower decks of a cargo transport, leaving behind… everything. But this was different. This looked like a massacre.

"Alright, everyone! Secure tethers! Kael, get the grappling hooks ready. Move fast but be careful. This isn't standard salvage. Something happened here."

As the Glimmerwind carefully navigated the field, Thane landed the smaller retrieval skiff on a relatively stable section of the liner’s hull. The air smelled of ozone, burnt plastic, and something else… something metallic and acrid.

He led his team through the ruptured corridors. The silence was deafening, broken only by the creak of stressed metal and the distant groan of the cloud currents. This wasn't a structural failure or a rogue storm. This ship had been attacked.

They found no survivors. Only destruction. And amidst the wreckage, a disturbing discovery.

"Captain! Over here!"

Thane followed Kael’s urgent shout. In a section of the main cabin, miraculously preserved from the worst of the damage, lay a series of crates. Standard cargo, by the look of them, but one had been torn open. Inside, nested in shock-absorbing foam, were intricate, gleaming devices. Small. Metallic. Shaped like stylized insects, with multiple delicate limbs and a central, glowing aperture.

"What are these?" Kael asked, prodding one with a hesitant boot.

Thane knelt, pulling on a pair of thick, insulated gloves. He picked one up. It was heavier than it looked, cold and smooth. There were no identifying marks, no Aeridorian crests or manufacturer's stamps. The design was alien, unsettlingly organic yet clearly mechanical.

"Never seen anything like them," Thane murmured, turning it over in his hand. "Not from Aeridor. Not from any Sky-kingdom records, at least."

Then, his gaze fell on the underside of a crate lid. Scratched crudely into the metal, as if done in a frantic hurry, was a symbol. Three interlocking triangles, arranged in a spiral. It wasn't a symbol he recognized from Aeridor. But he had seen it before.

In the fever dreams of his childhood. On the hull of the derelict transport that had carried him, a terrified boy, from the smoking ruins of the surface world to the precarious safety of Aeridor. And once, just once, on a tattered old map he’d found hidden in his father's meager belongings, a map of the "Old World," where it was marked beside a territory called… "The Deep Holds."

He pocketed the strange device. The Glimmerwind’s proximity alarms suddenly blared, a harsh, grating sound.

"Captain! Unidentified contacts!" Kael screamed, pointing frantically towards the churning clouds. "Multiple bogies! Fast movers!"

Thane rushed to the viewport. Dark shapes, sleek and silent, were emerging from the mist. They were small, agile craft, unlike anything in Aeridor’s fleet. Too fast for standard airships, too numerous for a rogue band of pirates. They moved with a chilling, predatory precision.

"They're not here to salvage," Thane said, his voice grim. "They're here to clean up."

"What do we do, Captain?" Kael cried, his hand on the harpoon trigger, trembling.

"We get out of here," Thane snarled, already running for the controls of the skiff. "And we take our discovery with us."

As the skiff launched back towards the Glimmerwind, dodging incoming energy bursts that sizzled past them, Thane knew their world had just gotten a whole lot bigger. And a whole lot more dangerous. The debris field wasn't just a site for scavenging; it was a battleground. And the signs pointed to an enemy that had followed them across the clouds, an enemy from a world they had long believed dead. The Sky-kingdom of Aeridor, floating in its self-imposed isolation, was not as alone as it thought. And whatever these mysterious markings meant, they were a threat that had found its way into their sky.