It has been forty‑seven lunar cycles since I last saw your silhouette vanish beyond the clouds, wrapped in the silver hull of your airship. The brass towers of Petrograd still breathe your absence; every piston sighs your name. Even now, when the engines groan beneath the hangar roofs, I imagine it is your laughter vibrating through the pipes — that same steady rhythm that once comforted me between deployments.

The others call this place quiet. I disagree. The steam never sleeps, and neither does memory.
Each night I climb to the observation deck, brush the frost from the ether‑lens, and point it skyward. Sometimes a glint of light shivers above the horizon — not star, not lantern, but something living. My heart betrays its discipline. I whisper, “Это ты?.. Is that you?”

You always belonged to the skies, капитан воздушных крыльев — Captain of Air Wings.
I remember how you spoke of cloud corridors and magnetic currents, the way the heavens hum differently when the aether winds change. You made the firmament sound like an orchestra, and I, the earthbound marksman, envied every note.

Since we parted, the city has grown heavier. Entire districts now glow dull red from the furnaces of progress. The Watch keeps order among the factories, but I… I keep searching the smog for remnants of your flight path. Even the pigeons seem mechanical now — brass feathers whirring instead of hearts. How strange that in this age of invention, the simplest warmth is the hardest thing to recreate.

“Я скучала по тебе,” I have missed you.

Do you still wear the same flight goggles, the leather cracked from Siberian wind? Do you still speak to the engines before each ascent, as if they were companions rather than machines? Those habits reminded me that even surrounded by steel, you remained profoundly human.

I paint sometimes, though my colors darken. A smear of soot becomes a storm cloud; a drop of oil, a memory. Your face emerges between strokes, only to vanish into the fumes. Perhaps that is fitting. You are the sky — always shifting, always untangible, yet always overhead.

Last week an Imperial courier arrived with news of new aether‑fortresses under construction. They say the command seeks seasoned pilots. I know how that call will reach you wherever you are — how your fingers will itch for the helm, your pulse to the rhythm of turbines. Go, if you must.
But remember this: the ground still watches the heavens. And one marksman below has never recalibrated his sights away from you.

“Возвращайся, мой дорогой. Come back when the winds are kind.”

Until then, I’ll keep the lantern burning on the deck rail, its flame bending with the exhaust breeze — a small, imperfect sun waiting for your shadow to cross it again.

Your comrade beneath the clouds,
** Timur Glazkov**

A black fingerprint mars the lower corner of the parchment, pressed into damp soot: proof that even a man of iron and lenses can still bleed memory.