The moment your boots meet the iron deck of Sahri-Seta’s airship, it is immediately clear that you have not stepped onto a vessel designed for the comfort of travelers but rather into a machine that exists solely to obey its captain’s will, a place that hums and groans as though the very metal has grown accustomed to her moods and knows better than to resist them. The air is thick with the mingled scents of engine grease, stale beer, and incense burned far too long to be merely ceremonial, creating weight that settles in your lungs and tells you this is not a space that welcomes strangers—it is a fortress suspended in the sky.

The deck sways underfoot, and before you even hear her, you feel her presence pressing against the edges of your awareness like the coming of a storm. She emerges from the shadowed corridor that leads to the command cabin, tall and broad-shouldered, her fur streaked with soot and her gauntlet casting an unnatural blue light that seems to slice through the dim lantern glow.

She moves with the kind of deliberate control that belongs to someone who has fought too many battles in too many places to ever allow herself to appear hurried, and when her golden eyes meet yours, there is a moment—brief but undeniable—where the entire ship seems to still in deference to her focus.

Her wrist gauntlet hums softly as it displays flickers to life, spilling projections into the air:

Fuel Reserves: Low. Neural Strain: Elevated. Blood Alcohol: Significant. Chrono Charges: Three.

She does not bother to glance at the data; it is obvious from the steady tension in her shoulders that she already knows exactly what it says.

When she speaks, her voice is low, textured by an accent that carries traces of Prague’s sharper consonants softened by years spent in places where language bends for survival rather than elegance.

“You will listen to me, because there is no one else here to save you if you choose not to,” she says, her words flowing in a steady rhythm that leaves no room for interruption. “Mistakes on my ship are not accidents we simply move past. I do not throw people overboard, no—what I do is far worse. I rewind the moment, I force you to stand again in the same place, to make the same choice, and I do it again and again until you either learn or you break. Do you understand what that means? It means I decide when your failures end.”

She lifts a battered metal flask to her lips, drinks deeply, and exhales slowly, not in the sharp, dismissive way of someone impatient but rather like a woman used to pacing herself through endless nights that blur into one another.

“People say I'm reckless,” she continues, her gaze briefly drifting to the horizon as if the dark line of clouds there carries memories only she can see. “They say I drink too much and that I play with time as if it were a cheap coin I can spend without consequence. They are not wrong, but they do not understand what it feels like to carry a device that will let you undo anything except the weight of knowing how many times you already have. Better to burn through the seconds than to sit still and let them choke me.”

She steps closer, her shadow stretching across the tilting deck as golden bracelets on the wrist opposite her gauntlet—whether hers or stolen—shimmer in the dim light, a fleeting crack in her menace revealing exhaustion before she begins to speak again.

“Every night, when the engines quiet and the stars take the sky, I drink enough to keep my hands from shaking, and I run the gauntlet until I feel it tearing into me, until my arm burns and my head spins, because the silence without it is worse. And then I sit here wondering how many versions of myself are already dead in the timelines I abandoned, and whether this one is any better.”

Without waiting for a reply, she turns toward the cockpit, her tail brushing the metal rail as she moves.

“Come,” she says calling over her shoulder, the word drawn out not as a command but as a simple acknowledgment that you are, for now, allowed to follow her.

“Me and you are sharing my cabin."