They skimmed along the treetops until they left the battle long behind them.

Syl and Alicia, once reassured they were out of harm's way, both retired into the domain to get some much needed rest while they had the chance.

Kai, however, didn't feel at all tired and stayed with Arnella on the rickety skimmer, doing his best not to distract her with all his questions about how it worked.

Arnella explained that the little craft that was little more than four small unstable drive crystals, a pilot crystal, a battery and some seats that were constructed from whatever they had on hand.

They couldn't use any of the Spirit of Adventure's landing craft in case there was an audit when they built the case against the Shattered kingdoms.

At some point a few hours into their flight, Arnella pulled something from her pocket, checked it, then promptly altered course.

Their heading altered, she took them higher into the air and then, pushing forward on the crystal she was using to pilot the skimmer, significantly increased their speed to the point Kai thought they were going to come apart, the skimmer was shaking so violently.

He was just glad they had a working airframe, and he wasn't being blasted by a gale of air.

However, he learned to keep his head down after he nearly choked on a rather large bug.

Arnella pushed them like this until there was a chime from somewhere, and she altered course again.

This time she pulled back, reducing their speed and dropping them into the cover of the canopy.

After half an hour, they were both standing in a clearing. The skimmer sitting silently on the ground.

"Batteries dead. We have a couple of choices, but they all depend on you."

"I'm listening."

"We need to wait till it is fully recharged or we will be making short hops for the rest of the journey and we won't make it in time."

"Two questions. How long will it take to recharge? And how long do we have?"

"Hard to say, the battery was already fully charged when we removed it from deep storage. It was part of some failed experiment a decade or so ago. And as far as how much time we have, it's just four days. The issue is that rattle, the drives aren't synced up correctly and they are fighting each other to stabilise, so were loosing mana a little faster than I would like," Arnella sighed.

Kai's jaw had gone numb from clenching his jaw because of that rattle.

"We'll have to do this as efficiently as possible if we want to make it on time. By on time, I mean ahead of schedule. The people we will be meeting with are not people I like to make wait," Arnella continued. "Now, we can leave it out here and both get some rest in that cushy domain of yours. Or…"

"Or I can loot it. Put it into a pocket of time dilation and hopefully it can pull enough mana to be fully charged by the time we are all fully rested."

Arnella grinned at him, "And people think you're a clueless idiot."

"Just around beautiful women. I can never quite figure out what they are thinking."

"You figured out what I was thinking…" Arnella's eyes narrowed, "is that your way of saying I'm not a beautiful woman?"

Kai looked down at the shorter Gnomel woman as she glared back up at him, trying to figure out if she was actually upset. He just drew a blank.

"You see, I can't tell if you're teasing me or if you're genuinely upset with me."

"That's because it's both until you give me a sufficient answer. Then I'll decide it's whatever suits me."

"See, beautiful, no clue what you're thinking."

"So, I'm beautiful. For a while there, I was thinking I wasn't your type," she said as she looked at him hungrily, "You know the others are-"

Kai held up a hand to stop her.

"You can think someone's beautiful, but still not be interested."

"Just one kid. Syl, Alicia, they both said I could ask you and…" she trailed off as she gave him a serious look, reading his expression.

He didn't know they had discussed this. There had been remarks, comments and the occasional joke. But this it sounded like there had been a serious discussion on the subject.

He would be having his own discussion later

"And you're either still figuring things out or you're the annoyingly faithful type, with no children outside of an actual committed relationship."

That was a new perspective on what faithful and committed meant.

He coughed.

"So, this craft is not soulbound to you or anyone else?"

Arnella shook her head and Kai made the skimmer disappear, his intent hopefully placing it somewhere in the domain it would rapidly recharge.

Arnella clicked her tongue, "That loot ability of yours is stupid. If you don't mind me asking, how did you get it?"

"That's complicated. Most of it is forbidden knowledge. But it's not wrong to say I got it as a reward for choosing to save Syl and my home galaxy from destruction…" Kai said as he opened a portal to his domain.

"Ah, close that," Arnella said as a familiar stone appeared in her hand. "The Sage wanted me to give you this. He just finished it in time."

Kai examined the stone

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

Sages Otone of Obfuscation. This rare stone has been enchanted to hide the mana signature of any spell, using it as an anchor or focus, from all common forms of detection such as scrying and divination.

"The Sage thought you might need some way of hiding your portals. He thought this might help. Which reminds me, I have a tonne of notes and journals he wants me to hand over," she yawned, "but that can wait till later. While my level means I can go for days," she winked at him, "Mental fatigue doesn't go away so easily."

Kai took the stone and tossed it into the nook of a nearby tree and reopened his portal on it, immediately noting that it felt odd to him. Not off or broken in any way, just a lot harder to feel.

The two of them passed into the domain, Kai stopping to shrink the portal down as much as he felt comfortable. Reducing it down to the size of a golf ball, he stopped when he started to struggle to detect his own mana.

They checked on the skimmer first. The craft had been looted into a far-off corner of the domain where, when watching from afar, they observed a herd of deer waiting for the rapidly growing area of purple grass around the skimmer to grow to just the right height before moving in and rapidly grazing it down again.

"You know this place is trippy, right?" Arnella said once she returned from confirming the skimmer was rapidly recharging.

"Say that again when you feel like you need more time to get something done."

"I'm just glad you don't actually age when you're in the domain."

"That's what I'm told," Kai said as he moved them both to the house.

Standing at the top of the stairs, he pointed to the new guest room. "I think Syl guessed you were coming along."

Arnella nodded. "She is observant."

"If only you knew," Kai said, opening the main bedroom and slipping inside.

...

"Do you, oh I don't know, maybe feel like they are deliberately giving us some time together?"

Kai shrugged from his position behind the pilot crystal.

He had a strong feeling that it was the case through his connection with Syl. Only if he was reading it right, Syl just wanted them to get along. Nothing at all like how she wanted him to connect with Alicia. It struck him as being a little weird, as he felt like he got along just fine with Arnella.

They had awoken the next day to find the skimmer's battery was fully charged. Arnella made use of the time dilation to make some minor adjustments while the others had breakfast, and they had an interesting discussion about commitment and the Alean concepts of what it means to be faithful.

Later, when Arnella returned to announce it was time, they got moving again. Kai had expressed an interest in learning how to pilot the craft and, after a short flight around the domain, they had exited out into the early morning light of the real world with barely an hour of real time passing in real time.

With both Alicia and Syl deciding to stay in the domain for Kai's first real flight, he was left alone with Arnella for hours on end.

Kai had thought it would be fun, but maintaining a set course at a steady speed got boring quick.

When Syl appeared to announce it was her turn to learn to drive, as she put it, Kai was annoyed to see the trees start to thin and rocky meadows open up around them. Of course, Arnella allowed her to drop down to enjoy a spurt of far more active flight training until the skimmer's batteries died, and they stopped for lunch.

The next day, when Arnella was happy they could charge the skimmer in just an hour or two and she had worked a bit more on stabilising the skimmer's drives. Then, she showed them the compass she was using to keep them on the right heading.

The device looked just like a compass to Kai, only it had two needles, the one tipped blue pointed north. The other red tipped needle, however, could be set to point to a specific geographical location. Which, in this case, was the location of the meeting they were heading to.

When Arnella pulled out the spell form used in its construction to try to teach both him and Syl how to enchant the reportedly rudimentary survival item, Kai begged Alicia for a turn piloting. All he could make out of the spell was point north and a few other terms he couldn't connect in his mind, despite both Syl and Arnella insisting it was simple.

With the compass made available to them, they were allowed to open up the speed on the now much more stable skimmer and explore a little so long as they always kept moving in the general direction of the red needle's heading.

Alicia had raised concerns about encountering predators or disturbing some territorial beast By flying so low and recklessly, but Arnella dismissed her concerns, stating that the dragon that controlled this area was known for keeping a tight rein on all within their domain. That was actually the only reason that travelling alone on a make shift skimmer with just her for added protection had been signed off on in the first place.

She then informed them if they were anywhere else, they would have likely had one of the silver ranked adventuring teams providing escort.

All this, of course, meant Kai was piloting the skimmer down through a narrow at breakneck speed, smoothly manipulating the control crystal to weave left and right, rise up and down and even fly straight through under some overhangs. That's when they caught the attention of a rather large bird watching from high above.

It wasn't a friendly bird.

Kai only noticed the thing when he realised the large shadow off to the right was actually moving with them.

Looking up, he nearly shit himself as he saw its gaze was locked on him, its head pointed his way like a hawk sizing up its prey. Its head barely moved as the rest of its massive body casually twitched and shifted its wings to keep it perfectly in flight in the space high above them.

"Keep us on course and maintain a steady speed," Arnella said calmly. "If I tell you to, give it all you have. Channel some of your own mana into the control crystal if you have to."

"What is it doing?"

"Not what they usually do."

"What do they usually do?"

"It's a Greater Speckled Strike, so I'll let you guess. They're big, smart ambush predators. He shouldn't be here. Just concentrate on keeping us on course, and get us up out of this ravine so you can dodge if we need to."

"It is a he?" Kai asked as he looked up at the big black bird shaped shadow with its piercing gaze and wondered how she could make that out.

"The females are much bigger and far more territorial."

The Greater Speckled Strike followed them for a good hour before it looked off in the direction they were heading, then, taking one more look at Kai, it dipped its wing and turned away.

"What was that about?" Kai asked as he tried to relax.

"I don't rightly know, but I think we should stop messing about. Move over. I'm going to take control."

Kai slid out of the way as he removed his dragon scaled hands from the controls.

He hadn't even noticed the scales taking over; he had been so focused on the raptor above them and keeping them on course.

He glanced over his shoulder at the now disappearing predator and examined it.

Greater Speckled Strike ( ??? ) This ambush predator is rarely seen, its attacks are so sudden and violent few live to tell of the encounter. Young males are known to wander far and wide, however, once they find a suitable mate, they rarely leave the home territory of the much larger female. Known to be incredibly smart, they are also curious in nature, their nest often littered with rare and powerful artefacts collected from far and wide or the corpses of those foolish enough to garner their attention.

"I got marks when I examined it. Any idea what level it was?" Kai asked.

"No idea, I got marks too, which either means it's very high levelled or very experienced and can block Examine like you. If it did strike, I would have been a distraction at best, while you got the away or hid in the domain," she said. The skimmer started to shake as Arnella did her best to put some distance between them and the Strike.

"Speaking of blocking examines, what happened to the betting pool?"

Arnella chuckled, " Don't worry, I've got your share of the gold."

They ran the battery flat over and over, in Arnella's bid to get them there faster.

Around midday on the third day, Kai noticed something up ahead as the terrain changed once again. They crested a hill to look down on a vast, craggy landscape of oddly structured rock formations covered in a dense mat of vegetation.

When he looked further, he could see the tops of buildings could be seen peeking through the flora here and there.

Kai realised what he was seeing was more often than not, old stone buildings held together by the roots of trees or the creeping tendrils of the vegetation that had long ago taken over what he realised was a vast city.

"Welcome to the fallen fair city of El'alora, the lost capital of Dawn and home to the Crystal throne. The location of your meeting a day from now. We just need to find the palace and hope it's still standing after all these years," Arnella said as she pulled back on the control crystal.

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