Incorporated with DeepSeek
The Parisian rain was a perpetual, acidic drizzle, painting the neon signs of the Ork Underground in smears of reflected light. Silas—they called him ‘Knight’—ignored the squelch of synth-leather and the low growl of an argument as he reached the rooftop.
His steed waited. Wyvern.
It was a skeleton of black aluminum and radar-absorbent fabric, a blasphemy against the sky. He ran a hand along the cold frame, then slid into the recumbent cockpit, the harness clicking shut like a final word.
The electric pusher prop whirred to life, a sound softer than the hum of faulty neon. He pushed forward on the stick, and Wyvern dropped from the roof, falling into the canyon between the arcologies. He flew by the heat of the world. The Seine was a sluggish, warm scar below; the cold, dead craters of the Alsace no-man's-land were pools of ink in his thermographic vision.
Trouble flickered at the edges of his sight. A glowing Ares patrol closing on hot, frantic signatures. A Yakuza sub breaching the waves like a metal leviathan. He flew around it all, a silent shadow skirting the edges of a storm. His code was simple: not his fight.
The Alps were different. They were not a thing to fly around, but through. The stone peaks were ancient, cold, and aware. The pressure of Lofwyr’s dormant attention pressed down on him, a mountain atop his soul. He threaded Wyvern through silent passes, his breath pluming in the frigid air of the cockpit, the only sign of his fear.
And always, the pull. A cord tied to his sternum, reeling him in. It was a low thrum in the air, a song only his bones could hear.
Over the Tyrrhenian Sea, there was nothing. No heat signatures, no light, only the vast, cool blackness and the silent, determined beat of his own heart. For hours, there was only the wind and the call.
Then, a pinprick of fire in the cold blue. Stromboli. A beacon. A warning.
He followed the thrum inland, over the sleeping Sicilian sprawl, until it became a vibration in his controls. He cut the engine, and Wyvern became a glider, a leaf on the wind, settling silently between the broken columns of a Greek temple.
The silence here was total. Absolute.
He slid from the cockpit, his boots crunching on ancient gravel. The hum was in the stones, in the air, in him. He spread his thin blanket on an altar stone worn smooth by millennia. He lay down, using his Fred Perry roll as a pillow, and looked up at the stars through the skeleton of his plane.
The violence was behind him. The journey was over. As he closed his eyes, the call finally stopped, replaced by a new, profound silence. He had arrived. And in the quiet, he knew the real work was about to begin.
Silas lay on the stone, the ancient cold of it seeping through his blanket into his back. Above him, the constellation of his plane, Wyvern, was a black crack in the starry sky. He let his mind drift back, not to the violence he’d avoided, but to the spaces in between.
The memory came not as a single stream, but as flashes, felt more than seen.
The Look of It: On the ground, between flights, it looked like a predator caught napping. A stretched-black manta ray with a single, sharp tail. The matte fabric skin drank the light, making it seem less a solid object and more a hole cut in the world. In the moonlight, it was a sculpture of potential energy.
The Feel of It: He remembered the constant, minute feedback in the control stick. It was a live thing in his hands. Over the dead lands of Alsace, the air was dead and Wyvern flew steady, a silent arrow. But over the sun-baked ruins of northern Italy, thermals had erupted from the broken concrete, grabbing the lightweight frame like invisible fists. It had been a battle of tiny corrections, a constant, physical conversation between man and machine. It never fought him; it asked questions, and he answered with his hands.
His stops were not logged in a flight plan. They were secret things.
The Rooftop in Dijon: He’d set down on a derelict warehouse, its roof covered in moss and pigeon droppings. He’d refuelled from a stashed canister, the smell of synthetic ethanol sharp in the cool air. Below, the hum of the French sector was a distant, manageable thing. He’d sat on the edge, legs dangling over a hundred-foot drop, eating a dry nutrient bar and watching the patrol blimps drift like lazy jellyfish. Wyvern had sat behind him, patient, a companion in the silence.
The Glade in the Jura Foothills: This was where he’d truly slept. He’d guided the plane beneath the canopy of a pine forest, the branches whispering against the wings. He’d laid his blanket on a bed of soft brown needles, the scent of sap thick and clean. In the deep darkness, he’d heard the howl of a free spirit miles away, a sound that chilled the blood but posed no threat to a shadow. Wyvern, parked between two great trees, had looked like something primal, a steed from an older world.
The Coffin in Genoa: His last stop before the sea-crossing. A “coffin hotel” for the truly desperate, where he’d rented a cubicle not for sleep, but for access to a shielded power outlet. He’d sat on the thin mattress, listening to the coughs and moans of his neighbors through the particle board walls, while the slow, trickle-charge filled Wyvern’s batteries in the alley below. It was a moment of profound contrast: the grimy, claustrophobic reality of the Sprawl, and the absolute, clean freedom waiting for him just outside the window.
He had not been flying to escape. He had been flying to find.
Now, lying in the heart of the silence that had called him, he understood. The journey was the ritual. The long, silent hours in the cockpit, the raw exposure to the elements, the constant, gentle mastery required to guide the fragile craft… it had stripped him down. It had scraped away the layers of the Sprawl, the cynicism, the noise.
The man who had left Paris was a weapon, carefully sheathed. The man lying beneath the Sicilian stars was simply a man, quiet and empty, ready to be filled with whatever came next. He closed his eyes, one hand resting on the cold stone, the other within reach of his plane’s landing gear. Both felt equally alive.
