Arwick vaulted from branch to branch as cinders stung his eyes and his lungs filled with the acrid taste of his planet roasting. Over the din of crackling flames, screams assaulted him from the smoke, some imploring for aid, others venting grief. But his pace never slackened as he leapt without rest through swirling plumes of sooty flame. He had been on the move for days without rest or nourishment. But he hungered only for vengeance.
The ashen clouds were at least traversable, compared to the pools of sludge that were steadily forcing his passage higher. At first he'd taken it for mud, but when one caught flame, he realized it was sap, oceans of it, already congealing to organic mortar. Again he spat. He had known from the first those Exiles with their airships and burning mouthsticks brought only misfortune. For them Arboria burned. And now instead of repelling the invaders, all they feebly offered was joining them in a flight to certain death for nebulous causes. To keep from howling, he tried to douse his rage in recollections of Myala's hair. Did she live? If not, he preferred to perish in this inferno.
Such was his last thought before he reached out to seize a long familiar creeper that suddenly wasn't there. Then he was plummeting through a dusty maelstrom. He fell for an eternity until his face smashed into a steel slab slimy with bubbling rust. There he lay, splayed on the head of a screw wider than the trunk of the most ancient lansa. Peering over the rim, he got his first glimpse of the roaring beast that he had been listening to gorge for days.
Merely looking at it made his head ache. Jagged knobs and screeching axles protruded everywhere from its concave surfaces with no observable purpose, as if its designer despised grace. Far below, hundreds of turrets squirted toxic webs of defoliant everywhere while metal rollers gnashed steadily through greenery older than the moon.
A wave of white-hot madness lashed over him. He ran straight down its surface and, just as gravity dragged him forward, jackknifed between banks of revolving turbines that missed decapitating him by inches. Then his foot caught in a stray hose, swinging him upside down to slam against a spinning cone of spikes, dislocating his shoulder on the ricochet. Something swatted him into a sliding axle to which he clung over an abyss of screaming circuitry until his remaining fingers had no purchase left and sent him careening down through nightmarish cavities of clockwork guts.
Source: World Story