Read The Airship Aurelia (The Aurelian Archives) for Free Online Page A

accepting the risk involved.”
                  Reece paused, eyeing Po worriedly. She seemed to have gone into shock. Her brown eyes, liquid in the lantern light, refused to blink. He exchanged a look with Nivy, who shrugged bewilderedly.
                  “You're…askin' me to come?” Po asked in a whisper.
                  “You don't have to,” Reece said again, “but I'd like you to.”
                  Squealing, Po threw her arms around his neck and hugged him till he coughed. “I gotta tell Tilden and Gus!” she laughed, standing and running towards the stairs with a whoop.
                  Reece almost called for her to wait until he had Gideon on hand. That way he'd be ready when her brothers came to call, asking why he'd invited their sweet little sister to join him on a dangerous trek across the galaxy.
                  Nivy gave him a dig in the ribs, her eyebrows raised. He read her face for a minute, analyzing her expression.
                  “I know,” he finally said. “But I told her it'd be dangerous.”
                  Nivy's semi-exasperated but mostly amused expression said she doubted Po had registered that part of his invitation. They could hear the echoes of her delighted voice announcing to everyone down below that “the cap'n” had brought her on as official mechanic.
                  Spreading his hands over the lantern, cupping its faint warmth, Reece frowned thoughtfully. “I've been thinking, Nivy. About The Heron.”
                  With a hesitant nod, Nivy bid him continue.
                  “From what you've told us, The Kreft have been here for hundreds of years already. Orchestrating politics from the shadows, quietly beating down any rebellions The Heron could raise.”
                  Looking confused—they'd been over this a dozen times already—Nivy nodded again.
                  “Why haven't The Heron sought help from other planets? If a unified galaxy were to fight The Kreft, the war might've ended a long time ago. Why haven't The Heron ever asked for help?”
                  Her brow furrowed, Nivy leaned back and stared into the darkness beyond Reece. She rubbed her fingertips together, almost as if planning how to make them make words.
                  “If I had to guess,” Reece continued more quietly, “I'd say it was because of their weapon. The weapon The Kreft thought had been destroyed at the beginning of the war. Am I close?”
                  Nivy paused, then looked at him and tilted her hand back and forth. Sort of . She seemed troubled, thoughtful.
                  But then, if anything was worth being troubled about, it was this. Reece, with the help the duke had generously given in the spirit of father-son bonding, had managed to piece together the broken history of Honora—weeding out the bits fed to them by Eldritch and The Kreft—and most of the broader, vaguer past of the Epimetheus galaxy. Honoran history books would still need correcting, but that was a job better left to someone who liked history and books. Or anyone besides Reece.
                  The Kreft were a race of marauders and conquerors. More than five hundred years ago, they'd set their sights on the Epimetheus, following rumors of a great weapon kept by The Heron, a people who lived in the secluded cluster of arctic planets known as The Ice Ring. The Kreft and The Heron fought for nigh on fifty years before The Heron began to lose their footing. Their final stroke against The Kreft had been to destroy their weapon and send two ships of refugees across the galaxy and to safety.
                  The refugees had landed on what was then a rural, insignificant planet…Honora. The refugee Heron were assimilated seamlessly into the population, and their airships