Werewolf the Podcast: Battles in the Sky. (Episode 227)

The professor and the soon-to-be wing commander fight the sky demons while Lady Luck watches on. What will happen?

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Transcript

The future wing commander Montgomery Fortescue the third.  

The thing about a B.E.2c is that it was not designed for war. What is the B.E.2c? It's a bally plane. Did they teach you nothing in history? 

Anyway hrumph. It was designed, if designed is the correct term, as far as I can tell, to terrify the pilot and baffle the enemy with its lack of agility. It was no fighter, but a decent enough bomber. What it was really is what we had. 

Describing it... hmmm. What say I? It's basically a poorly made drying rack with canvas stuck to it. 

A thing strung together with piano wire, glue and an egregious amount of belief in its ability to fly..

We bolted a Vickers gun to the front and a Lewis for the observer and called it a fighter, though the plane itself seemed to disagree violently with the concept. 

If we fired the Lewis and the Vickers forward at the same time, the plane would slow down significantly and almost fall out of the sky.

Anyway... That's what we had to fight it... annoy it. I don't bally know what we were thinking or really what we were doing.

We had no plan other than to get the planes up there. 

And so, we threw three planes at that sky. The last three planes we had. 

Six men in total had the gumption and the go to test themselves against that thing. True bravery. True heroes, yet all of them under twenty-four. Fine fellows to a T.

These plucky chaps were the last sane creatures in a sky gone feral. 

It was a terrifying rolling beast of a thing with those possessed airships at its centre, blasting out lightning bolts like bloody Zeus himself from Mount Olympus. 

We should have left it. We should have remained cowering on the ground. We should have hidden in fear, as whatever it was was alive and hunting for prey. 

Sadly, that prey would be us in this case. 

No, we must do our task. Distract it for the madman below to work his... erm... difficult to believe I am saying this. His magic. 

The sky beast didn't just roll in. It hunted. 

Clouds the colour of old bruises folded over one another, growling. 

Lightning didn't flash—it reached, clawed, prowled, snapping across the sky with teeth. 

The air itself was thick with the stink of ozone and burning metal, and every gust of wind felt like it wanted you dead.

And in the middle of this nightmare: the airships. They weren't drifting like proper Zeppelins. They were writhing. Their skins bulged and cracked, lightning slithered across their flanks, and the ropes beneath them dangled like tentacles. 

Possessed. Machines wearing the storm like a crown.

From the ground, I could imagine they looked magnificent. From the cockpit of a B.E.2c? They looked like the gods had decided to reanimate dead whales and set them to feeding on the souls of men.

The first run nearly killed us before we'd even seen the bastards properly.

The turbulence hit like a drunk throwing a punch in a crowded pub—unexpected, brutal, and delivered with staggering enthusiasm. 

The plane lurched beneath me, canvas flapping, struts groaning like a pensioner's knees. My observer, young Collingwood, clung to the Lewis gun like a drowning man to a plank.

'Bit bumpy, sir!' he shouted over the slipstream.

'Bit bumpy?' I yelled back. 'I've seen less movement in a kangaroo court!'

And then the airship ahead turned. Not banked—not turned like an aircraft—but turned, like a face slowly registering your existence. 

Lightning crawled across its skin in spirals, and the storm howled as though the thing were drawing breath.

Collingwood screamed his rage at it. Fair felt the hairs on the back of my neck as he bellowed curses and opened fire. He wasn't bally scared, he was angry.

The Lewis gun rattled, brass casings flying, tracers sparking into the monstrous shape. For a glorious second, we might actually be doing something.

Then the airship wailed its discomfort. A terrible sound, I have to tell you. Gives me the shudders when I hark back to that night over a quiet drink.

Don't ask me how. Don't ask me what vocal cords a machine of silk, gas, and steel could possibly possess.

But the sound was there—tearing through my head, vibrating in my ribs. A sound made of thunder, knives, and broken prayers.

And a moment later, a bolt of lightning the width of a church tower came down and swallowed the plane to our left. 

The flash blinded me for a moment, and our plane went into one of those strange, floppy dives that they often do. 

I blinked my eyes until my vision returned and searched the sky for my other fellow flyers. One plane remained. The other must have... just—gone. 

Was it now that puff of fire and black smoke spiralling into the rain? 

Gone was Hargreaves. 

Gone was Jenkins. 

Friends. Not really, no. Worse than that, boys who had shared a terrified joke while they shivered in fear half an hour before and trusted me to keep them safe.

I gritted my teeth. I would no longer just be a distraction; I was going to be an avenging angel, of sorts. 

Well, in that moment, I thought I would be. My mind was soon changed. 

The storm didn't care about me fighting back. The storm was hungry.

We fought. Of course, we fought. That's what the British do. We fight until we... well, don't, mainly because we're dead.

Every turn was a wrestling match with the elements. Every movement shook the fuselage. 

I thought we were going to be torn apart at any moment. I heard several wires ping. I heard something tear behind me, but I made sure I did not look. I focused on other things.

'Just stay in the bladdy sky!' I yelled at the bucking Biplane.

The stick jerked in my hands like it had opinions; the plane was trying to add its own influence to the happenings. It felt scared. No wonder. 

'Come on, you bucket.' I yelled at her. 

No, I was being unfair; the old girl was trying. So I changed my tone. 

Cadjoling her gently. 'Come on, we've got this.' She seemed to take that well. 

The wings shuddered, and the rain slapped so hard it felt personal. I could feel the aircraft wanting to come apart, every gust testing the bolts, the wood, my sanity, but she held it together. She was a plucky filly. 

I scanned the heavens that were doing their best impression of being hell. Where was... Oh no, Had... Oh no. 

Then, out of the maelstrom, it was there. 

The sense of relief was palpable. 

The second plane spun away, diving under the belly of one of the leviathans. A daring move. A brilliant move. 

I watched them while Collingwood still fired his Lewis at the beasts in the sky. 

Although his curses seemed to do more damage than any of the shots he took.

Then I saw that that fateful move of sheer bravery by the other plane was not. It was a fatal one.

A streak of white light cracked downward, slicing the sky in two. 

'Nooooo...!' I screamed into the darkness, but it did not do any good. 

When my eyes cleared, the second plane was nothing but falling embers. Two more men gone.

Now it was just us. 

Tears filled the corners of my eyes. Good people die in the pursuit of others' wants. 

We were the plane now. The distraction. 

One Vickers almost out of shells. 

One lad with a Lewis gun and a grin that was already turning manic. He had got blood fury. He was not cognisant of reality right now. How could he be? This was not that. 

We were a gnat against a titan.

But gnats bite and irritate, distract, and as long as we did that for a long enough time, hopefully the Professor would do something.

I could not imagine what he could do against this, but it was the only choice. 

What could he do with his glowing circle of water on the ground? I laughed at the ridiculousness of this situation. 

I was going to die for what? Blast it. I was going to die, but I would go on being the most annoying gnat that Britain had yet created. A far superior gnat than even the bastard midge of the highlands. 

'Tally ho!' I yelled. It did not feel enough. Then I remembered the Glaswegian Lewis as I fired a quick burst. 

'Stitch that ya bastard!' Definitely more effective in feeling than Tally Ho. He had a way with words, did that boy.

We dove, we climbed, we corkscrewed until the world was a blur of black rain and white fire. 

I fired until the barrel smoked, until my hands blistered on the trigger, until my voice was gone from screaming.

Collingwood kept reloading, kept firing, kept laughing like a lunatic who'd misplaced his straitjacket.

Then the storm reached out and killed him.

A single bolt snatched him straight from the cockpit. 

One instant, he was there, shouting something about hitting the gasbag; the next, he was a shape of light, then nothing. His Lewis gun clattered uselessly as his body vanished into the roaring dark.

'Aaaaaargh!' I screamed into the night.

I should have broken then. I should have wept, or cursed, or given up. But I didn't. British men do not. Stiff upper lip and all that bosh.

Also I had been joined in the plane. The bitch. Luck—green-eyed, smirking, impossible Luck—still had my back. 

In fact, she had replaced my observer. A green-eyed beauty now sat in his seat. Not green irises but green glowing orbs. 

She was dressed in aviator's gear and gave me a smile as she set herself up on the Lewis as though she had been using them for years. 

She started firing, which was bladdy impossible as there was nothing left on board to fire with. Not a single shell.

This was Luck not giving me Luck. Lady Luck was really helping me out. 

Every dive... the sky beast missed us, and she smiled.

Every claw of lightning raked the air inches from my wings, she would laugh. 

Every impossible gust somehow pushed me away from death instead of into it. I should have been dead a dozen times already.

And below, I could see it happening.

The Professor's circle. The airfield glowing, a lattice of light pushing back the storm. 

Clear sky was bleeding through the darkness, like a wound in the heavens. It was a moment that made me realise that this could work. He was doing it. 

It made me snarl and fly harder into the storm. 

Lady Luck was... she was laughing hysterically. I smiled. This felt good.

The Professor's magic clawed and tore through the clouds. 

The storm beast was screaming now in pain. It was being hurt. He was winning. 

He shoved the airships back, unpicking the storm one thread at a time.

But it wasn't happening fast enough. Not nearly fast enough. I still had to be an annoying bastard for a little longer, and I have to say I was doing a dam fine job. I have a knack for annoying.  

So I danced with Lady Luck and the Sky Wolves a little longer.

And then one of the great brutes decided it had had enough of me. It had taken notice of the irritation. It was going to swat the fly.

The lead airship—if "lead" is even the word for something possessed—twisted in the sky. 

Lightning coiled around it, and I felt it looking at me. Truly looking. The noises it made were terrifying. Its... gaze was... it was... 

And then it reached out.

Not with fire. Not with wind. With a grasping claw.

The plane shuddered as it pinched us out of the sky. 

I turned to look at Luck. She dropped the gun and saluted as she dissolved away into the clouds.

I smiled ruefully. 

Maybe my Luck was done. 

Part of me hoped so.

My stomach lurched. 

It felt as though an invisible hand the size of a cathedral had gripped the fuselage and was dragging us down.

The ground surged upward. Faster, faster. I pulled at the stick until my arms burned, but it was like wrestling an avalanche.

'Get your filthy mitts off me!' I screamed at the beast as it hurled me at the floor. 

Trees. Grass. The faint, defiant glow of the Professor's circle.

All of it hurtling up at me in excruciating detail. My head spun. The ground was coming at me very fas...

And then—the impact and. 

Wood splintering. Canvas shredding. The world turned inside out. I felt nothing. Blackness. 

The Professor

The chalk fought the rain. Why do I have to use bloody chalk? Why did they decide chalk was a big thing in invocations? Wet, cold, numb, bloody fingers and a stick of wet, slimy chalk. Gets a chap down, it does.

Though I have to admit it was a worthy stick of chalk. For those who are listening to learn, magical things need good chalk. Utterly excellent chalk.

That was the hardest part of it, really. 

Not the incantations. 

Not the placement of sigils, each aligned with star charts older than Christendom. 

Not even the blood tithe, which had cost me a perfectly good thumb-sized cut across my palm. No—the chalk.

Rain didn't care about geometry. And without geometry, the circle was just a series of damp scribbles in a muddy field.

Still, persistence is half of magic. (The other half is arrogance. The remainder is Luck. The fractions never add up, which is why so few people practice it responsibly.)

Luck... I can smell her. She is here. She is mixing in tonight. I wonder who she will choose to favour. She is somewhat a perditious lady at times.

Hmmm! And the last time we crossed paths.

I did upset her quite a lot. 

Not good to upset that Lady. 

Often, she is more annoying than Luci. 

You know Luci-fer. 

At least Luci has a plan for your downfall. 

Luck seems to have no plan. She seems to do whatever amuses her in that moment. Luci, well, you know her game. Luck... well, she rolls dice when she plays chess.

Well, nothing I can do about her right now. (laugh)

As if there was anything I could do about her anyway.

She is a problem I can do nothing about. So she is not a problem.

I grimaced as I knelt there in the mire, a gentleman of the University of Oxford in a ruined coat, sleeves soaked through, spectacles fogged, muttering dead languages under my breath while the sky tried to kill me.

To be honest, it wasn't my worst day this week. I had not been killed yet. Tuesday, on the other hand. Died twice... 

I must focus...

And, against all expectations, it began to work.

The circle glowed faintly—first the colour of dying embers, then the pale white of moonlight. 

I took off my useless bloody glasses and threw them into the night. I didn't need them; it was just a stupid affectation of mine. With all this rain, they were not even see-through, never mind fashionable.

I broke my Latin eulogy for a moment and used good old English to add some power to the magic.

'Come on, you utter bastard.' I yelled at the dull ring before going back to repeating the spell for the umpteenth time. 

It started to glow brighter. Swearing helped?

I must remember to write this in my notes. If you swear at the circle, it will brighten. What were the exact words? Utter bastard was in there somewhere. 

Lightning hit the dirt about four inches from my foot. The ground exploded, and I hit the floor face-first, hands over my ears as earth, grass and stones were blasted about me.

I say 'floor,' but by now it was no longer lush grass. No, it was a muddy mess. Nice. I had to spit to clear my mouth of watery grit.

'Not my day.' I yelled at the seething sky. 'Why do I bloody do this shit! No one's ever bloody thankful.'

I rolled sausage-like to my back with a sickening squelch and sighed before getting back to my feet.

'... and why don't you do me a favour and fuck off?' I yelled at the Airships now passing above me. 

Future note. Telling possessed Zeppelins to fuck off did not help. Lightning strike just missed me. This time, I just stood and took the blast.

'Fuck you.' I yelled. I was losing it a little.

I mean, I can't die, I can, but I come back, but those things up there are after more than your life. 

They were only here because they would willingly do the deed asked. 

Their payment being the souls of those they killed. 

And sadly, I only had one of those, and that was... Already owned. Not by myself either, at this time, which was annoying. So I could not lose it.

The air trembled. The storm pressed against it like a wild animal meeting glass.

Clouds shifted, split, peeled back. The shrieking thunder above us began to falter.

I started laughing; it was bloody working. 

I risked another look skyward.

And saw the final plane fall.

It was not falling in the natural sense. Not gravity's honest pull. 

No, the little canvas-and-wood contraption had been slammed, shoved earthward as if some titanic hand had reached out of the clouds and decided to swat it like a fly.

The sound—God above—the sound of it hitting the ground was like a church collapsing.

I paused for a moment, struck dumb. Rain ran off the end of my nose. The world took a breath with me. 

I had forgotten my Latin. Forgot my sigils. 

Forgot the thousand and one careful, precise calculations that kept me alive and sane while I meddled in forces designed to shred both.

I saw more good men die and give their whole selves. This was not good enough.

And something in me snapped.

I stepped into the circle, something no one should do for future note. It leaves you open to the denizens of other plains, but I stood there, rain soaking through to my bones.

'Right, you utter bastards, here I come. You have pissed me off now, so you are going to get both barrels.' And I roared. Lifting my arms to the heavens. I felt the power shudder through me into the sky.

Words left my throat that no human mouth was built to shape. Words I did not know. They blistered the air. They boiled the rain.

The chalk hissed, flared, burned white-hot.

A shadow of a woman with green glowing eyes outside the circle cavorted in a dance. Ah, Luck was on my side. Was she?

I called on something darker than even those things in the sky. An ancient thing. 

It would be angry that they had entered its realm. I just had to wake it and make it aware of them.

And the sea answered my call.

I started laughing. It would be wrong to say I don't enjoy my work. The power I sometimes play with is intoxicating.

What answered was not the North Sea. 

Not any familiar tide. But something deeper. Something older.

And the earth shuddered and split around me. As the answering Leviathan pulled itself into the world.

The ocean surged—not seawater, but black, abyssal water that smelled of salt, iron, and ancient grief.

From it, shapes shot into the horror of the heavens. 

Tentacles, vast as cathedrals, leapt skywards to grab and hold, grip and pull. 

Eyes the size of ships, each one unblinking, each one older than mankind, looked out of the arcane past at this war in the sky. 

I started to laugh again. Now slightly hysterically.

'You bastards are utterly fucked now.' I shouted at the blimps above me and saluted them with the ancient archer's salute of two fingers shown on each hand. Not magical, no, but it felt... right. Childish, maybe, but we all have an inner child, do we not?

A mouth opened wide in the sea, perhaps a mouth, though it is a mercy of the human brain that I cannot recall its exact form.

The storm recoiled. It recognised something much more powerful than itself had raised its head.

The airships—those writhing, possessed beasts of silk and steel—howled their electric screams as the thing from the sea rose up to greet them.

They were seized. Dragged downward. 

Crushed into metal pulp and canvas rags as easily as a child might crumple a paper toy. 

The sky bled fire. The storm bled screams.

And then silence.

Bubbles broke the water's surface, once, twice… and then the black tide retreated, dragging its catch back into the deep.

The airships were gone.

The storm was gone.

The Leviathan was gone and had done what was needed. I had done what was needed. It was done

And so, at last, was I. I was done.

Because no human mind can bear the weight of holding the abyss open. 

The dancer outside the circle stopped and curtsied. 

I gave her a thankful wave before she whirled away into the dark.

My legs gave way. The circle guttered out.

I fell face-first gratefully this time into the mud, unconscious, my last thought a bitter one:

God help us if it comes back. Any of it because I am... done. 

Future Wing Commander

First sensation: pressure. Not pain, not fire, not the heavenly choir one might expect after plummeting out of the sky at a speed usually reserved for a barrel full of bricks—but the simple, undeniable pressure of a full bladder.

'Bugger,' I muttered without opening my eyes. 

'Survived the Boers, the weather, and God's own lightning bolt, only to wet myself in the wreckage.' I mean, a chap can't be doing that.

I started to ready myself for the old eye-opening event, I thought I would go left eye first, even though everything achedin my body and felt unresponsive, even my eyelids.

Something squawked.

I winced as I cracked an eye. 

A seagull. Fat, oily, one-eyed, with the sort of expression that suggested it knew precisely what it wanted and what it wanted was my soul.

'Bugger off,' I told it firmly through cracked lips. 

The gull squawked louder, then hopped a few inches closer, just to make its point.

I closed my eyes again and checked into parts of my body mentally. Tallying up what was still there. It all hurt, so it was all there. 

I sighed, forced my eyes open on the second attempt, and sat up. 

A little too quickly at first, which made alarm bells ring in my whirling head, and I lay back down for a moment to gather some fortitude for the next attempt.

Slowly. Carefully. The way a man does when he expects to find bones sticking out in the wrong directions, I rose.

Except… none were. I mean, bones sticking out. Not a scratch. Not a bruise. 

My uniform was a little singed. Oh no, singed. I reached for my moustache. Thank goodness it was still there and only smelled faintly of ozone, but otherwise—perfectly intact.

Not the case for the B.E.2c. 

It was now distributed across roughly one hundred yards of Scottish coastline, looking more like kindling for a very enthusiastic bonfire than a functioning aircraft.

I blinked, rubbed at my face, and finally stood.

The world around me looked and felt… wrong.

Montrose Air Station had been a patch of wind-blown nothing even on its best days—a scattering of huts, a couple of hangars, a stretch of flat ground for pretending you could land a biplane without dying. 

Now it looked as if God had dropped a hammer on it.

One hangar was a blackened skeleton, its roof peeled back like the lid of a sardine tin. Another had simply collapsed, timbers smoking gently in the soft morning breeze. 

The mess hall had lost half its roof, the windows blown out, the smell of charred bacon drifting faintly from within.

The grass—what was left of it—was pocked with scorch marks and craters, as though lightning had decided to take up skeet shooting. 

Struts and fabric from the other planes lay scattered across the field, torn and burnt, flapping sadly in the breeze like flags from a defeated army.

And the silence. That was the worst of it. 

The storm had roared, howled, screamed with a voice like a thousand devils—now, nothing. 

Just the lazy call of gulls and the quiet hiss of something still smouldering in the wreckage.

'Lucky old Monty,' I muttered, half in wonder, half in shame. It was wrong of me to have survived this. 

Nothing should have survived this.

I remembered. The other two planes. Six men had gone up. Five of them... well... They had not come back down.

I was alone, standing— my bladder full—under the bright, beautiful sky of a brand-new morning. Not a cloud in sight. As if the storm had never been.

'Well, somewhat of a mess, what say you?' I said to the seagull. It made no reply.

I had lost my observer—poor Collingwood. A good lad, steady hands on the Lewis gun. Gone in a flash of lightning. The kind of death the world would call 'instant' and 'merciful,' though it was neither to the man standing here alive.

I tottered on my feet and began walking. My boots crunched over twisted struts, snapped wires, and fabric torn to ribbons. 

Every step reminded me I ought to be dead. And yet—I wasn't.

Halfway across the field, something glinted in the grass. I stooped, plucked it up. My pocket watch. I shook it and held it to my ear. Still ticking, stubborn as ever.

'Well,' I said aloud, turning it over in my hand. 'Not bad for a plummet out of heaven. I'm bloody charmed, clearly.'

The words tasted sour. Charmed, yes—but what use was charm when everyone else wasn't?

I pressed on, past scorched earth and splintered hangars, until at last I found him. 

The Professor. Sir Simon de Montfort himself, flat on his back beside a ring of burnt grass, as though the earth had caught fire and then politely gone out again.

The circle he'd drawn was still visible, a faint shimmer in the air, the grass within it blackened and crisp. 

Whatever he'd done here, it had worked—but at a cost.

I stood over him for a moment, hands on hips, then gave him a cautious prod with the toe of my boot.

He suddenly gasped—an awful, ragged sound—and sat bolt upright. 

His eyes snapped open, wide, ancient, and filled with things no sane man should remember.

I stumbled back, nearly dropped my bally watch. 

'Christ, man, don't do that! Nearly had me filling my trousers right here.' I told him, shocked. 

He managed a wry smile, though my heart still hammered.

'Lucky you're alive.' He said with a somewhat knowing tone.

He turned his head slowly, studying me with that same inscrutable, battlefield-worn look he had worn the night before.

'Lucky,' he repeated, voice hoarse. Then, with a suspicion sharp enough to cut steel:

'What are you?'