Where Passage Becomes Peril

More about Where Passage Becomes Peril

They did not drift into the canyon by accident.

Every captain who brings a silk hull into this air knows the maps, the margins, the
names carved into stone by those who misjudged the capricious whim of the winds
or the brooding patience of the cliffs. The route is marked, measured, and still
chosen, because what lies beyond it cannot be reached any other way. Trade does
not favor the timid; it favors those who accept that loss is part of transit.

The savage dwellers of the canyons make no claim of ownership. They do not
signal, parley, or pursue.

They wait.

Ropes swing only when the airships are fully committed, when the currents have
narrowed choice to momentum alone. This is not ambush but accounting — a
reckoning by blade and fang conducted at altitude, where strength, bone, and gravity
settle disputes without words.

Sometimes a ship passes cleanly through, battered but intact, its crew shaken and
older by years when they emerge at last into open sky. Sometimes it does not. The
difference is never recorded here. Only the passage matters — and the understanding,
shared by traders and watchers alike, that the canyon has already been paid in full
by those who come after.