Windskiffs

Stop asking me why I keep a spool of waxed line in my satchel. It has nothing to do with snares, or rope repair, though Tgii knows I've used it for both in a pinch.

It's for flying kites.

Yes. Kites.

A gnome pushing seventy, half made of gears and glass, hauling string around like a schoolboy.

Go on, laugh.

Every gnome in Clockworks City does the same, so you'll have to get in line behind the rest of them.

The Windskiff

A Windskiff is nothing more than a scrap of oiled parchment stretched over a bent tin frame, tied to a spool of line, and thrown off the nearest rooftop into a smokestack updraft. Any child in the city can build one by age six.

Most do.

The cheap ones fall apart in a season. The good ones get handed down.

What makes it a Clockworks obsession rather than a children's pastime is the thermals. The city breathes heat out of a thousand chimneys and vent-stacks, and a Windskiff caught in the right column will climb faster than anything a bird could manage, straight up past the rooftops until the string runs out or your arm does. There are platforms built specifically for launching them, betting rings for the races, and at least one guild that will tell you, with a straight face, that Windskiff design is a legitimate engineering discipline.

I've argued with them about it. I've also lost that argument, which tells you something.

The races themselves are chaos, and I mean that with affection. Two dozen Windskiffs fighting the same column of hot air, lines crossing, someone's cousin screaming instructions from the rooftop below, coin changing hands on outcomes nobody could have predicted three seconds earlier. I've seen a Guild Master lose a week's wages to a nine-year-old with a steadier hand than his. He paid up. Grumbled about it for a month, but he paid.

Grandparents teach grandchildren the fold. That's the part that matters to me, if I'm honest. Everything else about the hobby is showmanship.

The fold is inheritance.

The Last Windskiff

There is a second use for a Windskiff, and it isn't a game.

Clockworks City loses people the way any place built on steam and gears loses people...to the machines, to the depths, to the kind of accident that doesn't leave enough behind to bury. When that happens, the family builds one more kite.

They chalk the name onto the tin frame themselves, by hand, and they carry it up to the highest launch platform they can reach. They fly it once, straight up into the thermal until it's a speck, until it's nothing.

Then they cut the line.

No sermon. No grave marker. Just a name let go into the sky over a city that never stops running, so that everyone can watch it climb until they can't anymore.

I've cut that line myself.

More than once, if you want the truth of it, which I notice you do, since you're still reading.

No, I won't tell you the names.
Some records aren't for the Guide.

But I'll tell you this much: I still keep the waxed line in my satchel, and I don't only carry it for kites shaped like games.