The floating island hung in the air above a recovering Dresden, its scorched platforms and gas-choked corridors still warm from the battle that had claimed it. The party stood in possession of something that defied easy categorization — not merely a captured vessel or a seized stronghold, but a mobile, self-sustaining Hydrogas manufactory, one of the most strategically valuable assets in the known world. The conversation about what to do with it was not long.

They handed it to the Merchant Council, placing the facility under the direct operational stewardship of Barkevius Frumpymelon. The decision was not sentimental. It was precise. The manufactory solved Dresden's most critical reconstruction problem in a single act — providing the new government with a self-sustaining supply of Hydrogas to power the heavy machinery needed to clear the rubble, restart the industrial economy, and fund the infrastructure projects necessary to stabilize the region. It also gave Barkevius something his seat at the council table had not yet fully provided: leverage that did not depend on Coalborne's goodwill or the fragile mandate of a populace still raw from revolution. With the manufactory under Frumpymelon stewardship, the new government had a foundation that could bear actual weight.

Barkevius accepted the stewardship and did not leave. The wandering stowaway who had fled his family's legacy and returned to find it in ruins made his choice in the shadow of a floating island and the lie of a cabin outside the city. He stayed. Dresden was his now in every sense that mattered, and he intended to rebuild it into something his father's name could not diminish.

On the ground, the work that Stanley the Seer had begun in the rubble of the Cathedral of Amandine was taking shape faster than anyone had anticipated. The Church of Jasiri was not merely growing — it was filling a void the revolution had torn open when it dismantled the old spiritual order along with everything else. Orliath organized the swelling congregation with the precision of an academic who had found a cause worth the effort. Reverend Isaiah Windlass, who had renounced his vows to Amandine and come to the new faith as a high-ranking minister, brought with him the institutional knowledge of how a church actually functioned at scale. Under the three of them, a new temple rose from the rubble of the old, brick by brick, its bells audible across the recovering districts as a signal that the city's spiritual center had not collapsed along with its architecture — it had simply moved.

The smoke over Dresden began to thin. The vanguards of the revolution were celebrated in the streets as the architects of a new era, which was a complicated thing to be celebrated as when you were already making arrangements to leave.

The party had not forgotten Captain Carver. Using a portion of the resources salvaged from the pirate hoard, they commissioned the construction of a specialized airship at the Dresden gantries. They understood it would not be ready before they needed to leave. They commissioned it anyway. Some investments reveal their purpose in time, and Dresden needed to see its vanguards building something rather than destroying things.

When the hour came, Barkevius Frumpymelon made sure the city knew it. He organized a hero's farewell at the docks where the Captain's yacht still sat moored in the harbor, and half of Dresden showed up to send them off. The vanguards of the revolution stood on the dock in the noise of a city that had survived itself, and most of them were glad to be leaving. The ones who weren't had already made their peace with staying.

Barkevius remained. He had a council to run and a city to rebuild and a name to either redeem or bury, and Dresden was the only place any of that could happen. Sikro vanished into the wilderness beyond the city's edge, his clockwork drake at his side, and was not seen again. The enigmatic Professor Harrow slipped away without ceremony, returning to whatever private research had consumed him since before the Albacore went down, offering nothing in the way of explanation.

Miyake Harrier took her place at the navigation station of the Captain's yacht without being asked. The newest member of the group, Grilldis Drummy, stowed his gear and said nothing that needed saying.

The ship in a bottle — its unidentified magic still humming with quiet anticipation — was secured in Muddy's blackened hand. The submersible slipped beneath the surface of the harbor to the cheers of half the city and turned west. Dresden disappeared behind them. The Sea of Ghosts opened ahead, cold and lightless and indifferent, and somewhere beyond it, on the grey coast of Eire, the Carver family was waiting for news of a husband and father that was already months overdue.