Hey all!

I've been thinking about drawing a ship for quite a while now, but hadn't found that little extra fantasy element to turn it into something truly weird and (hopefully) wonderful. But then a few nights ago I woke up with the remnants of a dream, which led to the concept of a "shard ship".

The shards in question are fragments of a massive, monolithic block of rock which was originally situated deep within the heart of a mountain. When part of the rockface crumbled during an especially devastating earthquake, this rock was exposed, and small slivers of it were found floating nearby instead of falling to the ground like the surrounding rock. The members of the expedition (originally set out to rescue inhabitants of a nearby village after the disaster) soon discovered that it was all but impossible to move the rock fragments to any other elevation. With some effort, small pebbles could be taken down for examination, but they shot up again as soon as they were released. the larger the fragments, the harder it was to move them out of their apparently fixed horizontal plane. It was easy enough to move them around horizontally, incredibly easy even (the only friction they underwent coming from the air around them).

The members of the expedition eventually arrived at the village and saved the ones they could, and when they came back to civilisation, word soon spread about what they had found. The rector of the University refused to believe the tall stories of the exhibition members until one of them discovered a tiny sliver stuck to the top of a heavy chest, and brought it to the University.

Further examination soon revealed a rather sinister aspect of the rock fragment: anyone who touched it, or even came close to it, slowly became very sick. Nowadays we would recognize the symptoms as radiation sickness, with one big exception: those who had stayed just beyond the "sickness radius" of the rock fragments, like the rescued villagers and some of the less curious expedition members, never showed any of the symptoms.

Even before the first expedition members started dying, the government reacted. They had all of the members quarantined, and sent a second, heavily armed expedition to the mountains. The valley with the floating rock fragments was hermetically sealed except for people with the highest government clearance. Cheap labour was attracted with promises of high wages, keeping silent about the high risks involved. In the early months of Project Skystone, many of these workers met an untimely death, but soon they developed a process that allowed them to mine the rock without exposing their labour force to deadly radiation levels - although accidents still happened, naturally.

Then, huge caravans started bringing in building materials. Months the wagons kept streaming to the massive depot just outside the new wall closing off the valley, where they were unloaded and sent away before Project Skystone's private workforce brought them inside. Not one of the workers was allowed to leave in this phase of construction. Government officials kept saying they would reveal the result of all their efforts as soon as it was finished, but it just dragged on. Months they kept building, the sounds of woodworking echoing through the mountains 24 hours a day. They even started building towers on hills and crags, interconnected with massive steel cables hundreds of meters above the ground. The people working on those builds were allowed to go home once their project was done, but they know only what they had been ordered to do: build a tower, and connect it with cables to the ones nearby. They too had no idea of what the government was building. Winter came and went, summer came, slipped into winter again, and then, when the last snows had cleared, it happened.

On a bright spring morning, a thundering, booming horn started echoing through the valley. Over the last few days a huge crowd had gathered just outside the valley wall, eager to know what was happening, and they all came out of their tents despite the cold, and stared intently at the gates, waiting for them to open. Then a massive shadow fell over them, and in unison a thousand pairs of eyes looked up, and saw...

...the underbelly of a massive ship, floating in mid-air. Or rather, two halves of a ship, built around a spherical metal cage containing a big chunk of vibrating, greenish rock: a Skystone Shard. And then another one appeared, just to the left of it. And another one to the right. Five, eight, twelve ships drifted over the wall, stately as swans viewed from the bottom of an incredibly still pond, and they just kept coming. Only after a while the people below began noticing that each of the ships was tethered to the massive steel cable going into the valley - the terminus in a network that was even now expanding throughout the kingdom.

The kingdom had just revealed its Skystone Navy.

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Okay, so that's a bit of backstory, some of it made up on the spot for dramatic effect. But this is the idea: the Shard-Ships are vessels constructed around a cage that holds a shard of the Skystone. It looks like the stone is suspended in the middle of the spherical cage, but in fact it's the other way around: the cage, and the ship that's constructed around it, are all hanging from the shard. The heavier the ship, the larger the shard needs to be to keep it aloft. The cage is slightly larger than the "sickness radius" of that particular shard, allowing the sailors to move safely about without feeling even the smallest effect from it.

All of this (or at least some of this) will eventually appear on the map. For now I only have an unfinished ISO view of the ship, but on the sides there will be plans for each of the decks, a vertical cutaway, and even a small inset with a wider view showing a few docking towers and a bit of pleasantly mountainous terrain. But all that is for the distant future. For now, please enjoy this WIP!

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