At first the ascent was gentle.
A shopper might have mistaken it for a strange gust, if not for the sight of the countryside dropping beneath the rooftops.
Then the river below became a silver thread and the festival square disappeared behind curtains of cloud.
The redhead stood on her balloon mount and threw back her head.
“Now this is civic improvement!”
Her companion held both hands around the heart of the spell.
Beneath her, glowing threads joined every floating building to a point of blue light.
“I’ve stabilized the helium nexus,” she said.
“We’re approaching peak airarchy.”
“Peak what?”
“I’m workshopping it.”
The mayor clung to his desk as it bounced against the office ceiling.
Into an emergency microphone he declared, “Gravity is canceled!” He had not meant to say it.
He had also stopped trying to sound like a person in charge.
Below the witches, Vexbridge drifted whole: market, towers, cobbled streets, and a festival still in progress because no one knew how to end it.
For an instant the sight was beautiful enough to forgive them.
The redhead felt that instant keenly.
“We may no longer need the ground,” she whispered.
The dark-haired witch glanced at the horizon.
“So where should we float next?”
Lightning answered.
It lanced across a blue sky without a storm.
A tremor ran through the nexus, and the balloon creatures shuddered.
The redhead’s mount dipped.
Far below, a building tilted just enough to send people screaming into its doorway.
Lincoln appeared on an upper balcony, hat held against the wind.
“Ye’ve stretched the sky too thin, ladies!”
“Okay, rude,” the redhead said, though her voice lacked its earlier certainty.
“We’re not the only ones floating,” her friend observed.
Something was moving beyond the city, high in the bruised blue air.
Its outline could not settle on one shape.
Ropes, tentacles, and the shadows of old balloons tangled around a mouth large enough to swallow a clock tower.
Lincoln’s face changed.
“Their wishes had consequences,” he said to himself.
“And someone else has been waiting.”
Long ago, leprechauns had learned the price of careless magic.
Lincoln remembered the warnings, the old rules, and the last time a wish had made the upper sky hungry.
The girls had never attended that lesson.
“No more sky meddling, Lincoln!” someone had told him centuries ago.
He had agreed.
Mostly.
“We broke something,” the redhead said.
“Didn’t we?”
The dark-haired witch looked down at the people huddled in the floating streets.
They had been spectators a moment ago.
Now they were passengers on a city neither witch knew how to land.
“And now,” Lincoln said, staring above them, “it wants in.”