Updraft: Update 7
Spoilers ahead!
I left off with Kirit getting ready to take her first night flight. Well, things do not go well as the straps for Kirit’s wings start to fail. She uses echo-location to locate a bridge and makes an emergency landing with Wick’s help. It turns out her wings were sabotaged. Sellas discovers her wings were sabotaged as well, but she had time to land before they started to give way. Apparently it was the Windbeaters who did it since they were the ones to send up the wings. The Windbeaters are essentially Singers who through injury or age are no longer able to fly and instead control the wind currents in the Gyre through beating huge wings and opening gates on the side of the Spire. Why they are sabotaging wings is unknown, but apparently this kind of thing isn’t unusual in the Spire.
Before Kirit can learn anything about what is up with the Windbeaters, a challenge happens in the Spire. A Singer, Taren, challenges the Spire so that he can speak to the towers about some Singer secret. Rommul, the head of the Singer council, himself fights for the Spire. Taren is defeated and sucked out through a Spire gate with broken wings to fall to his death. After the challenge finishes the Windbeaters create a strong suction through the Gyre that makes a novice friend of Kirit’s fall in. Kirit rescues the novice girl and then immediately heads down to the Windbeaters to find out what is up.
There she meets her father, Civik who is blind and physically broken from his challenges against the Spire. It turns out another novice friend of Kirit’s has been bribing him to stir-up trouble in the Spire to support Taren which led to the sabotaged wings and the suction. Wick shows up and it turns out he was a supported of Taren as well, but he respects the outcome of the challenge. When Kirit confronts her father about betraying Nat’s father, Civik says she doesn’t really understand what happened implying the secrets Nat’s father were going to reveal were bigger than how to fly at night.
Civik won’t say what the secret is, but Wick shows her. He leads her out to the Gyre and reveals that, deep down in the Gyre, the Singers are keeping and breeding sky mouths. This is the reason they need Kirit so much, to use her ability to control sky mouths with her voice to help them manage the captive sky mouths. The reason they have the creatures is to use their ink and sinew for Singer use and to trade with the towers for supplies. Only there appear to be too many of them for just that. Why they have so many isn’t answered before Rommul shows up. Rommul doesn’t seem too upset that Wick has revealed this secret to Kirit. She has to find out at some point anyhow.
Rommul then announces that Kirit needs to fight a challenger from the towers. The implication is that if she defeats the challenger then she will become a Signer and be allowed to fly the skies of the city as well as manage sky mouths. The alternative is either death or being relegated to spending all her time managing the sky mouths and staying forever inside the Spire. Kirit accepts the challenge pretty eagerly and Rommul says it will take place that day.
Pretty soon, Kirit is getting readied for the challenger. I figured the challenger might be Wick’s brother or maybe Nat, but when she learns that the challenger has chosen the bow for a weapon, I knew it would be Nat. Naturally, Kirit doesn’t want to kill Nat, but she doesn’t want to lose the challenge either. She decides to try to get Nat to concede and tells him the real secret this father was going to reveal. It seems to be working, but a strong current of wind whipped up by the Windbeaters makes her and Nat collide and Nat’s wings are damaged. The winds shift again and Kirit is carried up as Nat falls as is sucked outside by an opening gate. I suspect that Nat isn’t dead, but Kirit certainly thinks he is.
Sellas has a challenge after Kirit and finishes off her opponent easily. They are raised to the level of full Singers which excites Sellas but not Kirit, though she tries to hide this from Rommul. That’s were I leave off.
I’m looking forward to the next part 
