For the rest of the day, the damaged airship drifts upon the wind with no clear or definite destination. You face a lonely vigil here, one of the only survivors among numerous corpses. Whilst you're here, you try to salvage whatever supplies you can, realising that you may be here for a long time if you are not fortunate enough to reach another island. There a few food packages in the captain's room, and you are careful to consume only a small amount. These might be your only supplies for a long time…

The captain has not regained consciousness, at least not fully. She mumbles incoherently when you try to rouse her, but you know she is need of nutrition and medical attention. Unfortunately, there are no medical supplies in this part of the ship. Those were lost with Mother Ghared. Unable to wake her, you force some water through the captain's cracked lips. She coughs and splutters but manages to get it down.

As you continue to drift, you see numerous other airships passing by. However…they give you no cause to celebrate. They, too, are drifting. The crew members on board are all dead, as you discover upon your first encounter; some have been attacked by mutants or aggressive races as happened with you, but in fact you find that the majority of them have been the victim of violent storms or run out of food and supplies completely. In more than a few cases, you find that there is a literal skeleton crew on board, as evidence by the remaining bones that greet you.

The world is falling apart around you, and you can do nothing to stop it. You are the only one out here who remains alive. The chaos on the surface must be affecting the skies, too, since many of the doomed ships here have been drifting for some time. How long has it been since your island fell? How long has the world been like this?

Hours pass, and you begin to feel that you will not survive. Your supplies will not last forever.

It is almost nightfall when you are confronted by a single ray of hope. At first, you think that your eyes are playing tricks on you. An island can be seen passing close to the airship.

An island. It seems like a miracle. There could be people there, people who could help you and give the captain the medical attention she so desperately needs. However, the airship isn't headed directly for it – you will have to literally jump down onto the island, making use of the few tools still available to you.

As you draw closer, you realise that you do not recognise this island at all. You don't know if the inhabitants there will be friendly or hostile to you: there might not even be any people living there at all. It could be filled with wild animals. If you choose to disembark, you will not be able to return to the ship, which will drift away and leave you stranded upon this isle.

Furthermore, the angle at which you are approaching the island makes it impossible for you take anyone with you. You can jump down onto the surface yourself with some difficulty. This will mean that you will have to leave the wounded captain behind, ultimately sealing her fate.

You stay with the drifting ship

You decide not to risk it. The captain's life is already compromised, and you still have some supplies left to make it to the next possible island. Granted, the captain may have been a little rude and abrasive to you when you first met her, but she did allow you to stay on board. You can't help but feel a little responsible for what happened to her.

The island appears before you, but you choose not to disembark. Before long, it has disappeared from view.

You proceed

Over the next few days, the airship you're on continues to drift at the mercy of the wind. You see no other inhabitable islands within range, and have no way of turning the ship around towards the islands you do see. Progress is painfully slow, and you feel sure that you will die here. Your supplies have dwindled down to almost nothing.

The captain's condition worsens near the end of the week. You manage to get her conscious enough to eat what little food and water you have left, but she barely eats anything at all. You don't have much hope for her survival, and every day she seems weaker than ever. A realistic approach would be to leave her to die and save what precious provisions remain, but you can't see what good that will do. This ship isn't going anywhere, after all.

It's difficult to sleep at night on the hard wooden deck. The stink of the corpses is too much to bear, and you spend hours dragging them off the ship and shoving him over the side. You thought that removing the extra weight would help the ship move faster, but it doesn't. Nothing works. Nothing you do seems to help anymore.

You run out of food in the middle of the second week.

There's still water. Water can keep someone going a lot longer than food deprivation will. It hasn't rained for so long. No storms. No rainfall. You almost wish for a storm to hit the ship, something to break the monotony, but right now this isn't a ship anymore. This is just half a ship, and you're just half of the skeleton crew.

Just mere skeletons now.

You're getting weak from lack of food. The gnawing pain in your stomach won't go away, and you don't want to waste what little water is left. You think about denying the captain water altogether. Someone has to survive.

When the next week begins, you awaken to see a strange red mist rise up ahead, out of the gloom. You've never seen such a thing before, and something about it frightens you. You feel that the airship has entered a part of the sky that nobody should enter, like a forbidden area. You don't want anything to do with this mist, just want to lie on your bed and clamp your hands over your ears and block everything out.

You're so hungry. You're so hungry and tired, tired and hungry, sick and tired, tired and sick…Does it really matter anymore? Does anything matter?

You hide in the captain's room until the mist passes

You stay huddled in the captain's room, keeping the door tightly shut. You don't know why, but something about that mist makes your flesh crawl. As you lock the door, however, you suddenly remember that you left the unconscious captain outside on the deck, right before the red mist was about to descend. She'll be vulnerable to whatever effects it has. You hesitate to run back out there and get her.

Just then, you start to hear strange noises from outside. It sounds like some kind of wailing, quiet yet piercing, and it's enough to drive you into a corner with your hands clamped firmly over your ears. You start to imagine that some strange force is going to board the ship and break the door down before bearing down on you. Muttering incoherently to yourself, you crouch by the wall and squeeze your eyes shut, hoping that the mist will pass on.

The air feels thicker than usual. It's getting harder and harder to breathe. You feel something change in the surrounding atmosphere, something so subtle that you wouldn't even notice it otherwise. As it is, you're so busy locked in your own irrational fear with your hands over your ears that you can't help but notice it.

Slowly, very slowly, you feel everything start to go back to normal.

It's nearly half an hour before your fear subsides enough for you to emerge back on deck. You're shaking as you crawl out of the cabin, shaking with a mixture of extreme hunger and trepidation. The red mist is gone. The captain's body is lying undisturbed on the upper deck. Nothing bad seems to have happened. You start to relax, realising your mind must have been playing tricks on you. Time can do that to you. Lack of food, lack of sleep, lack of all those little things you need in life until you find yourself getting delusional and seeing things that aren't there –

You walk over to the captain's body. Her skin is cold and her mouth is open slightly. She is dead.

There is no way to tell if she finally succumbed to her injuries over the past few weeks, or if the strange red mist had something to do with it. You stumble back from her corpse in confusion and terror, searching for somewhere to escape to. There's nowhere else but here. The red mist disappeared as quickly as it came…

That's not all, either. Something else has changed, something that you didn't count on. It's not something to do with you, or the captain, or your lack of supplies, yet at the same time it's one of the most important things you've been relying on up to this moment in time.

The wind has stopped.

Desperately, you run over to the side of the airship and look down. Nothing. Nothing but an empty void stretching down to the surface of the planet. No wind. No wind to blow you forward. The airship is no longer drifting – it's stationary. Static. Your vessel is at a standstill, here at the edge of an endless sky with no hope of salvation.

You stare out through endless skies, already weakened by lack of nutrients, before sinking to the ground. Your fate has been sealed. The airship is stranded in an uncharted region of open sky where the wind no longer blows, with no way to move forward on here. Without further resources, your situation is now beyond help. The days will turn into weeks, and the weeks will turn into months, but you have no future from here. You are never seen again.