The story
Highwind, as the Drift tells it.
The cloud city. Highwind is a station drifting through a gas giant's storm bands. Airships moor at its rings and carry cargo out through the cloud layers. Highwind's riggers will tell you their gas giant is one of the forty charts that match the Wick's night window. So will every other station on those forty charts.
What lives there. Sky-whales drift in the storm bands: gentle giants that ride the wind and never come close to the station. Kite-birds hang in the updrafts around the rings.
The post. The relay trails beneath the station on a kite-mast, with a gondola at the end of the cable. The flame is painted on the kite's canvas.
The keeper. Pip Arro is a sky courier and storm pilot. When a part needs to get from Sunder or Cinder to a post across the Drift, Pip flies it. Pip's courier is the Petrel, a small, fast, much-patched ducted-fan craft in faded orange and cream, a cargo pod clamped under its belly and a long ribbon pennant streaming from its tail; every post in the Drift knows its lamps. Of all the Lamplighters, Pip has met the most of them, though Pip has still never stayed long anywhere.
