“The thing about riding ancient wind paths,” Talon said as they curved through impossible spaces between clouds, “is that they remember everything they’ve ever carried.”
Jin watched starlight bend around them, forming scripts that matched the expanding patterns on her face. “Is that why we keep tasting other elements on the wind?”
“Salt from the sea. Smoke from fire. Stone dust from mountains.” Talon’s wind-rider shifted through currents that shouldn’t exist. “The airways never forgot how to carry messages between the elements. They just needed someone to remember how to read them.”
The night sky had become a tapestry of light and memory. Below them, Jin could see regular air traffic – Skyhost patrols searching known wind-paths while the real story wrote itself in silver fire above their heads.
A new taste hit the wind – something wrong. Something that made the currents want to flee.
“You feel that?” she asked, though Talon was already banking hard east.
“Void-wind,” he said, his voice grim. “Air that’s been unmade. The kind that comes from ships that drink light.” He gestured at the horizon where darkness gathered like spilled ink. “The Sundering’s hunters are waking up.”
“The what?”
“The ones who broke the elements apart. Who turned unity to separation, dance to discord.” His air-mark blazed as he spoke, patterns spreading across his skin like storm clouds. “The Zephyrcallers remember what the Skyhost tried to forget.”
The wind shifted again, bringing new messages:
Fire and water dancing in the deep.
Mountains opening ancient roads.
Others reading the elements’ true names.
All paths leading east, toward—
“There.” Talon pointed to where a mountain peak split the dawn. “The convergence point. Where elements can meet safely. Where the first dances were born.” His expression darkened. “And where the Sundering first broke them apart.”
Jin’s logbook fluttered, its pages catching starlight in new patterns. Everything she’d been recording, thinking she was discovering something new… she’d been remembering. They all had been.
“Look.” She pointed to where ships moved on the dark sea below. Not the void-ships, but others. A small fleet glowing with mixed fire and water magic. “More readers.”
“And there.” Talon gestured to the mountains where crystal light blazed along hidden paths. “Earth-voices, following the stone’s memory.”
The wind tasted of possibility. Of power. Of elements remembering how to dance together.
But the darkness on the horizon grew deeper. The void-ships were gathering, drawn to the awakening magic like shadows to flame.
“The Skyhost taught us the elements had to stay separate,” Jin said, watching patterns of light and shadow war across the sky. “That mixing them would bring disaster.”
“The disaster,” Talon corrected, “was keeping them apart. Breaking what was meant to be whole.” He shifted his wind-rider east, following airways older than empire or law. “The real question is: are you ready to help them remember how to dance?”
Jin felt the wind’s joy singing in her veins, carrying ancient secrets between sea and stone, fire and sky. Her carefully ordered notes gave way to older truths as the air itself taught her its first language.
Below them, ships sailed toward convergence.
Beside them, mountains opened forgotten roads.
Above them, stars wrote the true names of things.
And behind them, darkness gathered like a storm.
The elements were remembering.
The dance was awakening.
And the wind itself would help them write their story in starlight and truth.
But first, they had to beat the shadows to the dawn.