“Fire doesn’t like cold,” Reyna said through chattering teeth. “In case you were wondering.”
High above the clouds, riding wind currents that shouldn’t exist, Jin tried not to smile. The former merchant captain clung to her wind-rider like it might dissolve into air, which, to be fair, it sometimes did.
“The Aurora Temple isn’t about heat,” Jin replied, reading scripts written in starlight. “It’s about light.”
“Tell that to my freezing—” Reyna’s complaint cut off as the northern lights rippled across the sky. Not the usual green and white ribbons, but impossible patterns that matched the marks spreading across both their skins.
The wind shifted, carrying new messages:
Fire’s heart in heaven’s dance.
Star-script in flame’s tongue.
The first lights remembering their names.
“Can you read that?” Reyna asked, her water-mark pulsing in harmony with Jin’s cloud patterns.
“Not read exactly.” Jin guided them higher, following airways older than the Skyhost itself. “More like… remember.”
The aurora blazed brighter, writing secrets in the dark. After three days of flying north, the lights had become more than just celestial beauty. They were a language, trying to teach them something about their combined magic.
Something cracked through the air behind them – void-hunters riding winds that ate light instead of carrying it. They’d been following since the convergence point, always just far enough behind to track them.
“They’re herding us,” Reyna said, one hand trailing fire through Jin’s air currents. “Have been since we left. Question is: toward what, or away from it?”
Jin was about to answer when the aurora’s light changed. The patterns shifted, forming a gate of pure radiance that wasn’t there a moment ago.
“Hold on,” she called, already banking toward it.
“To what?” Reyna shot back. “The air keeps—” Her words vanished as Jin’s wind-rider dissipated and reformed around them, flowing through spaces that light hadn’t touched since the first stars learned to dance.
They emerged into… elsewhere.
The aurora surrounded them completely now, writing stories in colors that hadn’t existed since elements first learned their names. Beneath them, clouds formed impossible architectures. Above…
“That’s not supposed to be there,” Reyna breathed.
A tower of pure light rose through the northern lights, its surfaces catching and reflecting the aurora’s dance. Not built of stone or steel, but of frozen starlight and solid air.
The Aurora Temple.
“Actually,” Jin said, reading the star-scripts that wrapped around the tower’s height, “I think it’s exactly what’s supposed to be there. We just forgot how to see it.”
A void-ship burst through the gate behind them, its darkness immediately starting to eat the light around them. More would follow. They always did.
“Race you to the top?” Reyna asked, fire already flowing through Jin’s wind-paths in new ways. The elements were remembering how to work together, patterns in their flesh showing them dances older than empire or law.
Jin smiled as the wind rose to meet flame. “Try to keep up.”
They flew toward the light tower, fire and air moving like they’d never been apart. Behind them, darkness gathered.
But ahead?
Ahead, the aurora wrote truth in the sky.
And the elements themselves would teach them how to read it.
Time to remember how stars first learned to burn.