The conversations had a rhythm now. Five women in five different rooms had taken five separate pieces of me apart and helped me put them back together. The team had stabilized in ways the Script wouldn’t be able to wedge open.

What I hadn’t planned for was the rest of the team.

Specifically, the four people who weren’t in love with me.

I noticed it on a Friday morning. Caelen Raith was in the training yard early — earlier than the team’s usual schedule. He was alone. He was doing something I’d never seen him do. 𝘧𝓇ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝘣𝓃ℴ𝓋𝑒𝑙.𝑐𝘰𝑚

He was practicing without his wind.

I watched from the second-floor walkway for a few minutes. He was running drills — basic sword forms, the kind first-year students learned during orientation week. His footwork was perfect. His blade angles were correct. But the wind that usually wreathed his strikes wasn’t there. The Aether around him was quiet. He was practicing as if he were a non-cultivator.

I’d seen Caelen fight a hundred times. I’d seen his wind in formation, in concert, in the tournament’s team battle. I’d never seen him fight without it.

Something was wrong. Or — something had been wrong, and he was working around it, and I’d never noticed because the work happened in the dark hours.

I went down to the yard.

He saw me approach but didn’t break the drill. Caelen’s discipline was the kind that finished a sequence before acknowledging an audience. I waited at the edge of the practice circle until his current form ended.

"Cedric." He inclined his head. Wiped sweat from his temple with the back of his hand. "Early."

"I could say the same."

"I’m always here at this hour. You usually aren’t."

"I came up to walk and saw you."

He nodded. Didn’t elaborate. The Caelen Raith I’d come to know over two months operated by economy — he said as much as the situation required and not a word more. Most of what I’d learned about him I’d learned by inference. Wind affinity. Northern Highmark accent, faint enough that he’d worked to soften it. Family of moderate noble standing. Adequate at conversation, brilliant in formation work, the kind of person you trusted at your flank without ever needing to verify why.

He’d never volunteered information. I’d never pushed.

That had probably been a mistake.

"Walk with me?" I asked.

He looked at me. Steady. The pale-grey eyes I’d registered as expressionless for most of our acquaintance had a different quality this morning — tired, maybe, or cautious.

"Where?"

"Anywhere. The lower terraces. The eastern walls. I don’t have a destination."

"You want something."

"I want to know my teammate better. We’ve been on a team for two months and I realized this morning I don’t know where you’re from."

He was quiet for a moment.

"You’re sure that’s what you want?"

"Yes."

He sheathed his practice blade. Wiped his hand on the side of his training pants. Nodded.

"Walk, then."

We left the yard. Took the path that ran along the academy’s eastern wall — the one most students avoided because it offered no view, just stone on the right and a drop on the left into the cloud sea. The wall was old. The leyline reinforcement that kept the academy’s floating islands stable was visible up close as a faint shimmer in the air, almost invisible unless you knew to look for it.

Caelen walked the way he fought — measured, efficient, no wasted motion. He didn’t speak for the first few hundred meters. I let him have the silence. Whatever he’d been carrying alone in the training yard wasn’t going to come out under pressure.

After a while, he said: "Highmark."

"What?"

"You asked where I was from. Highmark province. Northern edge of the Empire, in the mountain range that divides our territory from the Kal’than territories. My family’s seat is in a town called Stonewatch. Six thousand people. One of seven Raith holdings in the province. We’re a minor noble house — old enough to have a name, small enough that no one south of the mountains has heard of us."

"What’s it like?"

"Cold. Most of the year. The wind from the Kal’than peaks comes down through our valleys with enough force to strip skin off bone in winter. We have a saying: *The mountains taught us to bend. The Kal’than wind taught us to listen.* Most Raith children learn to read wind currents before they learn to read letters. Wind cultivation in our line is — was — among the strongest in the Empire. The Wind Sect at Highmark Cathedral was where most of the Empire’s elite wind cultivators trained for six centuries. My grandfather was the Sect’s head when I was born. My father was the head when I turned ten."

"Was?"

He didn’t answer immediately. Kept walking.

"The Sect was destroyed nine years ago," he said. "By something that didn’t have a name. I’ll explain. But not yet."

I nodded. Let him take the path he wanted to take through his own story.

"My wind affinity manifested when I was four. That’s young. Most cultivators awaken between eight and twelve. Four was — exceptional. The Sect declared me a generational talent before I knew what either of those words meant. By six I was already studying with the Sect’s senior masters. By eight I could perform techniques that senior cultivators in their forties couldn’t replicate. The family was proud. The province was proud. There was talk that I might be the youngest Wind Sovereign in the Empire’s history."

"What happened?"

"I’ll get there."

We reached a section of the eastern wall where the path widened into a small stone landing — a maintenance overlook, used by leyline technicians to access the underside of the floating island. Caelen stopped here. Sat on the low wall that bordered the landing. Looked out over the cloud sea.

I sat beside him. Not too close. Caelen was the kind of person who needed personal space respected, even by friends.

"My sister was named Ithra," he said. "Two years younger than me. Her affinity manifested at six — also young, but not as exceptional as mine. Earth, not wind. Different bloodline gift, common in the maternal Raith line. We trained together when our schedules aligned. We were close in the way that two children who’d been singled out by their family’s expectations were close. We understood each other without explanation."

He paused. The cloud sea moved below us. A flight of mountain swifts passed beneath the wall, their cries faint at this distance.

"Nine years ago," he said, "when I was nine and Ithra was seven, something came to Highmark Cathedral. We never knew what it was. The Sect had wards that should have prevented anything from reaching the inner sanctum. The wards held for thirty seconds. Then they didn’t. My grandfather was dead within a minute. My father within two. The senior masters within three. By the time the Empire’s reinforcements arrived from the nearest garrison, the cathedral was a tomb. Seventy-three cultivators, gone. The Sect’s library — destroyed. Six hundred years of accumulated wind technique — gone. The bloodline genealogies that traced our lineage back to the founding patriarchs — gone."

"Caelen—"

"Let me finish."

I waited.

"I was outside the cathedral when it happened. So was Ithra. We were in the training yard. The same yard the Cathedral had been built around six centuries earlier. We saw the wards fall. We saw — something — in the dome of the cathedral. I can’t describe it. The shape doesn’t translate to words. It moved. It didn’t have edges. The Sect’s masters tried to fight it. The wind they generated didn’t touch it. The masters died. Then it left. It didn’t come for us. It didn’t come for anyone outside the cathedral. It killed the Sect and disappeared."

"That’s not a normal incident."

"No. It wasn’t. The Empire investigated. The Inquisition investigated. The Church investigated. No one identified what it was. The official report classified it as ’unknown threat — Class A — Cathedral incident.’ Most of the public believed it was a Cult attack. The records I’ve read suggest the Empire didn’t believe its own report. They didn’t have a better explanation. They settled for an inadequate one because admitting they didn’t know was worse."

I thought about it. The shape Caelen was describing — something without edges, something that moved without being constrained by physical form — wasn’t a Cult attack. The Cult used Aether-construct horrors and corruption-mutated beasts. They didn’t operate at the level required to dissolve a cathedral’s wards in thirty seconds.

I had a guess. I didn’t say it out loud. Not yet.

"After the cathedral fell," Caelen continued, "I stopped being able to use my wind."

"Stopped — completely?"

"Completely. My affinity didn’t disappear. The Aether still recognized me. I could still feel wind currents the way I always had — I could still read the air, predict storms, sense pressure changes. But when I tried to channel it through my body for cultivation, the wind refused. Not weakened. Refused. As if the wind itself had decided I was no longer a permitted user."

"For how long?"

"Three years. From age nine to twelve. The Empire’s healers couldn’t explain it. The Church’s diviners couldn’t explain it. Ithra’s earth affinity worked normally — she advanced through her stages on schedule. Mine simply stopped. Most of the Raith elders concluded that I’d been broken by trauma and would recover when my mind was ready. They put me on grief leave from cultivation training."

"And then?"

"And then at twelve, my wind came back. Not the way it had been. Different. The old affinity I’d had before the cathedral was — straightforward. Pure. The wind I have now is — broken. Functional, but broken. The currents I can generate aren’t clean. They have edges. They cut where they shouldn’t. They listen where they shouldn’t. I can fight with them, but I can’t refine them past Adept rank without losing control."

"That’s why you broke through to D-rank but no further."

"Yes. The Sect’s masters who survived — only three did, and they were the elder advisors who happened to be away from the cathedral that day — examined my wind when it returned. They couldn’t explain what happened to it. They speculated that whatever had killed the cathedral had touched me as well, and the wind I have now is the wind that came back through the wound. They could have rejected me. The Sect’s tradition was to remove broken cultivators from the bloodline records. They didn’t. They taught me what they could and let me find my own way."