The morning prayer had just begun, the ancient chants rising through the temple halls like incense, when Prior Marcus heard it—a child's delighted, unmistakable laughter from somewhere impossibly above. The assembled monks exchanged knowing glances, their sacred chanting faltering and stumbling over familiar syllables. Only one person could be missing from their carefully ordered ranks, only one voice could carry such pure, unbridled joy from an impossible height.
"Continue the prayers," Master Zephyrus commanded with practiced calm, though Matthias caught the subtle tension in his shoulders, the tightening around his ancient eyes. "Brother Matthias, if you would be so kind..."
Matthias was already moving, his sandalled feet swift on stone, his heart performing its familiar acrobatics of fear, exasperation, and resigned affection. Outside in the morning light, he scanned the temple's various towers and spires with practiced efficiency, searching for a small figure silhouetted against the morning sky.
"There!" Brother Dimitri's voice cracked with disbelief as he pointed skyward.
Atop the prayer hall's golden dome—thirty feet of smooth, curved metal offering no handholds, no grip, no possible purchase for human fingers—sat four-year-old Aetos. He waved cheerfully at the gathering crowd below, his storm-coloured eyes bright with accomplishment and pure happiness.
"How did he even..." Dimitri trailed off into bewildered silence. They'd found no ladder propped against the walls, no rope dangling from the heights, no earthly explanation for how a child could scale a surface that challenged the temple's most experienced climbers.
"Aetos!" Matthias called, forcing studied calm into his voice despite his racing heart. "Stay exactly where you are, little eagle. Don't move. We're coming to get you."
"Why?" The boy's genuine confusion carried clearly on the morning air. "View is best here. Can see all valleys! Eagles fly close! Look!"
Indeed, as if to emphasize his point and add to the morning's impossibilities, a golden eagle circled the dome in lazy spirals, coming close enough that Aetos could have touched its magnificent wing feathers. The majestic bird showed no fear of the child, treating him as it might another aerial predator—with cautious respect and curious recognition.
The rescue took an agonizing hour. Brother Thomas, the temple's best climber with years of experience scaling the treacherous mountain paths, needed multiple ropes and assistance from three other brothers to reach the dome's peak. He found Aetos sitting in perfect, relaxed balance, playing with wind currents that shouldn't exist at that height on such a calm, still morning.
"Wind friends dance here," Aetos explained cheerfully as Thomas secured a safety rope around his small waist. "They show me pictures in the air. Want to see?"
During the careful, nerve-wracking descent, Aetos kept up a constant stream of chatter about what he'd observed: trade caravans like lines of ants on distant roads, storm clouds gathering with purple bellies beyond the eastern peaks, patterns in the valley farms that looked like "earth breathing in sleep."
Safe on solid ground, facing a circle of relieved and exasperated monks whose expressions ranged from fond frustration to genuine alarm, Aetos seemed genuinely puzzled by their concern.
"But I'm careful," he protested with the earnest innocence only a child could manage. "Wind holds me. Always has. Since forever."
That afternoon, in the quiet of his study, Master Zephyrus made a decision that would change the temple's approach to their unusual charge. Rather than futilely trying to contain Aetos's irrepressible climbing instincts, he would redirect them into something constructive.
"We cannot cage an eagle," he told the gathered brothers at the emergency meeting. "But we can teach him to fly safely. To honour his gift while protecting his mortal form."
The temple's training regime expanded dramatically to include supervised climbing sessions. Ropes, carefully placed handholds, and proper techniques were introduced—though Aetos often ignored them entirely in favor of impossible routes that seemed to require levitation more than conventional climbing.
It was during these sessions that his friendship with the other temple children deepened from casual playmate to beloved leader. Where adults saw danger and disobedience in his aerial antics, the children saw adventure and infinite possibility.
"Show me!" demanded eight-year-old Niko after watching Aetos scale a sheer wall using only his fingertips. "I want to touch clouds too! Teach me the wind words!"
Aetos tried with infinite patience, earnestly explaining how to "feel the wall's breath" and "let fingers stick to stone's dreams." The other children, lacking his supernatural connection to air, mostly failed spectacularly—but they loved him for trying to share his impossible gift.
He became the unofficial leader of the temple's small population of orphans and temporary wards without trying. Not through dominance or demand, but through sheer infectious enthusiasm for life itself. When Aetos suggested an adventure, others followed eagerly. When he defended smaller children from the occasional bully, his protection carried surprising weight despite his young age.
The children invented increasingly elaborate games around Aetos's abilities. "Eagle and Mice" involved him climbing to impossibly high places while others tried to spot him. "Wind Tag" had him creating small, playful gusts to touch runners from impossible distances. "Storm Calling" was permanently banned after Aetos somehow summoned a localised dust devil in the courtyard that scattered Master Zephyrus's carefully arranged scrolls.
But his favourite companion remained the sky itself. Often, the children would find him on rooftops or perched on walls, having animated conversations with no one visible to normal eyes.
"Who are you talking to?" little Cassia asked one afternoon, her voice hushed with wonder.
"Wind spirits," Aetos replied matter-of-factly, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. "They tell stories about places far away. Want to hear about the desert where sand dances with fire?"
The children would gather around in rapt attention as Aetos relayed tales that might have been imagination or might have been whispers carried on distant breezes. His stories painted vivid pictures of places none of them had seen: vast oceans where water spirits played in foam and spray, ancient mountains where earth itself sang deep songs, sprawling cities where fire danced in countless forges day and night.
Master Zephyrus, observing these sessions from a discrete distance, noted something profoundly significant. When Aetos told his wind stories, breezes would illustrate his words—carrying flower petals in perfect spirals, creating miniature dust clouds that formed shapes, making grass bow in waves like green water. The boundary between story and reality blurred and shifted around the storm-born child.
"He's not just strong in pneuma," the master confided to Brother Alexei during one such observation. "He's connected to it in ways our ancient traditions barely describe. We're not raising a mere student—we're raising something entirely new."
The incident that would define Aetos's early years came during the autumn harvest festival. A young acrobat, hired to entertain the gathered crowds, lost his grip during a spectacular high-wire performance. As the crowd screamed in terror and adults scrambled with futile attempts to position something to break his fall, five-year-old Aetos simply stepped forward and exhaled with purpose.
A cushion of compressed air, visible as a shimmer of disturbed light, caught the acrobat ten feet from the unforgiving ground, lowering him with gentle care to safety. The crowd fell into stunned silence, staring at the small boy whose eyes swirled with silver light like captured storms.
"Wind caught him," Aetos said simply, then returned to eating his festival honey cake as if nothing unusual had occurred.
That night, as Matthias tucked him into his small bed, Aetos asked a question that stopped the monk's heart: "Why do grown-ups fear the sky? It's friendly if you're friendly back."
How could Matthias explain that most humans were forever bound to earth, that the sky's friendship was a gift given to precious few? Instead, he smoothed the boy's dark hair and said softly, "Perhaps you're here to teach us not to fear."
Aetos smiled sleepily, already drifting toward dreams. "Good. Sky is lonely when people don't visit. Needs friends."
As the boy drifted off to sleep, Matthias noticed his bed had risen three inches off the floor, held aloft by dreams of flight and clouds. He left it be, placing an extra blanket over the sleeping child. Some battles weren't worth fighting, especially when the prize was keeping an eagle grounded.