The desert let them go with a hiss, like a kettle taken off the fire.
Sion tore the air open with a palm and a thought. The portal bloomed in the glare—an oval of heat-rippled maroon edged in ink, humming faintly as if it were a living throat. Her hair—long, auburn-brown, wind-matted and full of grit—fell around her face in heavy coils. Her coat had been knifed into strips; the sleeves flapped at her elbows, and the scorched hem was more ash than fabric. But the body beneath was whole. Regeneration had stitched the gouges into quiet pink lines and sealed the punctures into nothing. Only the scent of blood clung to her like a hard memory, and the desert dust powdered her thighs where the torn cloth left pale skin bare.
She turned her head. "Emilia," she called, voice even, eyes still burning that faint iron-red. "You coming?"
Emilia rose from the dune she had claimed as a spectator's chair and brushed frost grit from the lapels of her black field jacket. The golden phoenix on her shoulder tack glinted as if eager for a new order. Her hair—carmine, long, and as disciplined as marching drums—caught a slant of light and flared copper for an instant. Her yellow-gold eyes held on Sion for a heartbeat, weighing the temperature of the portal, the steadiness of Sion's stance, the residue of violence on the desert floor.
"Yes," she said, simple as a verdict. She stepped to Sion's side, and together they vanished through the hot ellipse.
The world changed on a single exhale.
They came out to the underbelly hum of the floating island's garage—part hangar, part shrine to machinery, part warded cavern. The ceiling arched high and dark, carved from pale sky-stone and banded with ribs of black metal that carried mana conduits. Blue sigils crawled up the columns, breathing a slow pulse that harmonized with the larger dome outside—the island's sapphire shield. The air smelled of oil and ozone, cut clean by a medicinal tang of rune-lacquer and new rubber. Fans thrummed somewhere out of sight. Light fell in neat, surgical panes from runed fixtures overhead, each panel floating in a bracket of controlled levitation, changing brightness in response to movement like overseers adjusting their spectacles.
On the far wall a series of reliefs had been set into the stone—old guild marks of the skywrights who had anchored the island's bones: a spiral for Lift, a braided knot for Anchor, an angular fishbone for Drag. Between them new additions had been grafted—modern crests lacquered in enamel. Rotschy's silver crescent—an austere, thin moon with stardust dripping from its points—hung beside Emberhart's phoenix—wings spread, head tilted, the tail a spill of stylized flame.
Sion moved with intent toward a low bay where a black motorcycle crouched like a waiting hound. She swung a leg over the saddle, the posture easy, long-practiced. It was a modified monster—a matte obsidian frame veined with thin channels of red mana-glass, a twin exhaust like the snouts of dragons, and a forward cowl stamped faintly with the crescent of Rotschy. Her fingertips brushed the ignition glyph—three swift taps, then a press—and the bike shuddered awake with a deep-throated roar that kicked dust from the floor. Red numbers winked to life in the dash like eyes opening. The whole machine vibrated under her, a tame earthquake.
Across the aisle a white sedan waited under a braided canopy of cooling wards, its hood ornament the gold phoenix of Emberhart catching the light like sunrise. The doors were armored; the windows had a prismatic sheen that said the glass would laugh at bullets. A driver in a black suit stood at attention by the rear door, chin dipped, eyes politely shuttered against the disarray of returning combatants. Emilia angled toward it without hurry, rolling her shoulders once, loosening the fight out of her muscles.
"Hello, Sion."
The voice came bright and musical from behind a concrete pillar. It cut through the noise of the garage like a bell through fog. Sion's head snapped around. Emilia turned, too—alert, wary, the small muscles at the corner of her jaw rising.
A young woman stepped into view as if the air had been folded around her and now decided to let go. She was all golden light and neat edges: hair a long, bright fall of flax-gold that reached the small of her back, eyes a clear green with a fleck of deeper emerald at the rim, skin winter-pale and untroubled. Gold earrings—delicate, chainlike—caught in her hair. A slim gold watch hugged her left wrist. She smelled faintly of some light floral—something clean, absent of heavy spice, the scent of someone who had never hurried if she could help it.
Tishara Rotschy.
Sion's eyes widened, then softened in recognition that hit like a small ache. Seventeen years had passed since she had last seen the little sister of her lady; the years had edited nothing of the family stamp out of the girl's face. Sion slid off the bike and bent at the waist in a quick, clean bow that was more instinct than ceremony.
"Lady Tishara," she said.
A smile warmed Tishara's mouth. She made it look easy. "Sion," she answered, teasing and fond at once. "How are you? It's been… what? Seventeen years? I didn't expect to find you down here, looking as if you just wrestled a maelstrom."
Sion allowed herself half a grin. "I was at a meeting," she replied, dry as kindling.
Tishara's brow lifted, green eyes mischievous. "What kind of meeting tears your coat into ribbons and puts sand in your hair?" Her gaze moved, not intrusive, just careful—taking stock of the ripped fabric, the scuffs, the grit on Sion's legs. "You're all right?"
"I fought Eizel Frost," Sion said, as if she were saying she had stepped out for bread. "I'm fine."
"Ah," Tishara breathed, the syllable more a picture than a word. "I see."
Emilia had been standing half-turned, measuring the newcomer. Sion flicked a glance her way, and the scrape of introductions mattered again. "This is Emilia Emberhart," Sion said. "Commander, head of the Emberhart line's field wing."
Tishara refocused, and to Emilia she offered a small incline of the head, courteous without subservience. "A pleasure, Lady Emilia. I'm Tishara Rotschy, Naoko's younger sister."
For a fraction of a second, Emilia's face didn't move at all—then a precise surprise carved itself across her features and went still again. "The pleasure is mine," Emilia said, voice composed, posture immaculate. She had never seen Tishara in person; Naoko did not parade family unless there was a problem to solve.
Sion watched the two of them collide in politeness and felt a slight easing in her chest. Then Tishara's attention drifted back to her with the casual intensity of someone who had missed several seasons and wanted a digest of what mattered.
"Rotschy and Emberhart have a tie now," Sion supplied, anticipating the first question. "Rina Emberhart married Jin. It's a political marriage."
Tishara's easy smile faltered into a small frown, as if she had just heard the title of a book she ought to know but didn't. "Jin," she repeated softly. "Jin who?"
Silence pinched the air between the three of them. Sion felt Emilia go still—a soldier listening to the near future approaching. Sion cleared her throat.
"Jin," she said, "is Lady Naoko's son."
The words hung like a bright cloth in the garage. Tishara's eyes widened—green made greener by shock. There was a heartbeat of disbelief, then two, then the first dawn of math as her mind tried to place the news in a calendar that had never been filed. Her jaw parted a bit. She looked suddenly younger and at the same time older, as if stung by the thought that an entire branch of her life had budded in a locked room.
"What?" she said, the syllable naked. "Naoko has a son? And I… no one told me? When? How—when did she—" She shook her head once, golden hair whispering over the shoulders of her coat. "Is she married? How old is he?"
"Sixteen," Sion said. She kept her tone gentle, factual. "He's sixteen, and yes—Rina is his wife now."
Tishara blinked quickly. Behind the surprise something else flickered—something like hurt, and then the disciplined refusal of hurt. Tishara had always had a gift for making denial look like serenity; she had learned it young, under a sister who made silence a creed. She pressed her lips together for a second, then nodded to herself as if agreeing to a plan no one else could see.
"Then I'm his aunt," she said, shaping the word as if tasting a fruit for the first time.
"Yes," Sion answered. A smile ghosted across her mouth. "Aunt Tishara."
"Did Naoko… tell you to tell me?" Tishara asked, and the question was not an accusation. It was a practical inquiry about how information was supposed to flow.
Sion had the sense to be honest. "No, my lady. Lady Naoko doesn't… volunteer family details. I assumed you knew."
Tishara's laugh was soft, and it carried something brittle in its middle. "Naoko doesn't call unless a wall needs moving," she said. "So no, I did not know. I'm learning from you now." She took a breath; the gold watch on her wrist glinted as her hand drifted. "Who is my sister's husband?"
Sion weighed the answer for exactly the time it took to exhale. Then she gave it clean, the way Naoko would have wanted her to: unsentimental, complete.
"Lady Naoko married a man for the quality of his mana," Sion said. "A rare type. She used mana to fertilize herself—no touch, nothing sentimental. She bore Estelle first, then Jin. After Jin was born she killed him. He wasn't needed any longer."
Emilia watched Tishara in profile, curious despite herself—curious to see whether offense, or horror, or some imperious acceptance would take the floor in the younger Rotschy's face.
Tishara's mouth thinned in an instant of disdain that was not for Naoko. "Her husband doesn't matter," she said briskly, almost dismissive. "To hell with him. I asked because… no, never mind. She has two children, then."
Sion felt the nearby cliff of truth, and for a fraction of a beat she wanted to step around it. "Yes," she said, and it came out with a hair's breadth of past tense. "She had."
Green eyes sharpened. "Had?" Tishara asked, the word a small, sudden blade. "What do you mean—had?"
Sion's gaze flicked sideways, almost involuntarily, to Emilia. Emilia did not move. The garage hummed on, indifferent. Sion made a choice and placed a lid on the pot that had begun to rattle.
"Nothing," she said. "It's not for today, my lady." She put a rider on the evasion—gentle, firm. "We'll talk when Lady Naoko wants us to talk. For now, it's enough you know Jin exists—and that he's safe."
Tishara looked as if she might press, then something in her—the same thread that had let her flow through a life adjacent to Naoko without trying to pry Naoko open with a crowbar—softened. She nodded once. "All right," she said, and her voice steadied. "All right."
For a few breaths there was an honest quiet. The garage's lights adjusted overhead, dimming a fraction as if the room understood that something raw had just been handled and did not need glare or spectacle. A pair of mechanics down the way rolled a trolley past, the wheels clicking gently over joints in the floor. The blue sigils on the columns pulsed once—heartbeat-slow.
Sion let out a breath she hadn't realized she'd been strangling. Then the practical world flooded back in, as it always did. She swung back onto the bike and thumbed the throttle. The engine barked; the sound felt good in her bones, uncomplicated and loud.
"Lady Tishara," she called over the growl, pitching her voice so it carried. "I'm headed down the south ramp. Do you want to ride with me?"
Emilia, already halfway to her car, glanced back. There was the faintest curve in her lips—approval that Sion masked concern with motion. "I'll take the car," she said to the driver, then to Sion, "I'll see you on the lower ring."
The driver moved to open the rear door. Emilia paused, lifted her chin to Tishara with soldier's courtesy. "Lady Tishara."
"Commander," Tishara returned, the title fitting oddly in her mouth like a coin from a foreign mint—and then the oddness was gone, smoothed by courtly habit.
There was a second motorcycle on the line—sleek and black as a piano, low-slung, with a lean silver crescent etched into the gas tank. Tishara crossed to it, and Sion noticed, with something like private amusement, the way the girl's poise flowed into the simple mechanics of riding. Tishara swung onto the saddle with a grace that did not read as practiced but as native. She set her hands on the grips, thumbed the ignition like a woman ringing a bell she owned, and the bike answered with a silkier snarl than Sion's beast—higher, purring, arrogant.
Sion's mind ticked even now, its second ledger opening of its own accord:
There's a way she sits a bike that says she hasn't lived only in libraries. Naoko's sister, yes—but something else, too. Naoko asked for distance; Tishara made a life in that distance. The gold watch, the easy laugh, the eyes that hear what people don't say. I'll have to be careful with the holes I leave around her. She'll see the shape of what's missing and draw a map.
She raised two fingers in a wordless salute. Tishara returned it, eyes bright.
"Where to?" Tishara called.
"Obsidian causeway," Sion answered. "Drop to the lower ring, cut through the east sluice. Shield traffic is light this hour."
"Lead," Tishara said simply.
Sion rolled her bike forward and let it leap; the tires bit polished stone and the machine surged. The ramp ahead arced like a piece of obsidian the island had unrolled—a long, gentle spiral with blue ward-lines inset down its center like a spine. As she took the first curve, the island's skin opened to them: a glimpse through armored glass of cloud and sky below, the capital far underfoot like scattered gemstones. The dome shimmered just beyond, its surface crossed by slow waves that broke, reformed, held.
Tishara swung in behind her, the black bike falling into Sion's wake like a shadow given engine. Their exhausts braided, red and silver smoke swirling in a two-tone ribbon that curled and vanished in the controlled air.
Behind them, the white Emberhart sedan slid from its bay with the quiet decisiveness of a knife leaving a sheath. The driver guided it to a second ramp; the tires whispered. Inside, Emilia settled back into the moraled comfort of leather and armoring. She looked out through the prismatic glass at the two bikes ahead—one thunder and muscle, the other sleek and cunning—and her mind did what it always did: filed detail, measured risk, considered the next two days as if they were chessboards and she was responsible for keeping kings upright.
So Tishara is real, she thought. Naoko did not fabricate a ghost to keep us guessing. And Sion handled that revelation with soft hands. Good. The last thing we need is Rotschy house drama bleeding into council rooms.
Her eyes cooled. She thought of Rina and Jin, of the political math that had seemed so elegant when written on paper and how often paper had to be burned to keep a room warm. She thought of Eizel Frost—blood on the mouth, pride intact—and of the cold brawls that would bloom from today's insult like frostflowers on a winter window.
The car dipped into the turn. Overhead, sigils shifted intensity, guiding traffic through invisible lanes of permission. To the right, a maintenance door stood open, and beyond it Emilia glimpsed the raw ribs of the island—the skeletal scaffolds, the brace-struts, the humming banks of wards that kept sky out and life in. Men and women in blue coveralls moved among them, small and precise as instrument hands.
Sion slowed at the bottom of the spiral, boot easing the brake with a delicacy that spoke of affection. The floor widened into a broad, low corridor that breathed out into the open gallery of the lower ring. Here, the island's underface wore its anatomy without shame: the black-and-chrome lattice of struts, the blue-lit arteries of mana piping, the occasional bloom of a generator's glyphs. The wind was louder, managed but allowed—a harnessed animal meant to remind inhabitants that they were suspended grace, not a mountain.
She glanced into the side mirror. Tishara was a line of clean focus behind her—chin up, shoulders easy, green eyes narrowed a fraction against the wind. For a heartbeat Sion saw, not Naoko's little sister, but a creature the world had not learned to measure yet: untested not because she was weak, but because her tests had been of a different species—more dinner table and debt, fewer duels and gods. Sion filed that away.
They hit the causeway. It ran like the blade of a sword between two sets of structural ribs, slightly arched, its surface etched with a repeating pattern of small, round sigils that drank vibration and fed it back into the wards. The bikes shook something feral out of themselves, and the sound bounced off metal and stone and came back, stacked, fuller.
Sion did not speak for a while. The ride put breath and pulse in order. The fight's anger and decision bled off her skin and into the engine's song. The practical calculations, however, kept moving behind her eyes with the steadiness of an abacus. She thought of Jin again—of how easily he would have broken Eizel's frames with a moon's authority, of how easily she herself would break Jin with bone and angle and speed if ordered to subdue him. The triangle remained: her fist over his blade, his blessings over Eizel's ice, Eizel's geometry over her own heat unless she struck too hard and made promises Naoko did not want made. It was a ridiculous, elegant, terrifying knot.
Beside that calculus, a newer thread tugged: Tishara's shock, and the way it had turned itself into acceptance without crossing the violent terrain of outrage. Sion had seen arrests of grief before. This had not been grief. It had been one more notation in a ledger Tishara held, secret and neat, the ledger where she kept all the debts the world owed her and all the debts she owed the world. Sion suspected the book was balanced only because Tishara decided it should be.
They cleared the causeway and slid into the east sluice—a long, walled corridor with high rectangular openings that looked down over the capital. Through one, clouds knotted; through another, a sliver of the sea flashed like a blade. Sigils crawled the walls—maintenance marks, crew tags, an old spray of graffiti no one had bothered to scrub: GODS DO NOT PAY TOLLS.
Sion throttled back again near a service platform and gestured with two fingers. Tishara eased alongside, and for a moment the bikes drifted in parallel, engines purring like cats that had eaten.
"You're quiet," Sion called across the gap.
Tishara smiled with only half her mouth. "I'm thinking," she said.
"About Jin." Sion didn't frame it as a question.
"And Estelle," Tishara answered, watching Sion's face to see if the name cracked anything open. "You said two names."
Sion's jaw moved once. "I did." Her eyes softened, but her voice remained disciplined. "And I meant what I said in the garage. We'll speak when Naoko opens that door."
Tishara's gaze held hers a moment, steady, level. Then she nodded, simple as before. "Then tell me what matters now," she said. "If I am an aunt, what do I need to do besides not ruin anyone's plans?"
The ask pried a small, honest grin out of Sion. "Send him chocolate," she said, surprising herself with the warmth in it. "He won't eat it; he'll give it to someone else. But he'll understand the gesture. And if anyone calls him a rat in your hearing… you may feel free to do what I did today, only with more creativity and less collateral."
Tishara laughed, and the sound did something kind to the hard angles of the sluice. "I don't punch," she said. "I talk until people wish they had never learned language."
"That works," Sion returned. "Between the two of us we'll cover both dialects."
A courier bike shot past in the opposite lane, rune-plate flashing. The rider threw a quick salute, recognized the crescent on Sion's cowl, the phoenix on Emilia's distant sedan. The island's ecosystem hummed on—practical, tidy, everywhere a combination of ritual and wrench.
In the rearview, Sion caught sight of the Emberhart sedan taking an upper spur, keeping pace on a parallel run. Emilia sat forward now, speaking into a handset, face grave but not harried. She had the look of someone writing letters in her head, writing orders, writing silences. She watched the two bikes as if they were part of the letters.
The sluice broadened, spat them into a plaza under the island's ribs where the sky came closer and the city below was a mosaic at their feet. A low wall offered a place to stop. Sion rolled to it and put her boot down, the motorcycle shaking itself into a satisfied idle. Tishara coasted in next to her, killed her engine, and for a moment they let the wind do the talking.
The dome above them flickered—maintenance lightning playing over the surface, a slow ripple of blue. Along the far edge of the plaza, a pair of ward-techs argued amiably over a glyph array. The air tasted of salt and stone and the faint, metallic sweetness of the shield's field.
"Seventeen years," Tishara said, very softly, eyes on the city and not on Sion. "When I last saw you, you were the stern shadow who made sure I didn't fall off railings."
"I still do that," Sion said. "Just on bigger railings."
Tishara turned her head, green eyes bright. "Thank you for telling me," she said. "Even if it wasn't planned. Even if there are parts you can't say yet."
Sion held the younger woman's gaze. "It's not my secret," she said. "I'm only the one who carries it until Naoko decides it should see sun. But you deserved to know at least that you are an aunt."
Tishara's mouth tilted. "That's a different kind of weapon," she said. "Being an aunt. It might be the first one I'm excited to use."
Sion's chest did a strange, small thing—something like relief and something like fear. "Use it well," she said.
They fell quiet again. The sedan found them a minute later, soft tires whispering. Emilia stepped out and joined them at the wall. For a span none of them said anything. The world beneath went about its business. The island hummed.
Finally Emilia cleared her throat. "I'm heading to the Emberhart quarter," she said, businesslike. "Reports to file. Fires to sit on. If you're going to Obsidian, take the west service road. A maintenance cycle blew a bit of shielding on the mirror approach; it's rough."
Sion nodded once. "Noted."
Emilia glanced from Sion to Tishara and back. For a heartbeat the commander's professional mask thinned, and something like softness bled through it. "Congratulations," she said to Tishara. "It's overdue."
Tishara smiled, small and honest. "Thank you."
Emilia tapped two fingers to her temple in a soldier's goodbye and returned to the car. The sedan slid away, phoenix gleaming, making no more sound than a breath.
Sion pushed off the wall. "Ready?" she asked.
Tishara climbed back onto her bike. "Yes," she said. Then, more quietly, not quite to Sion, not quite to the air: "Aunt Tishara." She tried the title again, the way a singer tests a note in an empty hall, hearing how it carries.
Sion revved, and the two machines rolled into motion once more—one thunder, one purr. They threaded into the west run, the wind catching their hair, the ward-light painting their shadows long on the stone. Above them, the dome pulsed, below them the city glittered; between them, in the space where engines and breath kept company, something new took root that wasn't martial or political or strategic at all. It was simply a line drawn between two people: a protector and a sister, both orbiting a boy who did not yet understand all the math the world had set in motion in his name.
As they vanished into the long curve of the causeway, the garage returned to its normal rhythms, as if it had never witnessed a secret argued into daylight. But the blue sigils on the columns kept their slow, breathing pulse, and the reliefs on the wall—Lift, Anchor, Drag—watched with the steady attention of old mechanics who knew that every machine, no matter how elegant, runs on the small truths of motion and balance and the will of the hands that hold the throttle.
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heat: Thank you very much for reading.