Grief is a shape with no edges. It wraps itself around the bones, a frost that never melts.
Dellos could not remember how long he'd been kneeling by the cold mouth of the cliff, maybe hours, maybe a century, his hands numb, knuckles raw where he'd clawed the stone, searching for an opening, for any sign that Luka's small feet had ever pressed this earth.
He was still there, trapped in the moment, the last moment, the memory playing behind his eyes like the old festivals, endless and unmerciful.
Luka at the brink, blue glyphs crawling over his skin, his face lit with something holy and terrible.
The hush in the air, not wind, not night, but expectation—the kind that warns you the world is about to change and you're powerless to stop it.
He remembered his own shout, ragged, broken:
"Luka! Luka, come back from there!"
His son had not turned, had not blinked. Eyes wide, fixed on the horizon, as if listening to a lullaby no living thing should hear. Lips moving in a language Dellos couldn't understand, a song meant for someone, or something, below the living earth.
The mountain had trembled. The world had thinned.
And then that voice, Luka's but not his, older, hollowed out by wonder and terror both:
"The song...from below...the song."
A hush, a darkness, swallowing his boy as if he'd only ever been a rumour, a dream whispered by the blue flame.
Now there was only Dellos...
His scream was lost to the wind.
His hands were empty, aching for the impossible warmth of a child who could not be touched.
They had tried to hold him back, Asyana's hands gripping his arm, Reyland's quiet voice pleading reason, but he'd broken free, thrown himself against the invisible wall that the darkness had left behind. He remembered the pain, physical, spiritual, crashing against the boundary between hope and oblivion.
He had always thought himself strong, but now strength was nothing; only memory and regret remained.
He pressed his forehead to the stone, breath steaming in the mountain's cold.
How many times had he tried to barter with the gods, the flame, the wind?
How many bargains had he whispered into the blue fire, promising anything, everything, if only Luka could be returned?
But the world did not answer.
The wind carried only echoes.
The flame, tonight, burned low and sullen, as if in mourning or shame.
There was a song, he knew that now, a song from below, winding through the mountain's veins, ancient as hunger. Luka had heard it, called to it, and the mountain had answered.
A father should be able to follow.
A father should be able to defy the mountain, the flame, even the world, for his child.
Dellos rose on shaking legs, sorrow sharpening into resolve.
There would be no more prayers, no more waiting for mercy from powers that never truly loved their children.
He would go below. He would follow the wound in the mountain, the memory of his son's voice, no matter what the priests forbade, no matter what name they tried to take from him. He looked to the horizon, dawn threatening, clouds bruised with coming fire. Somewhere in the deep, Luka's song was still echoing, waiting for an answer.
Dellos closed his eyes and whispered, not a prayer, not this time, but a promise, rough as old rope, and steady as winter:
"Hold on, Luka.
I am coming.
Even if I must walk through darkness,
even if I must be lost myself,
I am coming."
A hand, warm and steady, fell on Dellos's shoulder. He hadn't heard footsteps in the hush, but there it was...
Reyland.
The Navigator's eyes were the colour of deep ice, his cloak stirring faintly in the wind. He knelt beside Dellos, a pillar of calm in the wreckage of grief.
"We'll find him, Dellos," Reyland said softly, the conviction in his voice as unyielding as the stone beneath their knees. "We will go to the end of the world if needed. There's no path too lost, no shadow too deep. The wind will show us the way."
Before Dellos could reply, another presence dropped beside him in a scuffle of boots and a laugh too wild for mourning—
Asyana, hair in wild braids, face smudged with blue ash, firelight dancing in her eyes. She elbowed Dellos with a sideways grin that dared the world to break her spirit.
"I'm already picturing my jumps into the abyss," she said, voice sharp and bright against the dull ache of morning. "What's the point of being a Jumper if we don't dare beyond the peaks? If we're going after Luka, let's make it a story worth telling, something the wind will brag about for a hundred winters."
She flashed him a crooked, ferocious smile, hope and recklessness stitched together, as if the mountain itself had raised her to spit in the face of fear.
For the first time since the night the world ended, Dellos felt something stir beneath the ache—
Not hope, not yet.
But the beginning of it.
The kind that comes not from promises, but from hands on your shoulders and the certainty of companions who will leap with you, even into darkness.
He nodded, swallowing the last of his despair, letting resolve fill the hollow places inside.
"Then we do this together," Dellos said, voice rough but steadier. "The Labyrinth, the mountain, whatever waits below. We find Luka. Or we don't come back at all."
Above them, the wind sighed, carrying the first rumours of dawn and the promise that some stories refuse to end in silence.
* * *
The flame burned blue and fierce in the assembly hall, throwing restless shadows across the carved stone walls. The Asiris gathered in silence, a circle of faces caught between awe and fear. At the centre, Ardentul—the old priest, all steel and shadow—sat cross-legged, hands hovering over the sacred fire, eyes closed as if listening for omens only he could hear.
A path opened through the crowd, each villager stepping aside, unwilling to meet Dellos's eyes.
He walked the length of the chamber with his shoulders squared, the mountain's cold still clinging to his cloak, grief sharpening his jaw to stone.
He stopped at the flame's edge. For a moment, he let its heat sink into his bones, one last comfort before war.
"I am going into the Labyrinth, Ardentul," Dellos said, his voice cutting through the hush like the wind itself. "I have to find Luka. I have to find the meaning of all this, of the flame, the mountain, the darkness that took him. I will not kneel. I will not beg permission. I only ask that you do not bar my way."
A ripple moved through the assembly, shock, fear, a low murmur of disbelief.
Ardentul did not open his eyes. His hands never left the flame, fingers splayed in a gesture of warning and prayer.
"You know the law, Dellos," the priest intoned, voice low, heavy with the weight of a hundred winters. "The Labyrinth is forbidden. To descend is to betray your blood, your name, your ancestors. The flame keeps us. The mountain protects us. Those who go below are lost, not just to us, but to themselves. There is nothing for you in that darkness but death and forgetting."
He finally looked up, gaze sharp as broken glass, catching Dellos in the full fury of tradition and fear.
"Your pain is great. But it does not give you the right to break the world. The flame has claimed your son for reasons only the fire can know. Trust in the old ways, Dellos. Mourn as we mourn. Pray as we pray. Let the mountain keep its secrets."
But Dellos stood his ground, fists clenched at his sides, firelight glinting off the tears he did not bother to hide.
"The world is already broken, Ardentul," he replied, each word heavy as a promise. "If the flame and the mountain would sacrifice children and call it mercy, then let me be the one to break the silence. I will find Luka, or I will be lost trying. I do not need your blessing. Only your honesty. Will you stop me, priest?"
The chamber held its breath. The blue fire roared higher, shadows leaping across faces, painting every scar and line.
From the shadowed alcoves, Reyland and Asyana stood as silent as stone, watching the drama unfold. Dellos had told them, no matter what happens, do not intervene. His voice had been low, final:
"If you risk exile for me, we all lose our chance. The mountain needs your strength, even if the council would rather keep it in chains. Wait for the moment. If I fall, then you move. Until then...stay hidden. Promise me."
Now, as Dellos stood in the fire's glare, his friends held their breath. He was alone, but not forsaken. Ardentul's gaze sharpened, suspicion flickering, but he saw only one man. He rose from his crouch, robes whispering across the stone, the flame casting a ghostlight on his weathered face.
"You would defy us all, Dellos? You would trade your place among the Children of the Sky for one foolish descent? The flame does not favour lone hearts, nor does the mountain forgive those who break its silence. You seek meaning in the dark, but you will find only oblivion."
He raised his hands, invoking the ritual words—the words that cut deeper than exile, meant to unmake a man's belonging:
"By the fire and by the frost,
by the wind and by the stone,
You are no longer named, no longer kin,
Your story ends here,
Your voice is a memory the flame will not keep.
Let the mountain forget your shadow,
Let the wind erase your song."
The assembly murmured, a mix of pity and unease, but no one stepped forward. No one would risk sharing his sentence.
Ardentul's eyes glittered. "Go, Dellos. Leave this hall, this flame, these people. Your journey is your own now. Should you return, do not look for mercy."
Dellos squared his shoulders, pride unbroken. He bowed his head, not in submission, but in defiance, one last look at the flame, at the faces that had once been his world. He turned on his heel, walked the long path back through the parting crowd. Every step felt like the cutting of a tether, the world narrowing to a single promise: Luka. He did not look for Reyland and Asyana, but he felt their eyes—fierce, loyal, waiting in the dark.
When the doors closed behind him, he was an outcast in the eyes of the world.
But he was not alone.
Not yet.
* * *
There are places where darkness grows teeth,
where the mountain remembers its old wounds and sings only for the lost.
Luka awoke as if surfacing from a drowned dream, breath scraping the cold. He lay on stone so ancient it remembered the first blue fire, the kind that burned before stories had learned its name. Every nerve ached with the memory of falling, of being wrenched from the world by wings that were less flesh than hunger, more shadow than air.
The cave was silent, pressed hard as bone. Not empty, but expectant. The hush before judgment, when the world holds its breath to see who will break first.
He tried to sit up, limbs trembling. The air here was thick, metallic, sweet with the memory of fire, old fire, nearly spent, clinging to the walls in pale veins that pulsed blue, faint as a forgotten heartbeat. He touched his arm and found three thin welts, bloodless but burning, the gift or curse of the Sky-Render's claws. The marks felt cold, as if something inside him had frozen over, a shard of night wedged beneath the skin. He was flame-touched now, marked in a way the old tales always said was the beginning of the end.
Above him, the cave roof soared up and away into blackness. The stone was scored with claws—long gouges, half-runes, the story of a creature that had survived not by winning, but by never quite dying. He heard it before he saw it: a scraping, the slow drag of wing over rock, a shudder in the shadows. Then, a shape moved, vast, graceful, wrong.
No one alive had seen one and spoken of it, not truly. In stories, it was all hunger, the hunter of the flame, the terror for those who dared to carry light into the dark. But Luka, watching it move, saw only sorrow made flesh: ribs sharp beneath coal-dark hide, wings torn and healing, eyes burning not with malice, but with memory.
It circled him, slow, a hush in every motion, the air colder where it passed. He waited for terror, waited for his body to shake itself apart with fear. But all he felt was the ache of something old and unfinished.
The beast lowered its head, nostrils flaring, steam ghosting from its mouth. Luka saw himself mirrored in one golden eye, his own face stretched thin, wild with pain, and the stubborn shine of hope that hadn't quite been starved out. It did not strike, only watched. And for a moment, in that patient gaze, Luka understood:
This was not a killer, but a survivor. This was what the world did to those who burned too bright, too long.
It watched him from the edge of vision, never whole, always half-veiled in shadow, as if the world itself shied away from naming what it truly was. Part dragon, part gryphon, as if the mountain had dreamt of both and stitched them together with wind and nightmare. Its wings folded and unfolded, black as mourning cloth, each feather a blade that cut the torchlight into ribbons. The creature was vast, large enough to block out the tunnel's mouth if it wished, yet it moved with a silence that belonged to dreams or to death. The lines of its body were all contradiction: muscle and elegance, menace and dignity, talons long and cruel but never careless, teeth white and curved for rending but pressed tight in restraint. Its eyes, when they found him, burned with a gold deeper than fire—ancient, thinking, unblinking. There was intelligence in that gaze, old as thunder, the kind that weighed you as you stood, found every secret you thought you'd hidden from yourself, and dismissed none of them.
It did not speak, but Luka felt its mind brush his—a vibration in his bones, a quiet ripple through the stone, thoughts too large for words, images pressed directly into the mind's dark: sky falling, fire feeding, hunger, pain, waiting.
The Sky-Render was never whole, not here, not anywhere; the very air around it warped and shuddered, a ripple of not-light that made it flicker at the edges. Look too long, and the world bled away, a black halo swallowing the torch, the walls, even the memory of shape. He saw its claws, long as daggers, black as obsidian, sharp enough to carve runes into the stone. He saw its wings, half-unfurled, the shadows of feather and scale overlapping in impossible patterns. He saw a mane, ragged, tangled, streaked with midnight and memory, lifting in the faint wind of its breath.
For all its power, the Sky-Render carried itself with the gravity of old sorrow, no rage, only the deep ache of a thing that had survived too long, learned too many lessons about hunger and silence. t never revealed itself fully. Always there was some piece—shoulder, wing, half a face—lost to the dark, as if the mountain itself conspired to keep its secrets hidden. As if the creature was not meant for the world's full gaze. As if to look on it would be to lose something vital, to fall into that silence and never return.
Yet Luka could not look away. He met that golden gaze and, in the hush, understood: The Sky-Render was both jailor and prisoner, hunter and hunted, the wound and the memory of healing.
It waited, as if asking: Do you understand? Will you run, or will you follow?
And for Luka, there was no question—only the pull of the song below, the cold ache in his new wounds, and the sense that every story worth telling began with a step into the dark.
He forced himself to his knees, then to his feet. The mountain pressed in on all sides, stone wet with blue light, walls alive with the slow music of dripping memory. The Sky-Render limped away, trailing a shadow, stopping just beyond the reach of the weakest flame. Luka followed, unsure why. He moved as if pulled by a thread buried deep in his heart, the thread that bound him to the blue fire, to loss, to everything the old world tried to forget. He stepped past old bones and shattered feathers, past claw marks gouged deep enough to bleed the stone. In some places, the flame seeped from cracks, and he thought he could see faces in it, ghosts of other children, flame-touched and taken, their stories burning just beneath the surface. He wanted to cry out, to demand why, to ask what it meant to be chosen by darkness instead of light. But the only sound was the low, aching growl of the beast, and beneath it, the song, a low, thrumming note that vibrated through the soles of his feet, through the scars on his arm, through the hollow where courage should have been.
He did not know the words, but he knew the ache, the song from below. It was not a threat, but a hunger. A longing for something that once was whole and now would never be again.
The Sky-Render paused before a fissure in the wall, blue fire leaking like tears from the stone. It looked back at Luka—not a monster, not a god, just a creature too tired to run, too hungry to hope.
In its gaze, Luka saw both an invitation and a warning. He stepped forward, alone but not abandoned, the marks on his arm burning cold as stars, the mountain singing its quiet song of ruin, and the world above growing farther away with every heartbeat.
If at first, Luka braced himself for fear, for that old, animal panic that had haunted every heartbeat since the Sky-Render snatched him from the world above, it didn't come. Now, the longer he stood within the cave's living hush, the more that dread softened, dissolved, became something altogether stranger, a kind of peace, as if the mountain itself had decided to set its burden down, just for a little while. The air grew lighter. The pressure that had been crushing his ribs began to fade, replaced by a subtle warmth that flowed through the stone, the flame, the very marrow of the place. Even the Sky-Render seemed changed. Where before it had been all claws and threat and shadow, now there was a gentler gravity to its movements, a solemn dignity that made the cave feel less like a prison and more like a sanctuary. The beast's golden eyes never left him. They watched, patient and unblinking, as if weighing his every breath, his every thought, searching for the truth beneath his trembling. Yet Luka no longer felt hunted. He felt, impossibly, safe.
The cave itself responded to the shift. Thin veins of blue flame, once faint as distant lightning, began to pulse along the walls, growing brighter and bolder with each breath he drew. The light spread, illuminating the lair in soft, shifting bands: the rough arch of the ceiling, scarred and scored by ancient talons; the worn alcoves piled with the feathered dust of forgotten seasons; the slow, glimmering trails left by the Sky-Render's passing.
The creature paced the chamber's edge, moving with a restless, side-stepping gait. Every so often, it let out a low, rumbling growl—not a threat, but a sound that vibrated in Luka's chest, steadying him. There was a sense of ritual in the way it circled: cautious, measured, almost expectant, as if it was waiting for something Luka could not yet see.
Drawn by an impulse he didn't understand, Luka reached out and placed his palm against the nearest patch of flame-lit stone. Instantly, the blue fire seemed to leap toward his skin, curling around his fingers in cool, flickering threads. It felt alive, welcoming, intimate, like being recognised by a song he'd never learned but had always known. The contact filled him with a pulse of warmth so deep he nearly wept from the relief of it. It was then that the Sky-Render approached the brightest vein of flame. The great beast lowered its head with a deliberate, reverent slowness, jaws parting to drink, not greedily, but with a careful restraint that spoke of both hunger and gratitude. As it fed, Luka saw the impossible: the beast's form began to blur at the edges, its body growing fluid, almost translucent, as if it were being unmade and remade by the flame itself. Wherever the Sky-Render moved, blue radiance trailed in its wake, marking the air with streaks of living light. Sometimes, the creature seemed to vanish altogether, lost in the brightness, only the glint of its eyes or the faint outline of a wing betraying its presence. When it returned, the cave was always a shade brighter, the gloom held a little further at bay.
A strange calm settled over Luka. He no longer felt the ache of exile or the sting of his wounds.
Instead, he felt as if he had crossed some secret threshold, come home to a place he had never seen but always carried within him. Here, in the company of this ancient, wounded survivor, with the blue flame alive beneath his skin and the song from below pulsing through the stone, Luka was not lost.
He was not prey.
He was part of something older, deeper, a silent pact between hunger and hope, darkness and light.
And somewhere beyond the lair, the song in the mountain's heart began to change, its sorrow melting into a promise that shimmered just out of reach.
* * *
Dellos stood before the assembly, eyes clear as winter dawn. The crowd gathered in a hush so deep it seemed the mountain itself was listening, old men trembling, mothers clutching their children, even the bravest kneeling in the dust, heads bowed in shame or grief. The blue flame flickered, restless, as if uncertain how to bless this moment. He reached up and tore the cape from his shoulders, letting it fall with a whisper to the stone. His hands found the sigils at his chest, the braided cords and copper badges that marked him as Jumper Leader, bearer of the wind's trust, keeper of their impossible hope. He unpinned each one in turn, fingers steady, ritual-slow, offering them up for all to see. He held the last badge in his palm for a moment, staring into the engraved glyphs, worn smooth by years of struggle, streaked with the sweat of every leap and every rescue.
Then he dropped it among the others. The sound was small but final, a door closing somewhere no one could reach.
He turned so the crowd could see him, bare and unmarked, stripped of rank and memory. Some wept openly, hands pressed to their mouths to stifle their grief. Children stared wide-eyed, as if watching the death of a myth. The elders knelt lower, keening under their breath. Even the wind seemed to catch, uncertain whether to mourn or rage.
Ardentul watched it all from his seat beside the blue fire, mouth set in a line of ancient stone. There was no pity in his gaze, only a thin, satisfied calm, as though a troublesome shadow had finally been banished from his path. With Dellos gone, his rule would hold tighter. The flame, the law, the weight of tradition, all his, for now.
Reyland and Asyana lingered at the margins, eyes dark with fury and sorrow. They had promised Dellos they would remain in shadow, keep their loyalty hidden until the world demanded otherwise. Now, unseen by the weeping crowd, they slipped from the assembly, their hearts already racing ahead to the forbidden peaks, the hidden path only they would dare follow.
Dellos stepped into the wind, the cold biting his bare skin, but he did not shiver. Every sigil he had stripped away became another promise, not to the flame, not to the mountain, but to the boy lost below, to the hope that still sang in the dark. He did not look back. The world behind him had shrunk to memory and ash. The path ahead was exile and song, and he would walk it alone, or as alone as any father could ever truly be.
He walked, step by step, through the shattered silence of the assembly, stripped bare of every symbol, every glory, every name. The crowd parted as he passed—old friends weeping, mothers clutching their children tighter, the young gazing up with wide, haunted eyes. Some reached out, desperate to touch the hem of his sleeve, as if a single brush might carry his courage with them. Others looked away, unable to bear the shame of his exile.
At the threshold, where the fire's light faded into the waiting dark, Dellos stopped.
He turned, just once, to look back. At the faces he had led through storm and hunger. At the elders he had challenged, the children whose dreams he had cradled, at the broken towers and the sacred flame flickering in its stone cradle. The village he had fought and bled for, every joy and wound and memory braided together in the hush of this moment. He let the sight burn into him, a final reckoning, a silent promise:
I was yours. I would have died for you.
Now I go for him, and for all you have forgotten how to love.
Then, with nothing left to carry but the ache and the vow, he stepped forward. The darkness swallowed him whole, swift, absolute, a tide with no surface. But as Dellos crossed the threshold, what should have been terror became a kind of quiet. He did not feel lost. He did not feel afraid.
Instead, there was a deep, almost holy calm, as if he was no longer falling but swimming through the dark, the way a child swims in dreamwater, buoyant, unafraid, carried. He blinked, expecting blindness, but found his vision sharpening, his senses opening to something ancient and electric. The dark was not empty after all; it was alive with hidden order. Patterns emerged, lines and glyphs, shimmering veins of blue fire winding through the stone, twining above his head, branching out beneath his feet like the secret roots of the mountain. He saw the echo of every step before he took it. The flame was not outside him now, but within—guiding, illuminating, a pulse in the marrow of his bones.
He walked deeper, the hush absolute, every sound absorbed by the mountain's vast heart. He felt his way forward, not with his hands, but with an inner knowing, the path unspooling in his mind's eye like a memory half-remembered from a life before names. He recalled Reyland's last whispered instructions—Find the hidden mouth. The way is marked by what cannot be seen in daylight. The flame will show you. We'll wait for you above, when the mountain opens her throat.
It was a promise and a test. Dellos would have to cross the labyrinth to reach the exit, a secret cleft in the mountain that even legend dared not name.
Each step was a shedding of fear, of doubt, of everything that had bound him to the world above.
In this place, he was stripped down to intention and longing— a father, and nothing else.
The labyrinth waited ahead, silent and merciless. He knew, with a certainty deeper than thought, that if he was to find Luka, he would have to brave the winding dark, face whatever truths or ghosts the mountain kept in her tangled depths, and trust the flame inside to lead him where no light could reach. He pressed on, feeling the blue fire hum along the walls, the way ahead shining in patterns only he could see. He did not pray for mercy.
He only whispered, "I'm coming, Luka," and stepped into the waiting maze.
* * *
Saera woke with a cry stifled in her throat, breath ragged, body slick with cold sweat. For a moment, she couldn't tell if she was alive or still tumbling through that endless dark, claws closing, wind howling, the mountain splitting open to swallow the last light. Her limbs ached as if she'd fallen for hours. Her heart hammered a warning in her chest, frantic as a caged bird.
The vision clung to her, more real than memory. She'd seen the boy—Luka—standing on the edge of the world, blue glyphs burning across his skin, the darkness sweeping him away, soundless and final. She'd felt the chill of stone, the pain of the marks, the taste of fear and wonder mingled on the tongue. In the moment before the world closed over him, she'd heard his voice:
The song...the song from below...
It echoed now, deep in her skull. Not as her own song, the one she sang every night, soft and hopeful, cast into the ether in a plea for kinship, but as something older, something that used her voice without asking. A current, not a creation. A transmission.
She pressed trembling fingers to her temple, struggling to steady her breathing. The room was silent except for the low, unceasing hum, her song, and not her song, rising from the core of her bones, from the stones beneath her, from the aching sky itself. Saera realised, with a kind of awe and dread, that the melody in her mind was not hers to command. She was a vessel, nothing more, a hollow reed through which the mountain's old grief sang itself back into the world. She had believed she was calling out, hoping for some Asiran heart to answer. But all along, she had only been repeating the message, carrying it from darkness to light.
The song's meaning shimmered just out of reach—pain, longing, a promise unfinished. Luka's terror and hope tangled in the notes, now a thread wound tight around her own soul.
Saera sat up, the dream still pulsing in her veins, the sense of a destiny turning beneath her skin. Somewhere, deep below, the mountain was stirring, and the song from below was not finished with her yet. She closed her eyes, let the melody wash over her, and waited for the next note.
She staggered to her feet, breath still ragged from the dream's grip. For a moment, she didn't know why she moved, only that something in the marrow of her bones tugged her to the window, insistent as a song she could not refuse. Outside, the poisoned air she called life churned in the half-light, dense and shifting, thick with the bitter tang of survival. But tonight, the smog was alive with impossible colour: threads of blue flame shimmered through the gloom, curling and weaving between the shadows, painting the world in trembling lines of hope and warning.
She pressed her palm to the glass, staring out, eyes wide, unblinking. Shapes moved in the haze—winged, vast, each step and wingbeat silent as breath. They drifted through the poisoned sky in slow, deliberate arcs, their eyes burning gold, their bodies half-swallowed by darkness and light.
Not just one, but dozens. An entire flock of Sky-Renders, more than any myth had ever dared whisper.
At their centre, as if sheltered or revered, stood a single figure—a boy's silhouette, small and unmistakable, head haloed in blue fire, guarded on all sides by monsters made holy in the dream. Luka.
Saera's heart caught, suspended between terror and awe. The song inside her roared up, wild and urgent, no longer her own but something vast and ancient, pulsing through her every nerve.
She understood then:
She had not been calling out. She had been called to witness.
The creatures circled the boy in silence, their wings stirring the blue flame into eddies and spirals that reached all the way to her window, as if begging her to remember, to see, to understand.
Saera did not move. She did not breathe. She stood at the window, held captive by the impossible vision, the world outside remade in blue and gold, every line a promise, every shadow a question.
And somewhere beneath the poisoned sky, the mountain's song rose, trembling, waiting for her answer.