The Crater Spine was supposed to be dead.
That's what the maps said.That's what the exiles believed.That's what the Empire wanted to be true.
But as Aero and Mica crossed the seventh dune past the Black Ridge, the desert began to breathe differently.
The sand grew darker.The heat stopped stinging.And the sky changed color.
"It's purple," Mica whispered.
"No clouds," Aero muttered. "No sun either. Just… haze."
He knelt and touched the earth.
The Resonance beneath was not quiet. It was a storm.
Roots. Lives. Hidden hearts. Magic dormant, not dead.
The Crater Spine wasn't a wasteland.
It was hibernating.
And it had just sensed them.
They camped beneath the shade of a petrified ribcage.
Literally.
Some massive, ancient beast's bones jutted from the sand like the ribs of a sleeping god. They wrapped cloth between two to make a tent. Mica went hunting, her wind magic slicing down desert hawks from the sky like thrown chakrams.
Aero stayed behind, listening.
Not to the wind.Not to the bones.To himself.
Ever since the Hollow Archive, his senses had shifted.
The Resonance no longer whispered in fragments. It sang. Like a symphony just beyond the veil of comprehension.
And tonight, something joined that symphony.
Footsteps.
Silent.
Too fast.
Too close.
He turned—too slow.
A figure slammed into him, pinning him against a rib bone, a blade of shimmering bone pressed to his throat.
"Name," the girl growled.
Aero blinked.
The figure was young—his age, maybe less. Brown skin smeared with ash, hair twisted into braids wrapped in feathers, eyes glowing gold with cracked black veins across her cheeks. Her blade hummed with life.
He recognized the hum.
Resonance-forged.
"Mica," he croaked. "Now would be a good time."
Too late.
The wind exploded behind them. Mica struck like a hawk, spinning into a kick that caught the girl's side.
The girl didn't move.
She absorbed the force, spun, and flipped Mica into the sand with one motion. Her bone-blade shifted into a staff, locking into place with organic clicks.
"Both of you," she snarled. "Speak or bleed."
Aero raised his hands. "We're not with the Empire."
"Then who sent you?"
"No one," he said. "We're looking for someone. A survivor. A Resonant like me."
The girl's eyes narrowed. "You can hear it?"
He nodded. Then pulled open his collar.
The scar glowed faint green in the night.
Her eyes widened.
And for a moment—just a moment—her blade lowered.
"You're marked," she whispered. "But you're flame-born. How can that be?"
"I don't know," Aero said honestly.
Silence.
Then she dropped the weapon.
"My name is Kaeli. And you're both insane for coming here."
Kaeli led them to her shelter—an old ruin built into the side of the Crater Spine's canyon, part temple, part cave, part bone-ship.
"Been here since I was eight," she said. "Wasn't supposed to survive. None of us were."
"Others?" Mica asked.
Kaeli's jaw tightened. "Not anymore."
Aero didn't ask. He already felt it in the soil—traces of burned-out lifeforce, of songs cut short. This place had once held a community. Maybe even a sanctuary.
Now it held ghosts.
"I need to learn," Aero said. "The Hollow Archive said someone here could teach me how to wield the Resonance. How to survive what's coming."
Kaeli stared at him.
And then, to his surprise, she laughed.
"Boy. You don't survive the Resonance."
She pressed her hand to the earth.
Vines erupted around her feet—sharp, metallic, wrapped in thorns of crystallized bone.
"You surrender to it."
The next morning, training began.
And it was brutal.
Kaeli's method wasn't structured. It wasn't safe.
It was baptism.
She hurled Aero into the canyon's wild growth, forced him to listen to the roots' screams, to feel the pressure of the earth's breath in his lungs, to match its pulse or be crushed by it.
"You're not a mage anymore," she yelled. "You're not a flame. You're a seed. Learn to bend or you'll break."
Aero failed. Over and over.
But each time he fell, something grew.
When he was struck, the roots caught him. When he was breathless, the air thickened with lifeforce. When he reached out—not with will but intention—the land answered.
By day three, his heartbeat could echo through the stones.
By day five, he could feel Mica's steps before she took them.
By day seven… he began to shape the world.
He summoned a tree.
Not a sapling. A full-grown, spiraled-root whitewood, crowned with golden leaves, grown from bare earth in a crater of death.
Kaeli watched.
And nodded.
"You're ready."
"For what?" Aero asked, panting, drenched in dirt and sweat.
"To meet the others."
"What others?"
"The ones the Empire doesn't know survived. The ones waiting for the Resonant child. The ones who believe the world isn't broken—just waiting to be reborn."
Aero stood taller.
The wind shifted.
The ground beneath his feet hummed not with warning… but with welcome.