The night before departure, I visited Cloud Terrace Four one last time.
Not for training. Not for a concert. Not for any of the operational purposes that had brought me to this platform thirty-seven times over the past seven weeks. I went because the place where you became yourself deserved a goodbye — even if you were coming back.
The platform was empty. The stone bore its history — concert scars, training marks, the particular wear pattern of seven people who'd knelt in the same positions night after night until the wards beneath the academy stabilized and the heartbeat quieted and the world pulled back from the edge of catastrophe.
I sat at the edge. Feet over the drop. The thousand-foot fall that had stopped being frightening approximately four weeks ago, when the things above the ground became more dangerous than the distance to what was below it.
