* * *

  The mountain didn't want him either.

  Shiryu had been climbing for two days. The glass desert had given way to black rock sometime during the first night, jagged formations that cut his palms when he reached for handholds, that crumbled without warning beneath his boots. The wind came in gusts that could knock a man off a ledge if he wasn't braced for them, and the temperature dropped with every hundred meters of elevation until his breath came out in white clouds that the wind tore apart before they could form.

  He climbed anyway.

  The peaks of Wajinto rose above him like broken teeth against the sky, their summits lost in clouds that flickered with constant lightning. Red. Blue. Green. Gold. The colors he'd seen from the desert, closer now, brighter, painting the stone in strobes that made his ruined eye throb with each flash.

  The Shard pulsed against his chest. Warm. Steady. It had been pulsing more frequently since he'd started the ascent, as if responding to a presence in the air itself; some charge, some force that made his skin prickle and his hair stand on end.

  He found the first body on the morning of the second day.

  * * *

  It was wedged into a crevice between two boulders, bones bleached white, a rusted blade nearby, symbols scratched into the rock above. Prayers, maybe. Or warnings.

  He kept climbing.

  More bodies appeared with grim regularity. One tangled in frayed rope, swaying in the wind. Another scattered across a ledge, bones rearranged by decades of storms. The mountain kept its dead close.

  The last was just a skull, grinning up at him from loose scree, eye sockets dark and accusing.

  *Skybound.*

  All of them. None had made it.

  *Why do you think you'll be different?*

  Shiryu stepped over the skull and kept going.

  * * *

  Higher up, where the air thinned enough to make each breath a conscious effort, he found something else.

  Not bones this time. A camp. Military-grade shelter fabric, faded to grey but still intact, the kind that took decades to degrade. Standard-issue ration containers, empty, stacked with a discipline that spoke of trained hands. A perimeter marked with sensor posts, long dead.

  The shelters faced upward. Toward the summit. Not down toward the exit.

  No bodies. No personal effects. No signs of a fight or a retreat.

  They'd come up here looking for something. And either they'd found it, or something had found them.

  Shiryu didn't stop. Didn't need to.

  The lieutenant's voice echoed in his skull. *That last part isn't a suggestion.*

  He kept climbing.

  * * *

  He heard the voices before he saw the people.

  Distant at first, carried on the wind in fragments, words he couldn't make out, tones he couldn't read. The sound came from somewhere above him, beyond a ridge that blocked his view of the higher slopes. Human voices. Living voices.

  The first sign of life he'd encountered since leaving the patrol behind.

  Shiryu climbed faster. His arms burned. His fingers bled where the rock had torn them open. But he climbed, hand over hand, until he reached the ridge and pulled himself over the lip and saw,

  A camp.

  Not a permanent structure, no buildings, no walls, but a collection of tents and lean-tos arranged in a rough semicircle around a central clearing. Fires burned in stone pits, their smoke rising in thin columns before the wind tore it apart. And people. Dozens of them, moving between the tents, gathered around the fires, practicing forms with weapons and bare hands in the clearing.

  Green crystals hung from poles along the paths between tents, casting a cold, steady light that didn't flicker with the wind. Cheap light. Functional. The kind Shiryu had seen powering street lamps in Nyxspire's outer rings, except here, at this altitude, each one hummed faintly, as if the storm overhead was feeding them. The ground between the tents was packed dirt, rutted from rain and traffic. No paving. No drainage. Just mud when it rained and dust when it didn't. Everything here was temporary. Built to be abandoned at a moment's notice, or destroyed, if an apprentice lost control.

  Young. All of them young, his age or younger, with the lean builds and hard eyes of people who had been training for something their entire lives. They wore robes of various colors, dark fabric that moved strangely in the wind, and they moved with a grace that Shiryu recognized from his own training. Martial discipline. Combat readiness.

  *Apprentices,* he realized. *This is where they train.*

  The legends made more sense now. The Wajinto lived up here because they had to, because down below, in the cities, their power was too dangerous. He'd heard stories in the barracks. A single word spoken in the storm-tongue could level a district. A sneeze from a master could shatter windows for kilometers.

  They weren't hiding from the world.

  They were protecting it from themselves.

  As he watched, he noticed something else. Some of them were... different. Faint trails of mist clung to a few, barely visible, like breath on a cold morning. Others moved with robes that rippled even when they stood still, fabric stirring against currents that didn't exist. One or two had hair that shifted and swayed regardless of the wind's direction.

  *Signs,* some instinct whispered. *Signs of power.*

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  None of them looked at him.

  He stood at the edge of the ridge, bleeding, exhausted, and obviously out of place, and not a single one of the apprentices so much as glanced in his direction. They continued their forms, their conversations, their movements around the camp, as if he didn't exist.

  As if he wasn't worth noticing.

  Then one of them did look.

  * * *

  The man stood apart from the others, positioned on a boulder at the edge of the clearing. Young, maybe Shiryu's age or a few years older. Tall and lean. He wore robes darker than the others, black trimmed with silver thread that caught the firelight. A faint shimmer of mist clung to his skin, and his robes rippled gently despite the sheltered position of his perch. His hair was long, pulled back from a face twisted somewhere between boredom and contempt.

  His gaze found Shiryu across the camp.

  The contempt deepened.

  For a long moment, the man just looked. That dismissive gaze traveling over Shiryu's torn uniform, his bleeding hands, his ruined eye. Taking his measure, then deciding he wasn't worth the effort.

  Shiryu waited for the challenge. The warning. The threat. This was Wajinto territory.

  But the man stayed silent.

  He just looked, contempt radiating from every line of his body, and then he turned away. Dismissed. Beneath notice. Not worth the effort of a single word.

  The message was clear: *You don't belong here. And you never will.*

  Shiryu's jaw tightened. His hands curled into fists, the instinct to fight, to make the bastard *see* him, then unclenched.

  *See what? A half-dead soldier who can barely stand?*

  A younger apprentice passed close to him, close enough to whisper without breaking stride.

  "Don't expect anyone to talk to you. Especially not *her*." The boy's eyes flicked toward the higher slopes, where the clouds were thickest. "The Silent One never speaks. They say her words would kill us."

  Before Shiryu could respond, the apprentice was gone, melting back into the crowd.

  He breathed. Started walking toward the camp.

  No one stopped him.

  * * *

  The storm hit an hour later.

  Shiryu had found a spot at the edge of the camp, near one of the smaller fires. The apprentices continued to ignore him. He'd eaten the last of his rations, drunk what remained in his canteen, and settled against a rock to wait for something. Someone to tell him what came next.

  Then the sky opened.

  It came without warning, one moment the air was still, the next it was screaming. Wind slammed through the camp with enough force to tear one of the smaller tents from its moorings. Rain followed, freezing rain that turned to ice on contact, coating everything in a glaze that made the rocks treacherous and the fires sputter. Lightning split the sky. Close enough to feel the heat. Close enough to feel his skin prickle with charge.

  The apprentices scattered, seeking shelter in the larger tents, moving with the practiced efficiency of people who had weathered these storms before. In seconds, the clearing was empty.

  Shiryu pressed himself against the rock and held on.

  *Move,* some part of his brain screamed. *Find shelter.*

  But the tents weren't his. The camp wasn't his. He hadn't been invited, hadn't been acknowledged, hadn't been given permission to take cover under roofs that belonged to people who watched him like he was less than dirt.

  So he stayed.

  The cold seeped in. His fingers went numb. His arms started shaking. The freezing rain soaked through his uniform, through his skin, into the marrow of his bones. He could feel his body starting to fail, could feel the darkness creeping in at the edges of his vision,

  The lightning stopped.

  * * *

  Shiryu blinked.

  The rain still fell. The wind still howled. But the lightning that had been hammering the ridge every few seconds had simply... ceased. As if someone had thrown a switch.

  And the storm itself was changing. The wind dying down. The rain softening. The temperature rising, degree by degree, pulling back from the killing cold it had been moments before.

  He looked up.

  And saw her.

  * * *

  She stood at the edge of the clearing, maybe thirty meters away, perfectly still despite the wind that should have been tearing at her robes. White fabric that moved on its own, rippling gently, floating at the hem as though suspended in water rather than air. A faint veil of mist clung to her skin, luminous even in the grey light, and her dark hair drifted around her face in patterns that had nothing to do with the dying gale.

  She was beautiful.

  Not pretty. Not attractive. *Beautiful*, in the way that lightning was beautiful, in the way that storms were beautiful, terrible, perfect, and impossible to look away from. Athletic build, the kind that spoke of years of training, of discipline, of power held in careful check. Skin that seemed to glow faintly in the darkness.

  Her hair was long, dark, moving against currents only she could feel, high cheekbones, full lips, a jaw that suggested stubbornness as much as beauty.

  But it was her eyes that held him.

  Clear. Violet: the color of distant lightning, of storms seen from far away, of something not quite human. They caught what little light remained and reflected it back, luminous and unreadable, and when they found Shiryu's face...

  Something shifted.

  Not in her expression. Her face remained still, carved from stone, giving nothing away. But something in the *air*. The wind gentled further. The rain softened to something almost like mist. The clouds above, which had been churning with barely contained violence, seemed to... settle.

  *The weather,* Shiryu realized. *She's controlling the weather.*

  It didn't feel natural. It felt *obedient*.

  She looked at him.

  He looked at her.

  And for reasons he couldn't explain, couldn't begin to understand, he sensed a stirring in his chest. Not the Shard, that was pulsing too, warm and urgent against his sternum, but something deeper. Something that had nothing to do with magic or crystals or anything he could name.

  A pull. A certainty. As if some part of him, buried deep beneath the trauma and the ash, recognized something in her that his conscious mind couldn't access.

  *I know you.*

  The thought was absurd. He'd never seen this woman before in his life.

  But the feeling remained.

  He opened his mouth. To say what, he didn't know. To ask who she was, why the storm had stopped, why she was looking at him like...

  She turned away.

  The motion was deliberate. Final. She turned her back to him, and the message was clear.

  But she didn't leave.

  She stood there, back to him, shoulders rigid beneath her floating robes. The rain fell around them both, soft now, almost gentle. The wind stayed dead.

  Shiryu's legs trembled. His vision blurred.

  But he didn't fall.

  He pushed off the rock. One step. His knees screamed. Another step. The cold was killing him, he knew that, but she was *right there*, thirty meters away, and something in his chest, not the Shard, something deeper, was pulling him forward.

  *Move.*

  He took another step. His boot slipped on the ice. He caught himself, barely.

  She watched him. Her pale eyes were tracking his pathetic attempt to cross the distance between them. Her expression didn't change. Stone. Marble. Nothing.

  But she didn't leave.

  Ten meters now. His legs were shaking so hard he could barely control them. His breath came in ragged gasps that burned his throat. The darkness was creeping in faster, eating the edges of his vision.

  *Just a little further.*

  If he was going to die on this mountain, he refused to do it by crawling away.

  Five meters.

  His knee buckled.

  He fell forward, not backward against the rock, but *toward* her, momentum carrying him those last few steps before his body finally gave out completely.

  She moved.

  A half-step forward. Instinct. Her hand came up,

  Then stopped.

  Her fingers curled in on themselves, nails biting into her palm. She stepped back. Controlled. Deliberate.

  Shiryu hit the ground at her feet. Face in the mud and rain. Close enough to see the hem of her white robes floating inches above the earth, close enough to reach out and touch,

  He couldn't lift his arm.

  He lay there, broken, at the feet of a woman who had almost caught him and chosen not to. The rain fell softly around them, gentle as tears.

  Something moved behind her eyes; grief, anger, or longing, too fast to read. And her jaw tightened. For an instant, she looked like someone tearing herself away from a grave. The rain intensified for just a moment, fat drops falling harder.

  Then she turned away.

  This time, she walked.

  She moved across the clearing with fluid grace, her white robes drifting behind her like mist made solid, until there was only the empty space where she had stood.

  The wind returned. Gentle. Almost sorrowful.

  Shiryu lay in the mud, cheek pressed to cold earth, and watched the place where she had been.

  *Who are you?*

  *Why did you almost catch me?*

  *Why didn't you?*

  The questions faded as the darkness took him.

  The last thing he saw was lightning, red, distant, pulsing on the summit like a heartbeat.

  * * *