The day Aetos discovered the eagle's nest changed everything.
It began as many of his adventures did—with a mysterious disappearance during afternoon lessons. Brother Dimitri, patiently teaching basic mathematics to the temple children, noticed the empty meditation cushion where Aetos should have been sitting, his slate and chalk abandoned mid-equation.
"Has anyone seen—" he began wearily, then sighed with the resignation of someone who had asked this question too many times. "Of course not. Brother Matthias!"
By now, the temple had developed a systematic, almost military search pattern for their wandering storm-child. Check the rooftops first, then the towers, then the defensive walls, then the gardens, then the storage buildings. This time, however, all the usual perches stood conspicuously empty, bearing no trace of their small climber.
"Perhaps he's finally learned to stay grounded," Brother Kyrios suggested with false hope that fooled no one, least of all himself.
A piercing eagle's cry from the eastern cliffs answered him, high and wild and somehow triumphant.
The entire temple mobilised with practiced efficiency. The eastern cliffs were not mere walls or buildings that Aetos typically scaled—they were a sheer rock face of forbidding granite rising two hundred feet above the temple grounds, considered unclimbable even by the most experienced mountaineers. Ancient eagles had nested in the highest crevices for generations uncounted, their eyries unreachable by human hands, sacred and inviolate.
Until now.
"There!" Brother Thomas pointed with a trembling finger, his face draining of color. "Mother of mountains preserve us."
Halfway up the impossible cliff face, moving with the liquid certainty of a spider or a shadow, climbed a small figure. Five-year-old Aetos ascended the vertical stone as if gravity were merely a suggestion rather than an iron law. His tiny fingers found holds in smooth rock where none should exist, his feet danced across surfaces that should have offered no purchase whatsoever.
"Get ropes!" Master Zephyrus commanded, his usual preternatural calm cracking like ice in spring. "Every climbing rope in the temple! Thomas, gather our best climbers immediately. Alexei, prepare medical supplies—bandages, splints, everything. Move!"
But even as the rescue organised with desperate efficiency, those with keen eyes noticed something extraordinary. Aetos wasn't struggling or straining. He climbed with pure joy radiating from every movement, pausing occasionally to wave cheerfully at circling eagles or examine interesting patterns of lichen on the rock. The wind, which should have endangered any climber on such an exposed face, seemed to cradle him protectively, pushing him gently against the stone when he reached for distant holds.
"He's heading for the nest," Matthias realised with dawning horror that turned his blood to ice. A massive eagle's eyrie jutted from a narrow ledge near the cliff's summit—home to a mated pair known throughout the region for their fierce territorial nature. Shepherds told stories of these eagles driving off wolves, attacking full-grown men who ventured too close to their domain.
The rescue team assembled with record speed. Brother Thomas led, the temple's most experienced climber with decades of mountain experience, followed by three others skilled in rope work and vertical ascents. They began their climb, careful and methodical where Aetos had been impossibly quick and casual.
"I can't follow his route," Thomas called down after twenty laborious feet, sweat already beading his forehead. "He's using holds that don't exist, crossing gaps no human could manage. It's like he's walking on air between the stone faces."
Above them, Aetos reached the eyrie's level. The assembled crowd held their collective breath, expecting the parent eagles to attack the small intruder threatening their nest. Instead, something unprecedented and impossible occurred.
The great female eagle, her wings spanning twelve magnificent feet, landed beside the boy with a rush of wind. Rather than striking with her terrible talons, she tilted her magnificent head, studying him with one golden, ancient eye. Aetos extended a small, trusting hand, and the raptor—apex predator of the mountains, killer of wolves—allowed him to stroke her breast feathers.
"Hello, sky-mother," the watchers heard him say, his child's voice carrying impossibly far on the wind, clear as temple bells. "Your babies are beautiful. They have your eyes."
The rescue team froze in complete uncertainty, unsure whether to continue. Approaching now might startle the eagles into attacking. But leaving Aetos at such a death-defying height...
"Keep climbing," Zephyrus ordered, his voice steady despite the fear in his eyes. "Slowly. No sudden movements. Let him have his moment, but be ready for anything."
For the next eternal hour, as Brother Thomas and his team made their painstaking, muscle-burning ascent, Aetos sat with the eagles as if visiting beloved relatives. The mated pair brought him strips of fresh meat from their hunt, which he politely declined with gentle gestures. He played with the eaglets, still fluffy but already fierce, who accepted him immediately as a strange, featherless nest-sibling. The wind carried fragments of his one-sided conversation down to the anxious watchers:
"...yes, I live in the stone nest below... no, I don't have feathers yet, but maybe someday... maybe when I'm older?... the wind says you fly to the sea sometimes... is it really blue like the sky? ... do fish taste like clouds?..."
When Thomas finally reached the eyrie's level, secured by multiple ropes and trembling with exhaustion, his muscles screaming, he found Aetos sitting calmly between two eaglets while their magnificent parents preened his dark hair with their beaks.
"Time to go home," Thomas managed between desperate gasps for air.
Aetos looked genuinely disappointed, his small face falling. "But Sky-mother was telling me about thermal currents and how to read them! And Sky-father promised to show me the sunrise hunt pattern tomorrow!"
"Another day," Thomas said, trying to project calm while his hands shook as he secured a harness around the boy. "Your human family is worried sick."
The descent took two agonising hours. Aetos, secured safely between Thomas and another climber, chattered the entire way about eagle wisdom and sky secrets. The eagles circled them throughout, calling occasionally—not in threat or warning, but in what sounded remarkably like farewell, like promises to meet again.
Safe on blessed solid ground, surrounded by relieved and exasperated monks, Aetos seemed genuinely puzzled by the fuss and worry.
"They invited me," he explained patiently to Master Zephyrus. "The wind carried their call down to the lesson room. It would have been terribly rude not to visit when invited."
"Aetos," the master said gravely, kneeling with creaking joints to meet the boy's storm-grey eyes, "do you understand that you could have fallen? That without the rescue team, you might have been stuck up there?"
The boy frowned deeply, considering the question with serious concentration. "No," he said finally, with complete certainty. "The wind catches me. Always has, always will. And if I got tired, Sky-mother said I could nap in the nest until I felt better. She has very soft feathers."
That evening, the council met in emergency session. The divide between those who wanted to restrict Aetos further and those who recognised the futility of caging him had never been sharper or more contentious.
"He'll kill himself," Kyrios stated flatly, his voice hard as the cliff face. "Child or not, chosen or not, storm-brought or not, flesh still breaks when it hits stone from height. Physics doesn't care about prophecies."
"And yet," Brother Alexei countered firmly, "it hasn't. How many impossible climbs has he made? How many falls has he walked away from without a scratch? Perhaps... perhaps we need to accept that different rules apply to him."
Master Zephyrus ended the heated debate with a radical proposal. "Tomorrow, I begin his formal training. Not in five years when tradition dictates, but now. If we cannot contain his nature, we must at least guide it properly. He will learn discipline alongside his gift, structure to channel his storm, wisdom to temper his wind."
The vote was unanimous—even Kyrios couldn't argue against providing the boy with tools to survive his own remarkable nature.
That night, as Matthias made his evening rounds, checking on all the children, he found Aetos's bed empty. His heart lurched sickeningly before he noticed the window—open wide to the star-filled sky. There on the broad sill, the boy sat in perfect meditation posture, breathing in rhythm with the mountain wind.
"The eagles gave me a gift," Aetos said without opening his eyes, aware of Matthias's presence. "They showed me how to read the sky's moods and messages. Want to see?"
He exhaled slowly, deliberately, and the night wind swirled obediently, carrying the scents of distant rain two days away, tomorrow's sunshine, and the green smell of spring still months distant.
"That's wonderful," Matthias said gently, guiding the boy back to his bed. "Master Zephyrus will teach you more tomorrow."
"More?" Aetos's eyes flew open, sparkling with excitement. "There's more than what the wind already shows me?"
"So much more, little eagle. So much more than you can imagine."
As the boy settled into sleep, Matthias noticed a perfect eagle feather tangled in his dark hair—a gift from his sky family. He left it there. Tomorrow would bring discipline and training, structure and rules. Tonight, let him dream of soaring on thermal currents with his eagle siblings.