The first step was wrong because the ground had opinions.
Cold air hit the back of Kade's throat like metal you weren't supposed to swallow. Light came from a direction that did not help. The platform they stood on wasn't flat in a way that counted; it slanted toward a drop that pretended to be sky but felt like a mouth.
[ZONE TRANSFER — UPPER GROUNDS]
Objective: ASCEND SKY REACH
Local Modifiers: Gravity flux (±30%); Falls: vector-dependent; Air currents: navigable
Hazards: Null surfaces (no anchoring), Vector shear (directional cuts), Ambient hypoxia (mild)
The Mist Horse arrived a heartbeat after Kade, vapor sloughing from its ribs, skull tossing once as if to deny a bridle it didn't have. It made a soft sound—wind through teeth it had once owned.
Nor came through with his jaw tight. The brand on his palm—lines of light burned into ruined skin—had stopped smoking, but the air around it twitched like heat above stone.
[CLAIM: Bearer Sigil] — Custodian: NOR
Side-effect TOLL persists: –Grip 10% / –Stamina Regen 15% / Pain spikes on exertion
Euthymia stepped to the platform's lip, then back again with a small, amused breath. "Everything's a slope."
"Slopes tell you what they want," Kade said. "The problem is when they want you off."
He let Instinct run. Pressure-lines mapped themselves through the arches of his feet: this edge would hold, that seam would argue, those bolts sunk into the stone had not shaken loose when the world changed its mind. Sight layered on top of the feeling—faint shimmer in the air where a current moved, particulate glitter like dust that had learned to swim.
The Gate behind them thinned into a tall line of night. On the other side, Vox stood on broken mosaics, one hand slack on his axe, rules wrapped around his ankles like patient dogs. He lifted two fingers, the small, familiar gesture that meant you first. The line of night closed.
"Up," Kade said.
Euthy's eyes tracked a ribbon of moving air that crossed the half-space to another platform. "We walk on wind," she said, more observation than poetry.
Kade uncoiled a length of Duskveil and sent threads toward the nearest ring-bolt—iron pitted by a long life, mounted in a stone knuckle. The threads bit and held—not enthusiastic, but professional. He tested his weight against the angle; the platform accepted him with the kind of resentment that stays quiet.
"Please," he told the Horse.
The Mist Horse stepped where air pretended to be floor. Frost laced out from under its hooves in delicate, transient webbing that melted as soon as the hoof left. The ribbon hardened for an eyeblink longer than it should have. Kade followed. The first step felt like lying. The second felt like the truth deciding to be useful.
[ADVISORY] — Navigable current detected
Temporary stabilization: +2.0 s within 3 m of Bound construct
"Keep it close," Euthy said.
"Planned."
Nor said nothing. He flexed his burned hand once. The motion hurt in a way that meant everything still worked. He took the rear—not because he preferred it, but because that's where things die when the front forgets to look back.
They moved along the ribbon in small, committed steps. Wind tried to have opinions about their ankles. Kade kept his focus narrow: breathe, place, feel the current give before it takes. The ribbon led to a second platform that waited like a trap with extra sky. Metal rings had been set in its corners at some distant point in time. Three of them, unevenly spaced.
Euthy crouched by the nearest ring and brushed a finger over it. Soot-black residue smudged her glove. "These aren't for chains," she said. "They're for lines."
"Whose lines," Kade said.
"Hers," Euthy said, meaning the air. She pointed with her chin toward a faint, angular symbol scratched into the stone by a careful hand: three circles connected by lines, a shape a child could draw and a priest would charge you for. The symbol sat where a foot would land if it trusted the ground.
[STRUCTURE DETECTED — Aeolian Loom (inactive)]
Anchors: 3
State: unbound
Note: requires tension + sequence
Kade let the text sit in the corner of his vision and didn't look straight at it. "How much sequence."
"Enough," Euthy said. "We don't have it yet."
Nor leaned his shoulder against a column whose sense of vertical was negotiable. He watched their flanks without turning his head. The burned hand stayed open and loose at his side, not touching anything. "We find out by moving," he said.
Kade did what he always did when the world offered him a new lever and no instructions: he tried something small and rude. Duskveil threaded through one ring, then the second, then the third—one, two, three—no finesse, just order.
Nothing happened.
He tried a different order. The air twitched. Not much. Enough to be rude back.
"Sequence," Euthy murmured, mind working over heatless coal. "Not just the rings. The pulls. The times."
"Later," Kade said. "When we aren't standing where a map says 'here be physics'."
He tore the threads free with a soft rip that didn't belong to fabric.
The next ribbon started higher, angled up into nothing, then down into a platform shaped like a broken tooth. The path between them undercut their balance a degree more than he liked. The Mist Horse made another ice-step, small as good manners, and the wind behaved for a heartbeat. Kade stepped into the bracket of stillness the Horse gifted him and then he was on tooth-stone, breath pulling a little shorter than before.
[Ambient hypoxia] — Stamina ceiling: –10%
[Note] — Expect headache at exertion
"You look pale," Euthy said, which was either concern or an insult. With her, sometimes both.
"I always do better in bad air," Kade said.
Nor snorted once. It counted as a laugh.
They zigzagged across the upper map, using currents where the world allowed, using stone when it remembered being kind. Twice they had to stop and wait because the air changed its mind about being a path and Kade refused to die for a shortcut. The second pause happened near a pillar that had seen religion at some point; it had carvings of people with wings and no kindness.
"Good place for an ambush," Euthy observed, too casually.
"Everything is," Kade said. He meant it to be dry; it came out true.
The ambush happened anyway.
It didn't come from behind the pillar. It came from above their right shoulders, a slice of air that cut early. Something screamed without throat and the scream ran along Kade's shoulders like metal shavings. A shape with too much wing and not enough body dropped on a vector that made the eye fail.
[ENTITY: SKY HUNTER]
Stance: aerial superiority
Attacks: dive shear, talon hook, gust lash
Counters: anchor control, lateral disrupt, frost-stabilize
Note: pack behavior; avoid straight retreat
"Down," Kade said, and the three of them did what people do when the sky lies to them.
The Hunter overshot, talons sparking where they kissed stone. It pulled bats' wings into itself in a way bats hadn't agreed to and threw itself up on wind that didn't exist. It folded, turned, dove again—this time for the Horse.
"Mine," Kade said, and Duskveil threw a net. Threads missed the body by a clean inch—the Hunter wasn't where he'd thrown them—the world had rotated a fraction so its edge could pass through the hole called miscalculation. Euthy stepped to the wrong side of a crack and made it the right side. Her blade bit a primary wingbone. The Hunter's dive collapsed into a bad, hard fall. It hit stone, rolled in a way that showed it had practiced, and lunched off again with a beating of air Kade didn't like.
"Don't chase it," Nor said, calm as surgery. "Make it come back wrong."
Kade took the advice like a gift. He placed himself half a step left of where he wanted to be, threads idling like a dog that listens. The Horse put a hoof down and breathed; frost made the corner hold long enough for it to count. The Hunter dove. Kade moved nothing—and then everything—lateral. The Hunter committed to an empty line. Duskveil cut its angle with a low, ugly pull. That was enough. Nor's dagger met it at knee height, short arc. Euthy's point punished the joint that didn't look like a joint. Bone cracked in a register they all felt behind the teeth.
The Hunter scrabbled off the edge and didn't find sky where it needed sky. It fell—not away, but past, vector wrong, a line drawn at a weird angle in a child's book. It caught itself a platform down with claws and hate.
"Pack," Euthy reminded.
They didn't need the warning. The second one came in silent from their left, the third from their high right, because this wasn't a duel and fairness had failed to show. The second clipped the Mist Horse's neck; frost exploded and froze some of the wind that shouldn't have been free. The Horse didn't scream. It just shook itself like a bad day, and vapor poured off it thicker. The second fell into that cold and hated it. The third tried to use the distraction to take Kade off the edge. Duskveil said no in an older language.
[Residuum] +3%
[Warning] — Vector shear trending
"Don't get greedy," Kade told himself and everyone. He put his back against a ring-bolted parapet that had enough ruin to lie convincingly and enough stone to be a friend. He didn't like the angle. He liked that he could see both flanks more.
Euthy found a small, hateful step and owned it; she let a Hunter overcommit and taught it why doing that in front of her was expensive. Nor kept the line that wasn't a line guarded—nothing fancy, everything correct. Pain creased the edges of his eyes when he had to push with the burned hand; he didn't make noise about it.
The three Hunters adjusted. Pack intelligence tilted. One tried to drive the Horse. Kade drove it back. The other two split them from each other by degree, using air like an experienced brawler uses a table—shove here, trip there, break your nose when you forget the edge.
Kade's lungs yelled at him in a small, unhelpful way. Hypoxia was a polite thief. It took your coins in exact change and smiled while it did it. He blew out, slow, ignored it.
"Rings," Euthy said suddenly.
"What," Kade said.
"The rings," she said, eyes flicking to the Aeolian Loom anchor set into the corner of the platform. "If you run a line through them in sequence—"
"Later," Nor said, moving three hands' widths without moving his feet.
"No," Euthy said, which meant now. "This place likes rules. The Looms are rules you can touch."
Kade didn't argue that the middle of a fight was a bad time to start a puzzle. He didn't argue because sometimes she was right in a way that saved time. He threw a thread at the first ring, then second, then waited, then third—counting half-breaths, letting Instinct tell him when the air would accept the lie.
The Loom woke like a low note. The air around the triangle stopped wanting to be a bully. It held. For a moment, Kade could stand in a place that didn't slip under him. The nearby ribbon firmed by a whisper.
[Aeolian Loom] — tensioned (partial)
Stability aura: +1.0 s within pattern
Note: sequence incomplete → effect minimal
"Needs all three in the right order," Euthy said.
"I noticed."
She smiled under the scarf with her eyes. "Do better."
Two Hunters made the bad choice of charging together. The Loom's small steadiness made that choice worse. Kade took the one on the left with a shoulder and threads, fed it to the wrong vector. Nor made the other trip over a straight line that wasn't there. Euthy knife-scissored a tendon that pretended not to exist and made it admit it did.
Both Hunters got the message. They retreated to the air like men retreat to rumors. The third circled higher, narrower arcs, looking for the trick that had cost it the advantage and weighing the cost of trying again.
"Think they leave?" Nor said.
"Think they call friends," Kade said.
He looked past them for the first time since the fight started. Past the next platform and the next and the next. Sky Reach didn't look like anything that had a name. It looked like the idea of up expressed in planes and spires, broken in the middle by a wound where wind bled in. Far above, something like an observation ring hung at an angle that would be called wrong by a sober architect and inevitable by a mad one.
"Currents change every span," Euthy said, more to herself than to them. "We can ride them if we mark them."
"Mark how," Nor said.
She tapped the nearest ring with the flat of her blade. The air chimed the way water does when it's about to be ice. "With lines," she said again, patient as knives. "We don't have a tool. We have Duskveil."
"We have the Horse," Kade said.
The Horse breathed out and the ribbon under them firmed by the width of a thought. It looked at Kade with its empty socket and then at the Loom rings like an animal that had seen a trick done once and would do it again until someone said please.
"Later," Kade told it gently. "Not yet."
He stepped to the platform's edge and looked down. Nothing. Not black, not blue, not a color. The sense of fall went sideways and then stopped. His stomach decided it would object later when the bill arrived.
The nearest Hunter drifted closer, curious. It didn't dive. It measured.
"Try not to bleed," Euthy said, tone light.
"I like saving new experiences for special occasions," Kade said.
A thin tremor passed through the air. Not the wingbeat of a Hunter. Something heavier, sharper, slicing from too high and too controlled. The Mist Horse's ears—if it had had them—would have gone flat. Its skull tilted and fixed on a point above and away, pupils it didn't have narrowing on a focus it did.
Kade felt it an instant later: pressure skewing three degrees toward a line that had intent. The kind of intent that doesn't belong to packs.
He didn't tell the others to look. They looked anyway.
A shape detached from bright and came down the wrong way—deciding to fall rather than being pushed. It hit the edge of a sister platform and didn't bounce. It stood like a punctuation mark.
Long legs. Too many directions in the joints. A face like bone that had been sanded down to a statement. No helm. No kindness. Its eyes were holes in cold metal.
[ENTITY: PREDATOR]
Rang: Elite / Speaker
Stance: edge-claim; anti-grapple; aerial tribunal
"Don't talk," Nor said. "Move."
The Predator moved without moving—edging the world toward itself, making the rim belong to its body. The three Hunters gave way in lazy arcs, content to be lesser things.
Euthy's hand found Kade's sleeve, not for comfort, for angle. "Three rings," she said softly, a reminder, an idea, a plan.
The wind changed its mind about being friendly. The platform's wrong slope got worse by degrees so fine you had to be honest to admit you felt them.
Kade exhaled once through his teeth. "We're not ready," he said.
Euthy smiled with her eyes. "We never are."
The Predator tilted its head all the way, face aligning with gravity and finding it irrelevant. When it spoke, the voice was clean and dry, like a blade wiped on linen.
"Falscher Träger," it said, as if greeting an old friend. "Wrong bearer."
The Predator stepped off the far edge and the air made room for it; as it fell toward them on a vector that should not have existed, the three Aeolian rings set in their platform clicked once—ready—like a lock deciding it might open if someone knew the combination.