Chapter 13
Chapter
Thirteen
The Air Parapet path was narrow, no wider than a dozen paces, flanked by jagged stone meant to keep the wind from claiming the unwary.
The wind pressed against the path, never ceasing.
It was constantly testing. Thaelyn kept her eyes on her boots.
Mist threaded her cloak and stung her cheeks.
Somewhere below the cloudline, a dragon’s shadow slid across the fog.
“This place is cursed,” Rowan muttered under his breath, boots scuffing against the slick stone as he walked just behind Thaelyn. “Or haunted. Or both.”
“It’s not cursed,” Brynnek said, eyes scanning the towers ahead. “It’s history. We walk where the old bloodlines did. Where the first Skyborne fell.”
Darian grumbled, adjusting the clasps on his cloak. The wind caught the edges and flared them behind him. “Still cursed.”
Thaelyn didn’t answer. The path ended in the black tower of the Aerothar Spire, its stone veined with pale silver that shimmered when lightning brushed the horizon. No roof, no railings, just the wind’s raw power.
They climbed the spiral stair that wound along the tower’s edge. The storm thickened. Every step sent water slicking across the stone. By the time Thaelyn reached the top, her fingers were numb, her breath sharp and thin.
The trial platform stretched before them, flat, circular, and suspended over the chasm. Sigils glowed faintly across its surface, remnants of enchantments older than the kingdom itself. The sigils were flickering in and out of sight; their magic seemed unstable.
Professor Syra Velnari stood at the center, her cloak unmoving though the wind howled around her.
Her voice carried effortlessly. “Air remembers those who seek to master it,” she said.
She turned, her scar catching the light like a blade.
“The wind chooses none who cling too tightly. To be lifted, you must let go.”
One by one, cadets stepped forward. Some bowed their heads, others raised their arms to the sky.
The wind answered none of them. One boy was thrown backward so hard that he struck the stone edge.
Then came Iri Vale. Thaelyn’s stomach knotted as her friend stepped into the circle, braid unraveling in the gale.
She stood still, hands open. The wind moved once, gently, like a curious animal, then drifted away.
“It hesitated,” Darian murmured.
Then, “Thaelyn Marren.” Her name cut through the storm like a blade.
Thaelyn stepped forward, boots scraping stone slick with rain.
The sound echoed through the ring of cadets, sharp and lonely.
Every failure, the silence of the Water Trial, the stillness of the Stonegrounds, and the rejection of the flame pressed like stones against her ribs.
This was her last chance. Her last breath to prove she belonged here.
You can do this.
The lie didn’t convince her. The wind pressed against her, wild and cold, tugging at her cloak as if testing her balance.
It whispered through her hair, curious, circling, alive.
She could almost hear laughter in it, the kind she remembered from her father’s forge, when sparks leapt too high, reckless and bright.
Thaelyn closed her eyes. Please. Just once, choose me. Nothing moved. The air tasted of iron. The silence stung.
Maybe they were right. Perhaps she wasn’t meant to stand among dragon-bound prodigies and noble bloodlines.
Maybe she was only the blacksmith’s daughter who’d wandered too far, too foolishly, into a world not built for her hands.
Her pulse thudded. The memory of every whispered dismissal clawed through her mind. Unmanifested. Unchosen. Unworthy.
She drew in a breath that hurt. Then I’ll make you see me.
Thaelyn spread her palms wide and let go.
The wind struck her chest like a heartbeat.
Once. Twice. Then the world fell away. Gasps rippled through the circle.
Her feet left the ground, her braid whipped loose, cloak snapping open like wings.
The current lifted her higher, weightless, soundless.
For an instant, the storm became her, every gust her pulse, every breath her power.
She felt alive. Free. As though the sky itself had remembered her name.
Then something shifted. The air thickened. The taste of it changed, metallic, sharp, wrong. The runes beneath her dimmed, from gold to rust, then to red. A hum vibrated through her bones, low and hungry.
What are you? she thought.
The wind didn’t answer. It growled. The updraft faltered, twisting around her in a violent vortex.
Cold became heat. Awe became dread. Her stomach dropped as the current convulsed, tossing her like a leaf in a hurricane.
Lightning flared across the spire, and for a heartbeat, she saw shapes moving inside the storm, shadows that shouldn’t have formed.
Pain lanced through her ribs. The air squeezed, constricting.
She couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t move. The pressure built until her vision blurred white.
It’s rejecting me.
No. It wasn’t rejection. It was recognition. Something inside the wind knew her. It wanted her still.
The wind screamed. Thaelyn hung in its grasp, caught between sky and stone, as the runes beneath her feet flared to life.
Light surged around her boots, not gold this time but an angry, seething red.
The air that had felt soft moments ago now clawed at her skin, spinning faster, pressing against her ribs until her breath came in ragged gasps.
Professor Velnari’s voice cut through the gale like a whip. “Thaelyn! You have to release it!”
Release it. The words made no sense. Her fingers trembled, palms open to the storm. She didn’t know what she was holding, only that it wanted out, that it wanted her.
“How?” she shouted back, the wind swallowing her voice. “I don’t—”
“Breathe!” Velnari barked. “Not against it, with it! The air mirrors your rhythm, slow it down!”
Thaelyn tried. Gods, she tried. She dragged in a breath that tasted of metal and rain, forcing her chest to rise and fall against the crushing current.
For a heartbeat, the wind gentled, following her inhale like a tide pulling back.
Then it roared forward again, doubled in force.
Pain lanced down her spine. Sparks of crimson light scattered from her fingertips.
She could feel her heartbeat in her skull.
“Focus!” Velnari’s shout came again, closer now, voice cracking with strain. “Do not fight the current, guide it out through your breath!”
“I can’t!” Thaelyn’s voice broke, the words dissolved into the storm.
Her boots lifted from the ground again. Air wrapped around her arms, tight bands of pressure that burned and numbed all at once. The world spun. The storm was no longer outside her; it was in her. She could feel every direction of the wind at once: spinning, collapsing, pulling.
“Anchor your feet!” Velnari commanded. “Visualize the weight of the stone, give the wind somewhere to go!”
Stone. Ground. Anything solid. Thaelyn reached for the image, the blacksmith’s forge, the weight of the hammer to the metal, the solid ring of steel on the anvil. For a heartbeat, she thought it worked. Her boots touched stone again.
Then the power recoiled.
The light beneath her pulsed darker, veins of red turning black. A violent updraft slammed into her chest and sent her sprawling backward, arms flailing as she was lifted higher than before.
“Thaelyn!” The instructor’s shout cracked with something she’d never heard from Velnari before, fear.
“I can’t hold it!” Thaelyn cried.
“You must! Find your center and let it go!”
“How?”
“Through the breath, through your heart! You are not its vessel, only its passage!”
But the storm didn’t want a passage. It wanted a home.
The pressure inside Thaelyn’s chest exploded. She couldn’t breathe. Her eyes watered, her veins seared with heat. The runes below the platform dimmed and then flared again, feeding the vortex that spun tighter around her.
The air changed. It was no longer the bright, wild freedom she’d felt moments ago. It was cold. Metallic. Alive.
Thaelyn’s mind splintered into panic. She tried again to exhale, to push the wind away as Velnari had said, but each breath only drew more in. Her lungs filled with fire and frost all at once.
“Professor!” one of the cadets yelled. “She’s, she’s burning!”
Velnari raised her arms, summoning her own gale, shouting an incantation lost beneath the roar. Wind clashed with wind, the air crackling in violent resistance.
Thaelyn screamed. The sound vanished into the cyclone. The world tilted. The clouds themselves seemed to twist around her, shadows moving within them, human in shape but larger, darker, and hollow. And beneath their whisper came something worse, a voice, old and dry, coiling through her mind.
“Do not release me. I’ve waited too long.”
Thaelyn’s body convulsed. Her vision fractured in streaks of red light.
Velnari’s magic slammed into her, cutting through the connection with a deafening crack. The force sent Thaelyn hurtling backward; she hit the stone hard, the breath ripped from her lungs, and everything went still.
Silence.
Rain pattered softly across the platform. The red glow faded to ash.
Thaelyn lay on her side, coughing, the air raw in her throat. Around her, cadets edged backward, eyes wide, whispering prayers.
Professor Velnari knelt beside her, jaw set, one hand trembling as she hovered it over the burned runes. “The wind obeys instinct,” she murmured. “But that wasn’t instinct. That was corruption, pure evil.”
Before Thaelyn could ask, the sound of horns split the sky, long, rolling notes that vibrated through the mountain.
Commander Dareth appeared at the spire entrance, cloak snapping in the gale. “Professor Velar! Dark winds are along the southern border, the patrol’s been hit!”
Velnari’s face hardened. “So that’s what it was reaching for.”