They were still loading the last of the supplies when the storm arrived early.
It came in wrong, somehow. Too fast, too dark, with the wind shifting direction three times in as many minutes, like it couldn't decide which way it wanted to push them. The first fat drops of rain hit the landing just as Desmond was securing the final crate, and he looked up at the sky with the particular expression of a man who had been right about something and taken absolutely no joy in it.
"My lady, I really must insist-"
"We're already loaded. We go." Vidora was already climbing aboard the Zephyrine with the brisk efficiency of someone who had made this exact argument, and lost it in the other direction, more times than she cared to count. "The tradition holds regardless of weather, Desmond. It has held through worse. I will not repeat myself again."
"Has it, though?" Bruce muttered, climbing aboard after Stephan, eyeing the wind-woven sail as it snapped and strained overhead. "Because this looks like exactly the kind of storm that ends traditions."
Xavier was the last one up the gangplank, casting one look back at Josh, who'd retreated his carriage to a covered awning and lifted one hand in an unbothered, entirely unworried wave, as if watching his employer's magical noble transport sail directly into a wall of black cloud was just another Tuesday.
The Zephyrine lurched free of the landing and caught the wind properly, and for one brief, weightless moment, the ride was almost pleasant. Smooth, fast, making the school shrink below them into a toy-sized cluster of towers. Then the storm swallowed them whole, and pleasant stopped being a word that applied to anything.
The temperature dropped hard enough that Xavier's breath fogged in front of him, ice-cold rain replacing the last of the pleasant afternoon air within seconds. Below, the familiar patchwork of the Ventus Plateau vanished entirely behind a churning grey wall, and for one disorienting moment there was no up, no down, just wind and water and the groan of a hull straining to hold its shape.
"This is fine!" Stephan shouted, entirely unconvincingly, gripping the mast with both arms.
"Nobody asked you!" Bruce shouted back, braced low against the deck, one hand locked around a rope, the other pressed flat to steady himself against a sudden, sickening lurch to starboard.
Rain came sideways. The wind-woven sail groaned under strain it clearly wasn't built for, silver thread flaring bright with each gust like the ship itself was wincing. Desmond moved along the deck with a rope in hand, lashing down anything not already secured, shouting instructions that the wind mostly ate before they reached anyone.
"Is this normal?" Stephan shouted, gripping the railing with both hands, delighted despite himself in the exact way that made Xavier's stomach hurt on principle.
"No!" Desmond shouted back. "This is extremely not normal! I would like that on record!"
Lightning split the sky somewhere off the port side, close enough that the boom of thunder arrived almost instantly, and Vidora, standing at the prow with her cane planted firmly against the pitching deck, didn't so much as flinch.
"We're close," she called back, voice cutting cleanly through the wind in a way that suggested this was far from the worst weather she'd sailed through in her long life. "The first shrine sits on Aeris Rook, just ahead. Once we're down, we ride it out on solid ground."
Xavier squinted through the rain and caught his first glimpse of it. In the near distance, he spotted a jagged spur of floating rock, smaller than he'd expected, with a weathered stone shrine just visible at its center and wind-worn statues flanking a set of ancient steps. It looked, from here, almost peaceful. A small, stubborn piece of stillness in the middle of all this chaos.
Another bolt of lightning cracked down, closer this time, close enough that Xavier felt the hair on his arms rise a full second before the flash. It struck open air, harmlessly, well clear of the ship. Then, a heartbeat later, another followed almost the same path, correcting itself mid-strike like something behind it had aimed and adjusted.
"That one wasn't natural," Bruce said, low, eyes narrowing at the sky. "Storms don't usually aim. Storms don't usually miss twice in the exact same spot, either."
Vidora's expression, for the first time since Xavier had met her, flickered into something closer to genuine concern than practiced composure. "Desmond. How much longer?"
"Minutes, my lady! Maybe less! Ideally less, actually!" Desmond was hauling on a line with both hands, rain plastering his immaculate livery flat against his shoulders, ledger long since abandoned somewhere on the deck. "I don't like this any more than you do, but we're committed now! By now, turning back means more time in the air, not less!"
A third bolt cracked down, closer still, close enough that the boom of thunder arrived on top of the flash instead of after it, and the whole ship shuddered with the force of the air displaced around them.
Nobody had time to consider what that meant.
The Zephyrine cleared the last stretch of open air and came in low over Aeris Rook's edge, close enough now that Xavier could make out individual stones on the ancient steps, close enough that landing felt like it might actually, finally, happen. Stephan, always first to move, was already vaulting the railing to drop the last few feet onto solid rock, whooping something about finally being on actual ground again.
The bolt that came down after him didn't miss.
It struck him mid-leap, white and total and blinding, and the last thing Xavier saw before the world went out in a flash of light and noise was Stephan's body going rigid in the air, falling the rest of the way to the shrine's ancient stone steps like something had simply switched him off.
For one endless, ringing second, nobody moved. The rain kept falling. The wind kept howling through the Zephyrine's straining sail. Somewhere behind him, Xavier heard Desmond shout something wordless and horrified, heard Vidora's cane strike the deck once, hard, like even she had needed a moment to process what she'd just watched happen to a boy she'd known for less than an hour.
Xavier didn't remember deciding to move. He was simply over the railing and falling toward the shrine's stone steps before any conscious part of him had finished catching up, ice already gathering reflexively along both forearms, Stephan's smoking, unmoving shape the only thing in the entire storm that mattered anymore. Somewhere above him, he was dimly aware of Bruce shouting his name, of the Zephyrine fighting to hold position against a wind that seemed determined to shove it back out over open air, but none of it fully registered.
There was only the rain, the drop, and the small, still shape waiting for him at the bottom of it.