Stephan wasn't breathing.
Xavier hit the steps hard enough to jar his teeth and was on his knees beside him a heartbeat later, hands hovering, useless, over a chest that wasn't rising, hair still faintly smoking, one boot burned clean through at the sole. For one long, horrible second the entire storm seemed to go quiet around that single fact.
Then Stephan coughed, violently, and sucked in air like a man surfacing from very deep water, and every terrible thought in Xavier's head shattered at once into pure, undignified relief.
"Ow," Stephan said, with real feeling, eyes fluttering open. "Ow. Okay. That's... yeah, that's a new one."
"You absolute idiot." Xavier's voice cracked somewhere in the middle of the sentence, and he didn't bother hiding it. "You jumped early. You jumped early into a lightning storm."
"In my defense, I did not know it was going to do that specifically to me."
"That is not a defense. That is just what happened."
Bruce arrived seconds later, half-sliding down the last stretch of steps, and dropped to Stephan's other side, checking him over with the brisk, practiced hands of someone who'd patched up this exact idiot more times than either of them cared to count. "Nothing's broken. Burns aren't as bad as they look... mostly the boot took it, not the foot." He exhaled, long and shaky, the first crack in his usual composure all day. "You scared the actual hell out of me, you know that?"
"Us. Scared the hell out of us," Xavier added.
"Adds character," Stephan croaked, and tried to sit up, and immediately thought better of it.
"Lie back down, you dimwit!" Xavier said, pressing a hand flat against his chest, more forcefully than he meant it to come out. "You got struck by actual lightning. Actual, real lightning. You don't get to 'adds character' your way out of that one."
"I mean, I kind of am, though. Look at me. Still talking. Still charming." Stephan managed a weak grin that didn't quite reach his eyes, the adrenaline crash clearly starting to catch up with him. "Did it look cool, at least? Tell me it looked cool."
"It looked like you died," Bruce said flatly. "For about four full seconds, it looked exactly like you died."
Stephan's grin faltered slightly at that, some of the bravado slipping. "...Right. Sorry. That's... yeah, that's fair. I'll aim for landing more carefully next time an insane storm is trying to kill me specifically."
"Please do," Xavier said, quieter now, some of the anger draining out of his voice and leaving something rawer behind it. He didn't let go of Stephan's shoulder for a while after that, not until his own hands stopped shaking.
By the time the Zephyrine settled properly onto the shrine's small landing and Vidora and Desmond made their way down, the worst of the storm had already begun to ease, rain softening to a drizzle, the wind losing its earlier, furious edge. It was as if whatever had been driving it had gotten what it wanted and moved on. Vidora took one long look at Stephan, propped between his friends and very obviously alive, and something in her rigid posture loosened by a fraction Xavier hadn't seen before.
"He'll live," she said, more statement than question, and did not offer to heal him, which told Xavier something about her he filed away without comment.
"Rest first," Bruce said firmly, ripping a strip from his own cloak to bind the worst of the burn. "The shrine isn't going anywhere."
***
They gave Stephan an hour, propped against a dry stretch of stone under the shrine's outer archway, before he insisted, loudly and repeatedly, that he was fine enough to watch. Nobody quite believed him. Nobody stopped him either.
The Wind Shrine of Aeris Rook was smaller up close than it had looked from the air. It was a ring of weathered stone pillars open to the sky, with carved wind-figures worn nearly featureless by centuries of exactly this kind of weather, and a shallow basin at the center that had clearly held water, or something like it, long before it had gone dry and cracked. Vidora approached it alone, cane tapping a slow, deliberate rhythm against the stone, and knelt before the basin with a stiffness that had nothing to do with age.
She spoke words Xavier didn't recognize — old, rhythmic, worn smooth the way the carvings were, like they'd been spoken by this exact family in this exact spot more times than anyone could count — and poured a small measure of clear water from a flask Desmond produced into the cracked basin. Her posture changed while she spoke, Xavier noticed, the brisk, businesslike stiffness melting into something closer to genuine reverence, shoulders lowering, chin dipping just slightly, like whatever authority she carried everywhere else in her life quietly stepped aside for this one specific ritual.
"How long has your family done this?" Xavier asked Desmond, low, while they waited.
"Longer than anyone's bothered writing down properly. Generations, certainly. Possibly since before the family held any real political power at all. Some of the older records suggest the pilgrimage came first, and the authority followed because of it, rather than the other way around." Desmond kept his eyes on Vidora as he spoke, voice hushed with something like genuine respect. "Whatever you believe about the Wind Spirit, the wind out here does answer her. I've seen it every year I've made this trip. That part, at least, has never once been in question."
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then the wind, still restless from the storm, gathered itself into something almost gentle, curling once around the shrine's pillars in a slow, deliberate circle, stirring Vidora's silver hair loose from its knot before settling again into stillness.
"Thank you," Vidora said quietly, to the empty air, and rose, brushing dust from her knees with the same brisk efficiency she brought to everything else. "That's the first. Two more to go."
Desmond, already flipping open his ledger despite everything it had been through, made a small, satisfied checkmark. "Right on schedule, my lady."
"Don't jinx it," Bruce muttered, glancing at Stephan, who gave an unrepentant thumbs-up from his spot against the archway.
Xavier lingered a moment longer at the basin after the others started packing up, studying the worn wind-figures carved into the surrounding pillars. They were stylized, swirling shapes that might have been meant as faces, or wings, or just abstract representations of something that didn't have a shape to begin with. He couldn't have said why the sight settled something in his chest. Maybe it was just relief that Stephan was alive to complain about his own bandages. Maybe it was something else, some quiet recognition of belonging to a world old enough to have traditions like this one, worn down to smoothness by centuries of people just like Vidora kneeling in just this spot. Either way, he found he didn't mind the moment of stillness before the next crisis inevitably found them.