The third island was smaller than the other two, barely more than a jagged spur of rock with the shrine taking up most of its usable ground, and after the ruined town, its emptiness felt almost like a relief. No bandits. No ash. Just wind, and stone, and a shrine that looked, if anything, older than the first two combined. Its carvings were worn down to little more than suggestion, its basin cracked clean through and mended, at some point in its long history, with a vein of what looked unmistakably like solid silver.
Desmond consulted his ledger one final time as they disembarked, voice carrying a note of relief that hadn't been there at the last two stops. "This one's always been the quickest of the three, historically. Quietest, too. If we're lucky, we're back in the air within the hour and home by nightfall." He said it like a man trying to convince himself as much as anyone else, and Xavier, watching the strange, mended silver vein catch the light, found he didn't share the optimism.
Bruce crouched by the basin's edge, tracing the silver repair with careful fingers. "This shouldn't still be here. Silver tarnishes. This looks freshly poured." He glanced up, frowning. "Someone's been maintaining this shrine a lot more recently than 'ancient family tradition' usually implies."
"The Wind Spirit provides for its own," Desmond said, a little too quickly, in the tone of someone reciting an answer he'd been given rather than one he actually believed. He closed his ledger with more force than necessary and didn't meet anyone's eyes for a moment afterward, which told Xavier plenty about how thin that particular explanation actually was.
"Last one," Vidora said, and if Xavier hadn't spent the last several hours watching her carefully, he might have missed how tired that single sentence sounded.
"You've been quiet since the second island," Xavier said, unable to help himself, following a step behind her toward the shrine.
"I've made this same trip more years than you've been alive, boy. Some years are quieter than others." Vidora didn't slow her pace, cane finding sure purchase on the uneven stone despite her age. "This year has simply had more to be quiet about than most."
"You don't have to explain the second island to us. But if something's wrong..."
"Then it will still be wrong after this last rite, and we can discuss it properly on the way home." She stopped at the basin's edge, finally, and glanced back at him with an expression that was almost, briefly, kind. "You've done more for a stranger's family in a short time than most escorts manage in a lifetime of service. Let an old woman finish her tradition before you start worrying about her."
She knelt before the basin the same as always. Spoke the same old words, unhurried, worn smooth by generations of exactly this. Poured the same measure of water.
However, this time, the wind didn't just stir.
It rose all at once, a sudden, violent gust that swept every loose stone and scrap of debris off the little island's surface, howling around the shrine's pillars with a pitch that didn't sound like weather at all. Vidora's whole body went rigid, spine snapping straight, cane clattering from her fingers onto the stone.
"My lady!" Desmond moved before he'd finished the words, and Bruce caught his arm hard, holding him back.
"Wait," Bruce said, low and urgent. "Something's happening. Don't touch her."
Vidora's eyes had gone entirely white, no iris, no pupil, just a flat, luminous glow that made Xavier's stomach drop straight through the floor of the world. When she spoke, it wasn't her voice. Not entirely. Something else moved underneath it, layered and vast and far, far older than the small, sharp woman it was borrowing.
"He comes on wings of envy,
crowned not in gold, but lightning.
A brother's breath shall be taken.
The balance will shatter.
All will fall."
The wind cut out entirely, all at once, like a held breath finally released, and Vidora crumpled where she stood, folding to the stone before anyone could reach her in time. Desmond caught most of the fall, dropping to his knees with her weight in his arms, her silver hair fanned out across the ancient carvings, breathing shallow but steady.
Nobody said anything for a long moment. Nobody seemed to know how to start.
Xavier stood frozen halfway between the shrine and the shore, ice he hadn't realized he'd summoned melting uselessly along one forearm, the words still echoing in his skull with a weight that had nothing to do with volume. He didn't try to guess who "he" was. He didn't try to guess what any of it meant. He just stood there, watching Desmond cradle an unconscious woman against a cracked stone basin, and felt, for the first time since waking up in this world, genuinely and completely out of his depth.
"Is she breathing?" Bruce finally asked, voice tight.
"She's breathing." Desmond's own voice wasn't steady at all. "She's breathing, she's just... I don't know. I don't know what that was. I've served her four years, and I have never, not once, seen anything like that happen."
Stephan crouched beside them, unusually gentle, checking Vidora's pulse at the wrist with two fingers the way Bruce had checked his own not so long ago. "Her heartbeat's normal. Fast, but normal. Whatever that was, I don't think it hurt her. Not... not physically, anyway."
"How would you even know what her pulse is supposed to feel like?" Bruce asked, distracted, mostly just needing something ordinary to focus on.
"I don't, really. But it feels like a normal fast heartbeat and not, like, a dying one. I'm going with that."
Nobody argued with the logic, mostly because nobody had anything better to offer in its place.
Stephan, uncharacteristically, had nothing to say either. He just limped over and helped Bruce lift Vidora as gently as they could manage, and the four of them made their way back to the Zephyrine in a silence that felt entirely different from the one on the second island.
Less grief, and more a kind of shared, unspoken dread that none of them had the words to describe.