The flight home was, against every expectation the last two days had built up, almost peaceful.
The storm had long since burned itself out, leaving behind clear skies and a calm, steady wind that the Zephyrine caught without complaint, gliding smooth and unhurried over the scattered islands of the Ventus region. It felt wrong, somehow, how easy it was — after the lightning, the bandits, the ruined town, the thing that had looked out of Vidora's borrowed eyes and spoken in a voice too old for her body — that the trip home should be this gentle.
Vidora slept through most of it, tucked into a nest of blankets Desmond had assembled with the quiet, practiced efficiency of a man who'd clearly had to do this before, color slowly returning to her face as the hours passed. She woke twice, briefly, disoriented, and both times Desmond was right there with water and a steady, reassuring voice, and both times she drifted back under before anyone could ask her the question sitting heavy in all their chests.
"Does this happen every year?" Xavier finally asked, quiet, watching Desmond change the cloth on her forehead for the third time.
"No." Desmond didn't look up. "The rite's always the same. The wind's always answered the same, gentle way, every single year I've made this trip. I don't know what that was back there any more than you do." He hesitated, folding the old cloth with more care than the task really required. "I'd appreciate it if none of you spoke of the specific words to anyone outside this ship. Not yet. Not until she's awake to decide what to do with them herself."
"Wasn't planning to," Bruce said, and Xavier nodded, and even Stephan, still uncharacteristically subdued, just gave a small, serious nod of his own.
"For what it's worth," Bruce added, quieter, "thank you. For catching her. For the whole trip, honestly. I don't think any of us expected you to be the steady one when it mattered. No offense. Maybe some offense. I don't know."
Desmond looked briefly, genuinely surprised by that. Praise was something he clearly hadn't been accustomed to. "It's the job," he said, a little stiffly, and went back to smoothing Vidora's blankets, though something in his posture had eased slightly at the words.
Stephan, watching the exchange from his nest of borrowed cushions, raised his bandaged foot experimentally and winced. "Anyone else feel like this trip was supposed to be the easy one?"
"Elrick did specifically call the first one the easy one," Bruce pointed out.
"Right, well, I'd like to formally request whatever the third one is come with slightly less lightning."
"I don't think that's how requests work with Elrick," Xavier said, and for the first time since the shrine, something like a real smile tugged at the corner of his mouth.
The moment of levity didn't last, though it was welcome while it did. Xavier drifted toward the rail as the conversation trailed off, watching the sun sink lower over the scattered islands below, each one small and distant and unremarkable from up here, nothing to suggest that one of them held a town that no longer officially existed and another held a shrine that had just borrowed a woman's voice to warn them about something with wings. He thought about Emory, about the diary, about a demon who knew Roswell's handwriting on sight. He thought about a Duke who'd once given him breakfast and a bed with no questions asked, and wondered, not for the first time, how many more of these quiet, comfortable people in his life were quietly hiding something enormous underneath.
It wasn't a comforting line of thought. He let it go, eventually, mostly because there wasn't anything useful to do with it yet, and turned his attention instead to helping Bruce keep watch over Vidora for the rest of the ride home.
Xavier caught himself turning the words over anyway, quietly, in the privacy of his own skull, where nobody could ask him to promise not to. Wings of envy. Crowned in lightning. A brother's breath. He didn't have names to put to any of it, and some small, wary part of him was almost grateful for that.
He had more than enough unresolved mysteries piling up already.
***
The Warrior School's landing came into view by early evening, and Josh was there waiting, exactly where he'd been left, though considerably more awake than usual — sitting up straight, watching the horizon with the specific tension of a man who'd clearly heard, somehow, that this trip had gone badly.
"You're all in one piece," he said, relief plain in his voice as the gangplank lowered. "Mostly. Word got back that there was lightning involved. I was told to expect a body count."
"Just the one dramatic near-miss," Stephan said, hobbling down the plank with his bandaged foot. "I'm basically fine."
"He is extremely not basically fine," Bruce said, following behind with a hand hovering near Stephan's elbow in case the limp got worse.
Desmond and two of the school's own healers carried Vidora off on a stretcher, still sleeping, still pale, and Elrick arrived at a near-run before they'd even fully disembarked, all his usual theatrical detachment nowhere in evidence.
"What happened?" he said, and it wasn't really a question.
Xavier gave him the short version.
The storm, the bandits, the ruined town, and, after a long moment of hesitation, the prophecy itself, word for word, because it felt wrong to keep it from the one person here who might actually know what to do with it. Elrick's easy, mocking expression didn't so much fade as simply stop existing, replaced by something considerably more serious than Xavier had ever seen on him.
"Wings of envy," Elrick repeated, quiet, mostly to himself. "Crowned in lightning." He was silent for a long moment, staring off toward the darkening sky in the direction they'd come from. "I don't like that. I don't like that at all."
"You know what it means?" Xavier asked.
"No," Elrick admitted, and for once, he didn't try to hide behind a joke about it. "But I intend to find out. Go rest. All three of you look like you've been rained on by something that hates you personally." He was already turning to follow the stretcher toward the infirmary, voice trailing back over his shoulder. "We'll talk about the third task later. This isn't the night for it."
Xavier watched him go, watched the lights of the infirmary flicker on in the distance, and let himself, finally, feel exhausted all the way down to his bones. Whatever else this pilgrimage had been, it hadn't been the easy second task Elrick had promised.