The wind settled on the peak as if a hand had pressed it flat.
Tadewi tipped her chin toward the clouds. "Call your pack," she said, all elder and edge. "Bring them up."
I turned toward the lower sprawl of floating stone, cupped my hands, and sent a flare of white fire into the air—a muted blossom that wouldn't set anything alight, just a signal.
They came quick.
Muir crested the rise first, blue scales skimming mist as he landed; a breath later Revik climbed down Muirs leg with the girl cradled against his chest, a blanket wrapped snug around her shoulders. Her hair—the thick ink-black of the sky-tribes—was neatly braided, the end tied with a strip of Revik's sash. Muir shifted, boots crunching dirt. The girl saw me and tightened her grip on Revik's collar, small fingers white-knuckled. He murmured something soft and set her down gently at my side.
"Easy," I whispered, crouching. "It's me."
She pressed close to my hip, silent. The burn at the base of my skull—the echo of the voices—had faded to a bruise, but my ribs still hummed where Tadewi's palm had found them. I stayed between the girl and everything else anyway.
Tadewi watched us like a judge watching dust settle after a duel. "So," she said. "The Primal Dragon, the Lightning Prince, and the Water Prince walk into my sky as if it were a road." Her eyes cut to the child. "And a wind-daughter who should never have left."
Revik's jaw tightened. "We brought her home."
"Did you?" Tadewi's gaze flicked to the girl's mouth, then back to me. "Home means safety."
The girl's throat worked. No sound. The reminder prickled beneath my skin.
"This wind-child can't speak! What did you do?" Tadewi spat, disgust sharpening her voice.
"We did nothing!" I shot back. "The bastard who had a part in it rots in the ground."
"And the others?" she asked.
"Soon to join him."
Tadewi's expression darkened. "Good. When the time comes, I will join you." Her tone left no room for argument. "That is not a request."
She turned to the young girl then, her voice softening like a breeze shifting directions. "Fret not, little wind. You may not speak, but you will still have a voice."
Figures ghosted out of the higher mist—Air Nation sentries in layered slate-gray and pale saffron, cloaks feathered at the hem. They didn't so much walk as arrive, the way wind arrives: already there by the time you notice. Long spears in hand, bows at their backs, faces unreadable. No one nocked an arrow, but the air carried a weight.
One—taller, eyes lined in white kohl—stepped forward and bowed fist to palm. "Elder. The Skyguard waits above. The council convened at your call."
"They will wait longer," Tadewi said. "We move through Still Winds first."
Her eyes returned to me. "With me, young one."
I stood. Raiden shifted half a step closer on instinct; I brushed his forearm with my fingers—enough. He held my gaze, then nodded once and fell in beside Revik and Muir. The girl kept my cloak in her fist. I wrapped the edge around her shoulders and followed Tadewi across the crest.
The path revealed itself the way breath reveals cold: step by step, silver-edged and faint. We crossed an arch of stone suspended over nothing, waterfalls unraveling into mist on either side like loosened silk. The air here was… different. Clean without being empty, full without being heavy. It vibrated. Hummed. When my boots touched the bridge, the hum climbed my bones and settled in my sternum.
"Do you feel it?" Tadewi asked without turning.
"Yes."
She nodded, satisfied. "The Temple of Still Winds does not exist to be found," she said. "It exists to ask whether the one seeking it belongs."
Muir's whisper found my shoulder. "Do you always speak in riddles?"
Raiden made a sound suspiciously close to a laugh. It died as the bridge widened into a ledge and the temple finally… appeared.
It wasn't carved. It wasn't built. It looked grown out of air and patience. White stone cupped the mountain's crown like an open hand—four petaled arcs around a circular floor of pale slate veined with luminous blue. Threads of wind chased each other over the tiles, visible as soft distortions—ripples that were not water, light that was not light. At the center, a ring of standing stones leaned inward, each etched with spirals that made my eyes want to trace and never finish.
At the threshold, Tadewi raised a palm. The sentries stopped. Only we crossed.
The little one tugged my cloak and pointed. Her sleeve slipped, revealing a chain of tiny tattoos along the inside of her wrist—three dots, a spiral, a swoop like a bird's wing. Faded under grime.
"Tribal sigils," Revik murmured. "That's how we knew she was from the Air Tribes."
"Cloud-Ridge," Tadewi replied quietly.
Her gaze warmed a fraction. "You have sharp eyes, fire child." She faced the girl and—softer than she'd been with any of us—spoke in the sky-tongue, pure breath and shape. The child's eyes filled. She nodded and rested her cheek against my hip.
"She still understands," Tadewi told me. "She feels safer with you. That will cost you and bless you both."
"Whatever the cost," I said. "I can afford it."
Something like approval brushed Tadewi's mouth. "Stand there," she said, pointing to the center ring. To Raiden and Revik: "Remain at the boundary. Interfere, and the temple will decide you are storms to be routed rather than guests. Only the worthy pass."
Raiden's jaw worked. He took position at the ring's edge anyway, eyes never leaving my face.
I turned and brushed a quick kiss across his lips, then set my palm to his cheek. "I'll be fine." I looked to the girl, lifted her hand, and placed it in Raiden's. "Sparky here will keep you safe. I promise."
A small smile ghosted her mouth. She let go and stepped into line beside him.
I stepped into the center circle alone.
The hum sharpened into a tone I felt behind my ears. Wind lifted strands of my hair and threaded them with cool fingers. The blue veins beneath the stone brightened, and a breath—no one's breath, everyone's—moved through the standing stones like a single, enormous lung filling.
"This place measures truth," Tadewi said, her voice carrying without effort. "Not your past—that you can survive. Not your pain—that you already have. It measures the balance between power and will. It asks whether the wind can trust you with what it knows."
"The wind knows things?" Muir muttered.
"The wind knows everything people say when they think no one listens," Tadewi said dryly. "And it remembers where the gods hid their mistakes."
My pulse kicked.
Spirals along her forearms glowed as she raised both hands, and the air in the circle stilled into something almost material—thin as silk laid on water. "Breathe," she told me. "And do not try to be strong. The wind despises performance."
So I breathed.
The first pull tasted like pine and glass. The second like rain before it falls. On the third, the temple moved through me as if I were a doorway left ajar. It slipped past my teeth and into my chest, touched the heat there, and—carefully, curiously—unfolded it.
I didn't erupt. I didn't glow. I didn't shatter.
I remembered.
A flash of white hair in a cracked mirror. Chains like cold bracelets. A little girl's hand leaving mine. A fire I didn't call answering anyway. Raiden's voice calling me light, and me wanting to argue and wanting to believe.
The wind studied all of it and then went softer, like a palm against a fevered brow.
When I opened my eyes, Tadewi stood within arm's reach, close enough to see the hairline scars at the corner of her mouth. "You are what I named you," she said quietly. "Primal."
"What does that actually mean?" I asked. "Because so far it's gotten me thrown off cliffs and into fights with creatures, gods, and the dead."
"It means you are older than the crowns that fight over you, and younger than the oath that made you," Tadewi said. "It means the gods tried to control what couldn't be controlled , and the world hid the pieces of that control from them."
"The relics," Raiden said.
"Locks," Tadewi corrected. "Not weapons." Her gaze returned to me. "And the Water Lock sleeps where no water claims it because, centuries ago, an Air-dragon and a Water-dragon—bonded mates—hid both their kingdoms' relics where no king would think to look. Away from courts. For balance. For peace. They died for it."
Revik's voice was very calm. "Then you know where it is."
"I know what the wind will allow," Tadewi said—which was not an answer and somehow was.
Movement pricked the air behind us—the threshold sentries stiffening. The Skyguard had filled the upper terraces: rows of cloaks and helms, pikes like a winter field. The girl flinched and tucked closer to Raiden's side; her fingers found the hem of his sleeve and stayed.
Tadewi lifted two fingers. The air across the threshold thickened to a glassy veil. Sentries waited and did not cross.
"You will walk the temple," Tadewi said. "If you are meant to see what you seek, the wind will show you the door only the breathless can open."
"What does that even mean?" Muir asked.
"It means you must let go of control long enough to be carried," she said. Then, almost kind, to me: "You've been carried enough times by violence. Let this be different."
We moved as a knot—Tadewi and I a half step ahead, Raiden and Revik on the ring, Muir circling like a restless tide. As we neared a narrow seam of shadow behind one of the stones, the hum turned into a note I would have sworn was sung by a throat—even though it wasn't. The air lifted the hair at my nape and pushed, suggesting rather than shoving.
The seam widened.
Not a door—an absence. A place where the world had chosen to be thinner.
The first breath beyond it tasted like deep water and cold stone.
"Still Winds is not the only temple grown into this mountain," Tadewi said. "It is only the one that asks first."
"Ask what?" Raiden said.
"If the one knocking intends to take or to carry," she answered. "We are not enemies, Lightning Prince. We are custodians of an old mistake."
"What mistake?" I asked.
"That," she said, "is for the gods to explain."
The chamber beyond was smaller than I expected and infinitely older. No carvings. No paint. Just a slick oval of rock worn smooth by centuries of air and—gods—water. The floor sloped to a shallow basin, dry now, ringed by tiny grooves guiding flow to four channels at the cardinal points.
Tadewi placed her palm on the basin's lip. The grooves flashed once, then dimmed. "When the lock was sealed, those mated dragons poured their magic into it," she said. "Only mated magic turns the key."
"It's old magic," she added—half to herself. "Magic we haven't seen for centuries."
I spotted a second seam—higher, narrower—hidden in the curve of the ceiling like a breath caught and held.
Tadewi watched me for a long heartbeat. "You can fetch the lock," she said. "But you cannot hold it without waking what sleeps inside. And I cannot promise it will open."
"What's inside?"
"Memory," she said. "The wind will ask a price."
"Name it."
Her eyes softened in a way that made me wish I hadn't said that so quickly. "You will have to breathe with the mountain," she said. "Not as the Primal. Not as the orphan. As Lyra."
The name startled me more than any threat. "How did you—"
"The winds tell those willing to listen."
Behind us, metal rang softly—the Skyguard stirring, unsettled. Raiden edged closer to the boundary. "How long?"
"As long as it takes," Tadewi said.
I went to the basin and knelt. The slate was cool beneath my palms, the faint blue veins pulsing slow—heartbeats I could match if I stopped trying to lead them.
I exhaled. I inhaled.
The first few breaths were mine, clumsy in the way of someone counting so she doesn't have to feel. Then the temple caught the rhythm and lent me an easier one. Edges softened. Old grooves sighed. Somewhere beyond the seam, wind licked stone and chose a direction.
A thin stream of air slid over my fingers—cool, then cooler. The basin fogged. Frost spidered in delicate lines and withdrew, leaving a dark wet sheen, as if the mountain had burst into gooseflesh.
Water beaded from nothing. One drop. Another. A slow gathering kiss of condensation that would have taken hours if it were natural.
Not a flood. A beginning.
A horn sounded from the terraces: low, warning.
"Hold," Tadewi told me.
"I'm holding."
Another horn. Closer. Footsteps. Raiden's energy rose like a tide against a seawall and held. "Something's happening," he warned, tight.
The water in the basin thickened to a shallow mirror. Not clear—deep as ink. It reflected something that was not the ceiling.
A mountain. Not this one. A blade of stone rimed with white where no snow should live, suspended over a sea of cloud as familiar as a scar. Etched along its spine: four sigils that were not Air.
Wind moved across that image and spoke without words:
What you seek lies here.
The mirror rippled. A second image answered: a narrow canyon lit blue from within, water braided into ropes that sang. I didn't know the place.
"Lyra," Raiden said, voice tight.
Tadewi looked down at me. "You have your answer."
"Two, actually," I said, heart racing. "The lock's here—but it threads to a second place." I glanced around. "Anyone recognize it?"
Revik swallowed. "I do," he said. "I wish I didn't."
"Later," Tadewi said, the word snapping like a banner. "You will leave by the high path. The Skyguard will escort and bristle—that is their way. You will not draw steel. These grounds are sacred; blood must not be shed."
"Fair," Muir said.
I rose. The basin stilled. The image thinned to ordinary water, then to a sheen that felt like a sword put back in its shieth.
At the threshold, Tadewi halted me with a palm. Her voice was only for me. "The next time the old voice tries to steer your bones," she said, "do not scream at it."
"Then what?"
"Command it," she said, a small, fierce smile cutting clean. "Make it learn your timing."
"That works?"
"It works on gods." A beat. "And on men." She actually winked.
We crossed into the open light. The Skyguard parted around Tadewi the way wind parts around a cliff-face: resentfully, obediently. Eyes slid over Raiden's hand, where lightning still threaded his knuckles. Over Revik's posture, water-quiet and unyielding. Over Muir—harmless until he isn't. Over me, and the girl pressed against my side, tattoos on her wrist saying she belonged to these heights even if her voice never returned.
We walked the high path with pikes for a guard and a legend at our back.
At the lip of the last terrace, Tadewi stopped. "You will return," she said. Not a question.
"Yes."
"The world needs the Primal Dragon now more than ever."
She crouched to the girl's height, and for the first time since we met her her voice gentled into something like a lullaby. "Little wind," she said, "you are not broken. You are weather. Come home."
The child's eyes shone. She touched brow, heart, then Tadewi's hand—an old Air-folk gesture. Gratitude. Promise.
"CHIEF! CHIEF! THERE'S BEEN A BREACH ON THE SOUTHERN BORDER!"
Tadewi didn't flinch. "What kind of breach?"
"We don't know—" the scout panted. "It's… it's like a sea of shadows."
"It followed us," Raiden said, worry underscoring the words.
Tadewi fisted the front of his shirt and pulled him down to meet her gaze. "What evil did you bring to my nation?"
"We didn't plan this. We're not even sure what it is," he said. "We only know it consumes everything in its path—and the dead walk with it."
Tadewi's eyes widened, then narrowed to knives. She breathed one name like a curse the wind refused to carry away.
"Mortimer."