Kiran's boots bit into gravel as the canyon's breath pushed at his ribs.
Wind did not simply blow here; it came with a taste of iron and old chorded sound that scraped teeth.
Elias set a meter into Kiran's palm and did not look away.
"Read it," Elias said.
His voice was a map: precise, unflinching.
Kiran swallowed.
The flow meter's needles quivered like two small hearts.
He held the device level and let the canyon's pressure find him.
The needle jumped, dipped, then steadied at a pale resonance.
"Lower," Elias ordered.
"Slow your count. Hear the baseline."
Kiran counted in his head, teeth together.
The wind's undertone hummed at bone frequency.
Small stones skittered like scattered teeth.
The meter's crystal threw a faint blue vein across its face.
He blinked to clear grit and the image of the amulet at his chest flashed while his fingers tightened.
"Good," Elias said after a beat.
"Now align the secondary needle with the node."
Kiran moved his thumb.
The needle lurched.
The canyon seemed to inhale through its cliffs.
A thin metallic taste filled his mouth.
He kept his jaw locked and his breath measured like an instrument.
"Don't let the wind set you," Elias warned.
"It learns to mimic control."
A gust skittered across the lip.
The meter read a micro-scar on the current—a tiny irregularity the instruments liked to hide.
Kiran felt his skin prickle.
Elias tapped the meter and smiled without humor.
"That scar's old," Elias said.
"It opened during winter storms. It used to sing back."
"Sing back?" Kiran echoed, clumsy with curiosity.
The canyon's sound wrapped around each syllable.
Elias pointed at the far wall.
"We catalog echoes as scars. They are where the air was torn and knit wrong. Walk close, listen; the scar will cough up memory."
Kiran stepped nearer to the cliff, the meter held out like an offering.
The needle ticked against a faint throb.
A small wind-thread braided over the canyon and brushed the device.
The meter's crystal flickered.
"Report," Elias said.
"Negative. Baseline still stable," Kiran answered.
He kept his voice even.
He did not mention the notch in the amulet pressing into his palm; he did not need to.
"Watch the filaments," Elias said.
He unrolled a coil of wire and looped it through a notch on the meter.
"If a scar yawns, it will pull the wire."
The wire trembled under Kiran's fingers, an animal waiting for permission.
He had no map to read these patterns yet, only a leaning toward shapes his parents might have trusted.
The canyon's sound made the world feel thin.
A small rock fell from the cliff and pinged against the meter.
Kiran jerked; the needle skipped.
Elias's mouth tightened.
"Focus," Elias said.
"One misread and the instrument tells lies."
Kiran steadied his grip and watched the meter.
The dominant sound was wind and the secondary was the meter's tiny internal song.
Both overlapped into a half-tone that made his teeth ache.
A bird's cry swept across the rim and vanished.
The wind shifted as if someone had turned a great fan in the air.
The meter's needle twitched toward the scar.
Kiran's thumb moved to hold it.
The wire trembled; the filaments on the canyon wall shimmered like heat.
"Take a sample at that node," Elias instructed.
"We need a reading before the afternoon drift."
Kiran moved closer, boots finding uncertain purchase on loose scree.
He crouched and planted the meter near the wall.
The needle arced and paused like a held breath.
A faint silver fog crawled along the lip below them, quiet and deliberate.
He counted the seconds as Elias had taught him—one, two—let the meter settle.
The canyon's tone deepened.
A pressure began at Kiran's temples.
"Good," Elias said.
"Now note the phase variance."
Kiran leaned his ear to the wall and the canyon answered with something like a memory of a song.
He tried to file the harmonics into numbers he did not own.
"You're distracted," Elias said, more a statement than rebuke.
He slid beside Kiran and the cold of his coat brushed Kiran's shoulder.
"Pull your eyes from the ridge. Read what the device tells."
Kiran squared his shoulders and re-centered on the needles.
He used the amulet at his chest as a metronome for breath.
The meter hummed steady and then, without warning, the secondary needle seized and spun.
Elias's hand snapped out and grabbed the device.
"Back!" he ordered, voice hard as flint.
Air tightened like a noose.
Stones lifted and rolled in a small, gray spiral on the canyon floor.
A thin silver mist began to rise, inching up from the ravine like smoke from a wound.
"Move!" Elias barked.
His fingers danced over the meter, fusing a shield-knot of wire and crystal.
The wire's filaments flared with a pale light, coughing like a throat.
Kiran stumbled backward, the canyon's voice trying to unlace his bones.
His legs wobbled and his vision blurred into pale streaks.
The mist reached them with an absence of sound that pressed at the ears.
Elias snapped a crystal into place on the meter; it sparked and then went silent.
"Echo Whirlwind," Elias shouted, each syllable a command.
"Circle of reflection. It matches memory and will try to seduce with what it knows."
Kiran's chest tightened.
The mist folded into shapes, not quite people and not quite wind.
They moved with a memory's insistence.
For one awful breath the shapes pressed against the air between them—faces without names but with the cadence of familiarity that knotted his ribs.
"Don't look," Elias said.
"Don't give it purchase."
Kiran's feet refused obeying the order cleanly.
The first shape took on a grandmother's stoop, the second a man's broad shoulders.
The third held a pocket of light like a humming tune.
One of the faces wore the exact tilt of a laugh he had gleaned in a dream.
His throat closed.
His hands found the hilt of his sword by reflex, fingers tightening as if on a rope.
The metal at his hip felt heavier than iron.
"Hold," Elias ordered.
He planted a crystal into the ground and slammed his palm over it; the crystal shivered and threw a lattice of light that kept some shapes at bay.
"It wants a story."
The mist folded inward, testing the lattice.
Kiran's knees buckled.
He sank down onto the gravel as if the ground had become a hand demanding confession.
One of the shapes bent toward him and there was the scent of wet earth—the same hint he had once tied to memory and to his parents.
His lips moved.
He did not call names, but his mouth opened like a wound.
Tears gathered behind his eyes.
"Don't let it use you," Elias said.
His voice cut through the fog like a blade.
He wrenched the cracked meter to his chest and hammered the bell-crystal until the sound made the canyon ring.
The mist recoiled, shuddering.
The faces blurred like poor ink.
The scent of wet earth thinned to a thread.
Elias's crystal threw a bright, pained lattice, and for a moment the canyon sounded like a bell struck once.
Kiran's hands gripped the sword until his knuckles lit white.
The metal tasted of old cold and dust.
The faces in the fog screamed without sound, mouths and eyes pressed against nothing that could be heard.
One of them—closer than the rest—stared with a look that a child's memory gives to its keepers.
He closed his eyes.
The world narrowed to the hilt and the rasp of the lattice.
"Read me the residual," Elias demanded.
He had placed a second meter near the crystal and pushed it toward Kiran.
"Tell me what came through."
Kiran coughed out words like splinters.
"Echoes of voices. A scent...wet soil. A pull—like the Borda's edge when the trains pass. It wanted—"
He could not finish the sentence without the canyon pressing a hand on his mouth.
Elias's jaw worked.
He checked the meter and the readout made a small, ugly line.
"It matched family signatures," he said.
"But not perfectly. Corrupted by the spiral."
Kiran opened his eyes and saw Elias's hands shake a fraction.
The old man's face had a new color—one that measured danger not by ledger but by experience.
"You should not have been near its node," Elias said.
"You are not trained to withstand its mimicry. Yet it...parted."
Kiran blinked gravel from his lashes and pushed to his feet.
The fog thinned like breath exhaled.
The canyon returned its usual roar as if a band had been cut loose.
Elias stood with a cracked crystal, the fracture running like a lightning tattoo through its core.
He stared at the device as if trying to reattach some logic to it.
Kiran touched his palm where the wound had been, skin now scabbed.
A faint smell of iron rose with the wind.
He noticed the amulet's seam had a fresh smear of dust above the silver and the memory that had just pressed at him had left salt at his cheek.
Elias turned slowly and looked past Kiran—to the sword at his hip.
His eyes traveled the rusted length as a man reconnoiters a battlefield.
"The Whirlwind..." Elias said, words careful as broken glass.
He inhaled, then spoke again with a weight that made the canyon feel colder.
"It broke when it came near you."
Silence settled, thin and complete, as if the canyon itself were holding its breath.
Kiran's ears rang with the absence of noise.
For that hush, the world felt like paper between a child's fingers.
The Whirlwind... it broke when it approached you.