The dragon leveled out inside the lower cloud layer, its wings adjusting to a cruising rhythm that was gentler than the vertical assault but still fast enough to push Raizen's hair flat against his skull. The white clouds pressed in from every side, the visibility still limited to a few meters, the Eon currents still tingling across his skin in competing waves. But the pressure was manageable here - uncomfortable, like standing in a really strong wind, but not deadly. Not like the upper layers, where the curved discharges wove their killing lattice above them.
Elin sat up. Slowly, her back straightening, her hands releasing the grip on the dragon's neck ridges. She rolled her shoulders, tilted her head from side to side, and exhaled with the long, satisfied breath of someone who had just completed something difficult and was ready to enjoy the aftermath.
The tension that had occupied her body during the chase - the leaning, the bracing, the sharp micro-adjustments that had kept them alive through a dozen maneuvers - drained away and was replaced by her usual posture. Relaxed. Easy. The body language of someone who was genuinely, fundamentally comfortable sitting on a dragon inside a cloud.
She half-turned her head. The dark red hair was wild from the wind, whipping in strands across her face, but her expression beneath it was calm and slightly amused.
"See?" she said. "Lost them."
Raizen was still holding her waist. His arms were locked, his hands white-knuckled, his face pressed between her shoulder blades. His body hadn't received the signal that the danger was over and was operating under the assumption that it never would be.
"You flew⦠Right into the clouds" he said, muffled by her back.
"I did."
"Into the clouds!" Raizen repeated, as if he couldn't believe himself either.
"Raizen, dear⦠That's why I am the Sky Sovereign." She patted the dragon's neck. "I know my stuff up here."
The dragon made a sound - a deep, resonant hum that vibrated through its body and into Raizen's chest. Whether it was confirmation or complaint was impossible to tell.
They flew in the white for a while. Raizen's grip loosened by degrees as his body slowly accepted that the immediate threat had passed and that the chaotic Eon currents weren't going to rip them apart at this altitude. The tingling on his skin faded to a background sensation as he got used to it, like the static from a wool sweater. His breathing steadied. His heart rate dropped from sprinting to merely jogging.
The cloud layer was strange from inside. Not just white - textured, layered, with variations in density that created pockets of thinner mist where Raizen could see further and pockets of thicker mist where visibility dropped to arm's length. The glow was everywhere and nowhere, sourceless and even, turning the interior of the clouds into a featureless room made of light. Above, the Eon discharges were still visible β still there, but higher up, the curved intertwining ribbons of raw energy pulsing through the upper layers in their slow, perpetual dance.
Elin glanced upward. The discharges reflected in her eyes - curved lines of light in dark irises.
"You know," she said, her voice conversational, as if they were sitting at a table rather than flying through an Eon-saturated cloud layer on the back of a dragon, "if we went higher - just a bit higher - you could see what's on the other side."
She said it casually. Lightly. The way she might suggest trying a new restaurant.
Raizen's blood froze.
The other side. Beyond the clouds. The sky - the one from his visions during the summoning. The millions of white points scattered across impossible black. Was it right there, right above them, separated from where they sat by a few hundred meters of increasingly lethal Eon currents?
Elin was offering to show him.
"Whaat?" she said, teasing his silence. Her head tilted, the dark red hair shifting. "You don't want to see what's after?"
The question was genuine and the temptation was staggering and for one wild, reckless second Raizen almost said yes.
Then his hand brushed his waistband.
The scanner.
Alteea's scanner - the device that held every page of Eiden's medical file, double-scanned, the intelligence that the entire mission had been built to collect. The device that was electronic. Mechanical. Built from circuits, components and the same fundamental technology that the Eon currents had just ripped out of three military-grade drones in under four seconds.
He'd been carrying it through the cloud layer. Through the chaotic Eon frequencies. Through the interference that had scrambled navigation systems, seized rotors and dropped a drone out of the sky trailing smoke.
The scanner had been in his waistband the entire time.
"We need to get down." Raizen said.
"Hm?"
"Down! Now. Elin, please - right now."
Something in his voice disturbed her casual posture. She looked at him, the amusement fading. She didn't ask why. She leaned forward, pressed her hand against the dragon's neck, and the creature banked downward.
They descended through the cloud layer's underside and back into open air. The cloud layer gave way to dark sky, and below them the world returned - the forest canopy, vast and dark, stretching in every direction. Ukai was visible in the distance, a cluster of amber lights and wooden platforms nestled among the trunks, small from this altitude but unmistakable.
The dragon descended further, spiraling downward in wide, lazy arcs, the four wings catching the air in alternating strokes that controlled the rate of descent. The temperature climbed. The air thinned. The Eon currents faded, the tingling on Raizen's skin diminishing with each meter of altitude lost until it was gone entirely and the atmosphere felt normal again.
They landed in a clearing. Not a clearing, exactly - a gap between trunks where the canopy was thin enough to let the dragon's wingspan fit. Silence.
Raizen pulled the scanner out - Alteea's device, compact and dark, its surface cold against his fingers.
He turned it over. Looked at it.
His face paled.
