Chapter 361: Falling
Raizen’s fingers pulled himself upward, his arms shaking. He hauled himself upward - one hand, then the other, his boots scraping against the hull, finding purchase on rivets and seams that hadn’t been designed as footholds but worked anyway.
He rolled onto the aircraft’s roof.
The wind hit him full force - a wall of cold, moving air that flattened his clothes against his body and pushed water droplets horizontally across his temples. The aircraft was fast, faster than anything he’d experienced in flight, the dark shapes of Ukai’s trunks streaking past on both sides in a blur of bark and branch and the occasional amber flash of a lantern glimpsed and gone. The hull beneath him was smooth and cold, offering almost nothing to grip.
He drew his right blade. Drove it into the hull’s surface, the luminite edge punching through the metal with a shriek that the wind swallowed, and held on. The blade anchored him, the wind trying to peel him off and the sword keeping him pinned.
The aircraft didn’t care that he was there. The autopilot held its course - steady, straight, climbing through Ukai’s upper canopy toward whatever destination had been programmed before the night began. The trunks were thinner up here, the branches more sparse, but they still appeared out of the darkness with the sudden, lethal unpredictability of obstacles in a world that was moving too fast to navigate.
Raizen rubbed his eyes from the raindrops pouring regularly, now that he was outside of the Eon Barrier’s range.
But he didn’t see the branch soon enough.
It came from the left - thick, heavy, extending from a trunk that the aircraft was passing too close to. The autopilot calculated clearance for the hull. It did not calculate clearance for a teenager standing on top of it.
The branch hit him square in the chest.
The impact ripped him from the roof - his hand gripping sword’s hilt, pulling it out, his body lifting off the hull and into the open air, the aircraft continuing forward beneath him without slowing, without deviation, without acknowledgment. The blade stayed embedded in the hull, the handle shrinking as the aircraft carried it away, and Raizen was alone in the sky.
Falling.
The world inverted. Sky below, forest above, or the other way around - the rotation made it impossible to tell, his body tumbling through dark air, the cloud glow spinning above him in lazy arcs that would have been beautiful if they weren’t the last thing he was likely to see.
He was at the top of Ukai. Hundreds of meters above the forest floor. The trunks rose around him like dark pillars in every direction, and between them - nothing. Air. Distance. The kind of fall that didn’t have a survivable ending regardless of what he hit, because at this height everything was equally fatal.
The wind roared in his ears. His body rotated. The glowing clouds spun overhead, and for a moment - a stretched, suspended moment that existed between the falling and the understanding of falling - his mind went quiet.
Not peaceful. Not like after the Eon explosion. Empty.
The golden ashes were still up there. Somewhere above him, dispersing in the aircraft’s wake, the last traces of something that had lived in his pocket for less than two days and had changed everything in that time. A creature that couldn’t be serious. That insulted everyone it met and denied every feeling it had and spent its entire short life performing an identity that was three sizes too large for its body.
And in the end, when there was nothing left to perform, it had tried to smile. For him. Its first smile and its last, crooked and messy and wrong and absolutely, devastatingly real.
Then something warmed at his shoulder.
Faint at first - a gentle heat, barely distinguishable from the friction of the wind against his clothes. But it grew. Steadily, insistently, a pulse of warmth that radiated from a specific point on his body and spread outward with each beat.
The knife.
Elin’s silvery knife, tucked into the strap across his shoulder where he’d carried it since she gave it to him. It had been cold and inert for days - a beautiful object, finely crafted, but dormant. Dead metal, pretty and useless.
Now it was alive.
The pulse quickened. Faster, stronger, the warmth becoming heat, the heat becoming something that vibrated against his shoulder with a rhythm that matched a heartbeat - not his, something else’s, something far away and closing fast.
A sound cut through the wind. High, sharp, the scream of air being displaced by something moving through it at a speed that compressed the atmosphere into a narrow, shrieking cone. The same sound he’d heard on the training platform when the black blur dropped through the canopy and obliterated the Nyx. The missile-like sound. The sound of something very fast coming from very far away.
It was getting closer.
The knife pulsed in time with the sound - faster, louder, hotter, the rhythm accelerating as the distance shrank. Raizen was still falling, still rotating, the trunks and the lanterns and the glowing clouds spinning around him in a kaleidoscope of dark and light.
Then something caught him.
Not a branch. Not a platform. Something soft - yielding, warm, alive. It met his falling body and absorbed the momentum over several meters of controlled deceleration. Arms closed around him, strong and steady, pulling him against something solid, warm and breathing.
The falling stopped.
The spinning stopped.
Raizen opened his eyes.
Soft chest against his back. The smell of leather and something faintly metallic, like heated silver. Arms around his torso - bare forearms wrapped in leather guards, the straps worn and familiar. Casual combat clothes, fitted but not too tight.
Dark red hair. Catching the cloud glow and holding it the way copper holds firelight, the strands whipping in the wind around a face that Raizen hadn’t seen in a while and had thought about more often than he’d ever admit to anyone, including himself.
She looked down at him.
Her eyes were calm, but a playful. Carrying an expression totally unsuitable for someone who had just pulled a teenager out of a fatal fall at several hundred meters of altitude and considered this a moderate inconvenience rather than a dramatic rescue.
"You," Elin said, "are an extraordinary amount of trouble."
