Chapter 369: Circling Back
The dragon circled back.
Wide, unhurried arcs that carried them over the coastline one more time before turning inland, and Raizen looked down at the world Elin had shown him. It was still there - still vast, still strange, still assembled from pieces that didn’t seem to belong to the same planet. The black sand beaches merged into red rock shelves that merged into whatever the glittering shore was made of, and behind them all the ocean sat dark and always moving, reflecting the glowing clouds in its surface like a mirror that had been placed there before anyone arrived to look into it.
Further out, the floating islands hung at the edge of visibility. He couldn’t make out details anymore - just the shapes, dark against the glowing sky, suspended in the gap between water and cloud. Structures on the larger ones, maybe. Lines that might have been walls or might have been ridges of natural stone. From this distance, the difference was minimal.
But they were there. Waiting.
And the thoughts stormed inside of him.
The last time he saw the Anathema fragment, it was just a crystal sphere with something dark inside. It had been scared when the whisper reappeared inside of Raizen’s mind. That whisper was now dead, crushed by a mechanical door. And now the Anathema was on those islands, somewhere, guarded by the Ice Sovereign.
Questions started flooding. Was it still encased in that glass sphere? If the Ruler died, then it must be broken. How was it contained? With ice? Surely, it was able to break through-
Breaking his thoughts, Elin spoke. "Say, do you know a woman named Kori?"
Raizen nodded. "Yes. She’s our teacher back at the Lotus Academy."
Elin’s eyes widened. "You mean she’s in Neoshima!?"
"Well, yeah. She’s living there."
Elin started laughing. "Hah... That girly..."
"What about her?"
Elin pointed towards the dark small shapes in the far horizon, the floating islands. "I think I told you before, but the Ice Sovereign lives on the floating islands"
"Well, yes. She’s guarding the Anathema fragment, right?"
"Not neccessarily guarding... More like containing."
"What about her and Kori?"
Elin took a small pause before answering. "I wanted to make sure she was alright. Years have passed since I last saw her."
Raizen tilted his head. "And when was that?"
"When she rejected being the Ice Sovereign"
Raizen almost flinched. "What!?"
"You heard me right. Not many know this, but Kori was supposed to be the next Ice Sovereign."
"Then why did she refuse!? Doesn’t that place come with benefits?"
"I have no idea why she did that, but yeah. Being a Sovereign means that you basically have access to the whole world freely, without needing special permits or stuff like that."
"Special permits?"
"There are some places that are restricted to everyone else."
"Why?"
"Depends. Increased Nyx activity, Eon fields that can shred someone apart, or just zones with weird resonance. This world still has tons of things not even the Echelon have discovered yet." She looked at Raizen with a smug look. "And I’m not going to give info to the Echelon for free." She turned back with her back towards Raizen, face forward. "Now stop asking questions, too much for tonight."
Raizen was already with his mouth half-open, ready to ask the next question, but he agreed. He’d find out things with time.
Below them, the rainforest stretched back toward Ukai, the dense canopy catching the cloud glow and turning it into a soft, luminous green carpet that rolled over hills and covered everything in sight.
Even the barren ground had its own beauty. Not the beauty of the plains or the ocean - something harsher, more architectural. But it was pretty. The grey, dead strip of rainforest was behind them now, swallowed by the living forest, invisible from this angle. But Raizen could still feel where it was - a cold spot in his mental map of the landscape, a place where the world’s colour had been pulled out and never put back. The dragon crossed back over the plains, and the grass rippled beneath them in silver waves, the wind carrying the smell of open land and distance and the faint sweetness of wildflowers that grew somewhere below but were invisible from this height.
Raizen’s mind, released from the immediate demands of survival and espionage, began to sort through the night. Not chronologically - the events were too tangled for sequence - but by priority, the way his brain always organized information when the pressure lifted: what mattered most, what mattered next, what could wait.
The drones.
They surfaced first because they were the most immediate practical concern. Three autonomous pursuit units, armed with taser projectiles, not deadly but enough to be extremely annoying, deployed within seconds of the alarm triggering. Raizen turned the details over, examining them from the outside now that the inside - the panic, the dodging, the neon blue bolts streaking past his face - was over.
All automatic, most likely. The response time was too fast for human coordination, the formation flying too precise for remote piloting through a forest canopy at night. The Echelon’s security system had detected the breach, identified the intruder’s approximate exit point, and launched three drones on an intercept trajectory without any person needing to make a decision.
Which meant no person HAD made a decision. No guard had seen his face. No operator had tracked him to a specific location. The drones had pursued a target - any target - that the alarm system flagged, and when the target disappeared into the cloud layer, they followed, meeting their destruction, the pursuit ending. An automated response, logged in whatever system the Echelon used to track security incidents, filed alongside data about trajectory and duration and outcome.
He wasn’t entirely screwed.
The guards he’d knocked unconscious would report the breach. The smashed drawer locks would be discovered. The fact that someone had accessed the aircraft’s storage section would be obvious to anyone who looked. But the WHO - the specific identity of the person who’d done it - was protected by a torn strip of shirt across his face and the fact that three drones had chased a silhouette rather than a specific face.
Eiden would probably know. Eiden would put it together - the timing, the target, the fact that the boy he’d dismissed as defeated had been in the aircraft. But seeing that nothing’s missing, he’d probably think that Raizen failed.
The dragon had crossed back over the rainforest and was approaching Ukai’s eastern perimeter, the amber lights of the city growing ahead of them, the familiar shapes of platforms and bridges and trunks emerging from the canopy in a cluster that looked, from this angle, almost small. Almost fragile. A city built in trees, holding itself together with wood, rope, Eon and the collective stubbornness of people who’d been forced to not live on the ground.
Raizen’s hand went to his shoulder. The strap on his shoulder, where Elin’s silver knife sat in its sheath. The blade was quiet now - the pulsing warmth that had saved his life during the fall had faded, replaced by the cool, inert weight of metal at rest. But the memory of it was fresh - the sudden heat, the quickening rhythm, the homing signal that had brought the dragon to him with the precision of something that knew exactly where he was.
He unclipped the sheath from the strap. Held it out toward Elin.
"Here," he said. "You should take this back."
Elin glanced over her shoulder. Saw the knife in his extended hand. Her expression shifted through several things in quick succession - surprise, amusement, something softer that she covered before it fully formed.
"Keep it" she said.
"But it’s yours."
"I owe you, Raizen." She turned forward again, her voice casual.
"Huh!? How are you the one owing me!? You saved me from dying... A few times, and all I did was jump off a window like an idiot, just to track you down!"
"That was some time ago, Raizen. Yeah, I could have let you die, but it was always in my way. I took you in my cave for a reason. I took you to the Ruler for a reason. If it weren’t for you, the fragment wouldn’t be safe now."
"Everything I did was tell the Ruler to break the contract! It’s the most basic thing."
"Even if you did something as simple as waiting and telling the Ruler to break the contract... We wouldn’t have managed without it. So I owe you."
She threw a look behind her back. "So, if you’re in trouble - real trouble, the kind where you’re out of options and out of time - channel Eon through it."
Raizen looked at the knife. The silver blade, sheathed, warm from contact with his body. "...then what?"
"Trust me." She didn’t elaborate. Didn’t explain the mechanism, the range, the limitations. Just the statement, delivered with the same offhand confidence she brought to everything: I’ll feel it. As if the distance between wherever Raizen might be and wherever Elin might be was a detail rather than an obstacle.
"That’s it?" Raizen asked. "Just channel Eon? And what’ll happen if I do?"
Elin patted the dragon’s neck. The creature hummed. "Keep the knife, Raizen. If you can’t consider it a gift, consider it an extra invitation to get into trouble."
He looked at the blade for another moment. Then he clipped the sheath back onto his strap, where it settled against his chest beside the empty pocket, the one that used to hold something small and warm and loud.
He left it there.
The dragon descended toward Ukai. The platforms rose to meet them - first the outermost ring, the wide cargo platforms and maintenance decks, then the residential district with its warm-lit windows and its people still sitting on roofs watching the glowing clouds. The dragon navigated the upper canopy with the ease of a creature that knew these spaces intimately, threading between trunks, gliding beneath bridges, its wings folding and extending in micro-adjustments that kept its massive body clear of the city’s wooden infrastructure.
Elin brought the dragon to a hover above a platform near the Echelon district - close to the hall but not directly over it, tucked behind a wide trunk that blocked the sightline from the hall’s entrance. The four wings beat slowly, holding position, the downdraft bending the branches below.
"This is your stop," she said.
Raizen swung his leg over the dragon’s side and dropped to the platform. Two meters - his feet hit the wood, his knees absorbed the impact, and he straightened up. The night air at platform level was warmer than it had been at altitude, carrying the smell of lantern oil and cooked food and the wet wood that was Ukai’s permanent perfume.
He looked up at Elin. She sat on the dragon’s neck, dark red hair catching the cloud glow and the amber lantern light simultaneously, her face half-lit and half-shadowed, wearing the expression of someone who’d had an eventful evening and was moderately satisfied with how it had turned out.
"Don’t do anything stupid before the festival," she said.
"Mmeh..."
The corner of her mouth twitched. Then the dragon’s wings beat once, hard, and they rose - fast, vertical, disappearing into the upper canopy within seconds, the sound of wingbeats fading until the only thing left was the gentle sway of branches disturbed by something large passing through them.
Raizen stood on the platform. Alone.
The scanner in his waistband. The knife on his strap. The blades at his hips. And the empty pocket on the left side of his chest, where the fabric still held the shape of something that had curled there and pressed against his heart.
glanced back - one look, automatic, checking.
He stopped.
On the hall’s curved glass roof, sitting cross-legged with her hands in her lap, her face tilted toward the glowing sky, searching -
Saffi.
