Gilded Ashes Chapter 369: Circling Back

The dragon circled back.

Wide, unhurried arcs that carried them over the coastline one more ti 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 sa planet. The black sand beaches rged into red rock shelves that rged 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 stord inside of him.

The last ti he saw the Anathema fragnt, it was just a crystal sphere with sothing dark inside. It had been scared when the whisper reappeared inside of Raizen’s mind. That whisper was now dead, crushed by a chanical door. And now the Anathema was on those islands, sowhere, 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 nad Kori?"

Raizen nodded. "Yes. She’s our teacher back at the Lotus Academy."

Elin’s eyes widened. "You an 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 fragnt, 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 right. Not many know this, but Kori was supposed to be the next Ice Sovereign."

"Then why did she refuse!? Doesn’t that place co with benefits?"

"I have no idea why she did that, but yeah. Being a Sovereign ans that you basically have access to the whole world freely, without needing special permits or stuff like that."

"Special permits?"

"There are so places that are restricted to everyone else."

"Why?"

"Depends. Increased Nyx activity, Eon fields that can shred soone 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 ti.

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 - sothing 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 ntal 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 sll of open land and distance and the faint sweetness of wildflowers that grew sowhere below but were invisible from this height.

Raizen’s mind, released from the imdiate 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 imdiate practical concern. Three autonomous pursuit units, ard with taser projectiles, not deadly but enough to be extrely 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 ti 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 ant 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, eting 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 outco.

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 soone 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 periter, the amber lights of the city growing ahead of them, the familiar shapes of platforms and bridges and trunks erging 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 tal at rest. But the mory of it was fresh - the sudden heat, the quickening rhythm, the homing signal that had brought the dragon to him with the precision of sothing 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, amusent, sothing softer that she covered before it fully ford.

"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 !? You saved from dying... A few tis, and all I did was jump off a window like an idiot, just to track you down!"

"That was so ti 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 fragnt 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 sothing 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 ti - channel Eon through it."

Raizen looked at the knife. The silver blade, sheathed, warm from contact with his body. "...then what?"

"Trust ." She didn’t elaborate. Didn’t explain the chanism, the range, the limitations. Just the statent, delivered with the sa 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 humd. "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 mont. 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 sothing small and warm and loud.

He left it there.

The dragon descended toward Ukai. The platforms rose to et 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-adjustnts 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 ters - his feet hit the wood, his knees absorbed the impact, and he straightened up. The night air at platform level was warr than it had been at altitude, carrying the sll of lantern oil and cooked food and the wet wood that was Ukai’s permanent perfu.

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 soone 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.

"Mh..."

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 sothing 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 sothing 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.