* * *

  Far below, at the edge of the training grounds, Tarek watched.

  He couldn't see the details from this distance. Just shapes against the grey sky, dark specks plummeting and soaring and crashing into stone. But he knew which one was Shiryu. Could tell by the way he kept getting up. By the way he refused to stop.

  The wind trial had been going on for weeks now. Every morning, Tarek would finish his water practice and climb to the observation ledge. Every morning, he would watch the distant figure fall, rise, and fall again.

  "He's insane," Tarek whispered to no one.

  But he couldn't look away.

  And somewhere in his chest, something that might have been admiration. Or fear. Or both. Began to grow.

  * * *

  The days bled into each other.

  Jump. Fall. Break. Heal. Repeat.

  Shiryu lost count somewhere around the third week. His body had become a map of fading bruises and fresh ones, layers of purple and yellow painted across his skin like abstract art. The healers stopped asking if he was okay. They just fixed what was broken and sent him back to the platforms.

  The wind was learning him as much as he was learning it.

  * * *

  "You're thinking too much."

  Rei appeared on the platform beside him, arms crossed, that familiar smirk playing at the corners of his mouth. Unlike Shiryu, he looked rested. Clean. Mist clung to his skin, and his dark robes rippled gently even in the stillness. Signs of his mastery over both water and wind.

  "How else am I supposed to learn?" Shiryu wiped blood from his lip. His seventh jump of the day. His seventh failure.

  "By not learning." Rei walked to the edge and looked down into the churning void. "The wind doesn't care about your thoughts. It cares about your *intention*. Stop trying to understand it. Start trying to feel it."

  "That's what everyone keeps saying."

  "Because it's true." Rei glanced back at him, something shifting in his expression. "You're good at the water. Better than good. You mastered it faster than anyone I've seen. But you did it by surrendering, remember? By asking instead of demanding."

  Shiryu remembered. The exhaustion. The emptiness. The moment he'd stopped fighting and started listening.

  "The wind is different," he said.

  "The wind is the *same*. It's just louder about it." Rei turned to face the drop again. "Watch."

  He stepped off the edge.

  For a heartbeat, he fell. A dark shape plummeting toward the clouds below. Then the wind *took* him. Not caught. *Took*, like a dancer claiming a partner, spinning him sideways, lifting him in a sweeping arc that carried him three platforms away before setting him down as gently as a falling leaf.

  When he landed, his robes were still rippling. His hair moved against a breeze that seemed to come from nowhere.

  "See?" he called across the gap. "Don't fight. Don't ask. Just *be*."

  Shiryu looked at the drop. In the clouds. At the distant figure of Rei, standing with his arms spread, letting the wind play with his robes like he was made of it.

  He jumped.

  * * *

  The wind caught him.

  The wind caught him. Sideways, rough, like being shouldered by something massive. He hit the platform hard and rolled twice before finding his feet.

  But he came up.

  "Better!" Rei's voice carried across the gap. "Again!"

  * * *

  By the end of the fourth week, something had changed.

  Shiryu could feel the currents now. Not just as force, but as *presence*. Distinct personalities within the chaos. There was the high wind that screamed across the peaks, cold, cruel, and ancient. There was the low wind that curled through the valleys, lazy, warm, and curious. And somewhere in between, there were a thousand smaller currents, each with its own mood, its own intention, its own way of moving.

  The trick wasn't fighting them. The trick was *calling* them.

  Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

  Not domination. He'd learned that lesson with the water. But once you understood them, once you'd earned their trust, you could ask them to do things. Specific things. Multiple things at once.

  "You're getting it." Rei sat beside him on the platform, legs dangling over the void. Below them, the clouds churned in endless patterns. "I can see it in how you move. Less resistance. More authority."

  Shiryu nodded, too tired for words. His robes were torn in a dozen places. His shoulder still ached from yesterday's crash. But for the first time since the trial began, he felt like he was making progress.

  Real progress.

  "Can I ask you something?"

  "You just did."

  Rei rolled his eyes. "Why are you here? Really?"

  Shiryu said nothing. The wind whispered past them, tugging at their clothes, playing with their hair.

  "I lost everyone," he said finally. "My squad. My friends. A Titan came, and I watched them die, and I couldn't do anything to stop it."

  Rei's expression shifted. The smirk faded into something more serious.

  "I'm sorry."

  "Don't be. It happened. Can't change it." Shiryu looked down at his hands. Scarred now, calloused from weeks of training. "But I can make sure it doesn't happen again. I can get strong enough that nothing ever takes anyone from me again."

  "That's..." Rei hesitated. "That's a lot of weight to carry."

  "What about you?"

  Rei was quiet for a moment. His robes rippled. His hair moved against a wind that seemed to come from nowhere.

  "I want to see something," he said finally. "Something most people think is impossible."

  "What?"

  Rei looked up at the sky. At the clouds that churned above the highest peaks, where colors flickered that had no business existing.

  "The Crimson Lightning," he said. "The Red. They say it's alive. They say it's the most dangerous thing on the mountain. More Wajinto have died trying to bond with it than with any other element. But they also say..." He trailed off, something wistful in his voice. "They say it's beautiful. Like looking at a god."

  Shiryu's chest tightened.

  He remembered. The glass desert. The delirium. The flash of red light in the distant clouds which seemed to call to him across miles of scorched sand.

  He said nothing.

  "There's a hierarchy," Rei continued. "I've read about it in the scrolls they leave us. Green at the bottom. That's where everyone starts. Then blue. Then yellow. Each one harder than the last, each one more dangerous." His voice dropped to something almost reverent. "But the Crimson is different. It doesn't just respond to intention. It *chooses*. It decides who's worthy and who isn't."

  "And you want it to choose you."

  "More than anything." Rei's eyes climbed past the yellow, to where the clouds sometimes burned a color no one could explain. "I want to see what the world looks like from inside a crimson bolt. Just once."

  Shiryu stayed silent.

  He'd seen it. From the desert. Before he'd even reached the mountain.

  But he didn't say so.

  Rei had dreamed of the Crimson his whole life. Had built his entire purpose around reaching it. And Shiryu didn't want to take that from him. Didn't want to diminish his friend's dream by admitting that the Crimson had called to *him* first.

  "One day," Rei said, his gaze still fixed on the highest clouds, "I'll be the second to tame it."

  "The second?"

  "The legends say there was one. Long ago. A Wajinto who didn't just bond with the Crimson. He *became* it." Rei's voice was barely a whisper now. "They say he's the reason the rules changed. The reason we're so careful now. He loved too much, lost too much, and the mountain still remembers."

  He paused.

  "He became something more than human."

  Above them, the clouds churned.

  And somewhere, just for a moment, something red flickered in the highest reaches.

  Shiryu said nothing.

  * * *

  It happened on a quiet afternoon.

  The training grounds were half-empty. Most apprentices had retreated to the lower platforms to rest. Shiryu was practicing alone, calling the winds in slow spirals around his body.

  He tried something new.

  Instead of spreading the current wide, he compressed it. Tighter. Tighter still. The air screamed in protest. The spiral collapsed into a thin ribbon that whipped past his face.

  Pain.

  He looked down. A line of red across his palm. Clean. Deep. The wind had cut him.

  Not pushed. Not bruised. *Cut.*

  He stared at his hand. At the blood welling up. At what the wind could become when you stopped asking it to carry and started asking it to *pierce*.

  He filed the discovery away. Kept practicing.

  When the screaming started.

  Not the screaming of the wind. Something worse.

  A boy. One of the water apprentices, someone Shiryu had seen at the pools but never spoken to. Was convulsing on a platform fifty meters below. His body arched, twisted, and then *split*.

  The Shatter.

  Shiryu had heard about it. Everyone had. The moment when the Voidborn inside you tore itself free. When all that learning, all that evolution, became too much for your mortal shell to contain.

  The creature that emerged was nothing like the Titan that had destroyed Nyxspire. Smaller. Rawer. A twisted reflection of the boy it had been born from. Humanoid but wrong, its limbs too long, its eyes burning with that same hateful void-black light.

  The boy survived. Barely. He lay on the platform, gasping, exhausted, his robes torn and his skin pale as death.

  "Control or effacement."

  The voice came from above. Three Ryujin were descending from the higher peaks, their hair alive with green and blue lightning, thick vapor pouring from their skin. Even from a distance, the pressure of their auras hit like a wall. Shiryu's chest tightened. Tarek, somewhere behind him, stumbled back a step.

  The newborn Titan didn't understand. It was confused, frightened, lashing out at everything around it. And the boy. Its creator, its other half. Was right there. Right in front of it.

  The creature grabbed him. Held him up like a shield.

  "Please..." The boy started to say.

  The lightning fell.

  It wasn't aimed at the boy. It was aimed at the Titan. But the Titan was holding the boy, and lightning didn't discriminate, and in the end...

  They both fell.

  Silence.

  Shiryu stood frozen, watching the scorched stone where two bodies had been one person. The Ryujin nodded to each other. Turned away. Dissolved back into mist, into wind, into the higher peaks. The pressure lifted.

  "They don't take chances," someone said beside him.

  Tarek. The younger apprentice had appeared without Shiryu noticing. Drawn by the screaming, frozen by the horror. His face was white. His hands were shaking. And without thinking, he reached out and grabbed Shiryu's arm, gripping tight enough to leave bruises.

  Shiryu didn't pull away.

  They stood there together, watching the blue pixels rise from the stone. Slow. Patient. The Wheel collecting what was left. Around them, the other apprentices slowly returned to their training as if nothing had happened.

  "Did you hear?" Tarek said later, his voice still shaky. "Another apprentice failed the mist trial last week."

  "Failed?"

  Tarek's face darkened. "Shattered. They found his robes by the basin."

  Silence. The word hung between them like a blade.

  The silence settled over them like a weight. This was the price of power. This was what happened when you reached too far, too fast.

  * * *