Rin'at's songcord lay heavy across his chest, secured for flight, the old beads dulled by years of touch and weather.
The Tawkami village still held the night in its woven roofs and damp paths. Smoke was only beginning to lift from the first cookfires, and the canopy above kept the dawn quiet, as if it had to be earned.
They lived deep in the jungle, where the light arrived filtered and sifted through layers of leaves and vines. Huts sat close to the roots of a giant panopyra that anchored the village, its broad crown holding shadow and moisture like a steady palm. The village was not built to be seen from above. It was built to stay inside the living green without making it louder.
Rin'at rose before most voices did.
He led the yearly route into the high places, not because he spoke loud, but because the others had learned what his hands meant. This morning he carried three apprentices with him. Seyri and Mok'tey were already bonded to their mountain ikran. Hìran, the youngest, still without one, would ride behind Rin'at to learn by touch and balance instead of pride.
Their clan watched the world the way other clans watched borders. Not with suspicion, but with care. Where many saw landscape, the Tawkami saw ingredients, reactions, and consequences. Even a simple departure carried rules. Packs were tightened not for comfort, but for silence. Knots were chosen not for speed, but for what they would not do in wind.
Rin'at did not count what he carried. He never had. His hands knew weight. His skin knew what would rub, what would snag, and what would speak at the wrong time.
He laid his bundles out on a mat of braided vine, not in neat rows, but in the order his body would reach them in flight and on stone. The extractor kit came first, wrapped twice, then a third time with a strip that had been softened by use. The seed pouch sat beside it, mouth tied down with a knot that would release with one pull and not loosen again by accident. He pressed the knot with his thumb until the fibers remembered their place.
The young ones waited.
Seyri stood with her load half-slung, watching Rin'at's hands instead of the sky. Her songcord was bright with newer fiber and fewer beads, and the tension in her shoulders made those beads tap softly until she stilled herself. A plain sash crossed her waist, the beginning of her alchemical training, still mostly unmarked. Mok'tey was more patient by nature, tail relaxed, hands folded at his waist, but even he did not step nearer than Rin'at's shadow. His sash held two thin colored strips, earned and kept clean. No one reached toward the mat. No one spoke over the work.
Hìran hovered closest, contained by effort. His cord was simple, more empty strand than memory, tied tight at the base so it would not snag. A plain sash sat on him too, but it was newer still, the cloth stiff with its first stitching. His eyes kept flicking from Rin'at's tools to Rin'at's face, then away again, as if looking too long might be taken as hunger.
Rin'at sensed the small movements behind him. Not irritation. Awareness. The young are loud, even when they are quiet.
He lifted Hìran's harness in both hands. It was new leather, still stiff in places, eager to hold its shape. A thin tie hung longer than it should.
He beckoned with two fingers.
Hìran stepped in quickly, then stopped himself, forcing his feet to land softly. He raised his arms and held still.
Rin'at did not scold. He did not need to.
He worked by touch, drawing the straps flat against Hìran's chest, pulling the harness into the lines of bone so it would not ride up when wind pressed against it. He found the long tie and folded it back on itself, then again, then pinned it under a wrap.
Hìran's tail tip twitched with the urge to look down. Rin'at's fingers paused. Not hard, not threatening, only a pause that held attention.
Hìran stilled.
Rin'at tightened the last knot with two quick pulls and flattened it with his palm.
[Spoken in Na'vi]
"If it catches," he said, voice low, like a hand laid on water, "it will speak when we need silence."
Hìran swallowed. His ears dipped, then rose again. "Thank you," he murmured, not loud enough to travel.
Rin'at answered with a small nod and nothing more.
He shifted to Seyri's bundle next, not because hers was wrong, but because she would learn more from a small correction than from being told she was ready. A strip of binding sat too close to the edge of her wrap. It would flap. It would tell on her.
He tapped it once with his knuckle. Seyri's gaze dropped instantly. She retied it, slower this time, watching how Rin'at's eyes moved.
Mok'tey caught the lesson without being addressed. He adjusted his own load with the same care, tightening where his fingers had grown lazy.
Rin'at lifted his songcord away from his chest and secured it tighter for flight. It had weight, and in the wind, weight becomes a voice. The beads pressed against his skin, dull and familiar, each one worn smooth by years of touch. He did not linger on the memories inside them. He only acknowledged their presence the way he acknowledged the ground beneath the village and the branches above it.
When everything sat right, when nothing whispered where it should not, he gathered the mat by its corners and folded it into his pack. He rose, and the others rose with him, not a heartbeat ahead.
Outside, the light had gained strength. The canopy held it in green layers. They passed between huts that still slept, past lines of drying fiber and small racks where leaves and petals had been laid out to cure for remedies. A few elders were already awake, quiet silhouettes by cookfires and mortars. No one called after them. The Tawkami did not spend words where they were not needed.
At the edge of the village, Rin'at stopped. Not a command. A moment. The young ones halted with him, breath quieting, tails settling. Beyond the woven homes the jungle waited, patient as stone.
Rin'at lifted his hand to his forehead, then lowered it, palm forward. A simple greeting that asked for steadiness more than luck. The gesture did not demand words. It only aligned them.
Seyri mirrored it. Mok'tey followed. Hìran did it last, careful to match the angle of Rin'at's wrist.
Rin'at turned toward the path that climbed into the trees, and the group moved with him, quiet competence carried ahead of their footsteps.
The ikran waited where the village thinned into root and stone, in a notch of high limbs that caught first light and held it. Their perch smelled of old claw marks and resin, of wind and shed down, and of the sour trace of last night's meat carried away.
Rin'at approached without haste. He did not come as if he owned them. He came as if he was expected.
His mountain ikran lifted her head when she heard his steps. Her head angled a fraction, her ridge catching the first light. Recognition. Her eyes tracked him with the same patience he used on the young. A slow breath expanded her chest, ribs shifting under skin, then fell away again. The air around her held a faint warmth from her body and the steady vent of her breathing.
Seyri's ikran clicked its jaw once, restless energy leaking through restraint. Mok'tey's shifted its talons on the branch, testing weight. Both apprentices held themselves back. They did not close the distance until Rin'at did. They knew better than to let their mounts lead their hands.
Rin'at stopped at the edge of the perch and lifted his palm, not touching yet. He let the space between them settle. The ikran leaned forward and met him halfway, pressing the hard ridge above her nostrils into his hand. He returned the pressure, steady, and felt the muscles beneath her skin loosen without ever fully letting go of readiness.
He slid his hand along the bone line of her cheek, down to the base of her kuru. The braid lay tucked and protected, a living cord that was neither a decoration nor a weapon. It was a door.
He breathed once, then offered his braid.
The contact was clean.
Tsaheylu did not arrive like words. It arrived like an alignment. The world did not change. Rin'at's place inside it did.
Her balance became his balance. Her hunger flickered against his ribs and settled. Her awareness of wind lanes brushed his skin, not as thought, but as instinct that had never needed speech.
A small impatience pulsed through her, a desire to climb into open air and let gravity stop touching her. Rin'at held it gently. Not suppression. Guidance. The bond was not a leash. It was a shared hand.
He felt her accept it.
Behind him, Hìran waited at the edge of the branch, hands close to his chest to keep from reaching too early. Rin'at broke the bond for a breath and turned his head.
"Come," he said.
Hìran stepped forward carefully, placing his feet where Rin'at's had been. The boy's excitement rode just under his skin. Rin'at heard it in the way his breath tried to run ahead of him.
Rin'at took Hìran's wrist and set it on the ridge of the saddle frame, then moved the other hand to the second brace.
"Here," Rin'at said. "Bone line. Not skin."
Hìran nodded quickly, then slowed himself, repeating the pressure until his grip became quiet.
Rin'at checked Hìran's harness again without looking at it. Two fingers under a strap. A small pull. A flattening. Nothing to catch. Nothing to flap. Nothing to speak.
Seyri greeted her ikran with familiar closeness. Quiet contact, no show. Her cheek brushed the mount's neck. Her hand lingered a breath longer than it needed to. The ikran leaned into it, pleased.
Rin'at saw the softness and let it pass. Softness was not weakness. But it could become it.
Mok'tey's greeting was shorter. He pressed his forehead briefly to the ikran's crest ridge, then stepped back and checked lashings. His mount huffed, annoyed, then settled when he tightened a strap that would have shifted in the air.
No one launched. Even when Seyri's ikran rolled its shoulders under the saddle line and clicked its jaw again, even when Mok'tey's lifted its head toward the open lane beyond the trees.
They waited for Rin'at.
Rin'at remade tsaheylu and felt his ikran's focus narrow. She was ready, and that readiness was sharp and clean. He guided her down into a calmer hold, then swung himself into the saddle with a motion that did not jolt her spine.
Hìran climbed behind him, careful now. Not graceful, but learning. Rin'at did not help until he had to, and he had to only once, when Hìran's foot caught on a strap and would have scraped loudly against the frame. Rin'at stilled it with his hand and freed it without a sound.
Hìran settled. His knees found the right pinch. His hips quieted.
The bond held steady. Rin'at breathed with his ikran until her breath matched his, then stretched beyond it, deeper and stronger.
And then, through that shared deepness, a small shift ran along the line of her attention.
Not fear.
A refusal to relax.
A faint tightening at the edges.
Rin'at did not look around. He did not search the trees as if something could be pointed at and named. He listened through the bond and felt the air become slightly less welcoming, as if the open sky ahead had learned to keep its teeth hidden.
It was not a shape in the canopy. It was not a shadow crossing the village.
It was the lane itself that changed.
Air that had been used too often by something heavier than an ikran. A corridor combed smooth by broad wings. The absence of small noise in places where it should have stitched the morning together.
His ikran preferred to gain height before seeking comfort.
Rin'at's hand rested on the saddle frame, still.
Hìran felt that stillness behind him and copied it without knowing why.
Rin'at did not give the signal with words. He shifted his weight forward, a small permission that his ikran felt through tsaheylu before his body finished the motion.
Her talons bit the branch. Her shoulders gathered. For a breath she held all her mass in one place, coiled and patient, and then she released it.
The launch was quiet until it was not. Leaves snapped back. Air broke under the first downstroke. The branch shuddered and steadied again behind them as if it had always carried this.
Hìran's stomach lifted with the drop that was also a rise. His hands tightened, then loosened when Rin'at's back did not change. He locked his knees where he had been taught and let his hips become part of the saddle instead of a separate thing that could panic.
Below, the village opened like a pattern woven into green. Roofs of leaf and reed caught the dim light and gave it back in wet highlights. Smoke climbed in thin lines and vanished into the canopy. A few figures looked up, small from this height, faces unreadable, but their stillness felt like seeing.
Rin'at kept them low at first, threading between the highest limbs, because the air close to home was familiar and forgiving. His ikran moved through it as if her wings had already learned the shape of every gap.
Seyri and Mok'tey followed only after Rin'at's second wingbeat, when the lane had been proven. Their ikran launched in quick succession, disciplined copies of the same motion. Even eagerness had to fit the line.
The four of them rose into a broader corridor of air where the canopy dipped and the world widened. Wind ran over Rin'at's face and tugged at the edge of his songcord until the wrap held it still. He tasted moisture, leaf, distant stone, and the clean cold hint of higher elevation waiting beyond the first ridge.
Hìran shifted once, instinctively trying to look down and back at the village. The movement was small, but on an ikran, small was enough.
Rin'at tapped the inside of Hìran's thigh with two fingers. Not a strike. A reminder.
"Hold," he said, low, close, meant for one ear. "Breathe with her."
Hìran drew his breath in slower. He let it out when the ikran did. The panic that had wanted to bloom had nowhere to root.
Rin'at watched the apprentices without turning his head fully. He read them the way he read wind. Seyri rode with her shoulders too high, holding herself as if she were still on the branch. Mok'tey rode steadier, but his spacing drifted half a body length closer when his ikran caught a rising current and wanted to climb.
Rin'at lifted one hand and flattened his palm, then eased it outward.
Space.
Both riders adjusted immediately. No argument. No delay. Their mounts felt the correction through their bodies and settled into the lane.
The village fell away behind them, swallowed by canopy, then by distance. Sound thinned. The air cooled. The horizon stopped being trees and began to hint at stone lines beyond, pale and far.
Hìran's fear turned into something else. Attention. He began to feel the shape of the route in Rin'at's choices, when to rise, when to skim, and when to let a current carry them without asking it to do more than it wanted. The sky was not empty. It had rules.
Rin'at's ikran banked slightly to the northeast, taking a line that avoided a cluster of tall crowns where the wind sheared hard and unpredictably. Rin'at did not force her through. He guided her around, just as he guided the young to manage their impatience.
Above, a seam of brighter light opened, and the first true morning touched the upper leaves.
Rin'at did not look back again. Home was behind them. The route was ahead. The air, for now, held them without protest.
Stone rose out of the trees like a broken tooth. Not tall enough to be a peak, not clean enough to be a cliff, but familiar in its shape, with one pale seam running down its face where water had once argued with it for years.
Rin'at's ikran angled toward it without being told. The perch was part of her memory as much as his. The wind here always curled the same way. The branch that could bear her weight had been scarred by talons long before Hìran had ever tied his first cord bead.
They came in low and slow, letting the air settle. Rin'at shifted his hips, and his ikran answered, wings cupping, tail adjusting. The landing was not a thud, not a scramble, but a controlled acceptance of weight. Talons gripped stone and wood. A brief tremor ran through the limb, then stopped.
Seyri and Mok'tey landed after him, each choosing the same stable lines Rin'at had chosen. Their mounts shook out their wings and flexed their necks, then went still, eyes scanning the forest below as if measuring how far they had already come.
Hìran exhaled only once his feet were back on something that did not move.
Rin'at broke tsaheylu and slid down first. He ran his hand along his ikran's neck ridge, not in praise or soothing, but only in contact, saying, We are still together. He checked the saddle lashings with quick fingers. Everything held.
Hìran climbed down behind him, careful not to scrape leather against the frame. He looked at the stone face and then at the branch scars, as if the place could speak its age.
Rin'at opened his pack and drew out a small bundle, not the rare targets they had flown for, but the common things that kept a body steady on long routes. He took a leaf, a thin stem, and some bark peel that tasted bitter but helped settle his stomach. He did not take much. He never did.
Seyri and Mok'tey waited until Rin'at's hands were already moving before they touched their packs. Their eyes stayed on him, not hungry, simply learning.
Rin'at stepped to a patch of growth that clung to a crack where stone met living wood. The plant was plain and simple to ignore if you did not know what it could do. Its leaves were narrow, with edges slightly serrated, and its scent was sharp when bruised, like clean sap.
He crouched and held one leaf between finger and thumb. He did not tear.
He showed Hìran the stem first. He pointed out the stem's angle. The way it rose from the root cluster was like a braided cord.
"Watch," he said.
Hìran came closer but stopped where Rin'at's shadow ended. He folded his hands together to keep from reaching.
Rin'at slid a small cutter from his kit and placed it against the stem, not at the base, but higher, where the plant could heal without losing its heart. He cut cleanly. No ragged pull. No ripping. He took only two leaves and a short length of stem, then pressed the remaining stem gently back into place, tucking it against the stone so wind would not worry it.
The plant stayed standing. It did not look wounded, only shortened.
Hìran's gaze stayed on Rin'at's fingers.
Rin'at held out the cut leaves and let Hìran smell them. The boy inhaled, then nodded as if the scent had found a new place in him.
"Not all taking is feeding," Rin'at said. "Sometimes it is keeping."
Hìran did not answer quickly. He looked back at the plant, then at Rin'at's kit. His tail tip moved once, then stilled.
Seyri stepped in after Rin'at moved aside. She mimicked his cut carefully, but her blade pressed too hard at first and made the stem bend.
Rin'at did not correct with words. He only touched the back of her wrist and eased her pressure down until the blade slid instead of crushed.
Seyri's ears dipped in acknowledgment. She finished the cut cleanly. She took less than she wanted.
Mok'tey gathered a different herb nearby, something broad-leafed that grew in a damp pocket under the branch. He harvested quickly, but he did not strip it bare. He left enough that the patch still looked alive, not erased.
Rin'at watched without hovering. Teaching was not chasing. It was showing the line once and then letting them find it.
When the small bundle was tied and stowed, Rin'at closed his pack and lifted his gaze outward. The forest below spread in layered green, heavy with morning moisture. In the distance, the tree line rose and fell with the land's slow bones, and beyond that, stone edges hinted at the plateau they would climb.
He turned to Hìran and checked the boy's harness again with a single tug and a flattening palm. The knot held. The tie lay quiet. Nothing would snag.
Rin'at stepped back toward his ikran. The route was long. The lake was far northeast. This perch was only the first mark.
He placed his hand on the ikran's neck ridge once more. The mount blinked slowly and leaned into the touch as if accepting the next stretch of sky.
Rin'at looked at the apprentices, then lifted his hand in a small forward motion.
Time.
They moved at once, packs tight, bodies aligned, and mounts settling under them as if the perch itself had only ever been a pause.
The climb did not announce itself with height. It announced itself with taste.
The air thinned in small steps as they rose, not empty, but cleaner, less leaf-heavy, and less wet. The wind stopped smelling like the village and began smelling like stone that had been warmed and cooled for longer than any songcord could hold.
Rin'at's ikran took the ascent lane without being urged. Her wings held a steady, practiced rhythm, and Rin'at let her have it. The route was in her muscles, in the tilt of her tail, and in the way she read liftoff ridges.
Hìran stayed quiet behind him. His knees held. His hands stayed on the frame, on bone, not on skin. His breath moved with the mount's, and that alone was a kind of respect.
Below, the trees changed. The crowns grew shorter and tighter. Gaps opened where stone pushed through like pale knuckles. The land's voice shifted.
Then, at the lip of the plateau, the air changed again.
Not colder. Not stronger. Different.
The wind had a sharp edge to it, as if it had scraped itself against stone before it touched their faces. It moved straighter. It did not curl and play the way forest wind did.
Rin'at felt his ikran react before he saw anything worth reacting to.
Her glide shortened. The easy float she usually took over this boundary did not happen. Her wings beat once, then again, climbing without being asked. The muscles along her neck gathered like a question held back.
The bond carried it to Rin'at's ribs as a quiet insistence.
Higher.
It was not fear. It was attention made sharp. A refusal to settle in a place that should have offered rest.
Rin'at did not scan for a shape to name. He listened through tsaheylu and tasted what his ikran tasted, a faint wrongness in the lane, like a familiar path walked by heavier feet.
Hìran felt Rin'at go still. The boy's spine straightened behind him, and his grip tightened for a heartbeat before he forced it loose. He did not ask. He waited for what the elder's body would say.
Seyri's ikran rose a half-body length without command. Seyri corrected immediately, lowering her shoulders, settling her hips, and trying to calm the mount through her steadiness. Mok'tey's spacing tightened by instinct, then he pulled it back, obeying the line Rin'at had set.
Rin'at lifted one hand and flattened his palm upward.
Higher.
No one questioned it. No one tried to glance past him for a reason they could point at. They adjusted as if the air had spoken and Rin'at had only translated.
"Higher," Rin'at said, voice kept low so it did not travel. "Keep the air clean."
Seyri nodded once, chin tucked. Mok'tey echoed the motion. Their ikran climbed, wings working harder than they should have needed to.
The plateau edge passed beneath them. Stone stretched out in broken shelves and pale ridges, and the forest behind began to feel like something already left.
Rin'at's ikran kept climbing. Not fast. Not fleeing. Refusing to sit where the wind wanted to hold them.
Rin'at let her.
And in the bond, that faint tightening remained, like a hand that would not release its grip even after the danger had not shown its face.
The ridge ahead was one Rin'at remembered without trying.
A long spine of stone cut through the plateau like a back rising from sleep. On its southern face, wind always leaned hard, and on its northern side, the air usually held warmer pockets where small things gathered. It had been a place with writing.
Last year, and the year before that, the stone had carried marks that did not belong to weather. Scrapes where talons had bitten. Scars where something heavy had landed too often. The sharp scent of a predator was strong enough to be recognized without being seen.
Rin'at tasted for it as they approached, letting the wind touch his tongue and the roof of his mouth.
Nothing.
Not peace. Not clean air. Absence where something should have lived.
His ikran glided closer, then lifted again, refusing the nearest lane.
Rin'at's eyes moved over the ridge line. Stone and lichen. Thin scrub in cracks. No fresh gouges. No pale streaks where old blood had dried. No scattered bones glittering in the open, as predators sometimes left it as a claim.
The surface of the place felt unnaturally smooth.
The land had teeth here. It was supposed to show them.
Mok'tey drifted closer on Rin'at's left, cautious enough not to crowd. He leaned forward in his saddle and looked down along the stone face as they passed.
"It is empty," he said, barely more than a breath.
Seyri's ears flicked back at the words. Her ikran's head turned slightly as if listening behind them, then forward again. Hìran stayed still, but Rin'at felt the boy's attention sharpen, the way it did when a lesson became something more than a lesson.
Rin'at kept his gaze on the ridge and answered without heat.
"It is taken."
The words did not carry anger. They carried placement, like a stone set in the middle of a trail.
Mok'tey swallowed and said nothing else. Seyri's mouth opened, then closed again. She held her questions inside her teeth.
Hìran stored the sentence like a bead on an empty cord. He did not know what it meant fully, but he understood it was not a story meant for the air.
They passed the ridge without lowering. Rin'at did not let his ikran take the easy lee-side pockets the way they usually did. He kept them higher, where the wind was colder and cleaner, where fewer scents gathered and lingered.
Below, the plateau rolled on, pale and uneven. The route continued northeast, familiar in shape but answering differently than it should have.
The plateau opened wider after the ridge, as if the land had finished narrowing them into its throat and decided to see what they would do with space.
Rin'at kept them high.
The lake was not waiting at the edge of stone. It lived far northeast, beyond folds of rock and long stretches of scrub and thin trees that clung where they could. Even from this height it was only a promise, a faint darker line where light changed and air held more moisture.
They set into the travel lane like a practiced line. Rin'at first. Seyri and Mok'tey were behind and apart, not close enough for wingwash to steal control, not far enough to be lost if the wind shifted. Hìran pressed to Rin'at's back, learning the shape of the route through the elder's steadiness.
Wind here was different from forest wind. It did not swirl with leaves. It ran clean along stone and rose where it struck ridges, forming invisible ladders. Rin'at let his ikran take those ladders without rushing. Climb when the air is offered. Rest when it smooths. Never fight what could be used.
He lifted two fingers and angled them slightly to the right.
Seyri corrected her line at once, sliding out of a current that would have pushed her too close to Rin'at's tail. Mok'tey mirrored her adjustment without being told, choosing the same safer pocket of air.
Rin'at watched their responses more than their faces. He watched how quickly their mounts settled after correction and how much their bodies spoke to the bond. A calm rider made a calm ikran. A rider full of wanting made a mount that searched for trouble.
When the lane steadied, Rin'at gave them something small to carry besides distance.
He pointed with his chin toward a pale seam in the stone below, where wind ran up from the south and lifted off the face like breath.
"Do not cross that seam low," he said. "The air breaks there."
Seyri's ears angled forward. Mok'tey nodded once. They did not answer with speech. Their mounts answered by holding the higher line Rin'at had chosen.
Hìran leaned forward slightly, eager to see what Rin'at meant. The movement tugged at the saddle balance.
Rin'at tapped the boy's forearm, quick and gentle.
Hìran froze, then eased back into place, eyes still fixed on the seam below. He learned without being shamed.
Rin'at kept the teaching light, the way you keep a flame when wind is uncertain.
He indicated a cluster of tall crowns ahead, isolated and darker than the scrub around them. A wind lane ran between those crowns and a low stone shelf.
"Do not take that gap if your ikran is tired," he said. "It looks open. It is narrow when the wind turns."
Seyri glanced at it, then away, committing it to memory. Mok'tey shifted his spacing a fraction wider, as if practicing the safer choice in advance.
The sun climbed higher. Light sharpened on stone and softened on sparse green. The air carried fewer insect voices than it should have, but Rin'at did not name it yet. Naming made things heavier. He let it sit in him as a quiet note, the way a hunter lets a scent sit before deciding what it means.
His ikran's wings beat steadily. She did not relax into long glides the way she would on a route that felt wholly safe. The bond did not press higher again, but it did not loosen either.
Rin'at kept them moving northeast, not chasing the lake, not hurrying toward answers, only holding the route with the patience of someone who had walked it many times and knew distance could not be forced.
They crossed into a stretch Rin'at expected to feel busy.
On the annual route, this was where grazers usually laid their paths in pale scratches through scrub and thin grass. You could read them from above: long lines that braided and separated, feeding lanes that widened near water pockets, then tightened again where stone forced bodies into single file. It was life making use of what it had.
Rin'at looked down and did not see the same writing.
Trails were there, but they bent early. They turned away from open shelves that should have been rich with growth. They cut across harder ground sooner than they needed to, as if something had pressed them out of their own hunger.
Not a stampede. Not panic. A shaping.
A long patch of plateau ahead carried a thinning in sound. Not silence, but a hollow place where the small buzz of insects usually stitched the air. The wind moved through it too cleanly.
His ikran's head turned slightly, not toward prey, not toward threat, but toward the emptiness itself, listening for what it meant.
Behind and to the right, Seyri's ikran held altitude without being guided into it, refusing to drop into a lower lane that would have been easy. Mok'tey's mount angled its eyes backward for a heartbeat, then forward again. Neither apprentice spoke. Their bodies stayed disciplined, but Rin'at felt their attention sharpen around the same wrong quiet.
He touched his songcord once, not as a prayer. As a marker.
A bead under his fingers. A memory of this route the way it should feel. A quiet line drawn between then and now.
Hìran noticed the motion immediately. The boy's gaze flicked to Rin'at's hand, then to the cord, then away, as if looking too long might be disrespectful. But Rin'at felt the thought settle behind him. Hìran did not know the bead's meaning, but he understood it had meaning.
Rin'at did not explain. The air was not a place for long speech. Teaching here was done in signs and kept breaths.
He lifted two fingers and made a slight circling motion, slow.
Hold the lane. Do not drop. Do not hurry.
Seyri mirrored the steadying with her shoulders. Mok'tey widened his spacing a fraction, giving his mount cleaner air.
The plateau rolled beneath them, pale stone ribs breaking through scattered growth. A shallow depression passed below that should have shown darker patches of feeding. It did not. The ground looked used and then avoided, as if the land had learned where not to invite mouths.
Rin'at stayed high, letting distance do what it always did.
The patterns were wrong, but they were consistent.
That was what made them heavier.
The wind carried them over a patch of growth that would have fed a camp without effort.
From above, it looked like a soft spill of green against stone, thicker than the scrub around it, with leaves catching light on broad faces. The kind of place you remembered when your mouth was dry and your hands were empty.
Hìran saw it and forgot himself for half a heartbeat.
His weight shifted forward, eager, his hips tightening as if wanting to pull an ikran down. The movement was small, but the saddle felt it. The ikran felt it too, a ripple through her back that made her wings adjust to hold the lane.
Rin'at did not turn his head. He did not speak sharply. He reached back and tapped Hìran's forearm once, then held his fingers there long enough for the boy to feel the steadiness in them.
"Let need guide your weight," Rin'at said.
Hìran froze, ears dipping as heat rushed up his neck. Shame tried to rise, quick and bright. Rin'at did not feed it. He did not add to it.
Hìran breathed in, then out, slower. He drew his hips back into alignment. His knees tightened in the right place. His hands relaxed on the frame. The wanting did not vanish, but it was put away.
Below, the green patch slid past.
Seyri glanced at it too. Rin'at saw her shoulders lift with the same thought, the same quiet calculation. She held her body where it needed to be. Mok'tey did not look down for long at all. His attention stayed on Rin'at's line, on spacing, on the air.
Rin'at kept them moving. Landing because something looked rich was how you made yourself predictable.
The lane ahead looked open.
From this height the plateau stretched in pale shelves and low ridges, broken by sparse crowns that cast short shadows. Nothing rose to meet them. No cliff face forced a turn. No sudden updraft demanded skill. It should have been the easiest part of the line.
Rin'at felt, instead, the sense of something used.
Not in the way feet use a trail. In the way air uses air.
The wind ran straighter here, as if it had learned a favored path and kept returning to it. Below, the land answered that path. Small creatures held to cover. Grazers kept to the edges of growth instead of spilling into it. Even insects, where they should have thickened in warmth, seemed to keep their noise lower, stitched tighter to the ground.
Rin'at's ikran did not glide. She held a working flight, steady beats that kept height without drifting down into the smoother pocket. Through tsaheylu, Rin'at felt her attention narrow, focusing on the space ahead as if waiting for it to explain itself.
He lifted his hand and flattened his palm, pressing it downward, then holding it there.
Hold height.
Seyri obeyed immediately, her mount rising half a body length to match. Mok'tey adjusted too, widening his spacing and keeping his ikran's wings level, as if any sudden motion would be heard.
Hìran leaned close to Rin'at's back, careful not to change balance. His voice, when it came, was barely a breath.
"The air is watched."
Rin'at kept his gaze forward and answered with the same quiet.
"Yes. So we do not make it louder."
They continued northeast in a disciplined line, wings cutting through a corridor that felt combed smooth by something larger than their own passage.
They held their height and let the wind carry them northeast, quieter than their own wingbeats.