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J ai dangled his feet from the high peak of the mountain, watching the currents of mana as they wafted from the grasslands beyond.

More than a week had passed, and he was beginning to worry he had left his tribe too long. By now, the Kidara had left their camp in the lee of the mountain, and had begun, as instructed, to make a slow journey east, along its edge. He could still make out their fires, just a stain on the horizon, and only the knowledge that he could fly there on Winter’s back gave him comfort.

Jai knew he might reach them in half a day, attend to his affairs and return. But to come back riteless, after the ceremony of his leaving, would be seen as weakness.

He knew there were risks. Never before had Tainted and untainted tribes been merged together, and these old rivalries could well lead to infighting in his absence. So too did he know that the other Great Tribes might sense weakness and hunt them, if Teji did not raise an army of mercenaries first. And that was forgetting the legion and the Gryphon Guard that marched the Great Steppe.

Jai knew he should be seeking a wild khiro, perhaps an Alkhara, to return to his people. Or an enemy to face, perhaps one of the legion’s scouting parties. Yet he knew what he did here served the greater good for his tribe. For without the Caelite to defend the Great Steppe’s skies – this war was already lost.

He was sure of it.

Every day he rolled the dice. But there was still so much to learn here.

He had settled into a routine of sorts. Training in Talvir into the early hours, perfecting his form beneath the lights under the watchful eye of Eko.

Jai had learned plenty from Kiran in the past, who in turn had learned from Zayn. But the teachings here were on another level.

He was taught to infuse his very footwork with mana, let alone his blows and parries. To use majicking in his battle, limited though it was to the kinesis spell in practice, lest they kill their opponents.

It was a difficult thing to cast and fence at the same time, no less because the falx was a two-handed weapon. But he was becoming adept at snatching away a free hand, be that in attack or to absorb the spell of another with a shield spell of his own, the kinetic energy blunted in a hollow of his ethereal light.

Sleep was hardly needed, for it could easily be staved off with mana, alongside his hunger. The limitless font at the mountain’s zenith cured all ills, all wants. And it bought him the time he needed to take full advantage of this place.

So, when the sun’s rays first bathed the mountainside, Jai would soulbreathe through the day, and work on the task as the Speaker had instructed. Now, in his trance, Jai let his mind’s eye wander.

To follow the currents of mana where they willed, exploring his line of sight, leaving his core, his soul, behind. Travelling beyond his physical form, tracing the eddies as they billowed into the endless sky.

From his vantage, Jai could see the entire grassland spread out beneath him. And amid the gold falling into the sky, he looked for the paler, whiter motes, using every bit of the gift of his soulbound sight.

So too did Winter search, scouring the cliffs and mountain streams for spirals and natural shapes. In this, the soulwalking was most useful, for she could go where he could not, and he could etch the patterns from memory.

They sought where the life produced a filtered form of mana. Where the motes were thick, and white, and bright. And if he spotted some, somewhere within the swirling sea of rising mana...

There. It was so faint, he had to stare for a full minute before he was sure. But there it was. A rising, paler, globular drop of mana, drifting up from the ground amid the golden mist. He had seen it once, too high to figure its location.

Jai called out to Winter within, summoning her with a thought. She came swiftly, for she took any excuse to race to him, cutting and soaring through the ravines below.

‘Flying again?’ Erica asked.

Jai looked behind him to find Erica grinning at him, arms crossed.

‘Jealous?’ Jai asked.

She chuckled drily, but he could see he’d touched a nerve.

‘Regin will come around. Seems he’s a little distracted of late.’

Jai grinned. When Winter was not flying him on their excursions, she was courting Regin. Following him with dogged abandon, getting plenty of exercise as he tacitly avoided her flybys, hiding within the depths of the mountain.

Sometimes, Jai thought he could learn something from his erstwhile dragon, for Erica had thrown herself into her own training with the same abandon he had, exchanging only pleasantries and advice in a businesslike fashion.

Today, it seemed, was different. She hesitated, and Jai was surprised to realise she appeared almost... self-conscious.

‘Let me come with you,’ she blurted.

Jai looked at her, amazed.

‘You sure?’ Jai asked. ‘I don’t have a saddle.’

She scoffed.

‘The Dansk have been riding bareback for centuries. But don’t worry, the Caelite have saddle makers of all kinds in their flock. I’ve taken the liberty of requesting one made for the both of us.’

‘You can do that?’ Jai asked.

Erica grinned.

‘Just because there’s no speaking here doesn’t mean you can’t ask for things, Jai.’

Jai rolled his eyes. The speaking rule was grating on him, not least because it limited his and Erica’s discussions to the training arena, or a more remote part of the mountain where they were now.

It was a strange rule, one that sought to still wagging tongues, and turn the focus of their energies inwards on their progress down the path. He felt good flaunting the Caelite’s rules as they were now, though he did not relish the thought of a night spent in the snow or a beating in the arena, the punishments for breaking them.

‘Their gallipot prepares pills, powders, tinctures and all kinds of things down there too, you know,’ she said. ‘Not that they have much need of them, with mana so plentiful. Mind you, it is only for the Caelite but—’

Winter’s arrival brooked further discussion, snatching away the last of Erica’s words with a last flap of her wings. She knelt a foreleg, waiting for Jai to mount her back.

‘Can she handle two?’ Jai asked, pressing his heels tight to Winter’s sides, his groin sandwiched awkwardly between her spikes.

‘Ask her,’ Erica chuckled.

Winter’s enthusiastic yawp as Erica leaped fluidly behind him was answer enough. He felt her arms wrap around his belly, and the softness of her breasts against his back, separated by but a thin layer of cloth.

Jai didn’t have time to get in another word, one minute revelling in Erica’s closeness, the next his stomach plummeted as Winter hurled them out into the vast sky.

For a few moments, Jai was focused only upon the grip of his hands on the horns at her neck, the padding he’d stuffed down his shirt resting upon the blunt spine beneath.

Then, as his balance set, and his heels found their grip against Winter’s sides, he was awash with the joys of flight, revelling in the wind that blew cold through his hair, the sights of a world rendered simultaneously in miniature and larger than it had ever been before.

Erica whooped behind him, her laughter infectious as Winter set her wings, spurred to greater speeds. They were making a beeline for where Jai had seen the pale mana, and he was amazed at Winter’s ability to navigate the enormity of the expanse beneath.

She used senses he could not understand, ones that if she sent them to him, no matter how close he’d drawn their cores together in his mind’s eye, all that came through was a gibberish that gave him a headache.

So it was with unnerving accuracy that she alighted in the exact spot he had noticed, letting Jai topple off her back, shaking the memory of the tight rictus that had been his legs for the last few minutes. That saddle could not come soon enough, Dansk tradition be damned.

‘You should do this more,’ Jai said. ‘There are more patterns than just the fossils in the rock.’

Erica scoffed. Long had they debated this point, but in truth Erica had little choice, for Regin had no interest in seeking spirals in the grasslands, rivers, ice and streams. She had taken Jai to find those ancient corals in the rock face of the Caelite’s lair. They had even visited the mushroom fields below, borrowing the strange furling spirals of the fungal flowers.

‘The ones in the caves are the self-same ones used to create the source,’ Erica said. ‘If they did for the ancient Caelite, they will do for me.’

Jai shrugged and drew his blade, using it to push aside the grass before delving between its blades, seeking out the source of purified mana.

It did not take him long to find it. A succulent plant, its juicy leaves curling in a fractal spiral, surviving amid the tall grasses like moss in a dark forest.

Jai closed his eyes, burning the shape into his memory. His core, by now, had been slowly reshaped into a pearly sphere, its surface scored with the patterns Jai had found already. With focus, and a hefty plug of mana, the lines formed, glowing and then fading as they raised upon its surface, the last section of the core’s shell covered.

It was here, in his homeland, that he sought to find the shapes that would take him to the next level of the soulbound path. Already, he had covered much of it in what the Speaker called the fingerprints of the gods.

There were a wide range of choices. A burst of twirling petals here, the splitting of a leaf’s veins there. The spiral in a snail’s shell, the seed pattern of a sunflower, growing alone on the fringes of a distant oasis. Whereas Erica sought uniformity in her designs, copying the same coral spirals over and over, Jai sought diversity of every kind. According to the Speaker, both strategies were sound – though he was, as ever, cryptic about what came next.

Certainly, Jai’s core’s stored mana was becoming purer, with every stroke of his mental chisel. But there was more to it than that, Erica said. Though even she had little idea of what came next either.

When every bit of his core’s surface was covered, he would be deemed a sixth-level soulbound. Then, and only then, would he be allowed to attempt the final test before he was welcomed as a true member of the Caelite sect, and all the privileges that wrought.

The pattern now seared into his core, Jai smiled with satisfaction. That was the last he needed. A sixth-level soulbound, finally.

If only the seventh was so easy. Jai knew it was considered by many as a second ascension, for it worked in much the same way. He would fill his core to the brim, and keep going. Pressure his core until it blossomed into a new shape. Erica had been trying for weeks, but she couldn’t bear the pain.

Jai straightened, looking back at Erica now. She smiled at him, and he plucked the succulent from its place, holding it out to her like a bouquet with a courtly bow.

‘Go on,’ Jai said. ‘Just one plant etching.’

She smiled at him, shaking her head, and Jai felt his heart twist at the sheer beauty of her, wild hair tossing in the wind, the low sun setting her fair eyelashes aglow.

Erica took the proffered plant with half-rolled eyes, but to Jai’s surprise, then gave a coquettish curtsy.

‘Why, thank you, my prince,’ she said, her voice singsong, an imitation of the bardic romances performed in drinking houses the world over.

‘Actually, it’s khan.’ Jai winked. ‘I outrank you.’

She laughed aloud. It was a perfect moment, their gazes holding without the urge to flick away, cheeks rouged by the wind’s bite, yet warmed by the sun’s last rays in that heady, spring evening.

Then her eyes narrowed, her head turned to the side and Jai followed her gaze, confused. It took a moment for him to catch it, seeking the line of Winter’s nose as she stared at the same.

Dark, winged forms in the distant sky, arranged in the shape of a V. Heading west, angling away from the line of the mountain.

‘The Caelite are on the move,’ she breathed. ‘Almost all of the fully fledged members, a dozen at least.’

Jai stared, at first in fascination, then slow realisation.

‘What business have they to the west?’ Jai asked. ‘Surely only the Dansk, and the Sabines lie that way.’

Erica’s lips tightened, before leaping back onto Winter, her eyes turned to the skies.

‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Before we lose them.’