The wind above Draymar Valley had teeth. Sharp little bastards. They pierced through his armor, through his flesh, nearly down to the bone. Even his feathers had chills, and it wasn’t even full winter yet.

Talon Veyr cut through the sky, his large black wings spread wide. They weren’t as strong as they used to be, having aged right long with the rest of him. It hadn’t been the years so much as the abuse of war and the way he took every defeat as a personal referendum. Everything about flight was work now. The steady beat that kept him aloft, the constant scan of the wasteland below, the way his body automatically adjusted for crosswinds without his mind ever leaving the hollow space where hope used to live.

Below him, the desert sprawled in its usual silence, desolate and unforgiving, imposing the constant reminder that what he was looking for might already be dead.

But he kept looking anyway. Because the alternative was admitting that three days of searching had led exactly nowhere, and that the girl with emerald eyes who had somehow slipped past every wall he had built around his heart was gone. Really, truly, inexorably gone.

The rational part of his mind, the part trained by years of tactical assessment and loss management, had already reached that conclusion. It was the other part, the part that remembered her laugh and the way she had called him Captain like it was both joke and benediction, that kept his wings beating against the thin air.

Even the burrowers had abandoned this stretch of the Fold, which really should have told him all he needed to know. Animals possessed an honesty about futility that humans had lost somewhere between civilization and its collapse. The grama grass below was brittle and brown, suggesting the earth had given up trying. No banners flew here anymore, because there was nothing left worth claiming.

It had become the perfect place to disappear.

The early winter sun, now well into its journey towards the horizon, offered light without warmth. It stretched cactus-shaped shadows across the barren land, those shadows growing longer and more distorted with each passing minute. The light revealed everything and offered nothing.

His blood was boiling and freezing, which made perfect sense when rage and grief were trying to occupy the same space. The heat came from knowing this was his fault. The cold came from three days of flying in circles and coming no closer to fixing it.

Three days since he had failed her. Three days since he had proven that all his training, all his oaths, all his desperate need to protect meant precisely nothing when it mattered most.

He pushed through the dusk because stopping meant thinking, and thinking meant remembering. The way she had touched his hand like it was a precious thing, despite the stains of too much necessary blood. The ache in his left wing, a souvenir from a Dominion pulse rifle that had found its mark ten years back, deepened with each mile. His body was reminding him that he wasn’t the guardian he used to be. Too many breaks, too many burns, held together by stubborn will and spite. A kind of spite that kept dead men walking.

The Fold stretched before him, a nasty scar across the face of an ugly world. It took a lot to resist the urge to dive straight down and let the ground decide whether he deserved to survive this failure. He had spent most of his life defending things, believing in things, swearing oaths to things. First to ideals, then to people, finally to one small girl who had somehow made him remember why any of it had ever mattered.

The Skyguard were meant to be guardians.

Wings sworn to the sky, bastions against chaos, shields raised to tyranny. It was an honor he had chosen, without hesitation. It was a life that endured everything that freedom costs. He had buried so many friends. Brothers. And he still whispered their names to the wind during the long watches between midnight and dawn.

But somewhere along the way, between duty and devotion, between serving a lost cause and serving the girl who had smiled at his bad jokes, his foundation had shifted. The war could wait. The greater good could survive one more day. She was what mattered right now, and she was gone.

And he was flying in circles above Draymar Valley like his will power and desperation could manifest the desire of his broken heart.

He hadn’t slept since the twisted tree. Well, maybe he had stolen a minute here or five there, whenever exhaustion managed to overpower the guilt. But it hadn’t been the restful kind of sleep that soothes the mind. It always ended the same way, with a jolt that would wake him to twitching wings, sweaty skin, and a hammering heart like he had just fallen from the clouds. Then he would feel even worse for losing those valuable seconds.

He knew how to carry the burden of losing a fellow soldier. There was grief in that, absolutely, but this… this was far messier. This was making him question whether he had ever understood what he was fighting for in the first place.

He had spent years defending the Fold, the Withered Glade, and everywhere in between. Its people, its sovereignty… hell, its dignity. Whatever remained worth protecting after the world had spent so much time eating itself alive. The Skyguard oaths weren’t just words written with quill and ink on some ancient parchment, some pomp and circumstance steeped in tradition. They truly mattered. Well, they had mattered.

Sentinels sworn to peace. Defenders of the good. Wings against the Dominion.

Pretty words that looked impressive on banners and sounded noble in speeches. But when it came down to one girl trusting him to keep her safe, all that honor hadn’t been worth a god damn.

His hand moved instinctively toward a leather pouch at his side which contained a small charm. It was bound with vine-thread, soft and worn. He didn’t need to look at it, just feel it with his fingertips to make sure it was still there. It was hers.

Behind him, five men were flying in formation, maintaining the disciplined silence of soldiers who knew how to survive. They were his men, the only ones left. They would follow him anywhere. He knew they would, because they had. And today they followed him here, to this god forsaken desert that felt like a coma. To help him search. To help him hope. And, though none of them would dare say it aloud, to help him grieve.

There once had been hundreds. Skyguard warriors born with wings, sanctified by oaths, devoted to standing between innocent people and whatever kept trying to break them. When the real fighting started, it was the Skyguard who answered first.

Talon had risen through their ranks not because of politics or favoritism, but through sheer refusal to fall. Excellence at war, it turned out, carried its own curse. It meant living long enough to watch everyone else die. Not in glory, not with sonnets written in their honor, but in silence. Cut down by machines, and monsters, and weapons that honor could not deflect.

Wings and blades could hardly hold their own against rockets and plasma cannons.

Now only six of them remained. The final torch of a hope, flickering in wind that seemed determined to snuff it out completely. Soon they would pass from reality into memory, from memory into myth, from myth into nothing.

He should have been mourning that. The death of an order, the fading of ideals that had shaped his entire life.

Instead, all he could think about was Kaela.

Her name was a self-inflicted wound.

But it had also reignited the fire in his soul.

Despite the exhaustion and the hunger and the guilt and the self-loathing, it was her name that was pushing him forward. Strengthening his resolve. Fueling the need to reclaim a world where small girls could pick flowers without wondering if today was the day monsters came for them.

“Steady,” he called over the comm channel. Voice clipped, controlled, carrying just enough authority to hold the line.

The five Skyguard flanking him were weathered by years of impossible service, yet they somehow remained focused on the mission. War had taught them that survival meant finding a balance between hope and realism. Caring enough to fight, but not so much that it killed you.

That balance felt impossible now.

“Drel veken shar ai’lor.”

The words drifted across the channel, beautiful and melodic, as if they were whispered by the wind itself. An old Skyguard blessing. A vow of hope and flight. Peaceful, inspiring.

And completely, unquestionably forbidden.

“You know that tongue is outlawed,” Talon said. Not harshly. Just tired regret.

Soryn Thalor closed the gap between himself and his captain. Lean, weathered, with wings the color of midnight, and a beard as grey as ash. His expression was calm, but Talon could see the tension in his eyes. The same tension they all carried now.

“No one’s monitoring this channel, Captain,” Soryn sighed quietly. “Thought the prayer might keep the sky on our side.”

Talon cut him a look. “Let’s not give Tyrillon an excuse to burn what’s left.”

Soryn adjusted his position in the current, compensating for some unexpected turbulence. He let the weight of Talon’s words settle. Then, less in rebellion and more in devoted persistence, he whispered:

“Drel veken shar ai’lor. The sky will finish what we began.”

Talon looked over at him, and this time, just gave a slight, reverent nod. Tyrillon was the least of his worries right now, and his second-in-command knew that. Besides, how could he be upset with a prayer, especially when at that moment, the sky answered it.

“Captain,” Soryn called out. “Do you see that?”

He did see it. A thin line curling upward into the sky like ink dissolving in water. Smoke. Wispy, thin, the color of charcoal. The kind a campfire might leave behind.

On any other day, in any other place, it wouldn’t have meant much. But here, this deep in the Fold where nothing was supposed to live, it meant something. And they both knew it.

“If that’s a campsite, it could be Dask!” Soryn’s voice was alive with tempered excitement.

Talon didn’t respond immediately. His speed increased, and the others followed without question. His eyes narrowed, tracking the smoke as it rose in soft spirals along the edge of the mountain range.

On another day, he might have expected Elrathi hunters tracking ghosts of prey that had died out years ago. Or perhaps Ilhari nomads lost in one of their rituals, murmuring to gods that had stopped listening shortly after the world went to hell.

But this wasn’t another day. And it wasn’t either of those things. His gut knew it even before his mind caught up.

His lips curled into a satisfied smile. “Syndicate.”

Exactly what they were looking for.

At his silent signal, the formation shifted. Wings angled, bodies dipped low, and the Skyguard began to spread out in separate arcs around the ridge. They moved with stealth, circling wide and slow, slipping beneath thermals and behind fractured rock until they could peer down into the clearing below.

“There,” Talon hissed, pointing. “Along the far side. See the carriers?”

“That’s Syndicate, alright,” Soryn confirmed with a grim nod. “No doubt.”

“And the cages.”

“Gods…”

They watched in silence as the reality of what they had found settled into their bones. Below them, trucks idled in a crude half-circle, their old diesel engines rumbling eeriely. Moving between them were figures, mostly men, sweaty and dirty and unshaven. Most had knives strapped to their waists. To an untrained eye, they might have been fur trappers, or a crudely trained militia.

But Talon knew better. This is what humanity had become in the places where law and hope had died together. Leeches feeding on the ruins, selling children to anyone with enough coin to mute their conscience. Monsters who wore casual cruelty like a uniform.

Behind the trucks, makeshift tents stirred in the wind. Somewhere in the distance, a child cried.

“They’re trading tonight,” Talon said, voice tight with rising fury.

“You think she’s down there?”

“I hope so.”

He leaned forward just enough to see the face of a small girl behind the bars of the nearest cage. Not Kaela. But still, a child with a mother or a father or a brother whose heart was breaking with the tragedy of loss.

“If she’s not?”

Talon’s hand closed around the hilt at his side.

“Then I’ll kill every last one of them anyway.”

Soryn shifted beside him, eyes never leaving the camp. “What’s the order, Captain?”

Talon opened his mouth to answer, but then came a sound from above stopped him. A low, rising hum that didn’t belong in the still air, deep enough to rattle bones and louder than any wind. Sharp, unnatural, and inherently sinister.

The Skyguard turned as one, gazes snapping eastward.

And there it was.

An aircraft floating across the horizon, sleek and predatory, moving slow enough to allow terror to precede it. Twin discs pulsed beneath its frame, bands of violet light rotating within them, generating the lift that kept it hovering above the desert floor.

The first thing Talon noticed was that it had no visible weapons. This wasn’t a ship built for war.

It was built for cargo.

But it wasn’t the ship’s effortless flight or its sleek design that made his jaw drop. It was the seal burned into its hull, clear and unmistakable even from this distance.

Tyrillon’s crest. The mark of the Crown.

This was a Dominion ship.

And it was headed straight for the slavers’ camp.