The ashes were still warm.
They drifted upward on the morning breeze — fine and dark, like the remnants of something that had once been made of light. Lina stood alone in the centre of the town square long after the crowd had gone, watching the last of them dissolve into the air.
Papa.
She pressed her fingers to her sternum, as though she could hold the grief in place if she pushed hard enough. It didn't work. It never did.
Eventually, she wiped her face and went home.
She found them on the front steps.
Alice and Nina had made it back before her, but not much farther. They sat slumped against each other at the entrance — Nina's head tipped back against the doorframe, Alice's cheek resting on Nina's shoulder, both of them asleep in the boneless way that only exhaustion produces. Like their bodies had simply given out mid-motion and refused to negotiate.
Lina stopped at the bottom of the stairs.
She looked at her mother.
In sleep, Alice looked peaceful. Younger, somehow. The tension that had lived in her face all day had finally let go — the tight brow, the pressed lips, the eyes that had been red and searching for hours. Now she was just still. A tear had dried on her cheek, leaving a faint salt track that caught the early light.
Three months.
The thought arrived unbidden and settled heavily in Lina's chest.
Nina opened her eyes. They were dry — she had either run out of tears or decided she couldn't afford them anymore.
"She has about three months left." Nina's voice came quietly from the stairs — not asleep after all, just still, eyes closed, speaking to the air. "Then she'll leave us, too."
Lina didn't answer immediately. She kept looking at her mother's face, memorising it the way she hadn't thought to memorise her father's.
"That's what scares me most," she said finally.
"Nothing can save us, Lina. You know that."
Lina said nothing. She went inside.
The house felt different without Joseph in it. Not empty, exactly — but lighter in the wrong way, the way a room feels when something heavy has been removed and you only notice its absence by how wrong the space looks without it.
She went to her parents' room.
His side of the bed was still made. His coat hung on the hook by the door. A cup he'd been drinking from the night before sat on the small table, still half full.
She stood in the doorway and let the silence press against her.
Fly as high as you can.
His voice in her memory was so clear she almost turned around, expecting to find him there. She didn't, of course. She stood with her hand on the doorframe until something shifted inside her — the sorrow didn't leave, but something else moved through it. Something with edges.
Purpose has a way of doing that.
She turned and ran back to the stairs.
"Lina—what are you doing—"
She had her arms under Alice before her mother was fully awake, pulling her upright, moving with the focused energy of someone who has just made a decision and isn't slowing down to examine it.
SNAP!
Her wings unfurled. Black feathers spread wide in the narrow entrance space, one of them knocking against the doorframe, and then she was lifting — pulling her mother with her, rising off the steps into open air.
"LINA!" Nina scrambled to her feet.
SNAP!
Her own wings erupted — broad and pale, the ash-grey spread of a vulture, powerful and wide. She shot upward and curved directly into Lina's path, hovering there like a wall.
"Stop." Nina's voice was flat with alarm. "What are you doing?"
Lina banked left.
Nina cut her off again.
"Lina."
"The Stone of Warkuron." The words came out fast, breathless, tumbling over each other. "Father mentioned it once — it concentrates healing mana, more than anything else in the world. If we could reach it, if we could find it, it might be able to—it could cure her—"
"Put me down. It is just a story that was made by your father." Alice's voice was quiet.
"Mama—"
"Lina. Put me down."
Something in her mother's tone — not anger, something gentler and more absolute — cut through the momentum. Lina descended slowly, landing on the street below the steps, and set her mother on her feet.
Alice steadied herself. Smoothed her clothes. Then she looked at her daughter with an expression that was somehow both heartbroken and completely calm.
"I want to go peacefully," she said. "That's all I want. To have these three months and to spend them properly. With you. With Nina. In this house."
"Mother, please." Lina's voice cracked. "Come with me. We could try — we could at least—"
"Listen to me." Alice took her face in both hands. "There are very few families left in our race. The single grace we are shown — the single mercy Lord Krioxious has offered — is the right to die at home instead of in a cell. If the Order discovers we've fled the town boundaries, they will take me." Her thumbs brushed Lina's cheeks, catching the tears before they fell. "I will spend whatever time remains in prison, transforming alone, away from you. Is that what you want for me?"
Lina couldn't speak.
Nina landed beside them. She folded her wings back slowly, watching her sister. When she spoke, her voice was quiet but steady. "She's right. Any hope of a cure is a story we tell ourselves because the truth is unbearable. I understand why you want to believe it. I do too." A pause. "But running gets her killed faster."
The fight went out of Lina like air from a punctured thing. She stood there in the street with her wings still half-spread, looking at her mother, and felt twelve years old in the worst possible way.
Alice pulled her into an embrace.
"My brave one," she murmured into Lina's hair. The same words Joseph had used. She must have heard him say it a hundred times. "I have one wish left. One real wish." She pulled back to look at her daughter's face — both of her daughters now, pulling Nina close with her other arm. "I want to see you married. Both of you. I want to know that our family will continue. That our blood won't disappear from this world when I'm gone."
The morning light fell over the three of them in the quiet, floating rocks.
Lina looked at her mother's face — the peace in it, and the love, and underneath both of those things, the exhaustion of someone who has been brave for a very long time and is ready to rest.
Fly as high as you can.
Alice looked at her daughter's face for a long moment.
Then something shifted in her eyes — not sorrow, not resignation. Something older and fiercer, a thing Lina hadn't seen there before. Or maybe she had, and hadn't recognised it until now because she'd only ever seen it in her father.
A slow smile broke across Alice's face.
"Ha." It came out soft, almost a laugh. "I almost forgot." She reached up and touched Lina's jaw — studying her, the way you study a painting you've walked past a hundred times and are only now truly seeing. "You are exactly like him. He's living right inside you."
Lina didn't answer. She just held her mother's gaze and didn't look away.
"Mama, what are you saying?" Nina's voice pitched upward with alarm. "You can't seriously be—"
"My last wish has changed," Alice said it simply, the way someone states a fact they've known for a long time and are only now saying aloud. She looked at Nina, then back at Lina. "I don't want to die peacefully anymore. I want to watch you grow. I want to see you both happy."
A beat of silence.
Then — SNAP!
Alice's wings erupted from her back. Not crow's wings, not vulture's wings — something softer, wider, the pale silver-white of a bird that flies high and doesn't come down. She caught the air and rose.
Lina was already moving. Her black wings spread, and she shot upward beside her mother, and for the first time since morning, there was something in her chest that felt like lightness.
"Mama!" Nina stared up at them from the steps, hands on her head. "Stop — where do you think you're going?!"
Alice turned in the air and looked down at her eldest daughter with an expression of complete serenity. "Wherever my daughters advise me."
"Don't talk like Papa." Nina pointed at her. "The Stone of Warkuron isn't even confirmed to be real — and on the chance that it is, you know what lives on that land? Dragons. You want to walk into dragon territory?"
Alice tilted her head, genuinely considering this. "And what exactly is the difference between a dragon and one of us?" She gestured at her own wings. "We both fly. We are not so different."
"That is not the same thing, and you know it—"
"Nina." Lina dropped back down and grabbed her sister's hand, grinning — actually grinning, the first real one in what felt like days. "Come on."
Nina looked at her. Looked up at their mother drifting lazily overhead like she had nowhere urgent to be and all the time in the world. Looked back at Lina.
"I hate both of you," she said, with great feeling.
Her ash-grey vulture wings spread wide, and she launched herself into the sky with the resigned fury of someone who has already lost the argument and knows it.
They flew together above the rooftops of Flora Town — three sets of wings cutting through the emerald-tinged morning air, the capital's crystal spire glinting in the distance. Laughter found them somewhere above the second tier of floating islands, unexpected and unstoppable, the kind that comes from nowhere and takes a moment before you realise what it is.
It was the first time Lina had heard her mother laugh since yesterday.
She didn't say anything. She just flew closer and matched her mother's altitude, and let it fill the space where grief had been sitting.
Then Nina went quiet mid-flight.
"What are those?"
Lina looked up.
They were everywhere — drifting downward through the upper currents like slow, luminous snow. Light particles. Each one was smaller than a fingertip, softly glowing, moving with purpose even though there was no wind to carry them. They drifted between the three of them, around them, with them — as though they had been waiting up in the high air and had come down to fly alongside.
The three of them hovered in silence, watching.
"What are they?" Nina whispered.
Alice didn't answer immediately. She reached out one hand, and a particle drifted toward her palm and hovered there — not landing, just near, the way a familiar thing comes close when called.
"I think it's your father," she said softly.
The words settled over them like the particles themselves — gentle, warm, impossible to argue with.
Am I right, Joseph? Alice thought. Not out loud, not quite a prayer — something between the two, the kind of conversation that doesn't need a voice. I'm flying with our daughters. Look at them. We'll reach beyond the sky, the three of us. I promise.
One particle drifted upward.
Slowly, with something like deliberateness, it rose — and then dipped — and rose again.
A nod.
Alice closed her hand softly around the air where it had been, and smiled with her whole face, and flew onward into the morning with her daughters on either side of her.