The Boy Who Bends the Sky
The bell of Skyreach tolls seven times before dawn ever fully arrives, its bronze voice rolling out across the terraces and catwalks in a sound that seems to come from the clouds themselves rather than the tower that houses it. Kaelan wakes to the fourth toll, as he always does, tangled in a blanket too thin for the altitude and too patched to keep out the chill that seeps up through the floorboards of his rented loft above the courier stables.
He lies still for a moment, listening.
The wind moves differently up here than it does lower in the citadel—thinner, sharper, carrying with it the mineral tang of the windstones that keep Skyreach aloft. Somewhere below, gears groan as the great suspension rings shift their alignment, correcting for the drift of the night. Kaelan has grown up to that sound the way other children grow up to lullabies. It is, in its own indifferent way, the only thing that has never abandoned him.
He rises, dresses in the gray-and-brown of the courier guild, and does not look in the cracked shard of mirror nailed above his washbasin. He knows what he'll find there: an unremarkable face, sixteen years worn thin, dark hair that refuses combing, eyes a shade…
