The pictures Amina had painted in her head of this night were far more interesting than reality. So far, despite the unceasing stare she had trained on the grey horizon, she hadn't managed to will them into existence, no matter how hard her imagination fought.

It had sounded so impressive in her head: taking her watch amid the natural elements, standing vigil, alone with only the wind and the dust and quiet prayer to accompany her. Zephyrine's ecstatic agreement had only bolstered the grandiose idea. She was a legend, and it was only right that a legend should spend the most important night of her life up high, close to the star-cast sky, where divine whispers of her god's many voices might beckon at her ears. It would grant her luck. It would bestow her with many blessings.

Yet it was also cold and gloomy, and the winds were annoyingly quiet. The hours dragged on and left her alone.

She huffed out a long, bored sigh and sagged against the railing. The sleek metallic curve of it was like reflective ice, biting into her bare forearms, but she'd long since condemned herself to slowly freezing into a coma. Her fingers were numb and barely moved at her command. Still she watched on, gaze piercing the unchanged mounds of sand, lungs fragile and spiky as they were shredded by every tentative breath. Her complaints bunched up at the back of her mind, heavier weights when she had no-one to speak them to.

It's a vigil, she could hear Isra saying in response, arms folded, words scathing and unsympathetic. It's a sacrificial endeavour built on faith. It's not supposed to be enjoyable.

She didn't know what Zephyrine would say. Her new mentor was much harder to predict.

She drew in a painful breath and filled the stale silence with her own words instead. "It'll be worth it," she murmured, wrapping the promise around herself like a ribbon, a binding thread, a cloak out of which to eke some small amount of phantom warmth from. "Soon." It'll all be worth it.

'Soon' felt like a lie given how marathonically endless the night ahead seemed, but she clung to it all the same. When morning came, so would her trial, and then everything would change.

The tremble in her knees doubled, layering on top of the cold's nipping shivers. With a sharp shake of her head that sent her gold headpiece rattling and clinking against itself, she pushed off the railing and took a few weak steps across the length of the watchtower's platform, pacing to the side which faced back at the monochrome city she guarded. This day was one she'd been awaiting all her life. She couldn't remember wanting anything else nearly as much; it was a hungry, rumbling desire that had only grown as she did, fingers like claws that scratched at her and slathered her throat with a syrupy craving—though for what, she'd never quite put her finger on. Power? Protection? Validation? All at once? Whatever it was, she knew she deserved it. She could see no other future. If she wasn't worthy, why would the dust sing to her as loudly as it did?

She'd waited so long that she should be ready. She was ready. She couldn't afford to be afraid, but the feeling curled around her neck with the same heavy weight as her white apprentice cloak. She picked at the hem of her dress as if that would loosen the imagined clasp.

Tehazihbith's skyline was all smoke, faint-edged shadows layered thinly over a hazy midnight sky. Without the sun's kiss, it looked strangely bleak, hollow sadness sinking in the places where tangles of bodies should've busied it. She didn't like it. An ache built in the cave of her chest where pride usually swelled.

She was thinking too hard.

Her fingers rapped against the rail and then shoved again, sending her slanted skirts swaying as she turned on her heels. Dwelling on all this was pointless. The night's unfamiliarity was simply eating at her confidence. She'd be fine.

"Totally fine," she murmured on a thin sigh, eyes already straying to the empty desert again. The darkness was fog, swarming in great pools that blotted out the scene's edges, black and unknown. Her mind took a sharp turn along with them, delving into the second ribbon of thought she shouldn't be entertaining—the second, underlying reason she'd suggested the vigil in the first place.

Her senses told her there was something concealed in those shadows, something big and important and just out of reach. Her skin itched with the intensity of it, even without a wind to sing a warning or the touch of dust at her fingertips. She couldn't stop picturing that armoured beastfolk nor shake the sensation that it was still out there somewhere.

She massaged the railing under her palms. Frustration built in her chest, crawling its way up the back of her skull until she felt like punching something. She was tiring of the resonant inside of her head. And the unchanging horizon.

She was so fixated on staring at that flat, dull line that the movement behind her didn't register, not until it was too late.

Her heart leapt to her throat, but before she had a chance to turn, arms ensnared her waist. Her cry hollowed out into a gasp as she stumbled, yanked backwards, legs folding underneath her. A laugh splashed into her ear, sticky sweet with amusement. Gritting her teeth, she gathered the restless, angry energy taut in her limbs and threw her weight sideways, wriggling wildly in her captor's grip, until her swinging legs collided with a body and they both crashed against the watchtower's brick roof in a tangled heap.

Amina rolled hastily to the side, delivering a kick to the ankle that tried to wrap hers, and finally tore herself free. She scrambled around onto her back and pushed herself up, panting hard. Her hipbone throbbed where she'd landed on it.

The pain was soon doused by the sharp ice of shock. Electric blue eyes snatched her frantic gaze, eerily bright in the night's oppressive dark and glinting to match her attacker's manic smile. Bony shoulders washed the colour of slate bunched either side of her face, tickled by a wild, feathery mane of hair that couldn't possibly be the eggshell blue it appeared to be—the same way the soft membrane stretched between her forearms and her slender torso couldn't possibly be wings.

Laughter still shivered through her. When her smile broadened, her lips cracked apart to reveal pearly teeth, bared in a mocking hiss that sent chills tumbling over Amina's bones. Her voice was smooth and sharp as an ivory blade. "Hello."

Amina's mouth flapped open and closed, her tongue a numb weight. Fantastical as her imagination might've been when planning this night, she could never have conjured up this.

Urgency thundered in her heart; she knew she had to rise, but couldn't seem to get the thought to trigger any action. She only stared as the crazed creature—feminine and humanoid in shape, but not human, far from it—leapt nimbly to her feet, still showing off her unnerving smile. Wispy ears, large and jagged as if their edges had been sawed at with a knife, twitched within her waves of pale hair. Sapphire feathers danced in the breeze her movements created. Those fabricky shapes really were wings. They could be nothing else, and they folded now at her sides, hung at two sharp points like twin tails of a cloak but thick with muscle.

The finger she tapped to her lips was too long and thin, curled at the end. "No noise," she whispered, syllables slurring, the s heavy with an accented lisp. Decoding the words within that made for too perfect a distraction.

Too late, Amina moved. She shoved upwards only to be slammed back into the brick, wrists snatched and pinned either side of her head. When she fought back, sharp pain scraped the underside of her arms, injecting frost into her blood. She tried to yell, but the hard knees suddenly pressed against her ribs squashed the air she needed.

The Feralite's face loomed above hers. Those brilliant blue eyes were painful to stare into this close, an icy river Amina drowned in as she grappled for the strength to look away.

"Weak." The creature's fangs slid back and forth over her lip as she spoke, chipping at the word. Her head tilted, flicking a few cloudy strands of hair past her mangled ear, shifting so they tickled Amina's jawline. "Too easy," she mused.

Amina could feel herself slipping. The places the Feralite's claws stabbed into her wrists were everything, like a cold, dark tunnel opening up under her feet, dragging her inside. Desperation held her clamped at its edge. The grin bearing down on her was a blade to her forehead, and so she squeezed her eyes shut, scrambling for something, anything, some hidden scrap of strength that would end the pain. If only she were a full mage already. If only she had her own dust to fight with.

Was she about to die before that ever happened?

The question rang deadly in her mind, but not loud enough to drown out a curling whisper of realisation. The dust.

It called to her, begged to be heard, out of sight but not out of reach. When she called back, panic a thick cord bundling her inner thoughts, it headed her summons without hesitation. It came. All she had to do was catch it.

Her eyes shot open. She wanted this thing to stop smiling. She wanted her bones to thaw. She thought of fire, melded it, and watched it explode into view.

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