Part Two — Three Years on the Horizontal Line

Looking back, I couldn't tell you where one season ended and the next one started. That's what three years alone on a mountain does to you — it stops being a timeline and starts being a rhythm. Wake up. Train. Eat. Train more. Sleep. Repeat until the version of you that used to live in a cramped Tokyo apartment feels like a story somebody told you once, secondhand. 

Honestly? I don't hate it. There's something almost peaceful about not having anyone around to disappoint. 

The training changed shape somewhere in the second year. It stopped being about more — more height, more speed, more force behind a swing — and started being about less. Mom called it control. I called it agonizing. 

"Anti-mana isn't a muscle, Kai," she told me, more times than I could count. "It's an instinct. You don't build it by straining. You build it by listening." 

"That's easy for you to say. You've had a few thousand years of practice listening." 

She laughed at that — the kind of laugh that meant fair, but also, keep working. 

So I sat. I breathed. I learned to pull a thread of my own energy thin enough to light a single leaf on fire without touching the branch beside it. It sounds small. It nearly killed me with boredom the first dozen times. But there was something in the failing, over and over, that felt more honest than any power fantasy I'd had rattling around in my head from my old life. I wasn't some chosen prodigy who got it right the first try. I was a kid, slowly, painfully, getting less bad at something. 

It was during one of those control exercises, deep into the second year, that I first noticed it. 

I'd pulled my aura out for Mom to check, same as always — she liked to see it made visible before I tried anything with it, said it kept me honest about what I actually had to work with. Hers came out the way it always did: a clean, unbroken red, steady as a flame that didn't flicker. 

Mine didn't do that. 

It came out red at the core, same as hers — but at the edges, where it thinned out, it bled into a deep purple, like ink dropped into water that hadn't finished mixing. 

I didn't think much of it at first. "Is that normal?" 

There was a half-second — just a half-second — where Mom's face did something I wasn't supposed to catch. Then it smoothed back over, quick enough that if I hadn't been looking right at her, I'd have missed it entirely. 

"Every dragon's aura settles a little differently," she said, and moved straight on to correcting my breathing. 

That wasn't an answer. That was a deflection dressed up as an answer. 

I let it go. I was eight. I didn't have the vocabulary yet for my mother is hiding something from me, only the vague, itchy feeling that comes right before you learn that word. 

Dad's trips away got longer around the same time. He'd always been gone more than he was home, but somewhere in year two the gaps started stretching — three days became five, five became a week and a half. When I asked where he went, the answer was always the same shape, different words each time: business, matters that need attending to, nothing you need to worry about, kiddo. 

I noticed the pattern even if I couldn't explain it. He never left right after something happened. He left right before quiet stretches — like he was making sure to be seen somewhere else while nothing was supposed to be happening here. 

Or maybe I'm just a paranoid ex-adult stuck in an eight-year-old's body, reading conspiracies into my dad's work schedule. Wouldn't be the weirdest thing about my life right now. 

The one real trip down the mountain that whole stretch happened near the end of year two — a supply run to a border town neither of my parents named for me, tucked somewhere at the base of the Horizontal Line where the isolation finally broke. 

It was the first time I saw anyone who wasn't Mom or Dad. Elves with ears too sharp to be human, a demi-human trader with something like fur along his forearms, humans who looked almost disappointingly ordinary next to everyone else. I stared more than I should have. Nobody seemed to mind — until one merchant, weighing out dried herbs for my mother, caught sight of me standing a little too close. 

He didn't say anything. He didn't need to. He just held my gaze a beat too long, the kind of look you give something you can't quite place, and then very deliberately looked away and didn't look back. 

Mom noticed. She didn't say anything either. But her hand found my shoulder, light and casual, and steered me toward the next stall before I could linger. 

Add that to the list of things nobody's explaining to me. 

Not everything about those years was quiet unease, though. Some of it was just — good. 

There was a sparring session with Dad, sometime in year three, where I finally did something I'd been failing to do for months: I got past his guard. Just once, just for a second, wooden practice sword catching him clean across the ribs before he could correct. 

He staggered back, blinked, and then — for maybe the first time since I'd known him — laughed like he actually meant it, loud and surprised and proud all at once. 

"There it is," he said, rubbing his side. "Knew you had that in you somewhere." 

I don't think I stopped smiling for the rest of the day. Funny, the things that stick with you. Not the magic. Not the flying. Just my dad looking at me like I'd done something worth being proud of. 

That same year, one night after training, I almost asked Mom directly about the purple at the edges of my aura. I had the question halfway formed — why does mine look different from yours — when she beat me to speaking first, like she'd been waiting for it. 

"Kai," she said, not looking up from the fire she was banking for the night. "Whatever you find out about yourself, out here or anywhere else — you're not less than either of us. Remember that." 

It wasn't an answer to a question I'd asked yet. It felt like an answer to one she was expecting me to ask eventually. 

"...Okay," I said, because I didn't know what else to say to that. 

Filing that one away too. 

Three years in, on an otherwise unremarkable evening, we ate dinner the way we always did — Dad telling some half-exaggerated story about a merchant who'd tried to shortchange him, Mom rolling her eyes at exactly the right moments, me eating too fast and getting told to slow down. Ordinary. Small. The kind of night you don't think to hold onto, because nothing about it warns you that it's the last one of its kind. 

I went to bed that night thinking about nothing more important than whether I'd finally get my flight height past ten feet. 

I had no idea it was the last uncomplicated night I was ever going to get.