The itch was a constant companion. Not on the skin, but deeper, in the muscle and bone between my shoulder blades. It was a phantom limb, a memory of something I’d never had. My grandmother, her own back stooped and scarred, called it the Faith of the sky. She said our ancestors had woven their Threads through the clouds, and that their Eidos remembered the feeling of the wind.

To me, it was just an itch. A cruel reminder of the Fact of the rust-eaten walkways and collapsed spires of our city-nest. We were the Aileron. The Winged. And we could not fly. We scavenged. We climbed. We kept our eyes on the ground, because looking up for too long was a special kind of heartache.

My life was measured in a simple, brutal calculus: risk versus reward. The risk of a corroded floor giving way. The reward of a sealed nutrient pack. The risk of a Skitter-dax nest in the lower levels. The reward of salvageable power coils. It was a grounded life, a life of Facts.

Then my sister fell ill. The Grey Cough. The Medicae in our warren had nothing, but he pointed a trembling, feathered hand across the Great Chasm. “The Spire,” he rasped. “The old Imperial Medicae Spire. There might be an intact auto-vial of stabilizers there. But the bridge… the bridge has been gone for a generation.”

The calculus changed. The risk was absolute. The reward was her life.

Getting across was a nightmare of climbing down, navigating the chasm floor, and scaling the other side. But I did it. I found the Spire, a skeletal finger of plasteel and glass, silent and mausolean. Inside, by the light of my glow-rod, I found it. A single, gleaming vial, its contents the color of a dawn I’d only heard stories about.

The journey back was when the Fact of my world chose to remind me of its cruelty. As I reached the chasm’s edge, I saw it. A Skitter-dax, all chittering mandibles and chitinous legs, was between me and the path back down. It hadn’t seen me, but it would. My sister’s life was in my hands, a fragile glass vial that would not survive a fight or a fall.

My mind raced through the options. There were none. The long way around would take days. Climbing down was impossible with the predator there. The chasm was a hundred meters across. An impossible distance.

And then the itch flared, hot and demanding.

It was not a thought. It was not a plan. It was an answer, delivered from a place deeper than reason. A voice that was not my own but was more me than anything I’d ever known. It was the howl of ten thousand ancestors screaming a single, undeniable truth.

You can make it.

My legs were already moving, carrying me towards the highest point on the chasm’s edge. My arms, holding the vial to my chest, found a perfect, streamlined balance. The wind whipped at my face, and it felt like a welcome. Like an old friend. The math was simple. Not of trajectory and velocity, but of will and air.

My Faith was absolute.

I leapt.

For one glorious, crystalline moment, the universe made sense. The phantom limbs on my back burned with purpose, catching the updraft from the chasm. The air became solid beneath me, a floor of forgotten memory. I was not falling; I was held. I was Aileron. I was home.

Then the Fact of my body, of my small, useless shoulder blades, reasserted itself.

The memory was not enough. The Faith was not enough.

The feeling was not of falling, but of being dropped. Of being betrayed by the sky itself. The world tumbled, a sickening lurch of rust and grey. The wind was no longer a friend; it was a shriek that promised only impact.

I hit the rocks at the bottom of the chasm with the sound of snapping bone and shattering glass. The last thing I saw before the darkness took me was the faint, rosy mist of the stabilizer vial dissipating into the unforgiving air. The pain was immense, but it was nothing compared to the shriek in my soul—the howl of a betrayed instinct, the final, agonizing tear of a Thread that had reached for the sky only to be savagely pulled to earth.