The sky answered him that night.
Aarav stood at the edge of the ruined tower, wind cutting against his face, blood drying on his knuckles. Below him, the city flickered—half alive, half afraid. Sirens wailed in the distance like mourning voices.
He jumped.
Not to escape.
Not to run.
To listen.
The air caught him harder than before, rough and trembling, as if the sky itself was uneasy. Aarav spread his arms—and felt resistance. Not gravity. Something else.
A pressure.
A pull.
His vision blurred. Memories flooded in violently.
His mother's voice: "The sky isn't empty. It remembers."
His father looking up on the day he vanished.
The first time Aarav fell… and didn't die.
He screamed—not in fear, but in anger—and the scream ripped through the clouds.
The wind answered.
For the first time, Aarav didn't just fly.
He was carried.
The clouds spiraled around him, forming a vast circular hollow, lightning crawling across its edges like veins. In its center, the air became still.
And in that stillness, a voice spoke—not aloud, but inside his bones.
"You are late."
Aarav's heart thundered.
"Who are you?"
"We are what remains of the sky you broke."
Images struck him—cities falling, people screaming, a man flying too fast, too high, too careless. Him. Not now. Not recently.
Before he remembered anything.
His knees buckled midair.
"You're saying… I did this?"
"You tried to outrun fate. The sky shattered instead."
Tears streamed from his eyes, ripped away by the wind.
"Then tell me how to fix it."
The clouds closed in, lightning cracking like judgment.
"Run."
The pressure vanished.
Aarav dropped—then exploded forward, faster than ever before. Faster than fear. Faster than regret. The city blurred beneath him as the sky screamed in his wake.
For the first time, he understood.
This power was not a gift.
It was a debt.
And the sky had finally come to collect