Aerial Skyborn was born the first of her kind, a sky elf meant to command the wind, and at nineteen she had never felt her magic wake. She stood in the ruined palace at the base of the great tree and stretched out her hand, the way her mother had taught her before she died. She waited for the air to stir against her silver hair. Nothing moved. The broken hall stayed silent, and her arm dropped to her side. She had come here because the old stories said this place held power. People in the valley had begun to ask her for help. A farmer wanted her to turn back a storm. A mother wanted her to lift a fallen beam. Aerial had refused them all, and the shame of it sat in her chest like a stone. She could not protect anyone while her gift slept. She climbed through cracked corridors and ivy-choked stairs. In a low chamber crowned with vines, she found a nest of dead leaves. Inside it lay an egg the size of her two hands, silver and streaked with twisting purple veins. She knelt. The shell was warm. When her fingers touched it, a pulse ran up her arm, sharp and alive. Aerial froze. She had felt nothing her whole life, and now something answered from inside the shell. She pressed both palms flat against it. The purple veins brightened under her skin. A cold thread of wind curled up from the floor and lifted the dead leaves in a slow circle around her. Her breath caught. The wind was hers. She could feel it now, a live current running from the egg through her hands and out into the air. She pushed, and the leaves flew higher. She pulled, and they dropped. The magic was small and clumsy, but it was real, and it was awake. Then a crack split the shell. A thin line opened across the purple veins, and pale light leaked out. The egg was hatching. Aerial understood in a rush what had woken her. The creature inside carried the same sky-power she did, and touching it had lit the spark in her blood at last. A tiny snout pushed through the crack. Wet, silver, blinking. The hatchling fixed one purple eye on her and made a small, sharp cry. The wind around them surged, no longer gentle, tugging at her clothes and hair. Aerial gripped the shell to steady it, and the power poured into her faster than she could hold. She had wanted her magic to wake. Now it had, and it was bound to a newborn dragon she did not know how to feed, hide, or control. The valley folk still waited for her help below. But first she had to learn what this creature had opened inside her, before the wild new current tore the ruined hall apart.