Aetherion, the First Wing, stood on a ridge above a valley he could not use. The grass looked soft. The drop behind it did not. A young steed who lost lift here would fall two hundred feet onto broken stone before her wings remembered what to do. He had turned three students away this month for that reason. He needed a training ground, and he needed it before the last of the old methods died with him. He was called the First Wing because no one else still taught the way he taught. He had learned by watching an elder from a distance for years, believing that watching would make him into that elder. It had not. Three seasons ago, his most recent student flew past the boundary storms and did not come back. He was still looking. He had also decided, in the same season, to stop training students one at a time in borrowed fields. He wanted an academy. Steeds and riders, learning together, in a place built for it. He walked the valley for two days and found nothing safe. On the third morning he climbed higher and saw the ruin. The old elven aerie stood on a shelf of rock above the tree line. Half its spires had fallen. The spiral stair still held. From the highest broken platform, the sky opened in every direction, and the land dropped away in a long, gentle slope instead of a cliff. A steed who stalled here would have room to recover. He stood on the platform for an hour and watched the wind. The wind was steady. He decided. Below the ruin, in the meadow where he had made camp, a heavy figure was waiting for him when he came down. Grey armor. Orange light burning through the seams. A torn white banner on a wooden pole, planted in the dirt beside it. The android had walked up from the valley without a sound. "You are the horse teacher," the android said. "I am." "I was told to hold this ground until relieved. Ground is yours now. I can lift stone." Aetherion looked at the fallen spires, then at the arms that had carried a flag through fire. "I need the upper platform cleared. I need launch marks set at the edges so a young flyer knows where the safe air ends." "Understood." They worked for six days. The android lifted beams Aetherion could not have moved in a season. Aetherion set a ring of crystal beacons around the platform's rim, each one tuned to hover a wing's length above the stone. The beacons glowed pale at safe distance and sharpened to red when a body crossed the line. He tested them himself, flying slow passes until the pattern held. On the seventh evening he stood on the cleared platform and looked at what he had. A launch site. Marked boundaries. Open sky. He could bring students here. The academy had a floor. Now he needed the first rider willing to stand on it.

The platform was ready. Aetherion still had no lessons to teach on it. He had trained students one at a time by feel, watching each steed for weeks before touching her. That method had cost him his last student. She had flown into the boundary storms because he had never taught her to turn back from what pulled her. If he brought pairs here now, riders and steeds together, he would lose them the same way. He needed a curriculum before he opened a single gate. He spent two days on the platform with a slate and a piece of chalk. He wrote the steps he used. He crossed them out. Every step assumed he was the only teacher, watching one animal in one field. None of it survived a second student standing beside the first. On the third morning a small figure climbed the spiral stair. Blue hair in two long tails. A torn red banner on a wooden pole, dragging behind her up the steps. She stopped at the edge of the beacons and waited for the ring to glow pale before crossing. "You are the horse teacher," she said. "I heard you were stuck." "I am Aetherion. Who told you." "A pink goat on a rock. He said you were writing alone. He said that was the problem." She set the pole down. "I am Hatsune Miku. I know about singing alone. It does not work." He knew the goat she meant. He had climbed to that pedestal once, looking for an answer about his lost student, and left with none. Catharsis guarded what a person was worth when no one was watching. He dropped the truth as part of giving it. Aetherion had walked down the mountain empty. Apparently the goat had spoken after all. "Show me what you wrote," she said. He showed her the slate. She read it standing. "You wrote it for one," she said. "Write it for two." "I do not know how." "Then we write it together. Baa is what the goat says. He said that too. Two voices seal what one voice cannot." She said it flat, no smile. "I tried the one-voice way. Something leaked back." He did not ask what. He heard the quiet in her voice and left it alone. They worked until dusk. She named what a rider needed to know: when to trust the steed's pull, when to override it. He named what a steed needed: a signal from the rider that meant turn now, no argument. They matched the two lists. Where a rider's signal met a steed's instinct, they wrote a lesson. Where the two fought, they wrote a drill. By dark he had twelve lessons. Enough to open with. Not enough to finish anyone. "You will teach the riders," he said. "I will teach them to listen," she said. "You teach the rest." He agreed. Then he thought of the boundary storms, and the pull, and wondered what he had just promised a stranger.