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.