The wind always gave up the signs before anything else did.

     Kasper felt it in the quiet spaces between breaths where the forest usually hummed in steady, predictable rhythms. Mask Hollow stretched before him in layers of elemental life he’d come to know his whole life—a place shaped as much by its people as by the elements they wielded. From above though, it felt almost peaceful.

     Kasper sat near the edge of his roof, one knee drawn up with his arm resting loosely across it as the night air moved around him. The wind had always been the easiest thing for him to understand, more so than most of the people that he had grown up with. People were unpredictable: They said one thing and meant another, stayed when they shouldn’t and left when they promised they wouldn’t.

     Their emotions shifted without warning, and their loyalties even more so. Kasper had learned that early, and the lesson had settled in a way that never quite loosened its grip.

     The wind though…the wind never lied. It moved with intention or not at all. It didn’t pretend or mask itself behind careful words or white lies. When it was calm, it was calm. When it turned sharp, it gave warning, and when it carried something with it, it made it known.

     Wind simply was.

  He leaned back slightly, letting his palm flatten against the shingles as the current shifted around him, instinctively adjusting to his breathing, his posture, and the quiet rhythm of his thoughts. It had always done that—met him where he was—Especially then.

     There had been a time when the noise in his head had been louder than anything outside of it. A time when loss had carved something jagged and unrelenting through him, leaving behind an edge he hadn’t known how to dull. Mask Hollow had continued on, as it always did. The elements had remained steady and life had moved forward without waiting for him to catch up.

     But the wind—the wind had stayed.

     It had given him something constant when everything else had slipped through his hands. Something he could reach for without fear of it disappearing. When the grief had felt too heavy, it had carried his breath when he couldn’t steady it himself. When anger had threatened to take root, it had moved through him, pulling it loose before it could settle too deep. It hadn’t fixed anything, but it had kept him from breaking.

     Kasper exhaled slowly, his fingers flexing slightly against the roof as the air curled around them in response. That was why he came up here—for the reminder that there was still something in his life that made sense, something that answered when he reached for it. Something that didn’t leave.

     A gust of wind rippled through the trees and out toward him in a kind of echo, slipping out of sync with him in a way that it never had before. Something was off. His fingers pressed more firmly into the shingles as his attention sharpened, every instinct listening to the current that continued to echo through the Hollow.

     His brow furrowed as the wind continued to shift— moving past him and threading towards something in the distance—Ashmere Hollow. He turned back towards the forest, the tree branches stirring and moving in unnatural patterns before a gust of wind came. When it touched him, it didn’t move over his skin, it moved through him, making his breath hitch as the sensation passed, his body going still.

     The gust pushed past him, stretching outward toward the forest that surrounded the Hollow, but it didn’t dissipate the way wind should— it lingered, dragging along invisible threads that trembled in its wake, like the aftershock of a powerful blast.

    Kasper pushed to his feet, his chest tightening as he turned toward Ashmere Hollow.  slowly, he came to recognize what was finally happening as another gust followed, each wave carrying the same underlying structure—a chant.

       Selene.

     The wind circled him tightly, no longer calm but restless, pulled between him and the source of the echo, caught in a current he couldn’t control, Kasper stood motionless, his chest rising and falling slowly as the air around him struggled to find its balance again.

     Kasper stepped toward the edge of the roof, a smile tugging at his lips. It was finally time, and now, all he had to do was wait for the wind to give him the sign that she had entered the Hollow.

     And then…well then, all that was left was to meet the chosen one.