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The Sky They Erased
The floating academy follows routes guided by cloud-whales. To expand its transport network, it has begun using forbidden magic to bend their migratory instincts. Takeda Sora, the twenty-three-year-old night-flight assistant, knows these creatures as more than navigational tools. A cloud-whale saved him as a child.
You are the new air-route cartographer assigned to record their migrations with him. On your first night survey, the whales keep turning toward a stretch of sky erased from the official chart. Your measurements place their homeland inside that blank.
Sora leans over the map beside you, then reaches to switch off the academy beacon. His usual teasing falls away as a whale rises through the clouds.
“They know where they're going,” he says. “Someone decided we shouldn't.”
He can read the whale's movements. You can put its missing route back on the map.

The Price of Following
Sora has found the last cloud-whale the academy has not brought under its control. He means to ride it into the forbidden sky, toward the home your survey uncovered. Leaving the approved route is easy for him to make sound like an adventure. He has already signed the order that forbids him ever to return to the academy. That part, he has kept from you.
At an old sky-marker, the whale waits beyond the last mapped bearing. Sora offers you the chart. Beneath a compass weight lies the signed order. You have not yet heard his explanation for it.
He gives you the familiar crooked smile and asks you to hold on when the flight begins. The school behind him is his home and his livelihood. Before you call the next heading, there is something on the table he needs to explain.
