Eldoria sprawled beneath the descending aerodyne, chrome towers rising sharp against a bruised sky while older structures (black arches laced with violet fire) curved between them like roots breaking through concrete. The city looked whole from up here, but Tobias Hale knew better. Six centuries of Accord peace had only papered over the cracks.
He kept his hand flat against the viewport glass, eyes tracing light patterns that pulsed in sequences no one else seemed to catch. Today marked his first official day in the Federation's elite joint-ops program, the first human ever tapped for it. He'd spent months bracing for the quiet resentment, the whispered questions about whether a baseline human could keep up with vampires who didn't tire, werewolves who could smell a lie, fae who bent light around their fingers, or shifters who wore whatever face the moment demanded.
He hadn't braced for the city to feel like it recognized him.
Memory slid in without warning: eight years old, half-buried in borderland ash, dragging a scavenged knife he was too weak to lift. The mixed Accord patrol that found him should have kept walking. Vampires didn't waste blood on human strays. Werewolf packs rarely looked beyond their own. Fae gates stayed sealed to outsiders. Shifters seldom trusted anything that couldn't change its skin. Yet they'd stopped. Carried him out on a stretcher. For weeks, healers from every faction took shifts. Blood infusions, runic grafts, serums that burned like acid and knit him back together with pieces no single species was meant to carry.
They gave him a bunk, a new surname, and a reason to keep breathing. The Accord hadn't just pulled him from the dirt. It had remade him.
That debt lived in his bones.
So when the runic district below flared, a sudden bloom of gold threaded through violet that lit the clouds from underneath, he felt it echo inside his chest like a second heartbeat.
Passengers glanced down, then away.
The crew busied themselves with landing protocols.
No one spoke.
Tobias didn't look away.
His reflection stared back: twenty-eight, lean, scarred, eyes steady in a way that usually unsettled people.
Then the voice came, not loud, not even truly sound. More like a memory surfacing that had never belonged to him alone.
You were never only theirs.
It brushed against something coiled deep behind his ribs, something the healers had buried with the grafts and the serums. Something that had waited patiently beneath six hundred years of careful peace.
The city's light faded, but the feeling didn't.
Whatever they'd put in him to keep him alive was starting to remember why it was there.
And it wasn't finished with him yet.