After twenty minutes of flight practice, she landed light-headed, her dragon core humming with depletion. The ambient mana in the park, boosted by gate residue, wasn't enough for active draconic exertion.
"You're operating at a deficit," Leo observed, watching her lean against the play fort after a particularly strenuous session. "Your consumption rate exceeds local regeneration."
"I need more," Astraea admitted, the words coming out breathless. "Or I need to be more efficient."
"Efficiency improvements will come with practice. But in the short term..." Leo tapped his tablet. "You need a reserve. A mana battery."
The concept was simple. The execution was not.
Human Awakened didn't store mana internally the way dragons did. Their bodies were conduits, not reservoirs. They drew from gates or ambient sources as needed. Dragon biology was different—designed for long flights between mana-rich areas, for periods of fasting during hibernation or travel.
Astraea's reserves had atrophied during the famine. Now, as she used them, their limitations became clear.
The numbers were clear. She needed to store mana, not just use it.
But how? The human world had mana batteries—crystals that could store energy for Awakened tools. But they were small, expensive, and tracked by the Association. Not an option.
Then she remembered something from her father's forge memory. Not the star-seed he'd made, but something simpler: void-caches. Small pockets of folded space where dragons stored emergency reserves.
Could she make one? Her juvenile abilities were limited. Her void-magic was rudimentary at best. But the principle...
That night, instead of flight practice, she experimented.
In the sanctuary's center, she focused on a point in the air. Not on sparkles or glamour, but on the space itself. On the void between things that was her birthright.
Void dragons didn't just fly. They understood absence. The spaces between stars. The silence between notes. The potential in emptiness.
She reached for that understanding.
At first, nothing happened. Then, a shimmer. A distortion in the air, like heat haze but colder. A spot where reality became... less.
She pushed mana into it. Not much—a trickle from her already depleted reserves. The distortion drank it, held it.
She pushed more. The spot grew more defined, a sphere of distorted space about the size of her fist. Visible only to dragon senses, it hovered, waiting.
Small. Unstable. But real.
She spent the night practicing. Creating caches, dissolving them, creating them again. Each iteration was slightly better. More stable. Larger capacity.
By dawn, she could maintain a cache the size of a grapefruit with a capacity of about twenty mana units—enough for a few minutes of flight.
It wasn't enough. But it was a start.
The real breakthrough came from an unexpected source: Mia's garden.
The next day at CYAP, Mia took Astraea aside during plant-care time. "The moonthread at home... it's doing something strange."
"What kind of strange?"
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"It's... crystallizing. Growing mana crystals at its roots." Mia's voice was hushed with wonder. "I've never seen that before. Plants don't usually..."
But plants exposed to sustained dragon mana might. Astraea remembered her mother's garden, where crystal fruits grew on vines fed by dragon breath.
After CYAP, they went to Mia's backyard. The moonthread Astraea had been given had grown exponentially, its crystalline leaves now the size of her hand. And at its base, nestled among silver roots, were small, clear crystals that glowed with soft light.
Mana crystals. Pure, concentrated, and completely untraceable to Association monitors.
"They formed after your last visit," Mia said, kneeling beside the plant. "The plant remembers you. It's... making gifts."
Astraea picked up a crystal. It was warm. The mana inside was clean, bright, compatible with her dragon nature in a way gate mana wasn't.
The System recognized it. Of course it did. The System was slowly learning her reality, even as it mislabeled the details.
"That night you practiced flying," Mia continued softly. "The plant glowed all night. Like it was... cheering you on. Or helping."
Symbiosis. Dragons and certain plants had always shared relationships. Her presence, her growth, was affecting the world in ways she hadn't anticipated.
She took three crystals—all the plant had produced so far. Small things, no larger than peas. But potent.
That night in the sanctuary, she experimented. The crystals could be absorbed directly, restoring her reserves faster than ambient mana. But more importantly, they could be used to stabilize void-caches.
She placed a crystal inside a newly formed cache. The distortion steadied immediately, the crystal's structure providing a framework for the folded space.
Two weeks. And she could make more. And the moonthread would grow more crystals.
A supply chain. A way to store what she needed.
Over the next week, she built her stockpile. Small caches hidden throughout the sanctuary—in the play fort's walls, under rocks, in the hollow of a dead tree. Each contained a moonthread crystal and stored mana she fed it gradually, building reserves.
She flew every other night now, using the stored mana to supplement her own. The flights grew longer. Thirty seconds. A minute. She circled the park now, not just crossed the clearing. Still low, still hidden by trees, but flying.
Her control improved. She could bank, turn, hover with reasonable stability. The muscle memory returned faster than she'd hoped.
One night, as she landed after a two-minute circuit of the park's perimeter, Leo approached with his tablet.
"You're ready for altitude," he said without preamble.
"Altitude?"
"The trees are 12-15 meters tall. Above them, your visibility increases exponentially. But so does the risk of detection."
She looked up. The trees formed a ragged canopy. Above them was open sky. And above that... everything.
"Cloud cover tonight: 80%. Moon phase: new. Optimal for first altitude attempt." Leo's voice was calm, but his eyes were bright. "The question is: are you ready?"
Was she? To leave the safety of the trees? To be in open sky, however briefly?
Her wings answered for her. They flexed, ready.
She took a moonthread crystal from her pocket, absorbed its mana. The rush was immediate, like drinking cold water after a long thirst.
Then she took off.
Not the clumsy, ground-hugging flights of previous nights. A proper launch, wings beating hard, carrying her up.
The trees fell away. Branches brushed her feet, then were gone. She rose above the canopy.
And stopped, hovering.
The world spread below. Not the tiny patch of the park, but the city. Lights stretched to the horizon in grids and clusters. Gates glowed like jewels. The night hummed with life and mana.
She was above it. Not far—maybe twenty meters—but above.
The view was... different. Not better or worse. Just different. A dragon's perspective.
She remembered her father's words: "The sky has missed you."
He was right. The sky had missed her. And she had missed the sky.
She didn't stay long. A minute. Two. Just enough to feel it. To remember what this height felt like.
Then she descended, slipping back below the trees, landing softly in the clearing.
Leo was waiting. "Maximum altitude: 22.3 meters. Duration above canopy: 127 seconds. No observed detection."
She folded her wings, breathless again but for a different reason this time.
"Thank you," she said to Leo. To Mia. To the moonthread plant making crystals. To the sanctuary providing space.
To all the pieces coming together to let her be, however briefly, what she was.
[System notification]
[Mana stockpile established: 4 void-caches active]
[Total stored mana: 187 units. Flight time equivalence: 31 minutes.]
[Milestone: First altitude flight (above 20 meters)]
[Development: Flight muscles at 41% capacity. Control proficiency: 58%.]
[Quest progress: 'Muscles remember' - 79% complete.]
[Reward: +30 to 'Resource management', +25 to 'Preparation skills']
[Note: Being prepared helps us achieve our goals!]
The System wasn't wrong. Preparation had helped. The stockpile. The sanctuary. The friends.
But some things couldn't be prepared for. Some things could only be experienced.
Core pressure: 42% (replenishing)
*Wing development: Phase 5.7 (altitude-capable)*
Human camouflage: 85.9% effective
Mana reserves: 4 caches, 187 units stored
Like flight after four centuries.
Like sky after so long grounded.
Astraea looked up through the trees at the patch of starless sky she'd recently occupied. Soon, she would go higher. Soon, she would fly properly.
But for now, the stockpile grew. The crystals multiplied. The wings strengthened.
And the dragon, after four hundred years of waiting, was almost ready to meet the sky properly.