“Galamad doesn’t allow unregistered portal travel,” Aerathena says. “The school seals the local dimension against it. Anything not keyed to the registry tears apart on entry.”
Aster considers this.
“So we can’t just—”
“No.”
“What if—”
“We go by chariot,” she says.
A pause.
“Chariot?” Aster asks.
She raises one hand.
The pocket dimension tears.
It comes through nose-first.
The head is—broadly—a horse’s head, in the same way a supernova is broadly a light source. Fire arranged into the suggestion of a skull. A mane that burns without consuming itself. Eyes that aren’t eyes so much as two deliberate absences in the blaze, as if vision is beneath the thing and the universe simply agrees to place whatever it needs in front of it.
Behind it comes the chariot: a white-gold frame, wheels burning with the same impossible restraint, a running board wide enough for two people if both are comfortable with proximity and the possibility of dying very publicly.
The creature looks at Aster.
Aster looks at the creature.
“This is Helios,” Aerathena says, stepping onto the running board with the ease of someone who has done this often enough to stop finding it remarkable.
Aster stares.
“Please tell me there are seatbelts.”
“No.”
“Handrails?”
Aerathena gestures to the side. “You can hold that.”
Aster grabs the rail with both hands.
Aerathena offers no further instruction. No acknowledgment whatsoever that what happens next may constitute a significant event in the life of someone who has never, until this exact moment, travelled by flaming celestial horse.
This will later strike Aster as a meaningful oversight in the area of passenger communication.
Helios moves.
Except “moves” is catastrophically inadequate for what follows. He leaves the pocket dimension the way light might leave a room if it remembered it never needed permission to be there in the first place. The stars crumple inward. Space bends like wet paper. A line of burning gold tears through the void.
The pocket dimension unzips.
Reality floods back in—colour, gravity, wind, the aggressive reassertion of physical consequence—and suddenly Aster is standing on a burning platform suspended several thousand feet above the impossible.
For one disorienting second he doesn’t recognize what he’s seeing below.
Then he realizes the storm is underneath him.
It spread beyond every horizon, a living sea woven from mist, lightning and liquid colour. Violet swells folded across one another in slow motion while rivers of molten amber carved luminous channels through them, the currents twisting into whirlpools the size of cities turning beneath the surface, visible only because entire weather systems orbit them like moons.
Lightning drifted beneath the surface in branching shoals.
The deeper he looked, the darker it became. Colour slowly surrendered to distance until the storm disappeared into a blue-black abyss that refused to reveal whether it had a floor at all.
It doesn’t feel temporary.
It feels geological.
As though someone peeled the oceans off the Earth and replaced them with raw thought.
Helios cuts through the outer storm, burning a corridor through mist and lightning as it seals behind them, and then—
Sky.
And above the sky—
Aster doesn’t immediately understand what he’s looking at.
The first island drifts past them: rock and scrub and a cluster of maybe forty buildings gathered around a faint deep light pulsing at the island’s centre like a heartbeat trapped inside stone. A jetty juts off one side into open air with a vessel docked to it. Laundry hangs on a line, which strikes Aster as an offensively mundane detail for something floating sixty kilometres above the surface of the Earth.
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Then another island. Larger. Dark at the edges, lit at its core.
Then two more, different sizes, drifting along different currents, the gap between some barely a kilometre.
Then more.
And more.
Thousands of them, if thousands is a number that can meaningfully apply to something this vast.
Each rides the invisible currents beneath them like a ship anchored to a sea no one can touch. Some are little more than rocky islets, barely large enough to hold a lighthouse. Others stretch into mountain ranges vast enough to rival the Andes.
Aster lifts his head and follows the chains upward.
They’re layered.
Stacked.
Above the first chain hangs another. Beyond that, another. Islands upon islands, suspended in ascending belts until perspective simply gives up and leaves the room. Bridges become threads. Settlements shrink to pale flecks of light. Entire mountain ranges dissolve into silhouette against the distance.
The Archipelago doesn’t just stretch into the horizon.
But into the sky.
Kilometre after kilometre. Rising into the heavens until the highest chains vanish into a haze of blue so bright it may as well be another sky entirely.
He looks down again.
The storm rolls beneath the lowest island chains, filling the gulf below like an inverted ocean supporting an entire civilisation on its back.
For the first time since arriving in the Astral Plane, Aster feels genuinely small.
Helios pulls them on in silence.
Ahead, the islands grow denser.
And now there’s structure between them.
Traffic.
Vessels move from island to island in patterns that imply established routes. The glowing mist between the nearest chains has been worn down by use into something like roads in the sky—lanes pressed into atmosphere by repetition alone. Bridges start appearing. At first, improvised ones. Then heavier ones.
Settlement bleeds into settlement.
Infrastructure multiplies with the frantic asymmetry of something that never had the luxury of planning itself from the ground up, so it grew outward and inward and between the available spaces all at once—following the mist currents, the stable rock, and wherever other people had managed to get to first.
And then the city.
It was built on an island that dwarfs the ones surrounding it. Pale stone towers rise from it in tiers, luminescent vein-lines running through the architecture like a circulatory system that has been stable so long it’s become structural. Bridges run at a dozen elevations between the main island and the smaller ones drawn into its orbit by generations of proximity and practical necessity—training grounds, market platforms, academic satellites, and one covered walkway angled so awkwardly it strongly suggests the market came first and the architects later admitted defeat.
“Welcome to Galamad,” Aerathena says.
Aster just stares.
“That’s—” He points. “Where? Is it part of the city?”
“It is the city.”
He looks again. At the main island. The satellites. The bridges. The districts.
“The whole thing?”
“The whole thing.”
Aerathena’s gaze stays forward.
“It was built after the last great war,” she says. “After the Aware came close to destroying themselves in both our realms, they agreed on one thing: the world could not survive another generation of cultivators raised entirely inside private power structures. Legacy houses. Prophet lines. Guild patronage. Factional debt. Too much of the world’s future was being shaped by people who already owed someone loyalty.”
She folds her hands behind her back.
“So they built the schools. One in every country. Neutral ground by treaty. Places that belonged to no family, no sect, no bloodline. And to keep them that way—to make sure no one ever got their hands around the throat of one—they placed them under the protection of the Celestial Council.”
She says the title the way people say the names of mountains or execution methods: something too established to need explanation.
“Every country has one. The most powerful cultivators in the region—Celestial rank, all of them—chosen by their peers, answerable to no institution, no faction, no family. People who reached a level of power where clan politics stopped mattering to them.” A beat. “Or stopped being worth the indignity.”
Something in her tone suggests that this is either noble in theory or exhausting in practice.
“The Council enforces the treaties, protects the schools, and ensures no one power accumulates enough influence to make the past look like a reasonable model for the future. Galamad is the South African seat. It has stood here for the seventy years.”
Aster watches the platforms below.
Students spar on open terraces, elemental techniques flashing between them in controlled arcs and brief violent blooms.
I’m going to be catastrophically behind, Aster thinks.
The chariot banks toward a tower standing slightly apart from the main cluster. A single window glows amber from within. A landing platform juts from the side.
Aerathena brings Helios down.
Aster steps off.
His legs register the platform’s solidity with the specific relief of things that have spent the last several minutes quietly unconvinced solid surfaces were still a concept.
Helios and the chariot do not depart dramatically.
They simply stop being present.
One moment there. The next—not.
Light, fire, and four tonnes of solar construct, just… concluded.
Aster stares at the empty space.
“They just—”
“Yes,” Aerathena says, already moving toward the door.
Old wood. Iron handle. A brass plaque polished smooth by decades of people reading it on their way to being changed by whatever waited inside.
Aster doesn’t read it.
He follows her in.
The office is enormous.
Not in the polished way rich people like to announce themselves. Not luxury. Not comfort.
Old power.
The room feels inhabited by someone who has spent centuries collecting objects they no longer remember the purpose of but refuse to throw away out of philosophical spite. Towering shelves groan under the weight of books, scrolls, jars of things Aster absolutely refuses to identify, and at least one skull wearing spectacles.
Plants overrun half the room with the quiet aggression of nature reclaiming capitalism.
Tea steams on a side table beside stacks of documents arranged in what could charitably be described as organised chaos and more accurately be called a nervous breakdown curated by a librarian.
And suspended in the centre of the room—
Threads.
Thousands of them.
Glowing strands drifting through the air like spider silk suspended underwater. Some pulse softly. Others flicker violently before splitting into smaller filaments that vanish into nothing. The entire room hums.
Not audibly.
Conceptually.
Like standing inside a thought the universe hasn’t finished having yet.
At the centre of it all sits an old man in cream robes, watering a plant.
Aster nearly jumps.
The man is focused with grave intensity on a pot of tiny white flowers that bloom and close in strange asynchronous rhythms, as if unable to agree on what time it is.
Without looking up, the old man sighs.
“There you are,” he says. “Late.”
He’s ancient in the deeply irritating way some old people are, where age has somehow become theatrical instead of limiting. Thin silver braids tied behind his head. Dark skin lined with soft creases. Cream robes embroidered with geometric pathways that intersect and divide like a map trying to predict an argument.
His eyes remain half-lidded.
Not sleepy.
Occupied elsewhere.
Aerathena inclines her head. “Headmaster Ndlovu.”