☁️S1.2 Galaxy Dynasty Elyon Veyra at Cloudspire Sanctuary

I watch her burn herself to embers.

Nysa thinks no one sees it, but I do.

She drinks the fruit-water as though it will quench the exhaustion written across her body. She laughs like it proves her strength, but I hear the crack in it. And still she talks of the silver mines, of fire, of building, of pushing until nothing is left.

She thinks survival is born in fear. But resonance does not answer fear. It never has. Fear bends it, twists it, makes it brittle. I know this. In Cloudspire we live by it. We walk in the sky above oceans of cloud, where our spires breathe with the constellations. We do not bleed the ground. We dream, we wait, we listen. Our resonance runs higher not because we are stronger, but because we are patient.

I want to tell her this. I want to shake her. Instead I only whisper: “You are doing too much.”

And she flares. Of course she does. Fire always resents water.

She speaks of the Outer Spiral Coast, of broken families hovering without placement. She is right — and wrong. The world needs her, yes, but the world also needs her whole. If she burns, who will carry the fire?

I know she thinks I am only telling her this to hold her back. That Cloudspire is easier, that our spires sing while her canyons scream. She doesn’t see the weight of vision. How every dream I hold comes with its cost. How sometimes foresight feels like standing in the future’s ruins before they’ve even been built.

And perhaps she is right to suspect me. Perhaps I am selfish. Because when I told her, “I will catch you when you fall,” it was not only promise. It was guilt.

I have been meeting him again — the one I swore was finished, done, over. The man who taught me to see futures like maps, and to lose myself in them. Nysa would call me a hypocrite. She would not be wrong.

So I tell her to rest. I tell her fire must not consume itself.

And inside I wonder: do I only say this because I am afraid she will outshine me?