The scream had barely finished tearing out of him before the blue-haired boy jerked backward.

"YAAAGH—"

His footing went first. Then everything else. He hit the water with a splash that sent droplets scattering across the rock Aries was lying on.

Aries lay there. Stared at the sky. Let the world reassemble itself piece by piece.

He was alive. That was the important part.

Lying on a damp rock beside what appeared to be a lake at the bottom of a cliff, clothes soaked through and sticking to him in the specific way clothes do after they’ve been extremely wet.

"Where am I...?" The question came out before he decided to ask it.

The boy resurfaced almost immediately, pushing wet blue hair out of his face. His expression landed somewhere between offended and deeply put upon.

He pointed at Aries from the water.

"Easy there." He had the voice of someone who had performed a genuine kindness and felt this was a poor return on it. "You startled me. I was checking whether you were alive after pulling you out of the water, but I didn’t want a return gift to send me straight back into the lake."

"Oh—" Embarrassment hit fast. "I’m sorry—"

"Okay good, he’s alive." A different voice, from behind.

Aries turned.

A girl stood at the edge of the rock, arms loosely folded, looking at him.

Pink hair. Pearl-colored eyes. Roughly Mirielle’s age. Something in how she stood reminded him of his sister.

Aries pushed himself upright slowly, finding a position that kept as many complaints quiet as possible.

"Umm... sorry. Who are you people?"

She placed a hand on her chest. "Nice to meet you. I’m Valea Ivoryhall. That wet person over there is Eren Lichenhall. Good to see you’re okay—"

"Thanks to me," the wet person said, with considerable feeling.

"Please." Valea didn’t even look at him. "The only thing you managed to do was nearly fall on him."

"EXCUSE ME?" Eren had pulled himself to the bank now, still dripping, his expression suggesting the only thing stopping a full accounting of his contributions was the effort still required to fully exit the water.

"Just why are you both barking like dogs?"

A third voice. Dry and flat, coming from the treeline.

A boy with green hair walked into the clearing.

Valea and Eren turned toward him at exactly the same moment.

"You just shut up and go back where you came from, you shitty Nico!" Both of them. Same words. Perfect sync.

Nico looked completely unsurprised.

"Alright, alright — that’s enough."

A new voice entered the clearing.

"The boy’s awake, professor," Valea confirmed, stepping slightly aside.

Aries was already turning before the sentence finished. Something in the back of his head had processed the voice before his eyes could confirm it.

And when the figure stepped into view — bronze hair, emerald eyes, one hand resting on Kivi’s neck while the creature leaned against him like she lived there — the finger Aries raised was more reflex than decision.

"I-It’s you..."

The man’s expression shifted slightly. "Nice to see you again, kid." The corner of his mouth moved. "Seems like fate made us meet again."

Eren looked between them immediately. "Wait — you know this kid, professor?"

"I wouldn’t say I know him." He stepped forward, settling at a comfortable distance from Aries. "But we have met before." He looked at Aries directly. "I’m Cedric Virelion."

A beat of quiet from behind.

"Nico Ivoryhall," Nico said.

"I’m Aries Aerwyn," Aries said.

The lake sat still. The trees held quiet.

And somewhere impossibly far above — the cliff edge, Mirielle’s hand reaching into empty air — everything that had happened sat in the back of his chest with a weight that the introductions weren’t touching at all.

’My family thinks I’m gone. I need to get back. I need to figure out how.’

"Good to know you, Aries." Eren had gotten himself fully onto solid ground and was wringing out a sleeve. He glanced up with easy curiosity. "But why are you out here alone? Where are your parents?"

Aries hesitated.

The real answer was long and strange and contained things he wasn’t ready to explain to four people he’d known for three minutes. "I got separated from my family while we were traveling," he said.

"I don’t even know the way back." Both sentences were completely true. He was just leaving out everything that happened between them.

"He probably doesn’t remember much," Nico said, casual as anything. "Wouldn’t surprise me if he hit his head going down."

"That," Valea said, turning to face him immediately, "coming from the person who once cast a spell backwards on himself."

Nico’s eye twitched once. "And you — who cried when—"

"Don’t you DARE finish that sentence."

The wind moved before she finished speaking. A sharp gust hit Nico square in the face and rearranged his green hair with extreme prejudice.

His response was a thin stream of water that shot forward with obvious intent, catching her shoulder by a margin too narrow to be accidental.

"Really." She brushed her shoulder off. "Attacking a lady. How low are your standards, exactly?"

Nico looked at her. "Lady?" he said. "You?" 𝕗𝚛𝚎𝚎𝐰𝗲𝗯𝗻𝚘𝚟𝚎𝗹.𝕔𝐨𝕞

The air between them sharpened considerably.

Eren pressed two fingers to his temple and let out a long breath.

"Here we go again."

"Every single day," Cedric agreed, in the peaceful tone of a man who had fully made his peace with this arrangement long ago.

Aries watched the two of them go at it — wind and water, fast and colliding, both of them knowing exactly where the other’s weak points were because they’d spent a long time finding them.

Element-awakened. Past the point of thinking about it. Both of them clearly strong.

All of them strong, actually. And even when they were tearing each other apart, they somehow fit together.

A sound came from deep in the trees. Cedric’s head turned toward it first, the easy expression shifting into something more focused without any announcement.

"By the way." Eren, either not hearing it or choosing other priorities, turned back to Aries. "How old are you?"

"Twelve."

Eren nodded with the gravity of someone receiving important information.

"I see. You’re smaller than all of us — we’re all fifteen." Something genuine came through underneath the easy delivery. "We’ll look after you until you find your family. How does that sound?"

Aries kept his face completely still.

’You absolute brat, I am older than you. It’s just this body.’

The thought lasted about three seconds.

Then the treeline came apart.

A massive boar, standing nearly at Cedric’s shoulder, tusks curved like twin blades. The sound it made when it emerged shook leaves off the nearest branches and hit every person in the clearing somewhere in the chest.

Every voice cut off at exactly the same moment.

Even Valea and Nico’s argument simply stopped existing, both of them turning toward the thing with immediate, total focus.