Guided by his father's officers, Eldin grew into a respected and beloved admiral. The Windchasers--not having any purpose while the windwyrm hatchling grew--were disbanded, but despite this, it was not an uncommon occurrence for the crew and civilians of the Ventus to witness their admiral soaring through the skies alongside the ship whenever the impulse struck him. His duties kept him occupied, but he never failed to find time to indulge in those things that lifted his heart, and if he were not flying, he would often be found in the company of his closest companions, Inpheria and Fenric.

The former of these two published several monographs on various subjects related to the events which came to be known by historians as the Windwyrm Incident. Working closely with the windwyrm hatchling--who lived on the Ventus until growing far too large for his comfort--Inpheria became the foremost expert on the fundamental properties of purewind, the physiology of wyrmkin, and several ancient languages that--somehow--the hatchling was in full command of once it had developed the capacity for speech. In her spare time, she often tutored younger sailors in the art of swordplay.

Fenric buried himself in his work. After many years, he and his team developed a means of improving the efficiency of the purewind engines to the point that energy consumption had dropped to an almost negligible amount. This dramatic decrease in windstone consumption ensured that the ship would not require the windwyrm hatchling to sacrifice chunks of his heart for several centuries. It was not a perfect solution, but in the end, it did not need to be, for just under two hundred years after the events of the Windwyrm Incident, the scientists of the Ventus began to observe a thinning of the miasma that plagued the troposphere of the planet. No cause could be determined for this phenomenon, and it was eventually agreed upon to simply be the natural life cycle of the still-mysterious orange vapor. After one hundred years of this thinning--almost a thousand years after the Ascension of the humans--there wasn't a single particle of the miasma remaining.

Humans were able to return to the surface.

It was not an easy transition, for the miasma had destroyed many of the ecosystems on the planet, but humanity managed to forge a new existence on the land that their species had fled a millennium prior. The monstrous creatures that Inpheria, Eldin, and Fenric battled during their acquisition of the windwyrm's egg were no threat, for it seemed that the miasma was the only thing keeping their bodies animated. The absence of that miasma brought true death to those thousand-year-old cursed humans.

The first colony to be established on the surface later became the capital of a nation of humans that eventually expanded to cover the entire planet. That first city grew to become the heart of modern historical knowledge, populated with several museums dedicated to the Ascension and the resettlement of the planet. Tourists interested in the thousand-year-flight of humanity visited these museums, where they learned more about the extinction that their species had narrowly escaped and the full story behind the chosen name of humanity's capital.

Zephyr.