Linda was still lamenting their too sudden departure from the shamanic feast although she had to admit that the House of Eastern Wind was nothing to gawk at either. This building too was almost completely engulfed by the surrounding vegetation, but she could see enough of the exterior to liken it to the Buddhist temples one would see in Japan or Korea back on Earth.

Brother Ma’ala had taken care to send lower ranking shamans ahead of them who had prepared seating, lighting and even some light refreshments. Linda's group currently sat in the Main Prayer room which was spacious, yet still felt cozy and private.

From sitting this close, Linda could finally make out the dark circles under Aeris Lee’s eyes and for the first time since she’d seen him, he actually looked his age. He sat in front of the ritual altar and the breathtaking mural of thunderous skies behind it. His hair, released from the feeble attempts of the band to restrain it, was flowing around his face dark and heavy like the sky outside.

If she squinted just right, she thought she could imagine a sword laying by his side like a general of old preparing to disclose his battle strategy. He drew in a deep breath and his severe expression softened just a bit.

“Well then,” Lee sighed “ I guess I should start from а beginning of sorts, except it’s hard for me to decide which one. Circumstances have changed quite a bit since I first departed the Wind twin with my sons... I am curious though, so if you’ll indulge me with a self-serving question, lady Tempayah - how come the infamous anarchist hacker Suffo Matrix knows who I am? I took Tan’s name, as per the old traditions, and both me and her went to great lengths to hide my origins.”

Wint gave him her trademark side-grin and a small shrug.

“Believe it or not, lord Aeris, I stumbled upon the truth about you by accident. I was really looking into your wife - Aeris Tan was at one point on the shortlist of super-ara level windstorms whom Aquina Liquitt’s Senate had selected for the purpose of assigning the next Ruling over storms. I believe she was top of that list too, so I wanted to learn what kind of person she was.”

“The kind to take a Tailwind as a husband? Wouldn’t that have been all the hottest gossip around Typhone, had she been proclaimed Ruling?” The man laughed, bitterness seeping in his tone.

Wint hit the tabletop with her fist and a sudden gust of air circled around for a brief second. The Wind men jumped a little, startled by the outburst, but the woman managed to contain her anger.

“The kind of woman who doesn’t fall easy prey to propaganda and manipulation. The kind who does not care for society’s silly restrictions and taboos, when she wants to do the right thing, consequences and gossip be damned.” The windstorm hissed. “The kind of Ruling over storms even I could find myself following and looking up to, so please, lord Aeris, don’t misunderstand my words from before - when I said you are a demon and a trickster, my sole intention was to get the little one here away from you, so we can keep focused and on task. Getting all misty-eyed, singing kumbaya around the shamanic campfires during a little Wind family reunion doesn’t fit on our current timescales.”

Wint eyed Lee for a bit as if looking for signs that he understood. Apparently she found the widening of his brown eyes as good an indication as she was going to get, so she continued.

“But then I figured - hey, this ain’t no ordinary Wind family, and this ain’t no ordinary Tailwind trickster either” She laughed suddenly, her mercurial mood changes startling the rest of the group yet again. “Look at you - Aeris Lee, né Phung-Shen Lee or for those of us who’ve learned our Ancient East Wind tongues - Lee of the House of the Wind god, right? A fitting name, I’d say. A nine-tail like you was rare even before the last Cutting of Tails and I bet you could give an ara level windstorm a run for her debits.” She drew in a deep breath. “So I’m hoping rather than blowing in different directions, we can unite our windcurrents, so to speak. Would’ve been even better to get both yourself and your wife, of course, but unfortunately…”

It was Lee’s turn to bang a fist against the table and Linda was grateful for the fact that most of the food and drink was already safe in their bellies and not spilling all over the place from all the abuse the small piece of wooden furniture was getting.

“We will not discuss this now.” He growled.

“Apologies, my lord, I thought…” Wint began and if the twins had let her go on, perhaps she could’ve talked herself past this tense moment, but the boys were nothing if not perceptive.

“Something happened to mama, didn’t it, papa?” Lao muttered, as Lei’s eyes were already filling up with tears. “That’s why she hasn’t called back, isn’t it?”

Linda felt her heart sink. Back on the Recreation Isles, when she’d seen Lee for the first time, he had asked her if her mother was there too. She remembered with vivid horror the vision she’d gotten in her confused state of the beautiful middle-aged woman with her distinctive East-Wind features hunched over an old dusty terminal, pressing a hand to a nasty gash in her stomach which was draining her life force drop by scarlet drop.

Lee took in a shaky breath and when he opened his eyes again, Linda could tell how much effort it took him to contain the pain he must feel from taking over his whole face.

“There was an attack on Syfis a couple of weeks ago.” The man finally said, lowering his head a bit so his hair would fall and cover his darkened expression. “I hoped… I thought…” He clenched his teeth. “The funeral was yesterday. We would have never made it back on time. They did right by her though, great-aunt Wang sent her off.”

Lei was already sobbing and even the ever-stoic Lao had two matching wet streaks on both sides of his beautiful face. With the twins sitting on either side of him, it was relatively easy for Lee to pull them into his arms without having to stand.

“I am really sorry, boys, I didn’t know how to even say it…” the man spoke softly into the mass of raven hair atop the twins’ heads.

Wint cleared her throat.

“I know I’ve done quite a bit of damage to this conversation already, lord Aeris, but I do hope we can still finish it…” She waited for him to raise his eyes to her, before continuing. “What say ye? If you tell me why you and your boys were roaming around half the planet, separated from your wife and protector, I’ll tell you what we’ve been up to with the Ruling over sea and we can possibly figure out this mess together, up to and including, hopefully - what happened to the real Aeris Fung.”

Lee let out the breath he had no idea he was holding and pushed his boys to sit up straight, gently rubbing their tears off with his hands. Linda felt a prickle in her own eyes, but inhabiting an Alaian woman’s body, it wasn’t as easy for her to cry as it used to be. Even so, her mind swirled with emotion and images so vivid, they may as well have been memories. There was a gorgeous looking house on a windy hill someplace on the Air twin, her brain showed. Two raven haired young children of no more than eight years old were running around the front porch, causing their usual mischief. A thirty-something man in loose fitting domestic clothing chased after them. The handsome woman from her previous vision called out to him from the porch to let the little ones be. The children jumped the man from both sides, clinging to his legs with excited cries “Make us fly, Papa! Make us fly!”.

The man, Aeris Lee, Linda noticed, had a sort of sadness to his smile even back then, but his eyes lit up as he crouched next to his two rascals and ruffled their hair. The woman approached and they each took one twin in their arms and shared a mischievous look before tossing the little ones in the air. A tween girl came into view and joined the fun, jumping a bit to catch the boy flying her way.

The memory whispered that she was happy, because her whole family was happy.

Surfacing back to reality brought again the pain in her chest. Looking over at the now grown twins, she saw they had both lifted their knees to their chins and had wrapped their lean arms around them, heads low and concealed by curtains of raven hair. Aeris Lee looked like he had just been punched in the gut and the color had drained from his beautiful face. Aeris Tan was no longer there to make any of them fly anymore.

“Of course, we can’t afford the time to mourn right now.” The strain in his voice was painfully audible as he spoke. “And you are right, lady Tempayah - we best blow in the same direction to get through this storm. Though I suspect we may have been doing so already for quite some time.”

He pinned Linda down with his darkened eyes.

“Although I know you are blameless in all of this, child, it still pains me to look at you.” He raked one hand through his hair absent-mindedly, collecting his thoughts. “Still, if you are travelling with lady Tempayah, it must mean that Fung had found her first. Perhaps my daughter thought another windstorm could help unlock her Gift. ”

Linda looked at him in shock. What was this man saying? Was his daughter Giftless? Was that even possible for the child of a nine-tailed Tailwind and a super-ara level windstorm? The girl felt her head spin as a piece of the chaotic puzzle that was her existence on Alaiah finally clicked into place. Back when she first awoke in this strange place, Wint had looked at her with something akin to expectation, which had quickly turned to disappointment. Linda had shrugged it off at the time, thinking it was just part of the windstorm’s rambunctious personality, but now that she gave it a second thought it made more sense that Aeris Fung had climbed up that mountain with the windstorm’s help, but instead of an Eastern-Wind girl with her Gift restored, Wint had gotten a confused alien woman with the meek character of a local male.

“Have you heard of the High Counsel Contact theory of archeology, lord Aeris?” The windstorm cut through the silence.

Lee laughed. It was a dry, humourless laugh, the kind you let out when someone’s just said something which sounded more ridiculous than funny.

“Who are you and what have you done to the empirically-driven lady Suffo Mattrix? Why do you bring up this Ancient Aliens pseudoscience?”

Wint pinned him down with her catlike green eyes for a while, considering her words carefully for what seemed like the first time since Linda had known her. This man’s trust and alliance was important to the windstorm, which was a first as well.

“What if I told you that it’s not actually pseudo-science?”

“Oh, come on!” The man exclaimed in disbelief, a half-smirk still on his rosy lips. “I’m a man and even I am not as gullible. Do you honestly expect me to believe that there are alien beings of pure light who have communicated with ancient Alaians?”

Linda felt her heart skip a beat. Beings of pure light? Or beings, hiding within it? “What is Balance?” The harrowing choir of voices echoed through her skull and she felt as though she had forgotten a promise made to some ancient being of great power which was now slowly inching forward to collect on her second chance.

“I… I’ve seen them.” She whispered, but everyone else around the table leaned in, suddenly shifting their focus to her. “After I died… back on Earth - I saw blinding white light and some voices kept asking me about Balance or something.”

“After you died?”

“Back on… Earth?”

There seemed to be no heavy subject or amount of tension that the twins’ charm couldn’t dissipate and Linda found herself smiling despite the weight she still felt in her chest. She took a good long look at the two boys and the man between them perhaps for the first time and felt that familiar stir in her subconscious. “Aeris Fung, are you still around in there?” Linda asked the faint presence. “Are you the one pushing all those images in my head of those two twin devils making a mess of the house? And this man, this man who had raised all three - are you showing me how beautiful he looks with a smile, so I can give it back to him?”

“Earth is the planet Linda claims to be from.” Wint responded and the boys turned their inquisitive stares to her. “The society over there seems to be a bit backwards - they have no Gifts, but their males have developed superior physical strength for some reason and the women had somehow let the men lead in most aspects of public life.” The emphasis she put on the word “lead” betrayed the windstorm's utter disbelief of what Linda had told her about Earth during their travels. ”I am not too sure how relevant her past is, in any event, and neither the Ruling over sea nor myself could figure out why the High Counsel sent her.”

Lee pulled his hair back and for a moment it looked like he would tie it up again, but he was so lost in thought, he forgot and just stood there, arms in the air for a moment. Linda tried to imagine what must have been going through his head with the loss of his wife and now this revelation that his daughter was what? Exchanged with someone else through the twisted mystical will of some ancient aliens of light?

“Tan…” the man began weakly and cleared his throat in an attempt to steady his voice. “After Fung left, Tan transferred to Syfis so she could find another way for our daughter to get her Gift back. With her gone, I couldn’t stay in the house in Balam-Tab with the boys… My in-laws may have tolerated me for her sake, but with Lao and Lei grown and showing tails… Tan agreed that we should try and look for Fung instead. She was worried, of course, but she knows how strong my Craft is and she allowed me to train the twins so they could take care of themselves too.”

As if on cue, the boys’ eyes flashed icy white and torrents of air appeared behind their backs - Lao had five, whereas Lei had four. Linda smirked - together they were a whole nine-tail and having experienced their abilities first-hand, she was afraid to think what Lee was capable of. Alaiah was a woman’s world, of course, but if men had to be travelling alone, it was comforting to know they were not completely defenseless.

“So you see, lady Tempayah”, the man sighed and attempted a smile. “I wasn’t entirely without protection - I had my precious thunder about me.”

“Precious thunder?” Linda echoed.

“Lao means precious”, the twin said.

“And Lei means thunder” his brother added.

“So Tan came to Syfis and you started roaming around, searching for Fung?” Wint repeated, while looking at the three Wind men with what looked suspiciously like respect. “Did lady Aeris mention anything about the attack on Syfis?”

“About an Air-moon rotation ago, she said she was tailing some suspicious colleagues of hers who had just been assigned to the Night Watch and that was about the last time I heard from her. These women were South-Magmalian.” Lee frowned, then added. “The media reports didn’t mention anything about any gravity-wielders, though - all the coverage was about the living flames around the capital. Of course, you’re not falling for the whole “the firestarters did it” bit, are you, lady Tempayah?”

“Of course, I am not.” Wint nodded reassuringly. “But others may not have the time or resources I do to reach the same understanding.”

Silence fell upon their group yet again. Tensions had been rising between the Twin continents and Magmalia in recent rotations, ever since Liquitt Aquina’s mandate as Ruling over sea had ended. Tyrannis Pyre was a bloodthirsty beast of a woman but she had no motive to attack when she herself had reached out for help to the current Ruling, after her son had disappeared. Her son…

Wint stood up suddenly and startled the rest yet again.

“Lord Aeris, we have much more to discuss, but I’m afraid we’ve been away from a somewhat crucial member of our merry band of misfits for a bit too long now. Little one, what time is it?”

Linda felt a chill run down her spine. With the emotional rollercoaster she’d been on all evening, she almost forgot about Fye herself. She patted around her pockets for a bit before pulling out her satcomm which read that they had been in the House of Eastern Wind for a little over two hours.

“Fye will be alright though, right?” The girl asked. “He’s with Brother Ma’ala after all.”

Aeris Lee was the next one to bolt up from his seat.

“Fye? As in Pyre Fye, Prince of Magmalia is that fire tribe boy you dragged over from the Recreation Isles?” The man bit on his lower lip. “Lady Tempayah, I advise we best check on him right away.” He drew in a sharp breath, as if debating whether to continue or not, but finally said. “You asked earlier if I were the one known as Big Brother. I am not, however the Reverend Brother is.”

As if to accentuate his words, a powerful angry thunder roared from outside and a flash of lightning made their faces look almost ghost-like. They all made for the door and went outside but the whole time Linda kept thinking to herself that the storm couldn’t have been either of their doing because their eyes never changed…