The massive Cloud Weaver, its elegant frame slicing through the sky like a blade through silk — or, in Judge's personal experience, like a butter knife struggling against a particularly stubborn loaf of stale bread — bore the Drakonis Family's proud sigil.
The emblem, a soaring dragon with its wings spread wide and its head turned left, always gave Judge the impression that it had just spotted something incredibly disappointing. Perhaps a knight charging at it with a spoon. Or maybe the bill at a fancy restaurant.
As the grand airship traversed the thick white fog, Judge noted a peculiar tightness in his chest, his breathing slightly more labored than usual. Not to an alarming degree — just enough to make him think, "Huh, this is mildly inconvenient" before immediately forgetting about it in favor of more important matters, such as whether he could bribe his sister into silence for the remainder of the trip.
Lediya, his ever-dutiful maid, had explained that the fog was not just for show — it was an integral part of the grand barrier that separated Terra Draconum, the revered land of dragons, from the outside world.
It was both a natural defense and a cosmic joke at the expense of travelers who thought they could simply stroll in unannounced. It also had the added benefit of occasionally scaring merchants into thinking they had veered into the afterlife, which, Judge imagined, was great for keeping the economy balanced.
Once they breached the fog, it would only be a matter of days before they reached Wistemere. A few days. A few days left to start his excruciating days of enduring his sister Amber's presence in the same confined space.
Judge wasn't sure what form of ancient magic she had mastered, but she possessed an uncanny ability to turn even the most composed individuals into desperate escape artists. If bickering were a recognized combat style, she would be the grandmaster. But he would endure. He had to. Because the moment she was dropped off at school, his long-awaited adventure could finally begin.
Again there were problems, of course, he had to get past the one true obstacle in his life: his mother. She would accompany him on his trip, and there was no way of attending his recorder group discussion without her knowing, she was inevitable.
Eleyn Drakonis was not merely a person — she was an event. A walking, talking force of nature. Conversations with her often felt less like casual discussions and more like cross-examinations where the defendant (Judge) wasn't even aware of his crimes yet. If she so much as suspected that he was up to something, she would unravel every last secret he had in his arsenal before he could even blink.
Which meant one thing — he needed a solid plan.
His mind raced through every possible excuse, every deception, every half-truth that could hold up against the sheer intensity of a mother's intuition.
He needed something flawless. Something unbreakable. A lie so masterfully woven that even the gods would hesitate to question it. But most importantly, it needed to be just plausible enough that it wouldn't immediately crumble under scrutiny, unlike his last attempt at deception, which ended with him admitting everything and making tea out of sheer guilt.
Despite everything, he realized it might have been useless summoning that spirit in the first place, but in hindsight, it wasn't a complete waste of time. His mother wasn't the only one in the house who could have caught him, after all. In a way, it was like investing in a heavily armored vault to store nothing but a strongly worded note — seemingly pointless but potentially useful in ways he had yet to realize.
Judge sat in his room, hunched over his desk, eyes locked onto the old-timer artifact before him with the sheer intensity of a scholar unraveling the mysteries of the universe — or, perhaps more accurately, a man realizing he had been reading the same sentence in a book for the past fifteen minutes without comprehending a single word.
He had spent countless hours tinkering with the old artifacts, uncovering their hidden mechanics, piecing together their secrets. But holy artifacts? Those were a different matter entirely.
There was one lying around, waiting for him to examine it, but unlike his usual experiments — where failures resulted in nothing more than minor explosions or the occasional teleportation of household objects to unknown locations — he had a nagging suspicion that breaking a holy artifact might result in divine retribution. And frankly, he wasn't in the mood to be smote down by a mere artifact. And worse, his brother was on the same ship.
Just as he was about to finally shift his focus, a knock at the door shattered his concentration.
"Master Judge," Lediya's voice filtered through the wood.
"What is it? I do not want snacks," Judge muttered distractedly, waving at the air as if that alone could dismiss her.
"It is time for dinner, young master," Lediya entered without hesitation, well aware that if Judge truly wanted her to stay out, he would have made it explicitly clear.
"What? But there's still sunlight! It's still evening, right?" Judge shot her a look of disbelief. Lediya was not the type to play practical jokes, nor was she the type to misread the time — unlike Judge, who had once mistaken three in the morning for noon and spent an entire minute pondering whether or not the sun had abandoned him.
"Light cannot pass through the border's fog, young master," Lediya explained with the patience of a scholar explaining arithmetic to a particularly stubborn rock. "What you see is the light produced by the fog itself."
Judge blinked, the realization hitting him like an overdue library fee — sudden, frustrating, and entirely avoidable had he thought things through.
"Oh…" he mumbled, feeling as though he had just solved a great cosmic mystery. The reason his cloudstrider eyes had failed to see through the fog was not due to personal incompetence but due to the immutable laws of barrier physics. That was far more acceptable.
A long silence stretched between them.
"...Can I at least get some snacks with dinner?" Judge finally asked, his priorities firmly in place.
Lediya let out the sigh of someone who had long accepted their fate and turned to leave, muttering something about how she should have asked for a transfer.
Judge, meanwhile, leaned back in his chair, fully prepared to face dinner like a man — by which he meant stuffing his face with food and pretending he hadn't just spent an entire afternoon questioning the nature of light.