Elias scrambled back, his boots slipping on the wet stone. He watched as Silas was hit first. The old man didn't fall. He was simply swept upward, his body suspended in the "wave" of air, drifting toward the clouds as if he were drowning in the sky.

A massive wall of distorted air—invisible but for the way it warped the light—rushed toward the shore at silent, impossible speeds. It didn't splash; it shattered. Trees didn't bend; they snapped like glass.

Suddenly, the humming stopped. The silence was deafening, a vacuum that sucked the breath from Elias’s lungs. The pressure dropped so fast his ears bled. Then, the horizon vanished.

The Air of Wave had come to claim the coast, and this time, it wasn't going back out to sea.