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.

The humidity on the coast of Blackwood Bay didn't just sit on your skin; it felt like a physical weight, a damp shroud that smelled of salt and secrets. Elias Thorne stood on the edge of the jagged cliffs, watching the tide roll in. But the Atlantic wasn't behaving.

Instead of the rhythmic crash of surf, there was only a rhythmic humming—a low-frequency vibration that rattled the marrow of his bones. This was the "Air of Wave," a local phenomenon the fishermen whispered about, usually right before they went missing.

Elias looked. A flock of gulls was frozen in mid-air, their wings locked, suspended in a pocket of shimmering, distorted air. They weren't flying; they were trapped in a ripple. The "Air of Wave" wasn't a tide of water—it was a tide of pressure, a localized distortion of physics that turned the atmosphere into a heavy, crushing liquid.