Leo exhaled. The little god had finally opened the door. He was back. But for the next hour, he didn’t trust it. He kept listening to his own breath, waiting for the world to go quiet again. It didn’t. But the memory of that trapped, inverted silence—a silence that hurt—would stay with him longer than any vista from 30,000 feet. He had learned that altitude wasn’t about the view. It was about the fragile, sealed chambers inside your own head, and the violence of coming home.
The woman beside him noticed his grimace. “You okay?” blocked ears from flying
Landing was a slow crucible. Each hundred feet of descent added a stone to the weight behind his eardrum. Lights of the city blurred below. The landing gear thunked down, a sound he felt more in his teeth than heard. The final approach: the roar of flaps, the change in engine pitch. He pressed a hot, desperate finger to the tragus of his ear, wiggling it, begging the pressure to equalize. Leo exhaled
Descent began. The seatbelt sign chimed. Leo felt the plane drop its nose, and with it, a clamp of pain tightened behind his jaw. It wasn't sharp, not yet. It was the ache of a stubborn vacuum, a tiny, stubborn god in his eustachian tube refusing to open its temple doors. He swallowed repeatedly, a dry, desperate clicking in his throat. He chewed the gum he’d bought specifically for this purpose, now a flavorless wad of desperation. But for the next hour, he didn’t trust it