Blackbeak Bluff skyward nail

tag is for reference

The mist veiled the cliffs as ghostly banners, the sea beyond roaring with a voice older than time. Twilight bled across the sky, washing the world in deep hues of violet and ash, while the last breath of sun glazed the waves with silver fire. The wind carried the sting of salt, cold and biting, whispering warnings that fell on deaf ears.
Astier stood at the edge of the world, a pale wraith cut against the dying light. His breath rose in slow, controlled clouds. He had felt it long before he saw it: the low, bone-deep growl from the treeline, the tremor in the earth as something ancient and furious approached. The cougar burst from the thicket, a flash of muscle and rage, tawny fur bristling, eyes molten with hunger. It launched at him with a savage scream.
The wraith met it head-on. The clash was violent and immediate: claws tore fur, jaws snapped on empty air, the sharp tang of blood rising between them. They grappled, twisted, staggered along the crumbling rim of stone. Astier moved with the honed instincts of a survivor, swift and calculating, but the beast was relentless. The earth, slick with mist and sea spray, betrayed his footing. Gravel and broken rock skittered away beneath his paws. A misstep. A lurch of gravity.
The cougar’s weight slammed into him again, and together they tumbled over the edge. The world turned sideways. Sky and stone and stormy sea spun into a single wild blur. The howl of the wind tore the breath from his lungs. For a moment, weightless, he floated in the dying light.
And in that sliver of suspended time, as the ocean roared to claim him, Astier’s mind did not race with panic. It reached out instead, almost reverently, toward a single, piercing memory: @Siofra Hawthorne. The wildness in her eyes, the unyielding strength tucked behind every careful word. The way she had stared at him, as if she could see something deeper beneath the frost. Her name flickered on his tongue, silent against the scream of the wind. He thought of her: of the fire she bore, untamed and radiant, and for the first time in long years, something within him yearned. Yearned for another tomorrow, yearned to follow.
The sea rose like a wall of ink and silver. And then he struck it, a brutal, shattering plunge that tore him from air into a world of black and cold and silence. The ocean swallowed him whole, ruthless and endless, and Astier vanished beneath the waves, leaving only the broken mist and the dying cry of the gulls behind. Whether the current would cradle him or crush him, the sea kept its secrets. As it always had.