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.
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. Air of Wave - Suspense
Elias adjusted the headphones of his seismic recorder. The needles on his monitor were jumping in jagged, violent stabs, yet the ocean surface remained as flat as a mirror. No whitecaps. No spray. Just a dull, metallic sheen stretching toward the horizon. "It’s not the water moving," a voice rasped behind him. Elias scrambled back, his boots slipping on the wet stone
The Air of Wave had come to claim the coast, and this time, it wasn't going back out to sea. He was simply swept upward, his body suspended
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.
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.
Elias spun around. It was Silas, a man whose face looked like a map of every storm he’d survived. He was pointing a trembling finger at the horizon. "Look at the birds, boy."