Spoiler! :
A young man stood on the boards of the Mylin city square, his feather cloak pulled tightly about his neck. The sky showed black clouds that signified heavy weather soon to come. “ Good,” he thought, “I can use those south-bound winds to thrust me to Locher. Maybe. Since that market has had prices tank…and all I have left is five Johls…and these rooms here aren’t exactly cheap like those at Locher... “
...
Miles away, the wind cried as it ripped through the branches outside the hovel built into the side of an oak.
“Verdeyan?” Unsa’s voice came from the next room.
“What now?” replied Verdeyan.
“Make sure you get everything. I’m serious, we can’t lose time. We must get away before the scouting party reaches
us, and before that storm.”
Verdeyan nodded absently, continuing her packing. Her three changes of clothing, the shawl her grandmother had made, and her jet necklace lay in the bottom of her rucksack. She touched the bone needle she held from her sewing kit with the tip of one finger.
“Great, it’s blunt, again!” she thought, reaching for the grinding block of mullar bone that lay on her bed beside her pack. She wrapped the bone needle and the grinding block in a scrap of fabric , “there, they shouldn’t migrate so wildly in there while I fly…unlike last time…” She winced, recalling how the needles from her sewing kit which had come open in her bag, and, had become stuck in her clothing on her last trip, which had made for unpleasant encounters early in the morning with sharp objects stuck in sleeves of her tunic.
She tucked back a wayward strand of red hair from where it lay on her forehead, as its tickling presence irritated her.
Next to pass through the opening of her bag was the Wind Spirit amulet, a small amber medallion carved with curving lines. Verdeyan smiled, recalling the chant her father had taught her when she was twelve, detailing the Wind’s persuasion of the Great One to create the first winged people from the birds. A few more objects and her blanket completed her packing. Most of her possessions were in the family’s winter home in Preacce, the northernmost city in the Chamalaen range. “By the Keeper, what I wouldn’t give to be there already…” she mused. Her brother was apprenticed there, where the glass-makers blew molten amber globules into richly contoured vessels. She sighed, longing for the warmth of the fires in the glassmaker’s shop.
“Verdeyan-” Unsa was in the doorway now, concern playing in the shadows and wrinkles on her face.
“What did I forget now? I thought I’d already swept every surface in this place twice,” Verdeyan huffily interrupted her mother.
“Stop this mouthing of yours and listen! We must go, immediately. An un-planned party was seen ten miles from here; the lantern beacons are lighted.” Unsa breathlessly related the news.
Verdeyan nodded, closing her pack and slinging it onto her shoulders. She already wore her heaviest clothing; “way to go mom…let’s put out the fire two hours before we need to leave—saving a little coal is worth two hours of misery!” she thought to herself.
“Now!” Unsa reiterated, taking her daughter by the arm, pulling her through the door.
They ran together, joined by Ashya, Unsa’s sister, who carried several large bundles. Ashya flailed wildly for a moment, trying to settle the cumbersome bags on her back. In desperation, she dropped one, and hefted the other baggage, following the two other women to the door.
Unsa and Verdeyan both leapt into the sky, flaring their wings to get lift. Ashya followed quickly. They set off southward, toward an emergency rendezvous point, where the few families in their rural community met during crisis.
They’d been traveling for mere minutes when the gale hit.
“Mom!” Verydeyan screamed, the words torn from her lips by the gusts of wind.
The updraft hit her wings, pushing up with such force any movement was nearly impossible; it forced her wings full; they felt as if they were going to tear from their place on her back. The air quickly grew thin and colder yet, her breath coming in sharp gasps of pain as the tendons and muscle in her wings stretched to accommodate the surges of wind. The world was a blur of gray.
She couldn’t see her own hands, just the gray. Adrenaline had already wiped all thought from her mind. Then, as quickly as it came, the updraft disappeared, leaving her wings empty, as more air began sucking her down, the endless gray racing past. She opened her wings as wide as they’d go, tilting her body to gain altitude. But it wasn’t enough. Something hard, sharp, smashed into her face, stinging her eyes. More and more impacts jolted her body, slowed her descent—tree branches? S
he caught hold of one, dangling from it like a leaf, and clung tight. The gray whorled so fast, so heavy, she couldn’t see what it was she held onto, but she knew it must be a tree. Groping in the darkness, she pulled her body up onto the branch, and crawled, sensing by feel, with raw and bleeding hands, the way to the trunk. Somewhere near her destination, her arms gave out, and she collapsed into a fork of the branch she was on.
It was hours later that her eyes cracked open, revealing the bareness of the landscape around her. She was huddled in a messy tangle of limbs, halfway up a tree, its leaves hidden by the snow that coated its branches. “Mom’s right about the flash storm,” she thought, fear beginning to gnaw at her gut. How long had she been asleep? The sun was hidden, but a bright spot behind the clouds signaled its position; it was midmorning. Her stomach now gurgled hungrily at this news.
“Well, there’s one thing to do now”, she thought, trying to steel herself for what was coming; “get out of the tree.”
She lifted her head, turning to face the trunk of the tree. Her muscles screamed in protest, one wing refusing to move from its limp, half-extended posture behind her back, drooping against her leg. She shook in pain, the battering she’d taken the night before, falling through the treetops, replaying vividly yet dully in her mind.
She tried to move again, and was left breathlessly mouthing swears, realizing the likely extent of her injury: dislocated wing, maybe crushed broken bones.
She took a breath, trying to will the pain away before making the movements necessary to get down from the tree. She managed to turn to face the trunk, but not before the breath-stealing pain slashed through her back again. “Uhnn-“ a groan escaped her lips, which made her angry. She had to cling tight for a moment, watching own her hands, odd in their claw-like configuration, as she grasped the branch beneath her, knocking snow and ice from the rough bark. Her breath came in sharp gasps, which streaked the air in puffs of white. Watching her breath in the air, she talked herself through her plan, and began to concentrate on picking her way down through the branches. Her next movement, which she took gingerly: she looked down to see where she was exactly.
“Great…halfway up an icey beechtree…” she complained to whatever audience there was in the recesses of her own mind.
The process took nearly fifteen minutes, each movement triggering a blinding stab of pain. “ Just another step,” she told herself with each movement. “ Just another step…” It took her fifteen minutes to make it to the ground. Hunched in the snow at the foot of the tree, she thought it might have been better to just jump down. “ Then the pain would have only come twice; once to let go of the branch and jump; then when I hit the ground,” she thought.
She counted to five, and let her body go limp, so that she fell backwards into the snow. The pain again seared, making her breathing ragged, her body trembling at its force. The ice’ cold bled through the feathers of her wings, and, as she had hoped, began to numb her injuries, sucking away the firey edge the pain had in her body, dulling it.
She lay until tingling permeated her limbs, creeping up her back and neck, before attempting to move. She stood awkwardly, the firey pain dimmed, replaced by the pervasive tingling of cold. Although she knew the numbness meant frostbite was a risk, she couldn’t suppress a stiff smile at her own cleverness.
She picked her way through the two-foot deep snow, as often as needed, lying down again in the drifts to dull the pain. “Just anther couple steps, I swear, if it hurts this bad next time I get up, I’ll get my bag off my back and slit my own throat,” she muttered, even though she knew, this was a lie. “As if I could even get my bag off….” After some time, trudging, stumbling, cringing in pain, cringing at the cold as she anesthetized herself again and again, she tired, and, when she lay down, failed to rise.
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