Courage

The branch that she embedded her claws in was the only solid thing she knew. In the raging gale it was the one thing keeping her steady, staving off an unending descent.

Terrified, the air tearing in and out of her chest rivalled the fury of the surrounding storm. Her wings strained against the gale to stay pinned to her back, desperately avoiding the current threatening to catch their edge and rip her away.

She’d been here for seconds, days, years.

She’d always been here, and never.

Sometimes a wave of pain crested large enough that her face twisted in rage, screams snatched from her lips and lost in the violent thunder. Sometimes her shed tears added their essence to the storm around her, ever on the verge of its hateful victory.

It was fear that kept her here, wings pinned by the unknown. She’d seen others lose their battle, the force too strong, wrenching their claws from the branch and their bodies into the fray. She’d seen muscles grow tired and wings allowed to be torn and broken from them. She’d watched some minds fail before their bodies, physically strong and young sent to the depths by the traitorous pilot.

She tried to ignore the thoughts of her own end, speculating cruelly on whether her body or her spirit would perish first.

Rarely, the pain of her bleeding claws and aching muscles would numb her into delirium. She’d imagine the raging torrent as a gentle breeze, jostling her feathers with mischief not malice. She pictured pulling her talons from the wood, forgetting at once why it was so important to hold on. Standing up straight, she’d stretch the tired cramped muscles in her back and wings until they felt strong and limber again. She saw for miles, clear skies unveiling a distant horizon. She felt buoyant, confident. She ran in her dream, and leapt from the branch, wings catching the mild currents. Then panic, like acid, as her body dropped, stomach left above as she plummeted to the ground.

Her incorporeal body breaking on the rocks below usually brought her out of her tainted reverie, and back to the reality of the storm.

Returning threw into stark relief the horror of her position, once again. Her muscles, so routinely ignored, ached anew, their timeless strain suddenly more immediate.

It was on one of these horrid re-entries to consciousness that she opened her eyes, still unbalanced from her imagined fall. Sand and grit accompanied the dim light that hit her eyes, reflecting her surrounds and painting the chaos to which she was accustomed.

She seemed unable to shake that grisly temptation of escape, lingering in her frail heart. It may have been this that caused her to turn and look behind her.

One moment to change an unending timeline.

Flames roared, the sound suddenly loud in her ears. Fear, enough to surpass all she’d survived, left her other once all-consuming ails forgotten. The flames licked and burned, devouring the tree from which her world stemmed, ecstatic in their horrendous destruction.

The fire turned its hungry mouths to the base of her branch.

Her world.

Her safety.

The one entity in her whirlwind hell that had kept her tethered and protected from that threatening drop, that revered and unreal flight.

The fire and shadow tore not only that safety to shreds, but her time, her excuses. It tore from her the choice she had been allowed until now to make, the choice to remain in the pain of the wholly known.

So quickly the fire spread, the darkness consumed.

She turned again forward, shoulders hunched, eyes screwed tight again, wings welded in place. She looked away and ignored the flame, tried with all her being to make it not so, mind tumbling to find the stillness again of her endless distress. Desperately, she held her breath.

When she did not immediately burn, the numbness made a slow return, nurtured by her denial. With energy she didn’t have, power she didn’t feel, her muscles clenched her branch with renewed vigour.

Seconds, days, years. The passing time emboldened her, giving her confidence to convince herself, to accept in dark humour her own foolishness, gullibility. Of course there was no fire.

"Look then."

The traitorous thought came from within, though she immediately rebelled. She would not let this insidious doubt war against her, wouldn’t allow a false memory of fire to tear apart the centuries of reality that she had endured. Hey eyes closed tighter.

But the seed of doubt ate at her, and unlike the pain in her body and of her past, she could not ignore it. She couldn’t return to numbness, she couldn’t dream again or lose herself in the physical discomfort. It ground at her, fraying her nerves until anger rose within her. She was strong. The last one left. She had the strength to last, had been here always and would remain here just as long. Her confidence grew.

It was this arrogance that forced her lids open yet again, determination creasing her warrior brow.

The wild light assaulted her eyes, forcing them almost closed again as panic welled hard and fast, tearing that defiant arrogance into shreds. Fire burned all around her, and a small part of her marvelled at her own power of illusion, of denial. She was burning, her claws long since melted to the charcoal she now clung to. Smoke ripped her chest apart and raked tears from her eyes.

She had done this.

Her closed eyes had bred this disaster and now she would burn, all that cultured strength lost to ash. She despaired at the waste. She would burn to pieces, the fire ending her as it embraced what had been her world.

"Or Jump."

That voice again, burning her with that which she did not want to hear, the choice that had kept her on her branch in this storm for longer than any other. But her branch was cinders, her choice was all but gone.

She opened her mouth and roared her rage, years of anguish mixing with the immediate torment she now suffered.

The wind robbed her of this too, tearing the sound away from inside her mouth. The theft hit harder than all else. She felt her wrath grow, melding her body and spirit in their resolve.

Fine.

Eyes full of fire, she filled her lungs and in a final agonal scream she reared back, ripping her hands free, leaving nails and blood behind, and let the wilds take her.

The raging storm she’d carried on her back since time now struck from every direction. Fear filled her, what had she done? That one brave moment gone, horror became her only truth. Her reason broken, her wings torn free from her body. Her unprotected back stung with the wretched cold, exposed for the first time in eons.

Sobs of panic consumed her as she felt ripped in every direction, yanked and disjointed in her body and her heart.

This was it. The storm she’d been avoiding, the terror that justified all her life of pain. She’d known this was waiting, had avoided it with such care. But here she was, lead to the same inescapable ruin despite each day she had won with her eternal plight.

She felt the fight leave her, her tortured spirit releasing the iron fast control she’d maintained. Her muscles responded in kind, loosening and unwinding as if it was her will alone that had kept them strong. Her wild heart slowed as she allowed the wind to tear and break her, body and soul, all resistance gone. Her eyes opened, tears again flowing but not of fight or fear, but acceptance.

Seconds. Days. Years.

Detached from her passionate hatred, the storm was almost beautiful. She admired the fierceness, the brutality of the gales that fanned the ravenous flames, the howling roars accented by cracking thunder. She felt each sting of rain, each beating offered by the debris falling around her, did not shy away from the pain of her descent. She felt it and welcomed it, welcomed the end of her eternal war. And when the piercing rain turned to mist, and the flames were replaced with soft ash around her, she admired the lightning that preceded each peel of thunder. When those powerful blasts became echoes with the distance of her fall, she admired true sunlight weakly reaching through the cloud and mist around her, as if dreaming.

Quietly, barely noticing that her body no longer thrashed but fell with grace, she marvelled for the first time at the stars peeking through the ever-sparser cloud.

She fell and may have remained so all the way to the patient earth had the cry not breached the serenity of her novel peace. It’s foreignness and beauty captivated her quiet reverie, her eyes turning toward its source.

A fellow flyer in the mild night, its outstretched wings a beautiful miniature of her own, its large eyes sparing her a piercing glance as it recommenced its predatory glide. The moment took her breath away, the practiced elegance of its trajectory, the trust in each of its movements.

Then she was falling past, and it was not a conscious command that had her twisting, her wings spreading on instinct to stall her, catching the air so she could watch the creature as it surveyed the earth with such magnificance. Its wing beats cut the sky with the clarity of perfection, bearing the owl’s body through the still night. Further the distance between them grew, and it was an intention not a thought that had her own wings performing an echo of that beauty. The feel of pressure building beneath her wings, for once not pressing from above but lifting from within their embrace caused her startled wonder. She watched her own feathers, singed and blackened with ash, beat in that same entrancing way, even more mystical for being attached to her own body, feeling the power firsthand.

She didn’t feel the laugh that bubbled out of her, unpractised and gravelly from her ravaged throat, but she felt the attached elation as she bore herself higher, arms out before her tracing the shape of the stars. She began to rise, the pounding of her wings and her ragged breaths a concert in the quite sky. She searched and found the owl’s silhouette in the distance and powered forward, embracing the speed and strength at her command.

Reason began to return as she drove through the sky, her conscious self returning finally for the first time since her feral jump. The reality began to weigh on her, those years, lifetimes, that she had been in pain. The fear that had kept her in such anguish, the desperation to avoid the storm which, now weathered, had a different power over her. It no longer bound her, to her marvel, but seemed to arm her. Once beating her down, the strength now added itself to her spirit, the thing she had lived through, that she had survived.

As she caught up and flew in tandem with her ally, his cry pierced the night, reflecting the joy of a flight shared. She breathed in deep, holding in her lungs the pain of her past, and cried out the triumph she had won, with her own melted claws and beaten body. She cried out with what she had lost, and what she had gained.

She cried out with hope for what was to come, a future finally unknown.