Ashan 13th, 689
The child stood at the precipice of a Pantheon, marble columns lined the perimeter. All around the sound of rushing water, birds singing, and of the jungle primates chattering. His feet could feel the cold limestone beneath them. Ahead, a large river monitor. Behind him, the endless sky above and below. From whence those sounds came, he didn’t know. He couldn’t very well see where their vibrations hit the air currents. Something was wrong here.
The boy let his legs carry him forth, nearer to the creature, and it turned its head to him.
In shock, the boy started, taken aback. He stood on his heels while looking at the large monitor, and said ”Who?”
”You. Larza Impri.”
So named, the boy nodded, and took two steps backward. Then he jumped over the edge of the precipice, falling into the sky as his alabaster wings stretched out behind him.
Larza’s wings twisted and caught on the air currents, manipulating his position on the air. He fell into the sky shaped like the ruff-stuffed nest of a newly birthed Avriel. A comfortable bed of fur, feathers, and silk awaited him with its perfumed promises. Then, as he was about to touch down to it with his feet, the illusion gave way.
He fell farther than he knew the sky rose. Farther than the air told. Larza’s silhouette was upon the bright blue abyss. He shouted to it, answered by reflections. He swung and capered in the air before it, echoed memories tossed back by his own silhouette.
It was as the sensation he had, upon first learning to fly.
The nest did not give way to a great nothing. A chamber lie beyond that passage, rung on all sides by stones and trees and primates populating those boughs straining, grasping for purchase in the flesh of those silhouettes falling with him now.
Yes, there were other silhouettes. They were barely visible in the light of the deep sky. Only hints of them when the air currents swept over them, or a stray cloud rose above him as he fell.
His feathers fell from his wings. Larza moved as he picked up speed. His clawed hands extended, turning into knives that he would use to claw the primates and tear their chattering insults from their vile throats. His wings were not yet done, as he glided from bough to bough, tearing, cutting, slicing.
Each time he grew heavier, the fall became slower. It grew more sluggish until he was falling with what seemed the gravity of an anvil through a quagmire. The primates chattered, bit, slapped him while he sank into the sky. The endless blue accepted him as its own, and he was Larza Impre once more, upon the Pantheon of the Monitor.
This time, his legs carried him with more strength toward that reptile. He stood, stomping his feet down with the last step, spreading his wings wide, and putting his hands on his hips. He frowned at it, then let fly the aggregated sum of all songs he would ever sing, whether dismal or full of cheer. Insulting or praiseworthy.
