Chapter 2
Two
Cairn
Instinct took over. I gripped her wrist.
Her skin was soft and warm.
I pulled her up in one fluid motion. Sat her on the stone next to me. Didn't let go.
My thoughts were slow. I had not thought much recently. There was nothing to think about.
Sometimes, an avian creature would make me think when it landed on me. I would endure the stench of its excrement until the rain washed it away.
It rained a lot on this planet.
I rolled my shoulders. Everything hurt. I had not moved in a long time. My wings were still extended, in the same position they had been since I petrified. I doubted I could fly.
Thoughts rolled through my mind like boulders. Thoughts about her.
She'd woken me from petrification. The female was breathing hard, but she wasn't saying anything. I turned my head, looked at her. My neck hurt from that small movement, but it was worth it.
She was soft and curvy like all of her species, without sharp angles.
Her lack of wings and horns would have been disturbing if I hadn't watched her kind for rotation upon rotation.
I'd got used to their small size, their strange language, their tendency to stay on the ground, rarely looking up at the potential waiting in the sky.
My senses were still waking up, but her scent slowly filtered through. Strangely familiar yet foreign, like a long-forgotten memory buried deep in the rocky cliffs of my mind.
And another thought surfaced. One so monumental that I couldn't quite comprehend it yet.
There was only one person who could break a gharrgoil's petrification when caused by the environment. No, it couldn't be. It wasn't possible. She couldn't be my...
“I'm dreaming,” she muttered. “It's shock.”
I had not spoken since the day our ship had crashed.
That day when I'd woken up in the wreckage of my escape pod, petrification already setting in.
I'd managed to take a few steps before the process completed, but there was no turning back once it started.
My senses had still been fully functional when a native had found me.
He'd spoken in a strange tongue and looked even stranger.
It hadn't taken long to realise that this civilisation was still in its infancy.
I would have cursed if I'd been able to move my lips.
The female slowly turned to look at me, really look at me. I'd been dimly aware of her presence, but I had not paid much attention to her. What was the point when these aliens believed I was nothing but lifeless stone?
“I'm dreaming,” she repeated. Maybe she wasn't very bright.
“Ew. Argh. Nott.”
I'd had plenty of time to learn their language, but what came out of my mouth didn't quite sound right.
I had imagined speaking their tongue for a long time, had planned speeches and entire conversations - back when my mind had still been active and I'd been bored senseless.
But it transpired that making my tongue create those sounds was harder than it had seemed.
“You. Are. Nott.”
Better. My voice didn't sound like myself. Deeper. Hoarser. Gravelly from eons of disuse.
“You can talk.” Her eyes were wide. “No. This isn't real. I'm unconscious after falling down the ladder. Have to be. This can't be.”
Oh great. I'd ended up with a stupid one.
Just my luck. At least she was pretty, for her kind.
Long brown hair peeked out from under a strange head garment crusted with dust and dirt.
Her eyes reminded me of the colour of the field where I'd woken up.
A deep green with flecks of brown. She would only reach to my chest when standing, but I was tall for my kind, and she was small to average for hers.
Her bulky clothes were hiding her figure.
No gharrgoil would ever wear that much fabric.
We preferred to feel the air on our skin, only wearing the simplest of garments to satisfy other species' sensibilities.
Until we'd become a spacefaring species, gharrgoils had not worn any clothes at all, save for ceremonial robes and jewellery to show wealth and influence.
Even now, gharrgoils rarely covered their upper bodies. Our wings and tails made most garments impractical. We wore fitted battle wraps and boots, just like I had when I’d been petrified. Somehow, my clothes had become stone like the rest of me and survived.
“I. Can. Tark.”
I tried to keep the sarcasm to a minimum. She couldn't help that she'd never encountered a gharrgoil before.
“How is this... I don't know... But you're a statue!”
I realised I was still holding her wrist. I squeezed it gently. “I. Am. Not.”
This time, I almost sounded like one of them. I just needed some practice.
“But... how?”
Where would I even start? Everything I had to say would blow her mind. And she'd already proven that she wasn't the brightest.
“Are you alright?” a male voice shouted from somewhere on the ground. I tightened my grip on her wrist again. Did he belong to her? Did she already have a mate?
“I'm fine! Can you go back to the car and grab the plans of the palace? I need to check something!”
She sounded so much more confident when she was talking to the other male. But as soon as she looked up at me, that confidence seemed to shatter.
“How can this be?” she asked softly. “How is this happening?”
I had so much to reply to that. But nothing felt quite adequate. How could I explain that I was from an alien planet, that I'd crash-landed here generations before she'd even been born, that there was a reason she'd been able to wake me?
I didn't want to scare her. I didn't want her to climb down that ladder and disappear.
If she was what I thought she was, petrification would return as soon as she was back on the ground.
I stretched my wings. They were starting to feel better.
I folded them behind my back. Stiff, painful, but I was starting to feel more like myself.
Strange how quickly I was returning to full mobility.
The few times I'd experienced full petrification before, back at the Academy, it had taken days to be at full strength. Maybe it was her.
“I should go back down,” she whispered. “Forget this. And you have to go back to the position you were in. Keiran will notice when he looks up.”
She wanted to pretend nothing had happened. Wanted me to turn to stone again.
No. That wasn't going to happen.
So I did the only thing I could do. I wrapped my arms around her, spread my wings, and launched us into the air.
For a moment, my wings held our weight. We hovered over the courtyard. Then a cramp hit my right shoulder. My muscles froze. I lost control. We swerved to the right, tumbling through the air.
She screamed.
I almost did the same.
Many rotations of training kicked in. I pushed away the pain, beat my wings as hard as I could, shifted my body weight for balance until I found an air current to carry us.
Her screams stopped, but her breathing was fast, too fast. Her heartbeat drummed against my arm. She was frightened, no, terrified. And I was the cause of it. Cloch. I was doing it all wrong. But there was no turning back now.
“Where are you taking me?!” she shouted against the wind. She sounded more angry than scared.
“Somewhere safe,” I replied. But I didn't know where that was.
All I'd seen of this world had been a chaotic mess of blue and green as our ship had hurtled towards the surface.
Then, fields and hills where I'd crashed.
Then, a dirt road, a primitive town, a stone building on top of a hill, before I'd been lifted onto the wall I'd stood on ever since.
I'd watched the land around me evolve. Battles, wars, burning pyres.
Slowly, the natives had evolved. Their buildings had become sturdier, taller, more populated.
Their roads had turned from mud to stone.
Their wagons had become motorised. And then, one day, they'd taken flight.
But my view had been limited. I'd never been able to turn my head in all those years.
What had been behind me had been a mystery that I'd been desperate to solve at first, and grown bored of soon after.
I had slept for many of the rotations that I'd been forced to perch on that blasted wall, hoping that one day the forever sleep would overtake me.
It never did, not like in the stories where petrified gharrgoils forgot that they'd once been able to move and think and talk, and became stone inside and out.
A gust of wind pushed us upwards. I'd almost forgotten what it felt like to fly.
The air stroking my wings. The views, vast and endless.
The freedom. I beat my wings, propelling us higher.
The castle that had been my home for so long was far below us, a strange arrangement of buildings and walls and gardens, set on a hill above the sprawling town.
What had once been a muddy village had grown into a bustling city.
I still didn't know where I was headed. In the distance, a tower rose from a low hill, a dark spire that called to me.
I'd seen it from my wall, watched the humans as they'd built it, and wondered about its purpose.
Gharrgoils loved living close to the sky - our cities were made up of roost towers reaching to the very edge of the atmosphere - but this tower didn't look occupied. It would do for now.
My muscles ached from too many rotations of disuse. I'd have to land soon.
The female hadn't said anything for a while. I squeezed her gently to get a reaction.
“Where the fuck are you taking me? Let me go!”
I got my reaction. She hadn't passed out from fear or altitude. That was a good sign. I would take her on many more flights once my body recovered.
“To the tower,” I called into the wind.
“The Wallace Monument? But why?”
“It looks like a good vantage point!”
“You're crazy!”
Her voice was a sharp mix of anger and fear. I'd have a lot of explaining to do once we landed. But first, I had to make it to the tower. I was getting tired fast. I'd misjudged the distance. Carrying us this high had been a mistake. I'd been reckless and I had no excuse for getting us into danger.
Cloch. I beat my wings hard, drawing on every bit of strength that I still possessed. We were slowing down too much. This was going to be close, too close.
The tower sat on a wooded hill rising up from the houses around it, with steep stone cliffs on one side.
I couldn't see any natives from this high up, but it would be a miracle if we went unseen.
I wasn't sure what they'd do if they spotted us.
I'd learned much about them by listening to the conversations drifting up on the wind, but not enough.
I knew everything about the castle there was to know, thanks to the tour guides who used to stop right beneath me, but not about their world.
Did they know that they weren't alone in the universe yet?
And did they still believe in the strange creatures they had carved?
Another cramp tore through my left wing. I tightened my grip on the female. Whatever happened, I wouldn't let her fall. And if we fell from the sky, I would buffer her fall with my body. Anything to keep her safe.
The opposite of what I'd done. I'd endangered her through my reckless behaviour. Just like I'd killed my crew all those rotations ago. It was unlikely they'd survived the crash.
I was bad news. Bad luck. Bad gharrgoil.
Pain shot through my wings and down my back. My arms went numb. All strength left me.
The landscape beneath us, tiny buildings forming a strangely mesmerising pattern, was out of focus.
And then we were falling.