Chapter 35. #4
What she thought about, slowly and precisely, between one spoonful and the next, was the Parapet. The reason she'd been going back. The balance drills, the wind, the particular way her body had started to understand edge and drop and weight. What she'd been building toward without fully naming it.
She named it now.
Virvolior, she said, through the bond.
Yes, he said, from wherever he was — the veil probably.
Tonight. I want to practice something.
A pause. What something?
Moving on your back. Standing. She ate another spoonful. Properly.
He was quiet for a moment — not the silence of disagreement, the silence of someone adjusting their schedule. I'll want Daennia there.
I was going to ask.
She can fly alongside. If I fall off I want something beneath you that isn't the ground.
Reasonable.
It'll have to be late, he said. The upper ledge has traffic until after nine.
Late is fine.
Then yes, he said. Simply. The way he said things when the answer had never been in question and the conversation was just the formality of arriving at it together.
She finished her soup. She stacked her tray. She walked out of the mess hall without looking at the corner table.
~
The upper ledge at this hour was exactly what Virvolior had promised — empty, the torches burned down to almost nothing, the sky above it very dark and very clear.
Daennia was already there when she arrived, settled at the far end with her wings folded, the gold veining on them barely catching the low light.
Ground first, Virvolior said. He was crouched at the centre of the ledge, lower than she'd seen him hold himself before — deliberate, offering her height.
Ground first, she agreed.
She mounted.
The first thing she noticed was warmth — the same deep warmth as before, but somehow still different.
She could feel the individual scales beneath her boots, the slight give of them, the way they were smoother at the centre of his back and ridged at the edges.
He was breathing. She could feel that too: a slow, deep expansion and contraction, like standing on something that had its own tide.
She stood still and let herself feel it.
Walk, Virvolior said.
She walked.
Six steps toward his neck, slow, weight distributed. The scales shifted subtly beneath her — not moving, just alive, the micro-adjustments of a body at rest that was still a body. She stopped. Walked back. Stopped again at his shoulders.
Again, she said.
She did it three more times — slow, then slightly faster, then slow again.
By the fourth pass she'd stopped thinking about her feet and started thinking about her centre, the way her hips tracked over the movement, the way her arms wanted to come up for balance and she let them because there was no one here to see it and being right mattered more than looking right.
Good, Daennia said from the far end of the ledge. Just that.
She came back to the base of his neck and crouched down briefly, reset.
Ready, she said.
High? Virvolior asked.
High enough that she has room, she said, with a tilt of thought toward Daennia.
Understood, Daennia said. I'll stay below and behind. If you come off, don't fight it — curl and let me find you.
She thought about what it meant to not fight a fall from a considerable height and decided she'd cross that when she reached it.
Virvolior rose from the ledge with the particular controlled force of a dragon that was being careful. Daennia came up beside him, wide and steady, her wingbeats slower than his.
They climbed.
The quadrant fell away below them, the training fields and barracks shrinking to familiar shapes, the torchlight becoming orange pinpoints in the dark.
The air sharpened with altitude, the cold hitting her face in the clean way she'd started to crave.
She looked down at the gap between them and the ground and decided it was enough.
Here, she said.
Virvolior levelled off. Daennia slid into position below and behind — she could see the edge of her wing when she turned her head, close enough to matter.
She slowly stood up.
The wind hit her differently up here. On the ground it had been manageable. Up here, with nothing between her and the full sweep of the sky, it moved around her in a way she hadn't accounted for — shifting, pressing, retreating. Not dangerous. Just present.
She stood.
She made it perhaps two seconds.
Virvolior adjusted — barely, a fractional correction to a thermal she hadn't felt coming — and her weight was wrong and the wind caught her left shoulder and she was off before she'd consciously registered falling.
The first thing was the cold. Not the cold she'd been standing in — something sharper, total, the cold of open air with nothing between her and it, rushing up her sides and into her collar and stealing the breath she hadn't finished taking.
Then the drop registered in her stomach, that particular plunging sensation, and the quadrant tilted sideways in her vision and she understood all at once that she was falling and that the ground was very far below and that she had perhaps a moment before—
Daennia's claw closed around her.
Not a grab — not the jarring, sudden thing she'd half-imagined.
More like being gathered. One taloned foot, large enough that it spanned from her hip to her shoulder, curved around her with a precision that left no room for bruising and no room for doubt.
The grip was firm and warm and absolute, and the fall stopped — not gradually, but cleanly, the way things stopped when something much larger than you had simply decided they would.
She hung there for a moment, suspended in Daennia's claw, the wind moving past them both.
Alright? Daennia asked.
Her heart was doing something loud. Yes.
Good. And then, without ceremony, Daennia angled upward and opened her claw and deposited her back onto Virvolior's back with the matter-of-fact efficiency of someone returning a book to a shelf.
She sat there for a moment. Reset.
Again, she said.
The second fall came later than the first, and this time she knew what was coming the moment her weight went wrong — a half-second of warning that was just long enough to be aware of the drop before it happened and not long enough to stop it.
The air took her sideways, the world wheeled, and the cold rushed in again — colder this time somehow, or maybe she was just more awake to it, her body's full attention finally paying the respect the sky deserved.
Daennia's claw found her lower this time.
Around her ribcage, careful, the grip of something that had calculated exactly how much pressure was too much and stopped well short of it.
She felt herself slow and then stop and then she was just hanging again in the dark, the quadrant somewhere below, the stars somewhere above, her heart still arriving late to the conclusion that she was fine.
Same problem? Virvolior asked.
Different problem, she said. You move.
I do, he said, with the patience of something that had been pointing this out by existing. I always move.
She thought about that.
The Parapet didn't move. That was what she'd been training on — a static surface, wind as the only variable, her body learning to read and absorb it.
But Virvolior wasn't the Parapet. He was a living creature in flight and his body was constantly making small adjustments — to thermals, to his own wingbeats, to the air coming off Daennia's wings beside him.
The wind wasn't the only variable. He was a variable.
And she'd been trying to hold a fixed position on top of something that wasn't fixed.
I need to move with you, she said slowly. Not against.
Yes, he said.
Like the formation. She thought about the second banking turn — the gap she'd held too wide, then corrected. Not by fighting the bank but by reading it a half-second earlier and flowing into it.
Exactly like the formation, Virvolior said.
She stood.
This time when his wingbeat rolled through his back she was already moving with it — weight shifting from her left foot to her right, a small unconscious correction that her body made before her mind did.
When the thermal hit she felt it in him first, a tensing along his spine, and she dropped her centre of gravity a fraction and let the gust pass over her.
She was still standing.
The wind moved around her. Virvolior's back moved beneath her. She moved with both.
Don't count, Virvolior said.
She hadn't realised she'd started. She stopped. She breathed. She felt the air and felt him and stopped trying to hold anything still and just — stood.
Below, the quadrant was a scatter of orange light in the dark. Above, the stars. Around her, the cold and the wind and the enormous fact of the sky.
She was standing on her dragon.
There, Daennia said softly, from below.
She didn't answer. She didn't move. She let it be exactly what it was for as long as it lasted — and it lasted long enough.
~??:?.??*??*.???:?? ~