only silence remained, holding my breath in the dark; gasping for air with the lungs of a lark
Aero does not often leave her family, but she does today.
She sneaks off when they are still asleep, her heart pounding in her chest as she makes her way from the Tephran land and deeper into the Beqanna that she knows little of. She is young still and painfully sheltered—naive with the glorious beauty of having been kept from the dangers and sharp corners of this world. Today though, she pushes against them. She presses further and further through the kingdoms that bank against her home. Cutting through parts of Sylva and then Loess as she moves.
When she tires, she shifts, turning into one of the small birds that she has seen flitting about in her home. The shifts are exhausting still, but traveling by air is less cumbersome than by foot, and she finds that the exertion balances itself out, in its own way. With her wings spread wide, she cuts through the afternoon.
As the sun dips low, she does too, landing amongst the trees and the bramble of the forest, her eyes still remarkably green, even when set against the rich darkness of her feathered body. Her head tilts to the side just slightly when she hears the noises coming, when the world comes into stark relief and she feels that whisper of his in her head more than she actually hears it. Aero trills and then chirps lightly.
Confused, she shifts into a small squirrel, racing down the trunk of the tree to the forest floor.
Of course I’m here, she thinks hard, not sure if he can hear her too.
Raising her tiny skull, she looks around, not sure if what she feels is fear, exhilaration, or both.
