Skies of Wonder, Skies of Danger by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: pirates, wizards, airships, fantasy, steampunk, science fiction, short stories, anthology
Publisher: Aetherwatch
Published: 2018-06-14T00:00:00+00:00

“EVERY SUBJECT’S SOUL is Her Own” © 2018 by Kelly Rossmore

Kelly Rossmore likes stories about faraway worlds and in the real world enjoys snapping photos of her travels. She also flexes her number -crunching powers, writes, games, and pets her needy cats. She is a graduate of the Viable Paradise writing workshop. Follow her on Twitter as @Sybara.

Thou Shalt Be Free As Mountain Winds

by Jennifer Mace

THE LAST TIME I SAW Aly, we were chasing a different sunset.

I hadn’t known it was the last, of course. We used to chase them all the time when we were young. Just me and her and the tearing wind beneath our feathers, land spilling out below us like a tipped jug of wine, all the doubts and hungers of dirtlife ripped out and abandoned in our wake.

It wasn’t just the beauty of the sky that called us. There’s a magic to dying things, from the snapped neck of a goose to first love’s heartbreak, and a day’s no different. Death’s as sacred as any bloody birth or sticky act of conception, no matter what priests might say. And the violent prolonged death of the sun spews power into the air like a pyroclastic flow.

We’d get drunk on it, dizzy and over-full with magic. The slow sip of power it took to feed our wings was nothing next to the glut of orange and purple and gold, the hiccuping sweetness of the clouds, the last splash of colour as day succumbed to night.

Sometimes it would take us half the night to make it back up the mountain. Gibbous or crescent, a moon provides no thermals, sheds nothing but dead air and sickly light. We’d beat our muscles to ribbons clawing back up through the sky.

It was worth it.

Worth it for the magic, of course. For me, though, it had always been about those other sticky, stolen moments, huddled close in the crooks of massive lowland ilma trees or tumbled onto the dry pebbled streambeds of the foothills. About laughter and touch and the flitting stroke of feathers.

For Aly, too. Or so I’d thought.

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