Night Flight

Clouds whispered past Medusa’s tarnished gold wings. Her burgundy beak clicked in delight and Avian stroked the down feathers on her head. She was secured in a harness on Medusa’s back. Her mulberry leaf tunic was fastened tight around her chest and extended partially over her cherry blossom petal leggings.

Avian’s deep violet dreads were pulled back into a coiled bun. Only a few spare strands flew free. Her ebony skin gleamed in the moonlight that threaded through pockets of cloud cover. Avian admired Medusa’s wingspan, but also felt a pang of envy.

Why hadn’t she been as gifted? Wasn’t it her birthright as a fairy just as it was Medusa’s birthright as a barn owl? Her fairy wings were stunted and strapped to her back with dyed spiderwebs. They were useless and would just get in the way if they were extended.

‘At least I’m not alone,’ Avian thought. Medusa had been her trusty companion for years, and then of course, there was Tryst. She looked over one shoulder and smiled. Tryst had a similar mutation, and thus was also assigned to courier duties for ungrateful royals.

Tryst had a black mohawk that was braided down to the back of their neck. They had round, thick features. Unlike Avian, Tryst let their wings be free. They were quite tiny in relation to Tryst’s body and weren’t in the way of their companion’s wings. Tryst looked like a ghost in comparison to Dream, the fluffy black bat that they were riding.

Dream had serene silver eyes and was gliding in calculated swirls. She caught up to Medusa and circled her, emitting a screech of glee. Tryst giggled and held on to her tight. Tryst’s fairy wings flapped against each other.

“You’re going to tire her out,” Avian scolded. Tryst flashed her a smile and patted Dream.

“She loves it. I’m not going to tell her to stop!” Tryst yelled back.

“Fine, but if we have to rest, it’ll take days to get to our destination,” Avian informed them.

“Whatever. It’s just rich kids professing their summer love before they start drama. They can wait,” Tryst said.

Avian shook her head, but was amused despite herself. Tryst and Dream were only a wing’s width below them and the clouds were clearing. That’s when Medusa flashed a warning, not with noise but by thought. Avian sat up straight and chills traced up her shoulders.

Avian hadn’t cast a protection charm for this flight and felt a pang of regret. She hadn’t thought they would need it this far from the town. Protection charms were typically used to hide fairy from the giants and render them impervious to their magic.

Medusa closed in on Dream so that Avian could issue a warning, but not before Dream let out a haunting cry. Dream spiraled out of control and both her and Tryst vanished below the clouds.

Avian cussed. She then recited a protection spell on her and Medusa before diving down into the human city after her friends.

Tryst’s mohawk braid seemed to slice at the wind as they tumbled wing over wing into the bright stars lit from the ground. Tryst had never seen such a place up close, always hovering at what was considered a safe cruising altitude far above the noise and bustle outside the forest boundaries.

They tried to keep their eyes open as the fierce bristle of wind tossed them back and forth.

“There, there,” they said to Dream, trying to comfort the distraught bat that was so obviously losing control of its own flight. Tryst reached into Dream’s mind with their own trying to understand the sudden plummeting.

All they could feel was confusion, conflictive messaging about from safety to panic, running back and forth like a nervous pacing from fine to frantic. They could feel Dream equalize at these moments of calm, spreading her wings in a soaring glide for a moment then as panic would grip her once agin Dream would crumple her wings like she’d never flown before.

Tryst couldn’t even see Avian and Medusa at this point, Tryst had to concentrate on where they intended to land or… um… crash. Tryst held tight to Dream’s bridle as they wound around tall cubic structures that seemed to be towers of glass. They’d never seen so much of it, miles high from every angle. Glass tower after glass tower, reflecting the shimmering stars below, red, green, yellow stars burning brightly from twisted metal roadway bridges. Or were they sculptures?

It was overwhelming how beautiful the scene was. But the smells! Tryst’s nose couldn’t help but twist from the chemical stench rising from huge metal creatures. Some of them seemed to be sleeping along the pathways, while others were definitely alive, moving faster than any bat and then stopping so quickly! They looked so dangerous, but the beings in them seemed less concerned. They seemed to be distracted by glass windows in their hands.

As Dream’s wings glided and crimped, then glided again, it seemed that every one of these beings had one and bowed to it, paying homage or worshipping it in some way. They had a trancelike quality of not being in the world around them.

Dream managed to tumble into an oak tree that looked to be corralled by gray and black rock. In truth, Tryst had no idea how the thing was still alive, being caged in a small square of earth. They offered words of support to the caged tree, hoping that their magic could heal its heart.

Tryst was not even sure that Dream little wing claws could grip it enough to hold on. Tryst felt into Dream again and ran the pace of the fear to fine then back again as if a pattern were running through Dream’s blood and causing a chain reaction within the whole system, a system that normally ran on basic instinct.

Dream did a little glide along the oak branch and then smacked softly into the trunk high above the gray rock below. The jolt tossed Tryst off Dream’s back and sent them twirling to the ground. Trysts own stunted wings began to work as limitedly as they could, flittering and breaking the fall offering small breaks in gravity like tiny parachutes floating then collapsing with their weight.

Looking up, Tryst saw Dream able to hang upside down from one claw. The other wing seemed to bounce around threatening to take her down in one last tumble. Tryst hoped Medusa and Avian had been able to follow their winding descent. It did not look as if Dream would be able to get back up in her current state.

Tryst began to mumble a protection charm, it threw a film around them and would obscure any giants from seeing them at least for a little while. They had been careless, not using the charm before flying out into the uncharted wilderness.

Tryst could see giant after giant pounding past them on the gray rock. Could no one walk on dirt here? They all bowed to the windows in their hands, some windows had frames of bright colors or fabrics. The beings spoke very little to one another as if the window worship were much more important than the ones that held them. They must be mighty gods that control this race of giants, to inspire such devotion.

Curiosity was getting the better of Tryst. What would they see in the little window if they looked? Along the walk path near the oak were dead tree tables, a giant was sitting there, hunched staring into what was a tiny window for them, but as Tryst climbed up the dead tree’s metal legs, using their wings to jump in bursts to the seat and then the top of the table, Tryst could see that the window was almost as big as they were.

It seemed to be a “lady” giant, with long flowing hair past her shoulders, shimmery glitter metal fell from her ears. She had piercing pools of blue that fixated on the glass and seemed never to look away.

‘She was beautiful,’ Tryst thought, ‘incredibly clean and put together.’

Tryst looked down at their woven onesie and fingered the soft worn barely there fabric and wondered about the clothes this clean giant wore, that smelled like nothing natural had ever touched them, not dirt, not wind, not rain.

At first, Tryst was too afraid to look into it, they instead looked at the giant using its thumbs and fingers to interact with the glass, pressing or tapping lightly or weirdly swishing or sliding the fingers from side to side, using magic to float the images away or closer.

Tryst tried not to look at the glass, but the intense focus with which the lady giant seemed spellbound, Tryst could not help themselves. They climbed deftly over one of the lady giant’s arms and looked up at her shapely chin and then without any further hesitation looked into the glass window before them.

It was a flashing, shimmering maze of light, images and words of a different language than they’d ever seen before, green and blue bubbles floated on top of each other, moving up and down the glass, too fast for Tryst to comprehend all that was going on or really any of it. They’d never seen so many flashes of light that did not connect in any coherent way.

The flipping from one image to the next was mesmerizing and captivating. They couldn’t seem to look away. There was a greedy disappointment when they wished to look closer or more deeply at an image (sometimes it moved!) and then the being’s finger would quickly banish the image then conjure another to replace the previous image.

Tryst would just begin to understand what they were looking at when the giant would use her thumb again or fore finger like a sorcerer’s wand appearing and disappearing images and words. Tryst had never seen such magic so frightening but was enraptured anyway.

‘No wonder these giants worship these glass portals,’ Tryst thought. They wanted to worship it too. They sat cross-legged beneath the lady giant’s chin on the dead tree table, almost embraced by her surrounding arms, holding the altar glass directly in front of Tryst’s greedy eyes.

When Avian finally tracked their two wayward friends, Avian could not believe what she saw. Tryst’s eyes were reflecting fast flashing images, practically sitting in the human’s lap without the giant knowing. So, Tryst must have thrown out some protection chant, but whatever Tryst had done was not powerful enough magic to cut through the handheld looking glass. Was it a mirror? Was it a portal? Whatever it was it had put the entire town under its spell.

Avian had to get Tryst away from it. As Medusa flew them down to the walking path, the giant stood up with a start. Had she never seen a barn owl before? She acted like Medusa was dangerous. What a laugh.

As she got up, Tryst fought to keep the glass portal in sight, hopping onto the lady giant’s shoulder. Tryst was about to walk away with the giant. Avian acted quickly and told Medusa,”Iz ommm eyn nuf," Avian commanded. In owl speak, it loosely translated to 'Kill the demon." She could read Medusa's mind but had to communicate with her in her own language to be concise.

Medusa flew into the woman’s face and she dropped the portal on the gray stone beneath her feet. It seemed to bounce, but refused to break. Medusa attacked it with all her force, pecking madly and relentlessly the glass until it shattered and the image on it became a kaleidoscope of shards, but the demon remained active in it, shimmering color and sound even though the doorway to its realm had been broken.

The lady giant stared at the scene wide-eyed with shock, but thought better of sticking around and ran quickly from Medusa as if she were her next victim. Avian had to think this a quite reasonable assumption giving that the barn owl had killed her demon glass.

Tryst had jumped to the ground and seemed to be mourning the lost magic. Avian unhooked her harness, jumped down to Tryst and wrapped her arms around them, shaking them as if they had been in a waking dream.

“Snap out of it!” Tryst’s eyes seemed to clear and gain awareness slowly, groggily out of the trance.

“What happened?” Tryst asked. “Where’s Dream?”

“I think their demon had you. I think it’s affecting Dream too,” Avian said.

“We must heal her. This place is cursed or damned. I had no idea. Did you see me? The thing had me.”

Avian gave Tryst another warm hug. Avian could feel the beating of Tryst’s heart against her own chest, feel the strength of their arms around her body. This had been too close a call. She could have lost Tryst and they must heal Dream.

They looked up at the flailing bat and both uttered a low gutteral chant of protection and clarity. Instead of the lopsided erratic movements the wings had been engaged in, Dream’s wings calmly extended and her claw released the branch to do a graceful flip onto the ground.

A small crowd had formed around them. And the crowd of giants had started to point their portals directly at the winged creatures, not knowing there were four instead of two.

“Let’s get out of here,” Tryst told Avian. Tryst hopped on Dream’s back and Avian again sat astride Medusa in the harness.

“We cannot leave this people bespelled by such demonology,” Avian said with conviction.

Tryst looked around at the giants and their magic glass and knew they would return with protection and a plan.