Wings of Evolution (WoF AU)

Chapter 2

Echo of the snow

When the storm stopped, it was sudden. Not a trickling eventuality that slowly brought it to an end. One moment Uhar was clinging to the ground moving slowly onward, and the next it was over, the wind halted its efforts to blow him away. The previous barrage of grains slowed to an almost stop, leaving a trickle that gradually flowed from the sky.

Uhar stopped and blinked with confusion, glancing upward and then all around him. The landscape slowly became clear as he watched the flakes of whiteness dissipate.

The sky above was purely white, and so was the ground around him, but they were distinguishable, barely. The sky was a darker grey and Uhar could see in the distance where the land met the sky. He looked around but Uhar couldn't find the cave he'd exited from. There were outcroppings of rock here and there, but none seemed the right size. He was well and truly lost.

Well, might as well keep going forward.

Uhar tried not to think about how lost he was as he navigated the strange world before him. It was so... empty. So frustratingly empty that he wondered if this was the end of the world, if he would walk just a few more steps and find complete nothingness.

To keep from thinking about that possibility, Uhar started to chant in his head, keeping focused on the words of the longest song. And decidedly not thinking about the nothingness. He was on the twelfth stanza by the time he spotted something in the distance, so far away that he could barely see it.

But, well. It was something.

It was at that point that he realized he'd been thinking in cave terms again, back home you had to walk pretty much everywhere, only flying when you had to get to a different cave system. This was a place where flying would probably be much much easier.

Uhar hesitantly spread his wings, focusing on that point so far away. He was better at short glides, in fact all the Kiaen were. But at some point they must've flown more often. Up here there was just so much sky. He felt the breeze beneath his wings and instinctively lept into the air.

Imediately he realised how different flight was up here. The air was alive. Drafts blowing in all sorts of directions that he had to use to steer himself. He had to flap more often and less at the same time. Whenever he found a current he could ride, it was mostly just gliding, but those sometimes changed direction on him and Uhar had to find a new one.

It was a learning experience that involved a lot of almost falling out of the sky. But even with this difficulty, it still surprised him how quickly the distant place grew. It was only an hour or so before he was landing on the large cliff, peeking down off the side. It was enormous. Large enough that Uhar was at awe once more of how big this world was.

He walked along the cliff, but although it had a strange feel to it that Uhar couldn't quite describe, almost otherworldly in nature, it seemed to be an ordinary cliff. It was sort of crystalline in nature but seemed to be made out of the same type of thing as the white powder.

Off the side of the cliff he saw mounds and mounds of strange white rocks that looked disturbingly like dragon bones. Uhar purposefully did not venture down there. He decided there was no point in continuing this observation, so he looked once more forward. Past the cliff he could see all the way till the land met the sky. It was a completely featureless landscape, a rocky area with little of the white powder that had made his life so difficult for the last few hours.

But it was strange though, the world seemed to be darker . In fact it was even now getting dimmer as he watched with confusion. He looked up at tthe sky, seeing a strange outline in the whiteness, past where the land met sky. As if a light were shining through a layer of something.