- Zak -
Zak had been at it all day and now, he understood the pitch and yaw of flight. Nothing had ever made more sense than this. It trumped anything he could have done for a thrill. He was free. When he left the roof of the building and filled himself with the sky, it made him whole.
He. Was. Free.
Finally.
The sound of feathers cutting through the air made his line more stable as he caught each billow and bluff. The icy wind in his lungs and the burn of his muscles as they adapted and learned new movements with each turn drew him higher. The slack of his body hanging from powerful structures. If he had a choice, he would never come down, he would live out his days above the clouds and only at his death would he return to earth.
Everything felt so much smaller when he was just a blot in that great expanse. A single, fading pixel on a much larger image. His troubles, the group, the monotony of a day to day existence.
Nothing, it was all nothing.
Each spray of clouds was different from the last. Unique.
So was he.
He felt new.
Rare.
A creature finally made free. Nothing should have held him down. Nothing should have caged him. Nothing should have demanded he become anything other than what he was. Should have. Reality had never cared for those words. The two waged a quiet war inside him, all because of one thought he could never loosen his grip on.
Kasper.
It ruled his future, possessed his present, and conquered his past with ruthless indifference. The wind stung his nose while the sun warmed the raw tracks the tears had burned into his cheeks.
I have to go back.
Up here, he was perfect.
A gust carried wherever the sky pleased.
Mist.
Smoke slipping from an old man's lungs.
Beautiful.
He wondered why he hadn't done this sooner.
He was a bird.
Birds cared little for what they left behind when they took flight.
But he was tethered.
Even this fragile taste of freedom was only another kind of cage.
If only he could climb higher.
Closer.
He wanted to feel the sun in the hollowest parts of himself- the places desperate to be held, terrified of what came after the squeeze, unable to surrender to the comfort of believing in the nothing it was that somehow mattered more than everything else.
Regret settled heavier than gravity ever could.
Most of it wasn't for what he'd done either.
It was for what he'd failed to do.
A single step taken sooner, and the course of everything might have shifted.
He wouldn't have spent his life living on scraps.
He would have been enough.
And maybe...
Maybe it all would have been okay.
"Damn the sky." Zak said. His lips chapped from the chill.
He headed home...
Trouble met him. It never failed to.
YOU ARE READING
The Eden Projects (FINAL EDITING)
Ação"This story has no hero." Set in the distant future, where the government has been overthrown, and a new world power has risen, known only by the Moniker "ARK Corporation." We follow Kasper as he fights to survive in a nightmare where wrong is made...
