Double Rainbow

Avery-3

One Year Later...

Avery-3

I walk out of my den nervously. There's a sort of dark, foreboding smell in the air. The cloud below me seems to be painted by the light of a sunset. The overall effect is that I'm nervous, jumpy, and completely terrified of what I know is about to happen. I am going to fight my first battle of the War.

Since thousands of years ago, we have fought the Unicorn Canira. No one even knows how the war started anymore, only that we had some type of small, trivial argument. An argument that became a feud. A feud that became a war. Neither side is willing to give in; both sides have lost too many soldiers to stop. It's a matter of honor.

Honor is a word that means a lot to the Pegasus Canira. To me, though, it means nothing but bloodshed that never should've happened. My mom stops me at the entrance, seeing the grim expression on my face.

"You don't want to fight them, do you, Avery?"

"They did nothing to me! Why would I want to fight them?!"

"Of course they did. They killed... your brother."

"I..." Mom had always talked about 'him'. It was always, 'he died that way', 'I don't want to lose her like we did him', 'I hate them for taking him from us'. I figured out pretty quickly after I met Shine that 'they' were the Unicorn Canira, but 'him'... I never knew. I had a brother once. Was he like me? Did he want to fight? I feel a pang of sadness that I'll never get to meet him. I resent not the Unicorn Canira, but this war. The Unicorn Canira didn't take my brother, the war did.

Shine flies over to me. "C'mon Avery, today's the day."

I shrug my shoulders and ruffle my wings unenthusiastically. "It's okay, I'll be there. Ready to smack 'em down with my new Feather Duster!" She swirls around, feathers coming off her wings and turning into energy. "Took me a day to perfect that one, but it was worth it." She says with a grin. "Avery, you've got some of the best dodges I've ever seen. We'll be fine."

I want to say, "You can convert mass into energy and I can dodge random clumsy Unicorn Canira, I'm sure we're evenly matched."

I can't bring myself to say it, though. I just shuffle my wings and reply, "Yeah. We're gonna do great."

I walk to the edge of the cloud with Shine, who swoops overhead, smashing random kicks into the clouds and flapping her wings around. There are more and more Pegasus Canira around us as we walk forwards, until we reach the edge of the cloud. Pegasus Canira stand tightly together, crammed into ranks. Shine pulls me up near the front, even though I'd rather just stand in the back.

I see them on the horizon, on a mountain not too far below- the Unicorn Canira. My first thought is that they look a lot like us. In the middle of a war, how can anyone tell the difference?

They stand snarling and fierce, and I attempt to growl slightly. The world stands still for a moment, and then someone screams, "CHARGE!"

The world erupts in flying bodies and yelling. Blasts of blue energy fly by me, as well as a wounded Pegasus Canira, who lands comfortably on the cloud. He gets up and back into the fray.

I stand there, trembling, wondering if somewhere out there, there might just be a young Unicorn Canira who doesn't want to fight. Maybe her brother who she never knew died in this war. Maybe she feels alone.

Shine comes up behind me, a bloody horn mark across her face. It's not large, but it's obviously deep. "C'mon, Avery! Stop acting like a newborn!"

"I-I..."

Shine rolls her eyes and kicks me off the cloud. I spread my wings out like a parachute, and then with one flap, I'm next to the mountain. I stay near the back of the aerial forces, but a beam of energy slams one Pegasus Canira past me and I fly into the middle. I attempt to throw a Unicorn Canira by the horn, but he ends up pushing me into a row of Pegasus Canira. Another beam of energy just grazes my foot, which sizzles and hurts like thorns in my foot (which I learned about the hard way on one of Shine's 'adventures'), but magnified a hundred times. I just flap my wings nervously until I hear a scream. A Unicorn Canira is falling off the mountain to his death. No one seems to notice, but I look down and find myself dropping into a freefall.

I catch him in my paws, but he's pulling me down. I lock my wings around him and hope for the best. The world is frozen for a minute until I hear a horrible crack and a thud.

I open my wings, which sting horribly. They're bloody, but not from my own blood. Across the field are bodies of others, both Unicorn and Pegasus Canira, who have fallen. The Unicorn Canira, trembling, walks out from under my broken wings. "You saved my life." he says, incredulous.

I nod slowly, wincing from the slowly spreading pain.

"You saved... my life."

I nod again.

He looks at me for a second, trying to figure out what my intentions were. Then, he gets up, and walks away.

"Wait..." I say weakly, "Don't leave me here... please..." He's gone.

I walk across the small plain, looking for anyone I know. The terrified faces of Canira bracing for impact stare back at me. Some are no more than skeletons, and some are fresh bodies. I hear screaming and a body plunks out of the sky, wings extended to catch her fall. It's Shine. She looks up at me, broken, battered, and bruised.

"Shine..." I say, tears in my eyes.

"Avery. It's okay." she says, wiping my tears away.

"What happened? You were the best fighter up there."

"I saw you fall, and I tried to see where you fell, and-" I hear sizzling. Her wings aren't just broken, one of them has half the feathers burned away. "Man, those Unicorn Canira have some nasty laser beams, huh?"

I shake my head. "It's okay. We'll get back up there. We'll, uh,"

Shine cuts me off, slapping me across the face. "For crying out loud, Avery! Neither of us can fly. We've been left for dead. Have you ever seen them come to get the bodies?"

I shake my head. A sense of creeping dread begins to tighten my throat. "We're stuck here forever, aren't we?"

Suddenly, a bright star- no, much more radiant than a star- shoots across the sky. The light from it shines across the heavens, glittering with perfect, awe-inspiring beauty. Above us, the war rages on. Are they really so caught up in revenge that they're blind to this type of natural wonder?

I can still see the trail the star streaking across the sky. It heads to the north, far further than I've ever gone. "Shine?"

"Yeah?" she says, not paying any attention to me and turning her head up.

"We're gonna follow that star."