Wandering

Flight

Entry #7

1st of July, 08:33

Airspace above SW slope of Jägarfjället

2090m ASL

Temperature 10º C, Wind Speed 17 m/s S-SE

In a sense, one could say we weren't actually flying. Leastwise, we weren't flying in the sense of moving through the air; if anything, we were unnaturally still, perhaps even more so than one could manage on the ground.

These thoughts did nothing to change the fact that I was airborne, of course, and thus did nothing at all to alleviate my oncoming panic attack. I was hanging in the air some twenty meters above ground, kept so by the massive green-black blob of magic attached to my back that was Elytra, and I had absolutely no control whatsoever over anything at all.

“You're going to get us both killed!” I yelled furiously into the wind. Not that I had to, what with Elytra being able to hear my every thought – normally, that would've been the more disconcerting issue, but right now my priorities laid elsewhere – but it didn't quite seem like she'd grasped the concept of acrophobia. Or vertigo. I like to think that I got rid of my fear of heights the summer I turned 12, but this morning had proved that assumption fatally wrong.

“Ash and despair take you, hunter, calm yourself!” Chrysalis was at my side, wings beating furiously to avoid being swept away by the wind like so much dust, and her twain-split voice strained to make itself heard. “It is simple levitation magic! It is perfectly safe, and with you as an anchored power source she can maintain the spell for stars know how long! You said yourself that you wouldn't have any problems with flying! What of keeping your word!?”

The wind in my ears made it hard to hear any possible hints of worry in her voice, but since the moment we'd taken off, Elytra hadn't said a word. That, if anything said its own about just how “simple” levitation magic was, at least to her. “I don't care! If I'd known this was what you meant byflying, then I'd never agreed to it in the first place! Hell, I'd rather be carried around by a dogpile of hivelings than float around like some bloody magic balloon like this! For the last time,get me down!”

Chrysalis seemed about to retort when I finally started to sink, and a massive surge of gratitude for Elytra rushed through my head. At that, our descent started wobbling a bit; worse, though, I couldfeel the embarrassment sweeping through her like a wildfire, and it took all my self-control to not let it simply mirror over to myself. Sharing your head with someone is not the simplest thing in the world, but doing so with a transforming alien who possibly holds less than platonic feelings for you is a bloody nightmare. I've never been fast on the uptake when it comes to realizing stuff like that, I admit, but the bluntness with which those emotional surges hit me was like getting smashed in the face with a hot frying pan, except the frying pan made you giddy and red-faced for an entirely different reason than concussions and third-degree burns. I was definitely not going to tell her I'd figured it out, either; that would have us both faint on the spot for sure, and seeing as we were probably going to spend a considerable amount of this day in the air, that would probably be the most stupid thing I could possibly do.

That was, if we could actually get off the ground in a manner that didn't have me in a fit of panic.

As my feet touched the ground I heaved a sigh of relief, and I heard it mirrored behind me by Elytra. Her cocoon of solid magic had broken up, and she was now back to her usual form. Or, well, half of it, at least.

As the name implied, Elytra's “melding” magic had effectively merged us together – body and soul, fluidly meshing together like water into a sponge. In this case, I was the sponge and she was the water – my body was more or less the same, except for the addition of a variably sized changeling sticking out of my back. Elytra, meanwhile...

I don't know where to start, really. Her explanation was that she had transformed her body into astral energy, which she stored inside of me somehow. Like a genie in a bottle; except I was the bottle.

“Are you okay, Martin?” I couldn't see the concerned look on Elytra's face, but I didn't exactly need that to know it was there. After all, I'dfelt her concern for me, even before she had spoken. It was very unnerving.

Before I could answer, though, Chrysalis swooped down on us, with a disapproving glare on her face. “This is getting us nowhere, Hunter! If we cannot have you fly with us, all of this will be for nothing! Stop whimpering about and get up there–“

She didn't get any further. Elytra literally popped out of my back with snakelike speed, swirling around me and thrusting her face at Chrysalis, stopping mere centimeters away from her nose. “Chrysalis!” I thought the queen's eyes were going to pop at being addressed like that by one of her subjects, but it didn't stop there. “He is not of an airborne species! Tethering him along like a piece of cloud will only frighten him, and he has told you so already! Apologize!”

For several seconds, Chrysalis stood dumbstruck, staring wide-eyed at her; not until Elytra gave a snort and wound herself back into my body again, leaving only a tiny black spot on my neck, did the queen break out of her reverie. I thought I heard her mutter something aboutosmosis, but she shook her head and gave me a quite abashed look. “I...um. She is right. I'm sorry, Hunter. It is hard to keep in mind all of the...differences, sometimes.” She gestured vaguely to my body with a hoof, and shook her head again. “It has always been one of the harder things for us changelings. We can adapt to almost anything – it is sometimes hard for us to imagine how it is to lack that ability. I apologize, Hu– Martin. It was inconsiderate of me.”

Some ten minutes later, we were reconciled and had devised a good plan of getting me stably in the air as easily as possible. At least, I thought it was a good plan. While my changeling companions understood at least some of the principles involved – the more magical ones they hopefully grasped better than I did – they were not quite as certain as I was that my idea would actually work.

“I don't understand the issue, really. Levitation magic, however applied, counteracts gravity, yes? Even if you reduce the field efficiency by not enclosing the space it's generated in, however that works, it will still be enough to reduce the total load by a significant amount. With my weight reduced, I should have no problem keeping myself airborne given the wingspan we'll be using. You don't need to be an engineer to understand that.”

Elytra and Chrysalis both stood in front of me, a small string of shapeless black connecting the hiveling's body to mine. She'd explained – transferred her memories, more like – a few of the key concepts when I'd asked her, but she'd been very wary about my idea of how to apply them. Apparently both changelings and pegasi, the airborne pony race, used a more arcane connection to the air itself to fly – I got a blinding headache when Elytra tried to show me what she knew of how it worked – rather than simply counteracting the forces of nature with magical power, as I was proposing.

Put simply, Elytra would transmute her body into a pair of rather enormous wings on my back, and then use her magic to generate enough lift that my weight would be low enough to actually let me fly with them – while, since she didn't actually have to make me weightless, saving a lot of energy compared to the previous method of magical ballooning.

All in all, I was to be a slightly more sophisticated, slightly more magical and hopefully slightly more reliable Icarus.

Hoping that changelings had no tendency to melt in the sun they hadn't told me about, I battered down the doubts of the opposition and told my companions quite bluntly to just get on with it.

Chrysalis gave me a scornful look, before setting her wings aflutter and rising a few meters off the ground. Her eyes definitely had a curious glint in them, though; she was just as interested in what would happen as I were. While it of course was quite a fascinating thing to think of being able to fly of (mostly) my own power, formulating theories based on magical antigravity and applying them in the field was something different entirely. Magic, applied as science. Quite extraordinary.

Elytra just sighed a bit, shook her head, and looked me in the eyes; I could feel her concentration as if it were my own, and it focused my own senses as well. Lidding her eyes, she took a leap up into the air, wings beating furiously; her horn blazed with emerald fire, and an aura of green light washed over me. It wasn't bright enough to blind, me, though. I watched as the fire spread across the length of her horn to envelop the base and then her entire head, and within moments the black length of wispy matter that connected us was blazing green as well. I felt a sharp pain across my shoulders, spreading from the spot on my neck where our bodies connected. Only pain, at first, but then giving way to awareness and sensation. New neural pathways were being forged, not of one of our bodies but of both, and I could feel them as well as she could.

The fire had started consuming Elytra, now; she was just a green inferno to my eyes, now, every spark and wisp of bright-green smoke gathering behind me and latching on, growing. The part of me that was still trying to be rational feared for her safety – after all, from what I could see it looked very much like she was being burnt to a crisp – but inside my head I felt her presence, a thing of sharp focus and intent, and I'm fairly certain I would've noticed if she was burning to death.

Meanwhile the part of me that wasn't busy trying to rationalize things once again decided to be an asshole. “You know, I'd appreciate it if you could make them, you know, not green and fleshy. I don't think I'd look very good as a damn fairy.” I laughed slightly when a spike of irritation shot up from Elytra, but the next second the pain intensified to a biting sharpness, and irritation was joined by the hot mirth of successful revenge. I grit my teeth when the last wisps of flame dissipated into drifting smoke, leaving the afterimage of its last, shining glare hanging on to my retinas as the searing pain in my back started slowly fading away.

“Well,” Chrysalis crowed from her spot on high, “you certainly look the part, at least. A big, ugly bird, but a bird nonetheless.”

I looked over my shoulder, and my heart almost skipped a beat. A pair of absolutely gargantuan wings grew out of my back, lined like a magpie's in black and white. They were easily longer than I was – which was just what I had planned for, but seeing it made quite a difference – with a total wingspan just short of five meters, each wing over two meters in length. The feathers – well, they were feathers, at least – seemed to have been added as an afterthought, impossibly long things that didn't quite seem to cover everything they were supposed to. Elytra obviously could tell I had noticed, or had already come to the same conclusion as I had, because her voice went through my head just as I laid my eyes on them.Well, sorry, but you asked for it. I don't usually dofeathers.

I assured her that it was all fine – given what the changelings' wings look like, my expectations on the visual department of this experiment had been rather low. Sure, they fit rather well on their bodies, in a morbid, insecty sort of way, but I hadn't been looking forward to incorporating that sort of architecture into my own body very much. Besides, improvements could be made later. Now, it was time to see if my theory actually worked.

Which, of course, first involved me getting acquainted with the entirely new set of muscles plugged into my back. Elytra was considerable help, of course, both with the wing muscles themselves as well as the concept of handling new body parts – being a shapeshifter, she had quite a bit of experience in that area, after all. Still, it took well more than half an hour before I could even start moving them properly on my own, without Elytra nudging my fumbling attempts at directing the brand new neurons in the right direction.

Chrysalis busied herself with gathering the swarm up for takeoff, and had one hiveling bundle up my sleeping gear and cram it all back into my pack somehow. I have no idea how he did it, but the fellow looked fairly smug when he dropped it off, as tightly strapped as it had been when I took it off. This of course made yet another problem evident, namely that I hadn't quite taken into account that I'd be carrying my own luggage on the flight, and thus hadn't quite remembered to ensure that the wings would need to be unobstructed by a 80-liter hiking backpack, besides everything else.

Thankfully this turned out to be a rather simple matter to solve; Chrysalis gave the straps of my burden a short look, before giving the construction a slight magical restructuring that allowed me to wear it without impairing my still-theoretical ability to fly. It did feel rather strange on my back – and rather crowded in a fuzzy sort of way, despite the changes – but it didn't feel like it was chafing anything at all. Anyone who's done walking of any kind knows that this is a big deal indeed, and for a hiker it's even more so.

Eventually, I reached the conclusion that practice on the ground could only take me so far, and unslung the pack from my back. There was no sense in bringing it on a test run – it was extra weight, for one, and if I wound up crashing on my first attempt there'd be nothing gained from having all my gear subjected to disaster as well. I gave a look to Chrysalis, who was once again up in the air nearby, and she gave me a confident nod.

“Okay, Elytra. Fire 'em up.”

A high-pitched hum started sounding behind me, and turning my head a bit I could see the tips of my wings –my wings! – glowing faintly. More importantly, I felt the pull of the earth lessen in intensity, bit by bit, until I could swear I could jump higher than an astronaut on the moon. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath; another, crouching down, then one more. Then, finally, I unfurled my wings, raised them as far as they could go...

Tense as a coiled spring, I drew one last shuddering breath, before leaping up and hammering the wings down as hard as I could in one motion.

Just like that, I took my first, determined wingflaps, and flew.

And just like that, a few seconds later, I realized that I may have been overcompensating a little, once I saw just how fast the world was actually flying by. “How do I slow down!?” Unfortunately there wasn't anyone to hear my desperate cry, since I'd left the entire swarm gaping in the dust of my dramatic takeoff. Elytra was more than aware of our plight, however, and her voice rung through my head.I told you this was a bad idea!

And as usual, the only part of me that managed to get any sort of hold of itself was the smartass part. “But it's not! It's an absolutely wonderful idea! It's not that it isn't working, it's that it's working way too bloody well! CAN YOU STOP US FROM GOING INTO ORBIT NOW!?”

That may have been somewhat of an exaggeration, but hell knows that I didn't exactly have much to compare with at the moment. Nevertheless, moments later I felt gravity's hold on me tighten, and our rapid ascent smoothed out into a soft glide before long. “Good, very good. Note to self, not quite so much power in the takeoff.” My voice was a bit unsteady, but I made no real attempt to control it. I had other things to worry about. “Note to Elytra, perhaps a little less antigravity would be a good idea. Also, you might want to teach me a bit of–“

I looked down. Far below, the mountains were spread out like porcelain on a dinner table, and wisps of cloud streaked by at a rather frightening speed. I gulped, and set my eyes to stare at the sky once more. “...How to fly this thing. Like you said, I'm not of an airborne species...”

Slowly but surely we started making our way downward in a long, gentle spiral, as Elytra went through the very basics of how to fly with a pair of wings in my head, throwing images and memories at me as fast as I could manage to grasp them while keeping our descent under a reasonable amount of control. It took a minute or two before I spotted Chrysalis, furiously beating her wings as she thrust through the air like a spear, if not quite as fast as the very realistic imitation of a humanoid cruise missile that I'd just performed.

Relief entered her face as she saw I was all fine, but was quickly replaced by stern disapproval. Rolling slightly in the air, she fell in beside me on my groundward course and opened her mouth. I wasn't quite in the mood for another lecture, however, so I waved dismissively at her with my hand, and shook my head. “Yes, I know, and I'm not going to do that again! Probably! But at least we know it works now, don't we?”

She gave me a sullen glare, before letting her eyes wander across my back – and the whole length of my wingspan – with a considering look on her face. “I suppose we do!” She looked me in the eyes, before gesturing downward with her hoof and angling her wings slightly to the side. “I'll see you on the ground, Hunter!”

My stomach fell as I watched her plummet into a sharp dive, and a nervous grin made its way onto my lips. “We're not doing that,” I said as much to myself as to Elytra, and shook my head sternly. “We arenot doingthat!”

On and on, we kept spiraling downward, until I finally started recognizing the myriad of black shapes below me as changelings, drawing closer and closer a bit faster than I had thought. A bit too late I realized that I probably should have asked for a more detailed walkthrough on how to land, but by the time that thought finished going through my head I was already flaring my wings to bleed excess velocity and making my final approach on the straight line below me I'd designated as my landing strip. Drawing to mind the way I'd run down the mountain and out the pass yesterday, I clenched my teeth and started whirling my legs up to speed.

The touchdown was not quite as heavy as I'd expected – Elytra was still powering her levitation magic on us, after all – but I stumbled like I'd been shot nonetheless. In my defense, it actually took several seconds of mad dashing before I actually crashed; and that was only because once again, Chrysalis had gotten the bright idea of putting her swiss-cheese frame right where it wasn't supposed to be.

“I'm sorry,” I mumbled nasally into her flank as I tried to get up, but Elytra's magic had screwed up my sense of balance something horrible. All I managed was making the heap of wings and limbs even more tangled.

“It's, fine.” Chrysalis moaned between her words, clearly in a lot more pain than I was, but at least she was coherent, unlike last time. Then, to my surprise, she chuckled, making my nose bounce against her flank like a woodpecker's beak. “I did say I'd see you on the ground.”

I groaned at her misplaced sense of humor, before Elytra finally let her magic go and I could start untangling myself from the queen – and having an extra pair of limbs to go about it did absolutely nothing to help me in that effort.