Aetheris Avidi
Of all the departures he’d made this was the most hushed. The atmosphere was almost reverential.
“How do you feel?” asked Ryan.
“As though I want to spread my wings,” answered Tanya.
“Are you ready to go then?”
“I see no reason to stay. I’ve said my goodbyes.”
“So have I.”
“Maybe it’s just my imagination,” said Tanya, as they walked towards the Axis, “but do you get the feeling that we’re changing?”
“In what way?”
“Are these beginning to feel permanent to you?” she said, touching the wings on his back.
“I feel as though I’ve always had them, in one form or another.”
“As though you were born to flight?”
“Exactly so,” he replied. “I know what you’re thinking,” he added, as they closed the face plates on their helmets, sealing themselves inside their suits.
“You do?”
Ryan nodded. “You’re thinking: are we the first of a new race? A species of winged humans.”
“That’s an interesting thought to take with us.”
“What if that thought became a reality?” asked Ryan, wondering if the Axis would make such a transformation possible.
Tanya said: “If such a thing is possible you had better get used to living in a nest.”
“I don’t care where we live as long as it’s not on the ground. I’ve had my fill of that,” replied Ryan.
“Another timely remark,” Tanya said, glancing at the ground beneath her feet, and aware once again of the appendages they carried - for all their weight and power - so lightly on their backs.
“There’s a hell of a universe next door,” he said.
She met his gaze. Ryan could see that her eyes had had their fill of this universe too. They longed for the sights of a new dimension. He could read it in her gaze, the words spoken with a look that told a story similar to his own. They had both seen this universe and now longed for the sight of another. It was that longing, as much as their wings, that carried them aloft, on a trajectory that propelled them beyond the reach of human eyes within seconds; projecting them skywards, on a path parallel with the ever-ascending pivot, towards a rendezvous that had been inevitable from the moment they left Earth.
Towards a destiny only a winged race could aspire to.