Skyris {GirlXGirl}

The Welcoming

~Serana⚜
I was standing on a cliff edge, wings slightly outstretched catching the cool breeze. The sun hitting my dark onyx wings making the golden highlights scattered on the thin quills of my blood red flight feathers visible, in a speckled pattern through the levitating masses of rock connected by vines and foliage or nothing at all.

It had always amazed me how the mountainous rocks managed to soar up in the sky without wings to lift and yet stay stedfast as a lake. Sure they moved, they were ever changing but they never fell. They never faltered in their trek through the sky. Flying as far as they could but never to far. Fearing of getting lost they stay true to their tethers linking them to the depths of the ocean and rising from beneath its shimmering surface, as their untethered children float away aimlessly searching for their resting place.

Looking down I could see the ocean. I was far, far from it, high within the safety of the moving forest, but I had gotten closer than I ever had to the endless water.

"Serana!" I hear someone call from behind me. Turning my head I look over my shoulder and move the arch of my wing to the side slightly to see Treale, a boy from my village and my only friend, a few yards away. "Come on we still need to find more food. We don't have enough to return yet and I don't want to stay out here any longer than I have to." He says turning away from me and motioning with his gray and green speckled wing to follow.

Turning back to the open cliff edge I peer down at the small flashes of rich blue between the tree covered rocks shifting below me before turning and following Treale into the forest.

~💠~

The sun was setting as the sky lit aflame marking the end of the day and our return home from hunting. Not much was brought back, a few skirte, small black tree rodents with two a-posable thumbs on either side of their paws, and one tuvey, large herbivores with a dark brown pelt with green speckling and large three pronged horns. Not the most bountiful meal but when combined with the other hunting party's it was enough for a meal for the small village.

The houses were made of large sturdy stones glued together with thick gray clay and roofed with wood and large leaves from the surrounding trees. The village was a scattering of houses on a rigged rocky stretch with a patchwork of bright grass close to a cliff but not so close as to cause great fear of the young flightless children to fall off the edge. The houses sat on lots flat enough for their foundation before the land dropped off or rose sharply, ranging from a foot to ten feet.

Letting Treale and the rest of my hunting party take the kills to be cooked for dinner, I split off in the other direction towards my home. It was a bit farther out than the rest of the houses. Residing closest to the tree line where's the other houses were closer to the cliff.

Walking through the crooked old wooden door I see my nani sitting on an old wooden chair the tall thin back coming up between her plush dark gray wings only big enough to span about three inches across the small gap between her wings that ran down the length of her back. They started at the top of her shoulders, at the back of the shoulder-blade, lined up perfectly with the curve between neck and shoulder, leading down in a gentle arc to the bottom of her back stoping in line with the top of her hip bones like almost all Angelo's did.

She was eleven centuries old and only had about four more left. The Angelo and Deamon life span was roughly fifteen centuries before the aging, which had stopped between the ages of twenty and forty when our cells went into a stage of immortality, started again once we reached around our fifteenth century when our immortality expired and our body's aged at a rapid rate, commonly referred to as expitra.

We never really looked different but when the process begins the person becomes weaker and their body starts to shut down all at once. Most die within two to three years from the time of expitra but there are a few who live longer. No one was allowed to exceed five years as the pain is too great at that point to justify letting them live and suffer.