Star Side

Chapter 34

The gentle twitch of her muscles as she moved her brush, the expanding and deflating of her lungs, the tickle of her calm heartbeat and the silken sigh of her hair against his wrist.

It was too much. He had to pull away or risk burning himself with his own heat and popping out of his own drawer, and that was an offense he didn't want to risk. He had never once seen Levi with his privates revealed, nor any of the divine beings, and it didn't take a genius to piece together that at least that was the same between their cultures. Privates were just that: privates.

Getting used to his new wings served as a necessary distraction from his maiden. Fortunately, there were places just large enough for him to test them out, such as the strange bright cave where they grew their food. Though his kind was also omnivorous, he found the divine beings even more so, which made sense as he had yet to see other living creatures in heaven beside the occasional flying insect. How they managed to find meat despite that was a continuing mystery to him.

That aside, flying came surprisingly easy to him. His body seemed to instinctually know how to mimic the much smaller flying creatures of his home caves. The feel of the air whooshing around him took some getting used to, though. It was too much sensation at once. But, over time, he found his senses narrowing so he could focus instead on how the streams of air moved and found it not unlike swimming through water. Just needed to scoop more down to move, which was where wings came in.

The first time one of the divine beings caught him practicing flying in the 'biome dome' as they called it, their eyes had nearly popped out of their heads and they'd run off to bring the others. He couldn't help but be pleased. Flying was just as much a new thing to his kind as it was to theirs, though he couldn't help but wonder why they hadn't grown wings. They lived in the sky, after all.

Which brought him back to the constant mystery of just what made up their sky caves.

His heavenly maiden had called him down more than once from hovering near the transparent surface of the dome where she built her nest. (The fact that she'd let him near her nest at all thrilled him beyond words.)

"Glass," she had told him when he'd asked about it. "It is made by melting down quartz sand, molding it into the desired shape, and letting it cool."

Quartz sand...It took some more lessons for him to understand just what kind of dirt they meant by sand, which apparently only applied to the texture, so quartz was something else entirely that they, oddly, didn't have up in heaven. But before he could be too confused they explained that they too had a ground where this quartz sand came from and that they had flown up from it, just as he had.

When he had eyed their wingless backs in confusion, Naomi and Jolene (Jolene, Jolene, Jolene), since they were the only ones to ever try to explain things to him, had smiled in amusement.

"We build tools," said Jolene. "The tools make it so we can fly. We build our wings."

And that was a mind-blowing concept. Of course he was familiar with tools and inventions. His people had pullies, lifts, gears, buildings, and tools to work and melt stones of all kinds. He was familiar with heating up a substance in order to mold it into something else.

But it had never occurred to him that something could be built to fly.

They didn't stop there, though. The females began to point out all parts of their cave. It turns out the very cave itself was one giant tool built of many. They even pulled away panels to show him the many...baffling innards beyond of things called 'wires' and 'fuses' and 'computer chips,' which he couldn't even begin to understand. They let him watch as they wore darkened 'glass' over their eyes (they also made him wear some for some reason) and used light to make minute, tiny burns, melts, and seals inside the complicated tools. They let him watch as they manipulated the many narrow ropes of all different colors, textures, and substances. They held up bits of metal so he could see the arc of light jump between them. They let him handle the squishy parts (he couldn't even begin to think of how one would use a squish tool). They pulled down many armed 'fans,' flipped 'breakers' and 'switches,' and even let him climb a ladder to poke his head into the array to see the very expanse of the innards of their home.