Flight School: Prey

A Good Hell

Why should he care for others when they did not care for him?

The phoenix extended her hand.

It took him all his effort to realize that this was what her gesture meant, and in a daze, Io accepted it blindly. Jing brought him to his feet with what seemed to him to be an effortless tug, leveling their gaze to speak to the one inside.

It has been long since I've seen fools like you. There was no accent in her mind, only a tone so clear and apt that Io would have thought to be from the stars. Or if not, heaven-sent.

Jing's gaze lowered to her palm, in which something burned in the heart of.

If humans had a soul; a spirit or so, this was how Io would have imagined it to be. The flicker of a flame—a slow burning of thoughts and emotions, collected in the essence of a sphere that fit in the palm, the size of a heart.

This is Sol. She held out the sphere with an orange glow, as though presenting it to the sparrow. Driven on instinct by the curious mind, Io reached out to touch it.

Sol emerged from her spirit into a burst of flames that spanned wide—above the pair in its burning magnificence and across the skies that now seemed as though it had two suns—spreading his wings with a call that was, indeed, worthy of a phoenix's. There was a tremor in the hearts of others around including the harpy's, in careful admiration or pleasant fear none of them knew but watched only, as the predator in the sky reigned the vast invisible thing like a land of its own.

Io stared wide-eyed at the girl before him, as if seeing her for the first time.

Can they not see it? The magpie and kiwi were searching for the source of the call so empowering, eyes scanning the sky in front, behind, around them.

Only you can see my Avian. He will guide you during the day, she said to him in his mind for the phoenix—the sun—ruled over diurnals.

Was she really?

To guide, to show him the way, was she really? Io couldn't bring himself to trust a dazed mind like his no less his eyes that had yet to adjust from the darkness it had seen before. Jing turned on her heel and began to leave in a manner so plain and ordinary that one would doubt the phoenix in the sky to be hers.

It was a mere thought, then; that Io seemed to remind her of how she was in the past and it was the past that she had left behind and wished to forget. So then, why would she?

But when night falls, sparrow,

You're on your own.

The girl paused to turn, before leaving her heart behind.

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Close enough, Lucienne thought with a sigh as green swept by in a passing blur—leaving the landscape below rather distorted in her wake. She searched the horizon for walls and found that she could, just barely, spot the grey to her east. I had it in my palm.