Before Beasts, There Were Storms--6

Summers of Russia

Contrary to popular belief, Russia wasn't a land of perpetual winter. Summer came just as it did elsewhere, bright and emerald green. At least back in Moscow the heat was dry, not the muggy, monsoon hell it often was in Japan and southern China. Not that the Abbey had allowed them to appreciate it much. Training didn't stop just because the snow cone venders came out.

But before the Abbey, right on the edge of his memory, Kai laid out on an uncut lawn somewhere, staring out at the warmed sky as he tried to feel the Earth's rotation. If he held his breath, he thought he could feel himself moving, spinning with the rest of space. Even before the Abbey he had been a strange one.

Mother had been there. Father wasn't. He didn't know what his father had been up to or why, but he remembered his mother, pale, gray haired, and soft featured. That is, he remembered the impression of softness. He could never remember her face in detail. But as we often remember the oddest, most unimportant details, he remembered the pop of the grass as she pulled it from the ground. They hadn't talked, nor would he have been able to recall what they had said if they had. But he remembered her, that she was soft enough to let him imagine he could feel the world turning, and that was enough.

He always recalled that faint memory whenever he stretched himself out in the grass under a hot sun. And then he'd close his eyes and try to catch the Earth turning him through space.

He woke up trying to catch that gentle momentum. Instead, he was thrown into a wall. Nearby, someone retched.

Then the world tipped violently again and he started sliding away. A pair of thin arms caught hold of him. He clung to them weakly, gasping. The only light was a green glow from a dashboard, but he could see the outline of pale wings.

"Wha--?" He could smell vomit. Had that been her?

"Hold on! I need to get the captain!" she cried, even as she pulled him towards something. As his hands found what could have been the back of a chair, but in the complete wrong direction being underneath him, the world started to tip back again like a giant seesaw.

He heard a man groan and somehow knew it had been him who had been sick. He didn't feel too well himself. His chest ached as though he had been stomped on by a crowd of elephants. It made it difficult to breathe.

"What's going on?" He couldn't find the force to speak it loud enough.

But she heard anyways, God bless those ears of hers. "Dragoon knocked all those men overboard and ransacked the ship, but when he returned to Tyson this huge storm came out of nowhere. Tyson sort of--ack!" She slipped and hit the wall hard, along with the thump of another body. "Eww." Well, he knew what she had slipped in. Though the floor tipping back and forth didn't help.

He managed to curl himself around the bolted bottom of the stool/chair, pinning him between the underside of the dashboard and the chair. It kept him from falling, as he didn't quite trust his arms.

"Tyson?" he asked.

"He's--he's--augh! I'm so stupid." She sounded near to tears. "He's enshelled in the typhoon. The change--I swear, if I had known his element was storms I wouldn't have sung to Dragoon on a ship in the middle of the ocean!"

Swerve--the beam of the stool dug into his guts. The floor tipped so violently he almost hung there, legs and arms dangling beneath him. The ship around him groaned, interspaced with cries of straining, popping metal. The ever present hush of the ocean waters had grown to a roar that broke out in thunderous crashes.

Lightning flashed, illuminating the control cabin Ayah had brought him to. Kai managed to make her out, crouched besides an elderly man in some kind of military navy jacket in the corner, her tail feathers and wings had been spread out for balance. The boom of thunder rattled the dashboard above him.