Episode 3: To the Clouds

RECAP: Glass ships float in the seas to the north in our world that exists after the ending of the world.  The world is going through an "Edening", healing and becoming a garden before it becomes a heaven to the souls who went on before.  We live here now.  Different clans learned from different creatures how to survive.  The people of the glass barges looked to the water.  My story will start as I fall from the sky.  Here I tell you how I got to the sky with my people.


To The Clouds

My clansmen looked to the skies for instruction. Twittering flocks come and go, and just when you wonder if no wing will ever be seen again, a flapping cloud always appears on the horizon.  At first the small band wandered to high places beyond the notice of those bickering below.  The thin air seemed to accentuate the pointlessness of wasting what little oxygen the lungs could hold on the shouting of angry words.  My clan was not the only people looking to remove themselves from the anger in the valleys of the world.  Where others failed to escape my fathers succeeded because they stopped trying to brace themselves against the winds and updrafts that tore at clothes, buffeted the brow, and ripped staked tents out of solid rock on the barren peaks.  My ancestors were those that opened their arms and let the air lift them instead of clinging to boulders.  By the time the warring ways of the world reached the mountain our clan had already floated away.

I was floating before I fell.  Man cannot grow wings, but the updrafts and currents of the world care not if you be made of feather or fur… or skin.  Warm air will always rise and warmed air is not difficult to produce, either by flame, which can consume too quickly, or by gasses and heat produced by decaying flesh or foliage.  It is not that my people fly, or never touch ground, we simply only touch the ground lightly, perhaps with just one toe, before letting the air lead us on another rolling trip across the sky.  We feel like birds, we act like them.  We take comfort in the twittering of our loved ones to know that they are near.  We take it upon ourselves to work while others take a moment to rest.  While resting we are acutely aware that we soon need to get back on task to give the chance to another to rest.  As such we are a strange people I presume, never fully awake or asleep as a whole.  Darkness is as much of our world as sun.  We gather more than we produce, we leave behind anything heavy, philosophically or physically.  Our sky rafts are marvelous creations that have evolved over the years.   Large sales billow above and below embracing the updraft and releasing the down.  All that decays and warms the air is held on raised platforms where the smells associated with decay can flow freely away from the people.  Those same gaseous smells and warm currents fill our sails and keep us in the air.  Sitting, laying, or in anyway adding to the weight of the rafts for any length of time is considered foolish, dangerous, or selfish.  From infancy we are raised with what we call wings and sails, wide as a wing is to a bird but not constructed of heavy bone.  Our wings are corded chutes and sails that let us dance among the clouds, soaring hundreds of feet in any direction at any time.  When clouds clear we see the world below, but typically the nebulous clouds are our floor, keeping us separate and safe from forest and sea.

I am in the strong days of my youth, or was when I fell.  We had always been told that heavy soil could not soar, that wet sails could not billow, and that both were likely still poisoned still and equaled death.  Those in the strong days of youth are gatherers and tread lightly on the boundary between good advice and adventure.   We would step off of the air rafts letting ourselves plummet toward the earth below, scrutinizing the rapidly approaching world for glints of anything of value or curiosity while simultaneously feeling for the draft that would fill our sails and lead us rushing along the ground and back to the sky.  To walk upon stone was rare, and unnervingly still and dead feeling.  Instead a trinket of interest would be approached on the heady rush of the wind, grasped by an outstretched hand and carried away on the breeze by an airman and his chutes and wings.  Heavy things have no value, so there was never a temptation to grasp weighty treasures too heavy to bring into the sky… but errors can be made, and gatherers in the strong days of their youth did not always return, as is the beginning of my story.

Next Episode: The Fall