Arryn pulled himself up the colossal tree. Craning his neck, he spied through the dense canopy,

Above him the Aurora of the Realm shimmered, its green shifting to red. It was calling to him. I bet I can touch it if I climb just a bit higher. Letting go with one hand, he made a scope with his fingers.

As he watched the spiralling veils. A Skydancer bird lighted on his shoulder poking its thin beak in one of his elven ears.

The boy shook with laughter, trying to catch the small creature that was dancing around his arm.

It paused and stared at him, its head cocked.

Then it flew away, presumably to drink sweet nectar from real flowers.

The sun had set an hour ago, its orange warmth still glowing on the horizon. He could see from the great tree straight through the verdant valleys to the sea of clouds below. The island on which he lived was called Thostramor, ‘the last step’. It sat on the periphery of Skies Gift, the great sky island archipelago, one of the 7 great bastions of humanity.

He looked down at the ground far beneath. The seed of this world tree was a gift given to his mother by her great grandfather before she left Elvenheim, the bastion home of the Elves. She had planted it on the top of this mountain almost a century before she met his father.

Elves lived impossibly long lifespans, with the drawback of being highly infertile. Meaning his father, a Skylarkin warrior, had taken almost his entire lifespan to give her a child. Combined with the 10 year gestation period of elves and he had passed away long before Arryns birth.

I wish I could have met him, Arryn thought to himself sadly. He would have taught me how to fly like a warrior, he happily daydreamed of himself standing atop a slain dragon in warrior attire; a silver sword raised high, his body wrapped in chitinous armour, and an outstretched glider on his back.

Maybe the other kids would accept me more if I could fly like them. They seemed to hate him and liked pulling his ears. But the Sky Warriors only recruited from the schools, so he couldn’t stop going.

“ARRYN, Get down here this instant!”

There was a loud shout from below and he slipped in shock, time slowing down as he saw himself separate from the tree.

His eyes widened in horror.

Before he could even scream gravity reasserted itself.

He plummeted.

A tree branch smashed into him, scratching across his right eye and face.

The ground rushed up to meet him and he closed his eyes, tears leaking from one, blood from the other.

Then nothing…

⟣⟡⟢

“ARRYN! Arryn! Are you ok? Please answer me…” A distant voice begged.

Someone grabbed his arm and shook him.

He swam back into consciousness and wildly flapped his arms trying to find purchase, opening his good eye in confusion when he found none.

He was floating half a metre off the ground, softly spinning in mid air above the leafy ground.

For a moment he thought his magic had manifested, but then he saw two of his worried mother in front of him. She had saved him.

He rotated back upright and she gently put him down with her will, hands grabbing his shoulders to keep him steady as he stumbled. He was on the top of a small mountain, next to the trunk of the world tree sapling.

“Arryn, are you okay?” she asked again, a very concerned waver in her voice.

He shook his head in pain as the two images of her merged.

She was a tall elven lady, long pointed ears hung low, poking out of her mossy brown hair, adorned with heavy piercings. She had high cheekbones, pale skin and deep green eyes. She wore a simple tunic, thick rope tied round her middle as a belt. She always went barefoot.

“I think he might be concussed.” A second voice to his side said.

Sluggishly he looked up to see his cousin's concerned face.

The man had tanned arms like tree trunks with clawed hands, one of which held a bright lantern. He was short in comparison to his mother, with a sharp jawline and dark brown eyes. Instead of hair the man had fiery orange feathers that swept back along his scalp, typical for the sky people. He wore light insectile armour and the thin, almost invisible membrane of his glider flapped behind him, half folded away.

His cousin, Lezen Blackwing, met his gaze and a complicated expression flitted across his face.

What happened?

The shock and adrenaline of the situation finally left him and he grasped at his right eye, breaking into sobs as the intense pain of moving his eye beneath its lid made itself known. His mother finally noticed the blood leaking from under the fringe that had flopped across the front of his face.

She swept the hair aside, wiped off the blood with her sleeve and then angled his face up to the lantern light, peeling back his eyelid with her thumbs so she could see the eye underneath.

She went deathly pale. somehow even whiter than she had been before.

Then she broke down into sobs and grabbed him into a hug as she wailed out with the primal pain a mother feels when a precious child of theirs is maimed, pressing his head into her shoulder in a protective embrace.

No words were spoken for a few minutes, only sobs and wails. Arryn finally spoke in a whisper through his tears.

“S-Sorry mum, I di-didn’t mean to climb that high.” He let out between sobs.

“If we get him to a doctor, they might be able to heal him.” Lezen finally spoke up, his voice attempted to be calm and collected, but his tone betrayed his worry.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

He put down his lantern and Arryn’s mother helped him climb onto his cousin's back in a piggyback.

“Which island are you taking him to?” She asked as his cousin began to redeploy his glider.

“Nortamos”

His mother bit her lip and turned away, clearly dissatisfied.

“It’s either that or the Mad Shaman of Pteroshka, but we both know what happened to my brother after that guy was done with him” Lezen insisted.

Arryn pondered the name, the man was known to work miracles, but often his definition of healing went more along the lines of: ‘he broke his arm and can’t fly, so I gave him wings’. The wings had worked as well as any birds, but Lezen’s brother had been shunned and cast aside for looking like a freak. Arryn thought they were cool though, everyone else was stupid and over obsessed with perfect human appearance.

His mother relented with the mention of the shaman. “Bring him back tomorrow”

Then Lezen dashed forwards, building up speed so the wind caught his glider.

Arryn felt gravity leave him as they passed over the top of a cliff. The wind blew sharply into his face, aggravating his eye, so he turned away. They dropped for a few seconds, then Lezen empowered the glider with his magical will and they shot up, soon regaining all the height they had fallen.

Arryn watched his mother get smaller and smaller, until all he could make out was a needle-like silhouette of the tree perched atop the behemoth of a floating island in the night sky.

He did not know how long they flew through the night as fuzzy fevered dreams replaced the throbbing pain and biting wind.

⟣⟡⟢

A thump awoke Arryn as they slammed down on a flat landing pad, his cousin collapsed from physical and mental exertion, sending them both tumbling down to the ground. Getting here so fast had taken its toll on him.

As he pushed himself off the ground into a sitting position he tried to look around.

Blood from the cut across his face had run down and scabbed on his eye lid so that he couldn’t even open it anymore, though that did nothing to stop the pain.

With his good eye he could see they had landed in a courtyard surrounded by shadowed buildings, the aurora no longer graced the sky. Normally he would have been very excited to visit any base of the sky warriors, but today had different circumstances.

There was a shout and soon muscled men and women wearing neatly folded gliders rushed out to the pad, they surrounded Lezen asking if there had been an attack. They must be on attack standby, Arryn thought to himself. Lezen seemed dazed for a moment and then pointed at Arryn and said some words in a vaguely familiar lilting tongue.

The Sky Warriors didn’t pause, three of them walked over to him and carefully lifted him without jostling before running through a dark archway into dimly lit earthen passages that had been carved into the rough island rock.

Soon they reached an alchemist's area; full of glass equipment and narrow cots. After depositing him on a waist height examination table; one of the warriors ran off while the other two checked him all over, to see if he was hurt anywhere else. They avoided his bad eye, but one conjured a small bright light and shone it into his good eye, the bright light gave him a headache and he turned away.

The shaman eventually appeared, a disgruntled greying elder, he summoned a green bubble of light around his hands, before setting to work, slowly peeling Arryns eyelids back. The bubble seemed to dampen the agony he was feeling to a degree where it felt no worse than an insect bite. The relief was immediate.

Arryn watched his neutral expression as he leaned over him and examined the eye.

He felt the man gently wrapping his will around the eye, even though he could no longer see from it, the will pushed it slightly in the various degrees of freedom and then he felt the weird sensation of will being sent into the ocular organ itself.

He did not take long, withdrawing his will from his eye only after a minute or two with a grim expression. “Your eye is ruined, my magic can only heal it, not repair it”

The man held up a small mirror in front of Arryn.

His angular face was marred by a jagged scar that bisected though his eyebrow and trailed downward to his cheekbone. His right eye was a mess: a jagged black slit, like a cat's eye, sundered the white of his eye and his green iris in twain.

For the second time that day he cried, this time not with physical pain, but with the mental anguish that comes with a child realising their dream might not be achievable.

It’s not fair.

People missing an eye can’t become sky warriors.

You need it to judge distances.

Why did this happen to me?

What am I meant to do with my life if not become a warrior?

I should just go to the mad shaman, it’s not like anything worse can happen.

Arryn pondered that last thought. It wasn’t actually a bad idea. With the scar his appearance was already ruined, and as a hybrid it had never looked that normal to begin with so he didn’t care too much about what the shaman might do to him in the process of fixing him.

He wiped away his tears as he latched onto the idea. It was quite feasible, he could even go tonight while no one was watching him. It could be done before anyone had the chance to argue about it. In fact he probably wouldn’t get the chance any time soon after he went back to Thostramor.

The ‘Last Step’ wasn’t even connected to the other isles by bridge, they were the sole inhabitants and Lezen’s glider was the only way off. His mother didn’t mind because elves weren’t very social and she could fly with magic, she didn’t even need supplies as elves were very efficient farmers.

Not long after the elder left, having made up his mind, Arryn snuck out.

On his way out the corridors were empty, everyone was either sleeping or on watch out front. No one guarded buildings at night here, as the islands were close knit, they didn’t have a currency like some of the other bastions, if you needed something you took it.

Unseen, he slipped out the back and to the rope bridge to the next island. It was less of a rope bridge and more of a thick rope to walk along with two much thinner ropes at chest height to aid with balance. Spaced evenly along, shiny polished charms pierced the rope to ensure that anyone flying in low light didn’t hit it and get tangled. These bridges were dangerous in high wind and could chill you off fast, so he was lucky that Pteroshka was only two bridges away.

His breath felt caught in his throat as he crossed the precarious bridge, the drop below him seemingly infinite. He forced himself to look upward at the other end, without his other eye he had no concept of the actual distance he travelled, but after almost slipping once he quickened his pace and eventually made it to the other side.

This island was uninhabited and primarily used for hunting a few species of land based game like rabbits, ferrets and moles. Nothing larger could survive without being plucked up by the griffins and great eagles that those without gliders used as mounts. Despite the knowledge that it wasn’t home to anything big, the shifting shadows the dense forest made still terrified him enough to make him run to the next bridge.

Pteroshka was a larger island, the second largest in the archipelago. Host to two settlements, a lake and a handful of mountains, it took half an hour to cross it by glider or half a day by foot. The shaman was said to reside in a cave due west of the tallest mountain.

It took Arryn until the early hours of the morning to reach the cave. This place feels wrong, I should go back. The cave entrance was in a small garden under a tree, but the place felt the opposite of welcoming, the plants were wild and strangled each other freely, and the tree looked half dead, its withered upper branches blocking out all the light that would shine near the cave.

He stood in front of the dark maw, looking down at the grimy chipped stairs that were carved into the entrance of an old inhabited mine. There was at least one of these on every island, mines that lead down into the ancient hearts of these flying isles. If you went deep enough you would find a perfect sphere of silvery mythril, larger than any dragon. This mystical growing metal’s primary use was for building the airships that the Skylarkin merchants travelled to the other bastions in, they chipped it off the spheres of highest flying islands every year at a careful rate to control altitude. Specialised magicians roamed the islands, ensuring that no more than needed was removed, and identifying which islands would be mined for the upcoming decade.

Weightless and stronger than steel, every other human race sought after it, especially dwarves. Arryn wondered why they would let someone live in a valuable mine. However he quickly realised the island would sink if too much was mined, so they would immediately know if the man was stealing any.

Realising he had been staring down into darkness for quite a while, distracting himself from going in, he took a deep breath and prepared himself. I need my eye fixed, no matter the price.

With his resolve renewed he stepped forwards.

⟣⟡⟢