[https://i.imgur.com/Uf7xL7d.png]

She was pushing more and more. Straining and straining to reach the peak of this journey. The apex when she would turn her endless push to the long straining drag to scrape herself against the aether and stall to a stop. Truly both great efforts of a journey were thrilling in their own way. During the great push her feathers lightened and her bones grew heavy and massive with the velocity she took on.

When she braked the feathers drank in the strain and reclaimed some of the loss potency as the mass was seeped out of her skeleton’s velocity and returned diminished into her feathers. It was almost like getting to drink up delicious grist, but not quite.

She was always lighter on arrival then she was on departure.

It was silly calf myths and legends that any ship could do better than that.

This would be a real journey. One that would crush time and space around her. She could feel in her eyes the way that her vision was distorted, that light and the inference of courses crumpled and twisted around her.

There was a taste as speed built up to the light that told her what was occuring. The spatter of individual atoms and motes in the medium of the reef slammed into her feathers now. She would push and push and push and avoid the worst of the motes. Her feathers would strain, their rich potencies directed into the forward motion.

Where they were not being drawn for lifting her speed to the apex of their journey she let them buzz and spin deep in their tines to help shed and deflect the hail of compressed light and dust.

She was sailing across emptiness so vastly the impacts rattled and bit into her with a constant roar. Her mind was a honed spear far ahead of her, widened like the greatest scoop. Soaking up the course and all that could be. She was blind to the now, she was only in the future.

There could only be the future for the immediate now was instantaneous, she could only weave and shift her passage by small measures ages ahead of her. Her eyes were full, of the light that was already old and dated and the intense weight of all that could mean.

Her feathers were flexing and pulling. Deep in her belly her drive was singing hardest of all, pushing the aether in a maelstrom of perfect synchronicity. The heat of it all burning in the shortest most intense of light, baffled and caught, slowed and redirected, cooled and filtered through layers and layers of her body. Reclaiming the spent potency within to help fuel her flesh and blood.

This was the long moments that Tunie lived for. That she was born for. It is what she suped upon the heavy grist for. It is what she carried the burdens of her cargo for.

She was the essence of speed and the future and all that could be. The reef was comfortably far away and so immediately close. A hundred thousand body lengths was an instant!

Tunie would never tire of the journeys.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

It was the very essence of being alive.

But it came with the sharp thrills of dangers too. She could not focus on anything now but the glints of light, the burn of the future and all the portents she could discern from them.

Which was why errant flickers and blank spots in one of her eyes was disturbing. Not unheard of. Sometimes the feathery shielding ahead of her failed to catch all of the lighter particulates and they dragged sharp searing flashes through her eyes. But these flickers and missing moments were strange and weirdly twisted.

She did not actually notice them at first, they were strange and only when she started to feel faint vague impressions of impending future obstruction ahead of her course did she spare a few moments to attend to one of her eyes and what it saw.

They were not aligned with the light of the exterior of her body. The effect was localized to a single eye. But it was irritating and disturbing.

Tunie suspected that there was something wrong, but it was an internal thing, an impossible to focus on thing. She could not afford to put attention on anything but her course at the speeds she was reaching.

But one of her eyes was flickering annoyingly with false flashes and blank voids where it should have been trusted to drink in everything around her.

Tunie had other eyes, she could think and feel and know with them as backups. But the irritation and false signals from one of them being disturbed by an internal effect was disturbing. She spared the faintest flicker of intent to notify her crew of the problem and then diverted her attention away from the compromised eye. She severed her connections and lessened herself for it.

The eye she knew would be lonely and distraught to cease to be a part of her in this most wonderful time. But it would have to do. Tunie knew herself and her eyes knew herself and would understand that they could not be a part of her during transit with such erroneous signals.

The loss of an eye was not inconsequential.

Tunie had to expand her safety margins subtly, give her courses more capacity for error and work the rest of her eyes all the harder in their attempts to grasp and contain the future. It was a handicap she had once taken when she was younger. It stirred some memories of the times of bad morale when the crew was depleted down to one.

But it was a little thing, a shift of a few more feathers, a slightly throttled drive ability. Slightly more tumble here and there.

Tunie suspected the problem would be resolved soon. Her Crew was after all the best crew and once they gave her eye a clean bill of health and it was seeing properly and clearly again she would bring it back into the fold of her entire self and Tunie would be able to make up for the slight loss of efficiency this journey.

Or if the problem was not solvable quickly their crew would recognize this and set aside proper maintenance for their arrival.

Tunie was sure of this.

Her Crew was the Best.

She trusted them.