And your conscious rushes back to your body, leaving your mind reeling.

This is not the first time you’ve lived through another creature’s memories; however, it is the first time you’d become so immersed in them you’d forgotten what you really were, relived a whole life not as an observer peering into another’s mind, but as though you had truly lived it all yourself in the span of a few of the little creature’s heartbeats.

Shaking your head in some attempt to clear it, you feel changed. Even knowing the memories you have just gained are not really yours, it feels as though they are, you feel connected to this creature in a way that is entirely new to you. No, not creature, Aericil. That was your name, is its, her, name.

Concepts that before were almost completely alien now feel intimately familiar, family, spoken language, a host of new feelings, empathy, the daily struggle of mortal survival, names… you suppose you don’t have a name. That had never bothered you before, you’d never even really thought about it, had no reason for a personal label, but now it feels strange, wrong, even, to be nameless.

Finally emerging from the daze of processing the sudden rush of new information and perspective mixing with your own, you look back to Aericil, she is still trembling before you, torso curling forward, hands gripping the sides of her head.

You speak with voice for the first time, muscles in your chest, throat, mouth, and face moving in strange yet somehow intuitive ways to push and shake the air in a manner similar to that which you had done in your new memories:

“I… did not intend to cause you pain.”

The air and rock throughout your cave vibrate with the sound of your newly found voice, deep and smooth, not entirely dissimilar to the sounds the great glaciers had sent reverberating through your mountain whenever they had enveloped it in the past. You roll your tongue, slide it over your lips. You enjoy how it feels to speak like this.

She straightens herself enough for you to see her face, twisted in a mix of what you now recognize as pain, fear, and shock accompanied by the wet streaks of tears.

“You will not be consumed or otherwise harmed as you fear. There is no threat to your survival here.”

A portion of fear shifting to doubt, her posture relaxes very slightly, seemingly recovering somewhat from the anguish your overly forceful thought projections had caused.

“Have… have I not offended you, Great One?”

Her voice is small, eyes downcast. You are unsure exactly how you feel about the title she seems to have given you, but suppose it isn’t all that unfitting given her perspective.

“No, you have not,” you pause for a moment, “In fact, I was greatly anticipating conversing with you, though that may not carry much worth for me now.”

Finally releasing her head, she shifts uncomfortably, confused, you know, eyes intently focused on the floor.

Slowly, you exhale through your nostrils, “You have found your way here—lost your way here?”—you give an amused huff—“No, I suppose not—in an attempt to protect your village, your people.”

“Ye-yes?” expression now all but overtaken by bewilderment.

You make a noise of contemplation, shaking the ground slightly, “Had I not experienced your… existence, I would have gone to observe, not interfere, though now it is almost as your people are my own, as though a part of me is you, and you would not abandon your home,” you speak as much to yourself as her, perhaps more. Putting voice to your thoughts like this is oddly pleasant.

“…experienced my… is that—”

“No. the pain you felt was due to my lack of practice with thought projection, I was careless, and unintentionally too forceful it seems.”

“I… see,” she does not, but it is of little import at this moment, “does this mean you are the power the seer sent me to find?” her eyes creep up to look upon you, widen, then dart back to the floor.

“I do not know. Perhaps.”

Your understanding of the seer’s abilities is on par with hers, very minimal. Does the seer also have some ability to interact with the nonphysical planes? But this still should not allow for any such predictions, gathering the thoughts of creatures that had been in the vicinity of your mountain via the mental plane should not yield anything more than the fact that they did not venture upon it. Even if it seems most of her species lack the instinct others have to avoid your mountain, it is very unlikely the seer learned of you through word of mouth, as they say, seeing as Aericil has no knowledge of anyone from the village venturing outside of the forest in her lifetime, or even recent history. As for the soul plane, it’s somewhat difficult for you to interact with, so you very much doubt anyone from a species such as hers would have the ability to. Did the seer merely make a guess? You must find out.

You both sit in silence for a short time, fire bubbling and popping behind her, she does not move.

“I may have healed your body, and though clear your mind is still tired from the events of the past days, it would be best for you to take time to recover and adjust to your… circumstances.”

“Ah… yes,” giving a minute nod, still unable to bring herself to look up at you.

You rise to your feet and start towards the mouth of the cave, your heavy steps, relative to her at least, cause Aericil to bounce as you pass her, picking up speed until you’re at what you might call a jog. Reaching the cave entrance, the bitter winds still rush and howl, unfurling your great wings you leap from the face of your mountain, deftly shifting the air currents to ease your flight, and hiding your presence once again.

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Stretching out your wings, savage gusts rip past you, your firm pillow of manipulated current pushing you up and forward. Breathing deeply of the freezing night air, you flex your claws happily. It’d been a very long time since you had last flown, you’d almost forgotten how pleasant it was.

Recreation was not the purpose of this outing, however. While Aericil could be sustained by the direct transfer of your life-energy, the experience of eating a meal was a comforting thing associated with positive emotions which would no doubt assist in alleviating her mental fatigue.

Soaring through the snowy mountains streaked with shifting slivers of pale moonlight that occasionally slip between the seething, dark grey cloud cover, you turn your attention to your senses. You hear the wind, of course, but also the sound of air moving around solid forms, smell the scents of various flora and fauna, and make out moving shapes of different sizes and velocities between the particles of water and ice forming the thick cloud above. It would seem there is a thriving ecosystem in the sky here.

With a single, powerful beat of your wings you angle upward and send yourself speeding deep into the clouds.

Now near the center of the dark swarm of water and ice, you find yourself surrounded by life, a large variety of winged creatures and lighter than air plants. The wind is calmer here somehow, there are many of a species of bush-like plants, though instead of a more conventional set of leaves they are made up of many little, thin, transparent blue tinted sacks, presumably containing whatever gas it is that keeps them afloat, and from the bottoms of these blue sky-bushes hang a white tear shaped fruit. Much larger than the bushes are fibrous, pale-yellow spheres, light enough to drift on the breeze.

Gliding toward one of the blue bushes until it’s right before your snout, you open up and get the whole thing in your mouth. After chewing twice, you promptly spit it out, the goopy mess falling to the mountains below. The gas sacks were very filmy and unpleasant, the white fruit’s interior slimy, stringy, and pungent. Not something you would consider edible, but the flying feathered creatures with wings that beat so fast as to be a blur when you aren’t focusing on them seemed to disagree.

They dart from bush to bush, hovering smoothly at each, snapping their rounded beaks around the white fruits. Their feathers a similar color to the dark interior of the clouds, likely making them harder to spot for whatever predator species there must be up here. With wide and round yellow eyes shaped for collecting what little light is available at night, and in dense cloud no less, each creature is perhaps half as tall as Aericil when hovering vertically. One of them could likely serve as a more than sufficient meal, though judging by what you know of their diet you’re unsure how appealing their taste will be.

You choose the nearest flying creature as a target, will the air to bring together, compress and chill moisture and ice particles into a thin, strong, frozen needle before you, form a tiny pocket of highly pressurized air behind it at just the right angle, then release it toward the needle which gives a sharp cracking sound as it sets off faster than the speed at which sound travels, piercing and passing cleanly through the targeted creatures skull in an instant. It’s wings slap against its sides at the end of their final flap, and the creature begins to drop. Diving after it, you swoop down, catching its carcass in one of your front claws, clenching the tiny creature tight so it doesn’t slip out to the earth below.

You’re almost tempted to perform the post-kill ritual you remember doing many times as Aericil out of force of habit, but decide against subscribing all that thoroughly to those beliefs. If there are spirits in this world, you’ve never noticed them before, and you’re fairly certain you’d be their elder anyway. You do retain something of a new appreciation for the creature losing its life for your purposes, however.

Surveying some of the cloud ecosystem a little more before you return to your cave, you grab a few of the fibrous sphere-plants. They’re far from dense so it takes a number of them squished together to make up enough material to form a sort of bedding for Aericil. Lying on a stone floor as one of her species wasn’t all too comfortable.

Again, you dive, this time only leveling out once you’re a ways below the cloud layer and between the mountains. You fly back to your cave, banking around frozen peaks, soaring along rocky bluffs until you see the cave entrance, you allow yourself to be seen, tilting your wings up to bleed speed, slowly gliding down, cushioning yourself with air, landing right on your ‘doorstep’ with a light thump, folding your wings upon your back, front claws still clenched around their cargo, arriving back not too long after you left.

Making your way back into the cave, walking on what would normally be the tops of your front claws, you come to the fire which is more of a smolder now. Aericil watches as you approach, apparently having worked up the courage to look at you, her head tilted straight up by the time you reach her in an attempt to maintain line of site with your face as you tower above her across the dying flames.

You lower yourself to the floor a short distance from the fire, holding out the claw with the fuzzy plant material, dropping it at her side. Her eyes follow it as it drifts down to the floor in a soft heap, large and dense enough to comfortably accommodate her.

“For you to sleep on,” the fibers vibrating along with your words.

“Oh,” her head turns back to you, bowing it, “thank you for concerning yourself with me, Great One.”

You give an affirmative hum, the low flames quiver.

Moving the corner of your mouth over the fire you let a string of saliva drip down onto the flames, they lap it and soon the fire is back to its prior strength, the flames crawling up the string and into your mouth, swiping it with a claw and closing your mouth to suffocate them, Aericil watching on with a look of both fascination and unease.

You open your other front claw and set about the task of plucking the well-feathered carcass, each individual claw being roughly four to five times the height of the entire creature not hindering your speed nor precision. In a short time, there is a pile of feathers on the floor and a bare avian body in the palm of your claw. You raise it to your mouth, bite off the head keeping it in your mouth, will the water in the blood to flow out onto your tongue through its neck, tilt your head up slightly, hold the body over your gaping maw, slit open its belly with the precise movement of a claw, spilling the organs onto your tongue along with the blood and scraping out what doesn’t fall, you set the processed carcass aside, shut your mouth tight, and breath flame into it, incinerating its contents. You blow out a small cloud of ash.

In the village everything you’d just incinerated would have been put to use in different dishes and crafts, but you’re lacking in cookware and tools, and you likely won’t be staying at your cave for very long either, so simply disposing of it seems like the most convenient option.

Looking back down, Aericil is staring at you, mouth slightly agape.

You pick up the carcass lightly between two individual claws and hold it over the fire, slowly turning it with a third. Continuing this for some time until the skin is mostly a golden color with a few spots of black char across it. Poking into it with a claw tip the meat gives way with ease. A bit dry perhaps, the creature’s lifestyle likely not conducive to the collection of fats despite its cold environment. Otherwise, it at least smells quite delicious despite its questionable diet.

Setting the cooked creature before Aericil, you hear her stomach growling, the stress she had been under earlier and the smell of well cooked meat accelerating the body’s desire for food, even if your life-energy transfer would keep her going comfortably for a few days yet. And, of course, the fact that she hasn’t had a hot meal in many, many days, sustained or no.

“Eat”

As soon as the word leaves your mouth, she digs her hands into the creature’s open chest cavity and yanks out a rib, rushing it to her mouth and stuffing it full, letting out a muffled moan.

Narrowing your eyes with amusement, you scoop two chunks of stone out of the cave floor, one about as large as the cooked creature, the other around the size of a typical village bowl. You watch Aericil gorge herself as you hollow out the first chunk, then the second, shaping it into a drinking bowl. Setting that on the ground, you take the larger vessel outside with you, pleasant chill night winds ripping over you as you fill it with snow, breathe flame to melt it down to water, and repeat until it is nearly full, the occasional stripe of moonlight dancing past, tiny shadows cast by rushing flakes.

When you get back to the fire, the two holes left in the cave floor have fully healed, and Aericil is still eating. She’s made her way through the ribs and started on a thigh, though her pace has slowed somewhat, you don’t remember ever eating this much as her. Even if she doesn’t need food at the moment, her stomach has still been empty for quite a while, her body seemingly very displeased with that regardless of your interference in its natural processes.

You set the water vessel next to her and move the drinking bowl next to that. Her mouth still full she gives a muffled yet profuse thanks and proceeds to fill and down three bowls of water, gasping when her mouth is finally empty, possibly for the first time since she started eating.

Sitting cross-legged, she bends forward into a sitting bow, arms straight, palms on the ground, white hair falling into a long curtain, a gesture of great appreciation in the village.

“Words cannot express how thankful I am for the kindness you have shown one such as myself, Great One.”

She seems to have fully settled on the idea of you being the reason the seer sent her here rather than a threat, which is good, you suppose, but you’re unsure how to respond to this reverence.

You simply make an affirmative humming noise.

“It is far into the night; you should attempt sleep.”

Though she had been restored by you and spent days in a state of unconsciousness, that did not provide adequate rest for the mind after struggling so, to make no mention of coming as close to death as she had. It would be ideal to get back to the village sooner rather than later, as time, while likely not of the essence, is certainly a factor. She should be in as best condition as possible for the journey back, even if it would not take long by your wing, and whatever events may follow.

Watching idly as she clambers into the nest of plant fibers in the warm firelight, partially consumed creature and water vessel nearby, you close your eyes and turn away, curling up. You obviously don’t need to sleep, but she would be far more likely to sleep herself without a tremendous being staring on.

After a short time, her breathing pattern changes, tired mind not forgoing its chance for rest even in such unfamiliar circumstances as this.