Creak, went the hanging tree.

That was when Solis knew he’d had a bad idea. He clenched his abdominals, assessing his bent-kneed perch on the twisted bole. It seemed fine, as fine as when he’d decided to hang from it, but what if the whole thing decided right then to become the next piece of deadfall, taking him with it in its tumbling plunge toward the sky sea south of Isle Ameros?

Releasing the breath he’d been holding—with effort—he shrugged and relaxed his upper body, letting his neck loll back just shy of painfully to view his home island from three thousand feet above. It was . . . a bit disorienting, but he wasn’t exactly afraid of heights. No Tapiq who’d flown more than a few times even remembered what that phobia was like.

Still, Sis would have let him have it. As would Mother. And probably Phoenix, but only because he hadn’t waited for her. It wasn’t the first time he’d been up to the Earth, but it had been almost a year. Just before last year’s festival, he had made the exhausting ascent and perched up in the alien trees, surveying the sky like a predator hawk with wider peripheral vision. The view was breathtaking, a dozen islands visible in imaginary orbit of Ameros. Most of them were small things, barely more than chunks of rock a few hundred yards long, some deeper than others. The faint imprints of faraway islands smeared the horizon. Below all, the backdrop of whitewashed thunderheads spread in every direction. At this height, roughly a mile above the storm barrier, the individual cloud formations were not visible, yet the roiling motions of the storms within were plain to see, darkness shifting as lightning illuminated the depths in a silent display.

A healthy breeze blew the flavors of the Earth into Solis’ face, rustling his hair and attempting to pry a sneeze from his sinuses. The Sun’s glare, sourced from the infinite eastern horizon, filtered through verdant foliage. Here at the top of the world, there was a surprisingly dense ecosystem of leafy trees and shrubs teeming with small life, though no land animals. Butterflies, moths and buzzing insects fluttered and zipped about, while songbirds chirped at one another. He was on the outskirts of one of the forested sections that spread chaotically over the great continent, where thick moss covered the earth and stone between trees. Just outside this forest stretched miles of grassy ceiling with few trees.

Still hanging upside-down, Solis looked back toward the forest and tried to imagine that the theory he had told Telsan the other day was true. He tried to view the world as it could have been, flipped the other way. He would be walking through a lush forest, and overhead would unfold an expansive sky capped by thick clouds. Would the islands still be there?

Solis was up here for two reasons: for the exercise and challenge, and to escape the embarrassing frustration he’d just received when he delivered the news of Phoenix’s note to the Magnates. He had managed to get in to see them at the village hall, and achieved responses that quickly declined from cagily curious to mockingly rude. Perhaps they just wanted him out of their hair, as usual, so that they could begin the process of considering forgetting he'd ever bugged them at all.

Or maybe they already knew. It was, if he was honest, the most likely possibility.

He was interrupted from his thoughts by a rustling in one of the trees nearby. His head swiveled toward the sound, for it was unlike those made by the small indigenous life up here. . . . He could swear there was a faint chill in the air, a feeling of unease creeping through on the wind. Though he knew he must be imagining it, he couldn’t suppress a small shiver. His own bent trunk creaked treacherously as he performed a swift full sit-up, aided by his powerful wings, which had previously been helping him to balance.

As he combed the trees with his gaze, he caught a passing shadow, a slight visible flutter of wings accompanied by the matching sound. This sent more shivers down his spine. Was the Harbinger somehow watching him? Or one of his kinsmen from the great above? Or worse . . . one of the Earthbound? Rising nimbly to his feet, Solis used his hands to skitter up the bole of the tree trunk toward the straighter section near the roof of the forest. Here, the moss smelled especially strong.

An eerie noise came from behind him, a three-note birdcall that did not fit with the local birds. He jumped, glaring suspiciously in its direction, swallowing down his fright while managing not to utter any sounds. That birdcall . . . he knew it . . .

A blonde head poked out from the leafy branch of a twisted oak, two trees over from him. Grinning like a child.

Heart still pounding, Solis took a moment for his mind to register what he was seeing. “Floris?” How on all the islands had his sister gotten up here with him?

“Mhmm!” she said excitedly, grin flickering as though just realizing his reaction wasn’t entirely positive.

“How . . . never mind.” With an impatient sigh, he leapt from his tree and grabbed hold of the nearest limb of the next tree. Springy but thick, it held his weight as he trolleyed himself hand-over-hand and grasped the maple’s main body with his feet. His wings navigated the tight space and helped him when needed, and soon he hung just above where his sister crouched in a gigantic oak.

She looked up at him with abashed brown eyes. “I just followed you here. You weren’t looking.”

He scrunched his brows in confusion. “That’s impossible. I would have seen you, or heard you.” Even as he said it, he knew he was just saying it; he was one of the most absent-minded people he knew. “Why are you even here?”

“Why are you?” She stuck out her tongue at him, not so much rudely as playfully. “None of us are supposed to be up here.”

He drew in a long breath, fighting the panting that his lungs thought best. “That’s . . . true. I can’t believe I really didn’t see you.”

Again, the girl grinned, and he realized she too was out of breath. The climb must have been tough for her small wings and dainty physique. Her uncertain foothold in the tree, her grip on its knobby bark, her left wing which grasped the splaying limb behind her, all worried him. Not because she looked unsafe, though that was certainly a factor, but because this was his little sister who had followed him to the top of the sky. His little sister, whom he would give his life to protect. He’d throw away his dream of getting inside the Earth, even with his last breath, if it meant protecting her.

“Just . . . be careful, all right?” he said, trying not to let his frustration show.

She rolled her eyes. “I’m being careful. But . . .” She rubbed the muscles below her left wing, nimble fingers parting the cloth of her hava. “Ugh, that was a long flight up here. How do you do this all the time?”

“I don’t,” he said with an incredulous laugh. “Haven’t been up here since the last festival.” But he knew what she meant: all the training, the dives and gliding practice, plus the regular patrol duty he signed himself up for. He shrugged his shoulders. “Practice. And Telsan. You’ll get stronger, sis.”

“Telsan . . .” she repeated. He thought it was supposed to sound disapproving somehow, but it came out a tad dreamy. He knew she had an unspoken crush on the birdman, but . . . didn’t want to be the one to break it to her that their tribes were not compatible in that way. Or at least, so he’d heard. I mean . . . they lay eggs.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

He let out an accidental snort, and she eyed him suspiciously from below. “What?”

Solis shook his head. “Nothing. Look, I need to get you back.”

“Get me back?” she repeated indignantly, right hand—the one not wrapped around the oak’s limb—on her hip. “What’s the point in disobeying the Magnates just to get one minute here?” Despite the involuntary trembling he saw in her, the fear of being in a dangerous place higher than she’d ever been, she looked around now with nothing short of pure awe. “This forest is amazing. You never told me it was so beautiful on the Earth.”

For a reason, he griped to himself. Yet he felt almost guilty for wanting to deny her the chance to experience the wonder of the earthen ecosystem. Caris had stolen away to this place all the time, and had even taken Solis with her when he was nine years old. She’d gotten a strict talking-to from the Magnates for that, but it hadn’t stopped her from doing it again. Sometimes it seemed his little sister just wasn’t allowed to be an adventurer. She was the baby, the delicate flower of the family, the one they would forever shelter until she finally broke from the nest and went her own way.

Honestly, he’d almost thought she didn’t have the adventurous blood in her at all, the blood that had come from Grandmother Fey and skipped a generation. Mother was boring, though Fey had always claimed she once listened attentively to her stories. But Floris, timid and sheltered though she was, loved her siblings’ stories of their departed grandmother and myths of the lands beyond the sky.

The slim girl pulled one foot from its hold in the crook of a branch and, taking a visible breath, began to ascend higher on the trunk of her tree. The trouble with climbing upside-down trees was that branches went downward, not upward, so the angle between branch and trunk was more, not less, than ninety degrees.

Not about to risk his sister falling, Solis hopped down and, grabbing a hold of two limbs with hand and wing, reached down to grab her hand, which she tentatively extended. “Come on,” he said. Seeing her continuing uncertainty, he sighed and said, “I won’t take you back just yet. But are you sure you really want to stay longer? You’re pale as a phantom.”

She swallowed and nodded. “I-I’ll get used to it once my nerves cool.”

“OK.” He pulled her up and towed her with him to the maple where he’d been a few minutes prior, where multiple trunks reached down in swooping curves, creating decent seating—though he took a different limb from her. Trees here grew at odd angles, reaching for the light in an almost human way, as though more than alive, and it led to them ofttimes reaching parallel to the overhead ground or even switching back.

“It’s . . . really not so scary up here,” she said as she situated herself in the tree, one hand higher up on her trunk and the other on her big brother’s leg. “Why’s it off-limits, anyway?”

He shrugged. “I don’t think anybody really knows. Supposedly there are monsters like the Earthbound, but I’ve never even seen one.”

“Bart says he’s seen a couple this year.” Her tone indicated that this statistic and her current experience did not relate to one another at all. She was probably too busy telling herself not to be scared of the height to dwell on less palpable dangers.

“Well . . . I never know how much to believe those guys,” Solis countered with a laugh. Bartholomew was one of the Terrologists, people from town who wasted their time staring at the Earth through telescopes and writing down their observations from afar. Most had never left the island. Granted, he would love to have their jobs, but he didn’t exactly respect them. He wanted to be an explorer, not a distant observer.

They chatted there for a few minutes, and Floris relaxed more, but he began to see a different sort of unease behind her eyes, that of staying out too long and worrying people—or worse, getting in trouble. He was just about to suggest they head back as he was struck with the memory of that strange feeling and shadowy blur. “Hey . . . Flory, you see anything weird when we first came up here?”

She tensed, and he felt it through her grip. “No. Why?”

He immediately tried to calm her. “Nothing, it’s fine. I think I must have caught a glimpse of you before I knew who it was.” He suspected that wasn’t the case, but he wasn’t going to let on. “Come on, we should be going.”

“Yes, we should,” a bit more quickly than she would have a moment ago.

CHARACTERS

* Solis Lightwing (SOLE-iss)—The main character, a white-winged boy of unceasing curiosity who longs to see inside the forbidden Earth.

* Telsan (TELL-suhn)—Solis’ best friend, a young man of the Bird Tribe.

* Phoenix Dolce (DOLE-chay)—Friend of Solis and Telsan, a Flameborn girl of sixteen years. Daughter of Falla Dolce.

* Melka—One of the three living Tapiq Magnates.

* Donnor—Said to be the eldest of the three living Magnates.

* Spore—One of the three living Magnates. Doesn’t say much.

* Fey—Solis’ deceased grandmother, a former Magnate.

* Pim Lightwing—Daughter of Fey of Longfell and mother of Solis and Floris.

* Arthur Lightwing—An exterior miner, husband of Pim, head of the Lightwing household.

* Floris—Solis' younger sister. 11 years old; aspires to be a physician.

* Caris—Eldest of the three Lightwing children, now married and residing in the neighboring Tapiq village of Dram.

* Falla Dolce—Phoenix's mother, a Dustborn from a powerful elementalist family of Fenaback. Kept her family name due to unfortunate events she'd rather leave buried.

* Otto Dolce—Old but strong leader in his elementally gifted clan, which consists mostly of his own direct descendants.

* Cana Shannaset (CAY-nuh SHAN-uh-set)—A Flameborn Dolce, elder sister of Falla.

* Callo Dolce—Eldest brother of Falla and Cana, old enough to be Phoenix's grandfather. A Stormborn.

* Erika—Daughter of Marcus's elder brother and cousin of Phoenix, currently in training with a courier at the school in Megeth.

* Bartholomew—One of the Terrologists of Megeth.

TERMS

* Megeth (Meh-GETH)—Hometown of Solis and his fellow Tapiq people.

* Ameros (AM-uh-ros)—Largest island in the southeastern quadrant of the sky, where the Tapiq village of Megeth lies.

* Fenaback—Also called the Isle of Colors, this island is home to many elementalists, including powerful families such as the Dolce clan.

* Tapiq (tuh-PEEK)—The tribe of winged men who dwell in Ameros and the surrounding islands. As with most tribes, they have adopted some from other tribes and races as their own, while others are visitors.

* Ornis—Also called the Bird Tribe, though this isn’t entirely accurate, as there are multiple; most simply live farther north.

* Hiding, The—The six hours in the middle of the day when the Sun’s low-angled course takes it behind the infinite cloud layer that looms beneath the sky world.

* Earth, The—Ground, dirt, namely the gigantic continent that looms above the sky. Forbidden to all save those whom the Magnates choose each year.

* Magnate—One of the three living souls of the Tapiq tribe who have ascended to the Earth and returned, bearing supposedly infinite knowledge that they choose to keep hidden.

* Earthbound—Ancient, many-legged chimeras said to prowl the surface of the Earth.

* Terrology—Study of the Earth. Terrologists have made a science out of useless observation of the world's ceiling, or so many see it.

* Hava (HAH-vuh)—Wrapped clothing worn by conservative Tapiq women.

KINSHIPS

* Elementalist—One born with a Kinship to an elemental force. They represent one of multiple types of Kinships.

* Flameborn—Those blessed with Kinship to the power of flame. They are characterized by their lack of wings, as they form their own as needed from tongues of fire that sprout from their backs.

* Dustborn—Manipulators of soil and dust. They fly with wings created from nearby dust particles.

* Windborn—Kin of the wind. Unlike other elementalists, these often grow wings just like any other, though some are blessed with a heightened ability allowing them to fly without wings—and thus lacking them.

* Waveborn—Also called Watchers, they control the invisible wards that protect the sky islands from falling hazards. Also includes those with the rare ability of sound manipulation.

* Wards—Magical barriers put in place by the Magnates and managed by the Watchers.

* Dewborn—Those who can control moisture and redirect water.

* Stormborn—Creators of small storms and electrical currents.

* Snowborn—Bringers of frost and snow on a small scale.

* Sunborn—Manipulators of light.

* Beastborn—These rare kind are seen largely only in the northwestern isles, and actually come in different orders, each with an affinity to a certain class of living creature.