The airship soars over countryside familiar to the winged Hekoye standing on the deck, as they draw closer to their destination of Aramole. The voyage has been uneventful, since the steward – very apologetically – sorted out the initial mix-up on rooms. Being a passenger on an airship is always an odd experience. There's very little to do, except think.
Lochinvar leans on the rail of the airship watching the ground pass beneath him. He sighs a little, still somewhat unused to travelling by airship and just being a passenger, letting his mind wander a little.
Flying so effortlessly now reminds the Vartan of a time when flight did not come quite so easily…
Lochinvar's mother leaps from the cliff top, her great brown-and-gold wings outspread, and dives perilously downwards before catching herself on an updraft, and climbing in lazy spirals to reach a point well above her starting place, then folds her wings and glides back to the side of her son, who has been watching her. "There now," she says, beaming encouragingly at him. "Don't you want to try?"
The young Hekoye looks up at his mother, then up at the cliff she jumped off, and swallows. "What if I fall?" he asks, looking back at her.
"Then I'll catch you," she promises, nudging him with a wing. "But you won't fall. You'll fly! You'll see."
The boy nods a little, but looks very unsure still. He hesitatingly walks to the cliff edge, and looks over it at the ground – some three hundred feet below them – thenquickly back-steps. "I'll fall! I know I will!" he exclaims.
The Vartan mother clicks her beak, and folds her wings at her back, reaching out with one hand to pat her son's shoulder. "You just saw me fly, didn't you?" she says patiently. "I didn't fall. Neither will you." In the distance, Lochinvar can make out the small form of another Vartan flying upwards, in their general direction.
Lochinvar's shoulders slump, and he steps towards the edge again. He stops about two feet from the edge, and looks around at his mother, then faces the cliff-edge again, stretching out his black wings.
He pauses there for a long time, making his mother wonder whether he'll jump off or not.
When Lochinvar looks at his mother, she nods and smiles again, encouragingly, her arms folded before her chest. As he steps up to the cliff edge, the other Vartan, a boy no more than a year or two older than Lochinvar, swoops up along the same updraft Lochinvar's mother had used earlier, but turns the maneuver into a loop, performing it a dozen yards or so away from the hesitant pupil.
The Hekoye/Vartan scowls at the other boy. "Show off," he mutters under his breath. "I'll show them I can fly too!" With that, he jumps off of the edge.
The air feels cool as it rushes past him, and it takes him a half-second to remember to unfurl his wings. Flying doesn't seem as easy with the wind rushing past as it did when his mother and the other boy were doing it, and the ground seems to draw closer much too fast while he tries to follow his mother's instructions. The air beneath his right wing seems warmer than under his left, as his headlong rush to the ground wobbles.
Lochinvar realizes all of a sudden that he's not in control at all, and desperately tries to flap his wings or compensate somehow. When it's obvious this isn't working, he calls out, "MOM! HELP!!!" – the panic pretty clear in his voice.
A nudge at his side, easing him towards warmer air currentson his right, startles the young winged Hekoye, before he realizes that his mother has already responded. "Flatten your wings, dear," she soothes, speaking quickly but otherwise unaffected by her son's panic, "curve to the right and let the air hold you, then flap, slowly." Meanwhile the ground seems just seconds away.
"I'm trying!" replies the coyote, attempting to do what his mother is telling him, but is a little too panicked to be getting it right.
His clumsy efforts do slow his fall to a degree, although by no means reversing it, and his mother reaches out to take one of his flailing hands, steadying it in her own firm grip. "Easy, now, Lochinvar … you can do it," she croons. He sees a swoosh as the other Vartan boy dives past them, then brakes and tilts his head back up to watch the mother-son pair curiously.
The presence of the other boy is enough to snap back some of Lochinvar's determination, and he manages to flex his wings out enough so that they're at least flat now.
With his wings flat, and his mother leading him onto the updraft, his downward plummet nearly halts, his mother's hand leading him in circles over the warm air current. "Good!" she beams at him. "Now, flap your wings, Lochy."
Feeling a little bit of confidence returning, the Hekoye/Vartan tries a small flap or two experimentally.
The results of this effort seem encouraging, giving him a few feet of lift, his hand tugging at his mother's as his position becomes higher.
Then, just as it seemed like the young Lochinvar was beginning to get the hang of it, he manages to flap each wing out of sync with the other, and once again losing control and heading down towards the trees.
"Lochy!" his mother scrawks, still clinging to his hand as he starts to plummet. She angles her wings to keep pace with him, tugging his arm straight again and trying to guide him back into doing slow circles. "Flatten your wings, son, catch the air!" she instructs firmly.
Lochinvar tries to get back the momentum he had, but is now quite flustered again. "I can't!" he blurts out at her after a couple of failed tries to move his wings back.
With a quick shake of her head, the mother Vartan tucks her left wing to her side and rolls her body to shift her position from beside her son to over him. She releases his hand only to grab his shoulders. "I've got you now, dear," she assures him. "Fold your wings to your back; I'll get us landed." With her wings spread above his and her hands tight on his shoulders, they begin to glide between the sparse treetops, headed slowly towards the ground.
Reassured to feel the grip of his mother on him, Lochinvar finds it easier to do as she tells him, and tucks his wings back against himself.
His mother has little difficulty in guiding the two of them between the branches of the trees, and after a few moments, she straightens out her body and curls her wings to come to a neat, light landing on her feet, setting her son down before her, still holding his shoulder with one hand to steady the young male. With the other hand, she smoothes his ruffled feathers reassuringly. "There now, dear, a bit rough to start, but you'll soon get the hang of it."
The young winged coyote sighs, hanging his head a little. "Will I? It's too hard to keep my wings to do what I want them to do," he protests weakly.
"You will. You'll see." She clicks her beak encouragingly, and fluffs at the fur on the top of her son's head. "It just takes practice. Let's go on back to the top, and you can practice making your wings move while we're still on the ground. You won't have any trouble with that, sweetie."
As she speaks, Lochinvar catches a glimpse of movement out of the corner of his eye.
Lochinvar nods again a little, then on noticing the movement sidesteps towards his mother a little. "There's someone there," he says, looking up at her.
His mother's eyes track in the direction Lochinvar indicates. The young Vartan who'd been flying towards them earlier is gliding down through the branches. As he approaches the ground, he reaches his taloned hands out to grasp a tree limb, using it to end his descent, his body pivoting around it. He settles into a position with his feet dangling above the ground and his claws around the branch, swinging slowly, watching the pair.
The female clicks her beak again, a note of faint apprehension in the sound, then leans forward to preen her son's feathers. "It's just Dalton, Janael's boy, sweetie," she reassures him.
The Hekoye/Vartan's shoulders slump slightly, and he nods with a small sigh. "Yeah, just Dalton," he echoes, but thinks to himself, Show off.
Another pat on his shoulder urges the boy forward. "Come along, dear, we'll give it another go before it gets too dark!" She makes the pronouncement in cheerful and determined tones, hustling him towards the path to the cliff … which incidentally leads near Dalton, as well.
Lochinvar follows along dutifully, shoulders still slumping a little as he's not all that keen on an audience being present for his flying lessons.
His mother doesn't seem too pleased about it, either, but she does not ask the other boy to leave. However, when they ascend to the cliff top, Dalton stays behind and out of sight as the Vartan instructs her son, patiently, on the basics of a handful of different wing positions and movements, occasionally lifting him above her head to let him get a feel for how to move his wings when airborne.
The young Hekoye seems to manage his wings fairly well like this, but he keeps looking over at the cliff-edge to see if Dalton is going to show himself up here again. In fact, at times he seems a little too preoccupied with the presence of the young Vartan.
Occasionally, the winged coyote catches a glimpse of feathers among the trees, or a flash of glitter from a tail ornament, as Dalton plays among the trees far below. But as Lochinvar's mother catches him peering over the cliff edge again, she clucks a rebuke. "Focus, Lochy!"
Lochinvar snaps his attention back and tries to remember what he was meant to be doing. "Sorry," he offers.
Her irritation melts away immediately in the face of contrition, and she resumes her "play flight" pass with her son above her head, making "swoosh" sounds as she guides him through mock-flight. After a few minutes, she sets him down, glancing towards the afternoon sun as it nears the horizon. "Now, think you're up to another try at flying?" she asks, after kneeling to get down to his level as he stands, and clicking encouragement.
The boy pulls a slight smile in his muzzle, and nods a little. "I suppose. Yes," he says. His mother's words, Focus, echo in his mind, and he does his best to put Dalton out of his thoughts too.
"That's my boy!" She beams, leaning forward to preen his wing feathers into place, then dropping back to her crouch, resting her hands on her knees and nodding to her son and the cliff's edge a few paces away.
Lochinvar steps to the cliff edge, then looks over his shoulder. "You'll still be behind me?" he asks.
"Always, my dear." She spreads her great wings, gold flecks in her brown feathers glinting with the afternoon sunshine. "Always."
With that, the winged coyote turns back to face ahead, and outstretches his wings fully. He's not there, Lochinvar tells himself about Dalton, hoping to convince himself of that. Then he leaps off the edge.
Behind him, unseen but her presence felt, the female Vartan springs into the air, her momentum carrying her into the air over Lochinvar, her spread wings letting her maintain altitude as she flies above him, keeping a careful watch on her son.
Lochinvar is seeming to have a bit of better luck this time, as he attempts to feel for the warmer currents and try and maneuver into them.
As the wind buoys beneath his feathers, he can hear the approving clicks of his mother. The Hekoye begins a slow, controlled spiral towards the ground, slicing in and out of the thermal as he loses altitude steadily.
Still feeling he has a bit more control this time, he calls up to his mother, "Should I flap my wings now?"
An answering call cries, "Yes!"
The coyote/Vartan tries an experimental flap of his blackwings, and is pleasantly surprised when he gains a little bit of altitude. With a few more beats of his wings, he manages to gain a bit of the altitude that he lost on his way down.
His mother continues to lose altitude, with the result that she drops below her son in her descent. "See, sweetie! Isn't it fun?" she scrawks to him, craning her neck to watch him.
"I'm doing it right then?" Lochinvar calls back down between wing-beats.
A warm click answers him. "Can't you tell?" She flaps her own wings to regain some altitude, bringing her closer to the level of her son. She stays a half-dozen yards or so to one side of him, minimizing the impact her disruptions to the wind currents will have on his flight. "You're doing great!"
As Lochinvar gaze travels over the land below them, he spies a flash from Dalton's tail, the slightly older Vartan turning figure eights among the treetops.
Lochinvar tries to ignore Dalton's aerobatics, and concentrates on keeping his flight simple for the moment. He's not there, he tells himself again.
A few clicks from his mother, and a downward motion from her wings, suggest to Lochinvar that they resume their descent. As they do so, the young Hekoye catches an abrupt movement from the corner of his eye, and hears a faint cry.
The Hekoye/Vartan turns his head to look for the source of the sound, while at the same time gliding downwards.
Lochinvar spots the flicker of long tail hairs passing between branches of one of the trees that Dalton was performing his aerobatics around, then the young Vartan'sbody is briefly visible, plummeting ground-wards, wings akimbo and apparently out of control.
The coyote barely has time to think. "Mom! Dalton!" he calls out, pointing towards where the younger Vartan is falling, and at the same time tucks his wings back against himself to pick up some downward speed, then angles them out a little to steer his descent towards Dalton.
His mother, who had been facing away from the young Vartan while watching her son, scrawks in alarm at his cry, and mimics her son's actions as she re-aligns her flight path towards that of the tumbling child. Her position was further out of line than Lochinvar's, however, and she still lags behind her son when they start passing the treetops. The Hekoye, his reflexes perhaps sharpened by the danger, seems to be having little trouble controlling his own flight … so far.
The area at the base of the cliff is sparsely forested by tall trees. Dalton falls among them, perhaps a dozen yards from the ground, and below the level of the high tree tops. Lochinvar closes in on the older Vartan, as Dalton's fall is slowed somewhat as he bumps into the branches of the tree he is beside. One bounce carries him farther from the tree, and he flails his wings about madly in the now-open air.
Lochinvar tries to think what he'd do – what he'd be told to do – if he were in such a predicament. "Dalton!" he calls out, "Flatten your wings out! Don't flap until you have control of them!" The coyote looks back over his shoulder for his mother, calling out for her help again.
Mom beats her powerful wings in a counterstroke that carries her past her son, her arms outstretched as she reaches towards the falling boy. Dalton, in response to the Hekoye's advice, stops flailing his wings and straightens them instead. With his back towards the ground, he still has no control over his flight, but at least the increased resistance further slows his tumble.
The Hekoye slows his approach a little, seeing that his mother has passed him now, and she could probably help Dalton better. He doesn't stop, however.
Her talons lock onto the other Vartan's shoulders, and her words to Dalton echo familiarly to Lochinvar's ears. "Fold your wings to your back, Dalton, I'll get us landed." The child obeys with some stiffness, and she manages to land herself with minimal difficulty, setting the boy down then craning her head to look around for her own son.
Lochinvar landed a few moments before his mother and Dalton, and comes running up behind her towards them.
Dalton wobbles on his feet, the adult Vartan's hand, still on his shoulder, keeping him from falling. As the younger boy runs up, he looks away. Lochinvar's mother clicks warmly at the sight of her son, then returns her attention to the other child. "Are you all right, Dalton?" she asks.
"'m fine," the boy mumbles, downcast.
"Hey, Dalton," says the coyote, stopping just behind his mother and looking around her. "Good to see you're okay."
The older boy scuffs one of his hooves against the ground, still avoiding eye contact. "Yeah." After a long moment ofsilence, he scrawks, "Uhh … thanks."
Lochinvar shrugs a little. "Sure," he says. "I just said what Mom told me to do when I was falling earlier."
Dalton lifts his eyes from the ground to look at the Hekoye, and he opens his beak to form a shy smile. "Moms know best," he offers in reply.
The coyote smiles and nods in agreement. "Yeah. Mom is the best," he says, hugging her gently.
The adult Vartan wraps her wing around Lochinvar to return his hug, then sweeps Dalton into the embrace, too, with her other wing. "Boys," she sighs. "I think that's enough practice for one day. Let's get you two on home."
