Sudden drabble

[cdybedahl]

With a piercing scream he threw himself from the roof's edge. Darkness above, darkness below, raindrops and wind all around. His wings snapped out, caught the air and turned fall into flight. Again, the scream escaped his sharp beak, challenging the night and the storm and the darkness to tear him from the sky. He rose, circling and dancing along the gusts that tore chaotically among the flat walls and sharp angles of the city buildings. Again and again, he turned mere millimeters from rainwashed glass and steel, bouncing back and forth between the walls of the man-made canyon. Here, in the air, he was king. A third time he screamed, filled with exuberant living. No matter the past, no matter the future. All that was was now, and in the now he was riding the stormwhipped air.

He folded his wings to his sides and let himself drop, drop like a small brown-gray piece of debris towards the water-slick asphalt below. At the last possible instant, he extended his wings again, leveling out and turning his fall with all its speed into level flight a mere wingspan above the flat, hard blackness below. The rain was beating the ground hard, bouncing thin mistlike drops up towards him. For a moment, oh so old memories of flying between man-high waves of a storm-torn sea came back to him. He blinked them away. That was not now, not this life. In this life he was flying along a city street, passing through ash-yellow cones of sodium-lit raindrops, carrying a message from the denizens of the world of the air to those who lived in the lost corners of the humans' world.

He turned a corner, and another one. He knew the way. He'd flown it before. Few of his people dared meet the ground-dwellers. Few of them ever got below the lower roofs of the city. But not him. He had no fear of the lower reaches. Indeed, he liked them. Flying as he did now, close to the lowest roof of them all gave him a rush like few other things did.

Another turn, a bit of level flight and he turned suddenly upwards with his wings spread as far as he could to kill his speed. He came to a full stop a claw-length above the piece of steel railing he'd been aiming for, let himself fall down that last little bit and ended up sitting on it. The railing stood on three sides of a slanting walkway into the underground. Dry smells of machinery and fear welled up from below. He'd never been there. He might be willing to go further down than his sisters and brothers, but even he had his limits.

Impatient, he screamed. He wanted to deliver his message and leave.

"I'm here, boy."

The voice was old and hoarse and came from what he had thought was a largish pile of garbage. Slowly, the pile unfolded into an old human. It was dirty and its clothes was bound-together rags, but it smelled healthy and its eyes shone with power. He closed his eyes and changed form. Claws changed to feet, wings changed to arms and where a large predatory bird had sat an eyeblink before a starved-looking young boy now perched, rain pouring down his naked skin.

He tilted his head as he looked at the human. "You are the fortuneteller?" he asked.

"Yes," it replied. "Has she come?"

"She has," he said.

"Are you sure?"

"Her hair is red. Her eyes are pale. She sees the peoples of the roofs and the lost places and talks to them. Is this not as you foretold?"

"It is. Will you bring her to the park?"

"We will. We will lead her to the place of sacrifice and ask her to wait, we will."

"Good, good. I will be there." The human smiled at him. "Your message is heard," it said. "You can leave now. May your wings never fail you."

Without a word he changed back to his real form. One mighty beat of his wings and he was in the air. Another and another and he was rising into the darkness and the rain, heading for home.