Flying above the mountains, their spires interwoven by thin clouds.

Searching, hunting.

Tasting the wind.

Adjusting the angle of my wings in rapid bursts.

Necessary to remain in level flight in turbulent air above ragged peaks.

Prey.

Shallow valley, few trees, perfect.

Pulling my membraned wings closer to my body, I slowly descended.

Prey never looks up.

On the final leg of my descent, prey within reach.

Pain wracked my head. Like trees repeatedly smashed into me.

For a second I was eating grass in a sunny valley, the next I was fleeing from a gigantic winged lizard.

A certain familiarity overcame me.

The lizard I had seen before.

In a dream, flying over a glacial lake, it had looked at me from the deep.

Rage overcame me. I was the hunter, not puny prey consuming sparse greenery.

I shook myself out of the stupor.

Too late.

A cliff filled my vision.

The biting cold from a memory of death clawed at me from below. Like a kick to the back of my head, it ripped me out of the warm embrace of sleep.

Through blurred eyes I saw the grey ceiling of the stone tower I now called home.

“I hate that feeling. I know that it’s unavoidable, but going back to sleep with that in my short-term memory is just impossible.”

I rolled out of bed, onto the floor.

The soothing coolness of cobblestone helped obscure the memory of someone else’s death.

“That’s the first time I’ve gotten a memory-shard from something that’s not human.”

My childish face scrunched into a frown: “... that’s wrong, I doubt that the first one was from something humanoid… or anything fitting the definition of ‘life’ at all.”

I got to my feet to make coffee and made it exactly half a step before remembering why that was impossible.

Instead I cumbersomely pushed open the door, glanced at Bran’s sleeping form and walked outside.

The warm breeze sweeping the grassland outside helped me suppress the memory of my unusual nightmare.

“Dying in normal dreams doesn’t leave me with that nasty feeling. Small mercies, I guess.”

A few weeks, that is how long it took for me to return balance, dexterity and muscles to tolerable levels. My arms still felt far too weak, which is why I regularly snuck away to do a few pushups.

“Better to not weird them out any further, but I have a minimum tolerance for my body’s functionality. Not that it matters much, considering my tiny size.”

I carefully climbed up a small heap of worked rocks. Wind blew up my makeshift poncho and tickled my dangly bits.

Slightly annoyed, I sat down with crossed legs in a tailor position and used my poncho to keep away the cheeky trickster.

After getting done protecting my dignity, I started looking out over the landscape.

Gray fog during winter, wet fog during early spring, now the sun baked down on the landscape from a clear blue sky. Our hill sat overlooking a flatland covered in woods, a small creek flowed from the green hills behind me. In the grassland it grew into a lazily winding brook. The hilly area ended at a series of small blue-ish mountains, far off in the distance.

“Flying lizards, huh. Looked pretty big… probably too smart for the silvery bullshit.”

Deep in thought, I absent-mindedly stared at the mountains.

“Bits of impossible memories. Places I’ve never been. Most of them worthless. Some containing useful muscle-memory. At least I’ll know what to do if my experiments ever turn me into a gigantic, flying lizard.”

A slight chuckle escaped me at the thought.

I felt a hand on my shoulder. Almost had a heart attack.

Phuma’s voice came from behind: “It’s beautiful isn’t it?”

“Holy… I can’t let people sneak up on me like that, when I’m this deep in thought. My facial expressions would scare the crap out of anyone.”

I hesitantly answered: “Yes… very.”

We sat in awkward silence. He looked off into the distance, then focused his eyes on me.

“So, what are you really?”

“AHHHH! He knows! Wait, what, how?!”

“... friend?” I tried.

“Don’t give me a cutesy face. I know you understand me perfectly.”

“What~ you mean?”

“You might fool Eric, but I’ve been watching you when you’re alone and Auria told me about your sleeptalking.”

“Oh shi-, t’was a good life.”

“What, Auria say?”

“She wrote that you talk in a foreign language and today you started growling, that’s why she went to get me.”

“Damn you dragon ripoff. Dying like that and dragging me with you!”

“Mean no harm. Will help.”

In desperation I let my mask slip for a second and I saw the reflection of my sad, mentally exhausted face in Phuma’s eyes.

“Ah shit... Sorry.” He hugged me.

I struggled against the unfamiliar feeling, but ended up trying to hug back.

“I’m not crying, sweat just flowed down into my eyes.”

Using my small fists to dry my eyes, I got some corns of sand in my eyes and had to blink rapidly to look at Phuma.

“How?”

“You know how old people eventually go to sleep and never wake up again?”

“Death. Yes.”

“Riight~, anyway. Sometimes old mages fall ‘asleep’, but briefly wake up again, their eyes glowing a nasty reddish color.”

“Wha?”

“They become violent, regardless of how they were in life. The priests of Bran’s people say it’s the price of magic, I don’t believe it though-,”

“Undead, great.”

“-I just think they’re trying to scare magic out of the hand of us common folk”, his hand swept out, gesturing across the grassland.

“Dangerous?”

“No, they really aren’t. Fumbling around, gnashing at people… not dangerous, just really horrific for the family.”

“Why, important?” I wondered aloud.

“Your eyes glow a pale, piercing blue whenever you use magic.”

“Oh”, I felt my heart drop.

“Combined with your general… weirdness…?!”, he gestured at my entire body.

I felt slightly insulted.

“... well, let’s just say that I went for a wild guess and you fell for it. Not like it would’ve been important, since you wouldn’t have understood me if I was wrong.”

“It was a bluff?!”

“Phuma, huge-butt!”

My paltry insult triggered a fit of laughter that made him slide off the rock, onto the ground, holding his stomach.

He finally picked himself up from the ground and stared me down. A serious look strapped to his face.

“Anyway, what are you?”

I fumbled around in my memories, trying to come up with an adequate, truthful answer for what had transpired.

Eventually I settled for just pointing at the sky and saying “Came from there.”

“Sure~, and my left foot created the moon.” His sarcasm was lost on me in my absent-minded state, so I looked down at his feet. He grinned again.

“You can always explain it properly later. Your reaction to the ‘radioactive crystal’ showed us that you aren’t the same as a re-woke mage.”

“Why?” I wondered.

“Just being in proximity would return a body to normal, you are still bumbling around, aren’t ya?”

“There goes my fear of the undead dragging me off into the night.

Phuma grabbed me, sat himself against the foot of the stone, put me on his legs and we silently watched the juicy, green grassland ripple in the wind.

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Grass-lizards are the gray goo of this world. They collectively ran out of food weeks ago and now they try to eat anything with nutritional value, including us.

Obviously still harmless… for everyone but me. I live in constant fear of waking up missing a pinkie or a little toe. “I’m so used to pain, I probably wouldn’t even notice while sleeping.”

There is little point in asking the others to make me shoes. I am going to grow out of them before they even finish making them. Figuring out a way to deal with the lizards while walking outside, was a problem I was confident could be solved with magic.

So I began experimenting.

+-+

Days later. My feet were ripped to shreds, both from lizards and my failures. I was tired of waiting for these shallow injuries to heal. So I decided to take a risk. I tried to heal my wounds using magic.

Spectacular mistake.

I managed to hurt my ankles so badly that I actually needed to have Auria sacrifice some of her small supply of plant-fibre cloth, so we could keep the damaged area together. “If the wound had been any larger she would’ve probably pulled out her sewing kit. She was certainly eyeing it.”

At first, during the casting phase everything seemed to work out, but during the final step a discrepancy occurred. My casting had the correct timing, learned from Bran, I even used the gestures and syllables to make sure. It still went wrong somehow.

The image used was simple; I wanted smooth skin instead of a red, swollen bloody area. Certainly not the most elaborate, but the weird ball of light made no scientific sense either. I had hoped that whatever controlled the minute details, whether subconscious or external, would know what I wanted. The largest risk was of course to promote uncontrolled cell-growth, getting magic-cancer would be an experience.

Instead a seemingly uncontrolled torrent of magic had bloated and ripped my already damaged skin to shreds. Slowly dripping blood, I had made my back to beg for help from Auria.

I was now banned from magic until I could tell Bran, in detail, what I had tried to do.

+-+-+-+-+

I spent the time it took for me to put together a coherent explanation on helping Eric with his field.

‘Helping’, being a charitable interpretation. He first had to teach me which plants were to be left alone and which ones I could purge. Then my shoddy balance almost damaged some plants and saw me falling straight on the ass.

At least I had time to think about the general weirdness of my situation.

“Back home aliens were real, and for some reason they decided to adopt us into their community or organisation, instead of just artificially Kessler-syndroming our asses and letting nature run its course?!”

My hand nicked a bit of Zitterweed by accident and I breathlessly watched the fragile plant sway back and forth, luckily it did not break.

“What caused them to deem our chances of survival too low for comfort? Was that just some kind of political maneuvering or was something of significance happening while I carried out my workmanship? A few hundred people flying commercial jets shouldn’t have such a huge impact on humanity at large, maybe we were already skirting the bottom of the barrel and I killed someone important by accident. I’ll probably never know.”

I watched the herbs slowly sway in the warm breeze.

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