Creative Challenge: Post 11

Her foot slipped and she started to fall.

“‘Taaaaaaaaa-” Tori started to curse. Alarmed, Kiy spread his wings out, painfully quickly, and launched himself up to catch her. She landed in the crook of the inside of his elbow rather heavily; she’d put on weight. Again.

“No swearing,” he said exasperatedly, gently gliding back down to the ground. He set his little sister unceremoniously in the muddy snow, then went back to sitting on the damp wooden bench.

“But I was gonna fall and die,” she said pointedly.

“Clearly, you are not dead,” he said, flicking a finger and poking her with a jet of conjured air magic. She frowned at him, rubbing the place where the air hit her.

“Cleaaaaarly,’ she said, stretching out the vowels to mock him. “You are a stupid.”

He rolled his eyes and slumped onto his hand. He hated babysitting her.

She tottered around the yard a bit more. Kiy kept one eye on her at all times now, wary that she might try to fly again. It was unusual that she was having so much difficulty with it; she could already fight with wooden swords better that boys and girls twice her age, and beat him occasionally at horseshoe-tossing, but the chubby fledgling tired quickly, was unusually chubby, showed no interest in learning letters, and, most unusual of all, could not so much as glide.

He and their father had wondered, at first, if it was due to the strangeness of her wings. To be truthful, nobody had really known what to expect of a Falconian-Human child: there weren’t many precedents for such a union in the healers’ records.When she was, at first, born without wings and only down on her forearms, they had all thought the worst, that she would be flightless.

However, after crawling up over her crib and trying to leap onto the floor, the wet nurse had found, after coming to the wailing infant’s rescue, that what had been the rest of her human-like arms and hands had magically transformed into downy wings. The change was only temporary, however: the next morning they were back to normal.

But, despite this miracle of magic, little Tori, several years later, still seemed destined to be ground-bound. It was probably her weight, in all honesty: she was twice the size of either of her racial counterparts, as if being a hybrid had meant that she would also need to be the sum of both parts in weight as well.

A shriek brought him out of his musings. His mind and eyes had wandered, and there his little sister lay on the ground, under the broken branch of a tree. Tears were in her eyes, but the scream seemed to be just out of surprise; her pain she would contain as much as possible.

“Ow,” she allowed, as Kiy pulled her out from under the branch. This needed to end, he decided, so he crouched to her level and held her shoulders.

“Sissy? You are too fat to fly,” he said bluntly. This provoked some real tears, and tiny but powerful fists struggling to beat his face. Finding that his arms were too long and held her to far, she scratched at his hands instead. He put up with it.

“If you want to stay airborne, you’ll have to get lighter. No more sweets and heavy meats, ades, nothing, until you can beat those chubby little wings of yours and stay in the air for longer than the Earth goddess will drag you back down naturally.”

Screaming like she was being stabbed, she tore away from him and ran back into the palace. Sighing, he rose and followed after her. However, once inside, he found she had already run off and vanished. With a twinge of guilt, he set off to find her. After ten turns, he started to fret; after twenty, he was panicked. He finally sent word to the servants to look for her, and was relieved when, a few turns later, word came back that she was in the kitchens. He headed there, expecting to find her buried in her usual comfort food of bacon and pudding, but instead found her defiantly devouring green vegetables of the like she had never touched before. She looked up at him as she paused her eating to take a breath, and glared ferociously. He just smiled back.