Silent was the only way to make the trip, she knew, and silent it remained. But without words, thoughts are left to conquer, and Eclipse's mind threatened to tire faster than her already weakened body.
Chaos reigned in a constant battle between maintaining focus and the sucking current of dread in her own mind. The towering glass and steel world of Possibility cut the sky like an endless strip of jagged teeth. Bridges laced the entire length of the river as if the city could hold the waterway to the earth, strapping it into its gridded ports and docks.
There was no light from the sky here.
It was torturous to fly beneath the sickly yellowed night sky, a sky in which no stars shown. The two smallest moons were beyond their half-waned point, nearing new, and they wouldn't dare show their faces till before dawn. Imperial too had retreated below the horizon.
And so the sky was void of its celestials.
Their emptiness in the night beat as heavily against her soul as the ever-growing tug of the Western horizon. Beyond the desert, into the sea.
Why not just leave? Her subconscious juggled the thought constantly, her active thoughts rejected it. And the gentle wingbeats of the others helped brush the tug aside, not just the waking sound of what reality surrounded her, but the ever-constant reminder of those relying on her.
But as the city faded, and the rocky earth of the Sky Kingdom rolled out in front of them, the thought became forthright.
Why not just leave? Fly away now, now that she was free of the Scorpion Den, far from Possibility? It wasn't running away, her thoughts lied. It was returning to what was hers- her life, her freedom, her only refuge.
If only she were still selfish.
To go back to that life meant to ignore the monster that was the Scorpion Den, slowly eating away the tribes like corroding metal. It meant to kill again, the Nightwings and their hunters, without seeing dragons like Bloodmoon or Sol in their eyes before she plucked their lives away. It meant forgetting the debts she owed to these dragons and humans who'd helped her, it meant abandoning the ones that relied on her, and it meant pulling her piece out of the game when it was one of the only things keeping them alive.
It was an irony that the silver Cloudwings taunting words stung her sporadically throughout this maddening conflict.
What is a dragon worth if he can't keep his own word?
If only she were still evil.
So she fought the entirety of the draining flight to stay settled into determination. That warring remained beyond the threshold of her mind, she dared not let it in. The others could not see or feel her own doubt. And so she forced the doubt to be unfelt.
Flying against the pain, numb to the burning in her muscles and the growing tightness in her wings. Mentally barred against the ever-growing tug of the Western horizon, she flew on.
The Lunarwing ducked her head with a slight cock, glancing at the Solarwing from the side of a dark indigo eye.
The pause was longer than needed, but at last, she breathed a suppressed sigh and side-stepped closer to the Solarwing and the nearly still river, watching for a quiet second before slowly lowering her head to the gloriously cold river.
Perhaps the hours of silent flight had reserved them all to a form of permanent silence, but now on the ground, it felt more awkward than necessary. However, Gen was usually always quiet.
"What's with that one anyway," her thoughts continued aloud, barely a murmur as she cocked her head back up toward Sol, the only one within earshot. "Gen. How do you know him? Why is he..."
The way he is?
She wasn't sure how to finish the sentence out loud.
(Braaaaiiinnnn thoughtsssssss, character development again, finally)
@_-Captain BRM-_
@Barnette
