so i pretended to have wings for my arms
On the back of a great green bird, Sena soars. Ether, a kind familiar yet strange beyond all the associations of Aionios, bristles beneath her fingertips, courses as fleshy pulse through each aminant feather of the wing.
She sees things, of course, that she's never seen from her diminutive vantage. What a difference some scant few inches should make (right? they're all still at head height), and then again how powerful Eunie must be to stand so, so tall, all the time.
How could she ever fly as free as Eunie? How could she ever be so strong, so proud?
But the bird shudders, as it soars and sears, withers as it wheels and peals, judders as it jousts through the endless sunless sky.
Sena holds on by her knuckletips, thinking of the last time she took a tumble in the dusty desert and Eunie extended a quick-taloned hand to haul her up. The calluses, cold and coarse, refused to slip against her too-smooth Agnian skin, covered in brilliant blue lines that felt like nothing at all.
No texture. Neither outset nor inset. Seemingly zero application of an intentional ridge.
Sena won't feel the worse for it - no, because she knows that's a weakness for which Eunie won't stand, not ever and never.
Eunie. Beautiful Eunie. Eunie, who comes from a world where they need blue-ringed doohickeys to measure up to the pure raw strength of the Agnians. Not just Sena's strength, innate and invisible, but Mio's and Taion's as well.
As if Eunie couldn't sprout wings and fly circles around the whole crowd of them, each colony component of an army.
Circles. Lazily, the emerald egret coasts the clouds in a loop as large as the entirety of the planet, the holy hemisphere upon which Aionios is mounted.
The wind, an uncautious comfort, blisters through Sena's blunt-trimmed bangs and whistles across her forehead. The bird's crest, like a life-size harmonica, makes a multicolored tune of the disturbance and sends it both backward and forward, aftward and onward, splitting the sound waves with all the carefree determination of a flying wedge.
Every sense alight, indeed. Sena hears the howling, tastes the anguish, smells the sharpness of ozotic air. With eyes wider than a gasp, she curls her fingers tighter into the prismatic plumage; the bird has osmosed her awakening thoughts and begun to descend.
So perhaps the bird can take offense - the ancient dinosaur, the messenger of gods thought lost, the most majestic and long-lived step in evolution's eternal cycle. Perhaps it is loath to be chained by the wills of any, regardless of likeness or puerile human sentiment taught by everyone and no one.
Sena's thighs tremble together, and then she is soaring herself, cut into the breeze and spun upside down.
The euniebird's steep angle shallows to match hers, for Sena has a sense of self-preservation and holds herself in place as if treading water without arms, rather than plummet unceremoniously.
Resistance. Sena has never known resistance; resistance is certainly not the lack of a reaction. But the buffet of atmosphere layered between her and the earth cares not for her personality, nor for her plight.
It suspends her momentarily, and then it's gone.
This is when the euniebird makes its most calculated decision. This is when Sena goes from being an idle, unnoticed observer to the direct object of someone's attention. And it's not because she made herself helpless on purpose.
The buckle of her belt gives a mighty jerk as it is seized by talons. The tips of her own short, thick wings comprised of a thousand spiraling rivulets of tungsten-coiling ether autonomusly fold toward either side of the euniebird's face, covering it and its hooded eyes against the harsh censure of oncoming air currents' sting.
Together, they spiral, interconnected by a thread neither of them know.
"Eunie..." Sena whispers, as much as one can whisper into the rushing wind. Eunie says nothing. Eunie does not hear.
Maybe this is just how it'll always be. Never acknowledging. Never knowing if all of this remains in the visible spectrum on the hard-packed earth where clouds of a different, moistureless kind swirl between digging Hox and rattling Aspar.
But it must - it has to! Because this is who Eunie is. Sena can see it clear as day whether there are clouds or not. No matter the overcast haze, the storm or the snow or the horrible beating sunshine, Sena shelters in the shadow of a wing spanning her entire length of terms.
The bird made of a human and the human made of a bird continue to twirl together, strands of a rope woven with third and secret symbolisms, directly through the center of the world, through the sea and Origin and the origin point of it all at null coordinates where nothing has ever been and where nothing should ever be.
But they keep going. They've got no reason to stop. Sena refuses to stop until she wakes up, and she doesn't want to wake up if it means that her wings, green and graceful despite all pretenses and unconscious walls, will fall away.
Eunie. The first. The only. The one Sena looked at and knew, I am good enough to swing my hammer for her. I am good enough because she shows it so.
In my dreams, she does. In my dreams, we are together. In her dreams, she is flying solo, up to the end of the atmosphere instead of down to the lower limits.
Eunie doesn't speak. Eunie can't speak.
Eunie is barely even breathing.
So Sena summons all of her formless strength and slams her shoulders to the side, rolling up top so that she can take control without yielding to Eunie's impaired vision.
They'll get back up. They'll break that barrier, the thing that slides its sinister slime across Eunie's eyes and balks her beak.
"Don't give up on me, Eunie!" she pleads, thinking of Eunie's smug little looks and all-consuming faith. So intricate. So fragile. So intensely telegraphed and painfully passed.
Eunie's eyes crack open. The beak juts with a subtle pride. "Wouldn't dream of it, love."
Another pump, then thousands more, to pull them up. If Sena's nothing else (and she's not nothing, never nothing), she'll be another brain's muscle.