Fallen Wind

• Yxavel Dino, Grade 11
• Short Story
• 2018

“There are things that will devour you out there.”
Paisley tightened her flying goggles around her head. The leather fit snugly over her face, the circular glass lenses perfectly clear. Whenever Abe made something, he made it good.
“Razor teeth with no mercy. Eyes blacker than the night.”
Paisley braced a foot against polished metal, swinging smoothly into the skyrider’s cockpit. She sat on the low chair at its centre and rested her feet upon the pedals.
“We are earth-dwellers, child. The sky was never man’s domain!”
Gripping the steering wheel, she pushed the echoes of her grandmother’s voice from her mind. She couldn’t afford any distractions.
Breathe in, breathe out…
Ready.
Paisley pumped her feet, faster and faster, driving the pedals to a blur. The skyrider shivered as the huge leather wings on either side began to beat slowly up and down.
Faster still she pedalled. The wings beat harder, their wind scattering stones and whipping her hair about her face.
And then the skyrider rose into the air.
The island dwindled as the skyrider climbed, until her village looked like a child’s playset. Surrounding the tiny island, the sea was a rippling swath of blue, and beyond that, the grey outline of mountains far in the distance.
This island was everything her people had ever known. Abe had been the first to truly wonder if anything lay beyond that fathomless sea. His resourcefulness and ingenuity had seen them both working late into the nights, building a machine that could take them across the water and to that far-off shore.
Racing over the waves, Paisley had never felt freer.
She flew into the wind a few moments more, then brought the skyrider to a hovering halt. It was a prototype, Abe had warned her. The craft couldn’t yet fly all the way across the sea. She was to ride short test-flights only, then come back.
But returning to the island meant returning to a bland life where every day was a repeat of the one before it. Here was the unknown, where possibility was infinite as the sky.
She imagined a world so large her life would be too short to see it all. The skyrider’s batlike wings beat steadily, the engine humming peacefully.
So, Paisley began to pedal.
Her hands were white on the wheel as the skyrider sped towards the distant land on the horizon. The wind raked her clothes as the wings moved faster than she’d ever seen before.
And then suddenly, they stopped.
The skyrider gave a rusty groan; the leather wings shuddered and stilled. The craft dove towards the sea, with Paisley staring at silver-capped waves she’d never seen this closely before.
The sky was never man’s domain…
She and the skyrider plunged beneath the waves. Her head spun from the sudden impact.
So much so that she didn’t notice the serpentine form that ripped through a sunken leather wing, shadowed eyes fixed on the struggling shape that was about to become its prey.