Cloud Walker
Cloud Walker
Section titled “Cloud Walker”On Ascension Day, and the Skywisp who was afraid of falling.
| Species | Skywisp |
| Holiday | 🐉 Skywisp’s Ascension Day |
| Reading Time | 8 minutes |
| Themes | fear, identity, courage, acceptance |
Zephyr had a secret that would have gotten him expelled from the Temple of Winds if anyone found out.
He was afraid of heights.
This was, for a Skywisp, roughly equivalent to a fish being afraid of water, a Fennix being afraid of warm, or a Puffquill being afraid of being round. Skywisps were born in the clouds. They lived in floating temples. They meditated on cliff edges. The entire species’ cultural identity was built on the principle that the sky was home and the ground was just where you kept your stuff.
Zephyr had kept the secret for sixteen years, which was his entire life, and he had managed it through a combination of careful positioning (always sit with your back to the edge), creative excuses (“I prefer walking meditation — it’s more grounded, which is actually more enlightened, if you think about it”), and a very deliberate policy of never, ever looking down.
But Ascension Day was tomorrow.
Every Skywisp came of age on Ascension Day. At sixteen, you climbed to the Pinnacle — the highest point on the Celestial Peaks, where the air was so thin it tasted like starlight and the clouds were below you instead of above — and you flew.
Your First Flight. The moment you stopped being a hatchling and became a Skywisp.
There was no alternative. There was no “I’ll take the stairs” option. You climbed. You flew. Or you didn’t, and then you weren’t really a Skywisp, and everyone would be very polite about it in a way that made the politeness worse than cruelty.
“You could fake it,” said Cirrus, who was Zephyr’s clutch-sister and the only person who knew his secret. She’d figured it out when they were eight, when Zephyr had frozen on a rainbow bridge between temples and she’d had to talk him across step by step while pretending they were playing a game so the elders wouldn’t notice.
“How do you fake flying?”
“Badly. Just go off the edge and kind of — flail. The wind updrafts at the Pinnacle are strong enough to carry you even if your technique is terrible. Half the First Flights are just panicked flailing anyway.”
“Cirrus, I can’t go to the edge. Forget flying. I can’t go to the edge.”
They were in Zephyr’s chamber in the Temple of Winds — the lowest chamber, which Zephyr had specifically requested for “acoustic meditation purposes” and not because it was the closest to the ground. The window was shuttered. It was always shuttered.
“What happens,” Zephyr said, “when you look down from the Pinnacle?”
“You see everything. The whole world. The Grove, the Desert, the Cove — everything tiny and beautiful and far away. It’s the most incredible view in Norblia.”
“What do you feel?”
“Free.”
“I feel like I’m going to die.”
Cirrus’s tail-tuft drooped. “Zeph, you’re not going to die. Skywisps can fly. It’s what we do.”
“It’s what you do. My body knows how to fly. My brain knows that my body knows how to fly. But there’s a part of me — this screaming, irrational, completely unreasonable part — that looks at the gap between the edge and the air and sees nothing. And nothing is the scariest thing in the world.”
He climbed the Pinnacle at dawn.
Thirty-two Skywisp hatchlings in a single-file line, ascending the crystal staircase that wound around the peak’s exterior. No railings. Because why would Skywisps need railings? Skywisps could fly. Railings were for ground-dwellers who hadn’t evolved past the concept of “falling.”
Zephyr climbed with his eyes on the feet of the Skywisp in front of him. Don’t look left (sky). Don’t look right (sky). Don’t look down (everything). Just follow the feet. One step. Next step. The crystal staircase was wide enough. Probably. If you didn’t think about it. Don’t think about it.
He thought about it.
The staircase was wide enough for two Skywisps side by side, which meant it was approximately four Skywisp-widths, which meant there was a comfortable margin of error, which meant—
He looked down.
The world dropped away beneath him like someone had pulled a plug in reality and drained the ground out. The Celestial Peaks fell in sharp white-gray angles toward forests that were the size of moss patches, rivers that were threads, the distant glint of Tidewater Cove’s harbor reduced to a speck of light.
Zephyr’s claws locked onto the crystal step. His wings — small, cloud-membrane wings that every Skywisp sprouted at adolescence — clamped against his body. His serpentine form coiled tight, making himself as small as possible, as close to the step as possible, as far from the sky as a creature born in the sky could get.
“Zeph.” Cirrus was beside him. When had she moved? “Zeph, close your eyes.”
“They’re closed.”
“No they’re not. You’re staring straight down. Close them.”
He closed them. The darkness helped. The darkness was solid. The darkness didn’t have a thousand-foot drop at the bottom.
“Listen to me,” Cirrus said. “You don’t have to do this.”
“Yes I do.”
“You don’t. You can climb back down. Nobody will think less—”
“Everyone will think less, and we both know it. But that’s not why I have to do it.” Zephyr’s eyes were still closed. His claws were still locked. But his voice was steady. “I have to do it because I’ve spent sixteen years being afraid of the one thing I’m supposed to be best at. And I’m tired, Cirrus. I’m so tired of being afraid. I’d rather fall than spend another year not knowing if I could fly.”
Cirrus was quiet. The wind — the constant, whispering wind of the Peaks — flowed over them.
“Okay,” she said. “Then let’s do it together. I’ll be right next to you. When you jump, I jump.”
“You’re not afraid.”
“I’m afraid of losing my brother to a secret he doesn’t deserve to carry. That counts.”
The Pinnacle was a flat platform of crystal, maybe twenty feet across, with no edges — just a smooth curve where the platform ended and the sky began. There was no railing, no wall, no barrier. Just stone and then infinity.
Thirty-two hatchlings stood in a circle. Elder Nimbus — ancient, translucent, practically made of cloud at this point — spoke the words of Ascension. Old words about freedom and sky and becoming.
Zephyr didn’t hear them. He was counting his heartbeats. They were very fast and very loud.
One by one, the hatchlings approached the edge. One by one, they stepped off.
They fell for exactly one second — the traditional freefall, the moment of surrender that every Skywisp experienced before their wings caught the updraft and instinct took over. One second of nothing, and then flight.
Zephyr watched them go. Each one stepping off the edge with the ease of someone stepping off a curb. Each one falling, catching, soaring.
His turn came.
He walked to the edge. He looked down.
Everything. The whole world. Tiny and beautiful and impossibly far.
The screaming, irrational part of him said: Nothing. There is nothing between you and the ground and you will fall and you will break and you will end.
And a quieter part — a part that sounded a little like Cirrus, and a little like the wind, and a little like the boy who’d spent sixteen years surviving the scariest secret a Skywisp could have — said: You’ve been falling your whole life. This is just the first time you’ll have wings.
Zephyr stepped off the edge.
One second. The longest second. The nothing-second, the scream-second, the second where the ground was below and the sky was above and Zephyr was in between, belonging to neither, claimed by both.
His wings opened.
Not gracefully. Not like the others. They snapped open with a panicked jerk, like an umbrella in a hurricane, and the updraft hit them and Zephyr lurched upward with the aerodynamic elegance of a brick discovering it had opinions about gravity.
He flew.
Badly. Wobbling, overcorrecting, wings at the wrong angle, tail-tuft streaming behind him like a flag in a gale. He looked nothing like the other hatchlings, who were executing smooth spirals and lazy figure-eights around the peak.
He looked like a Skywisp who was terrified of flying and was doing it anyway.
Cirrus appeared beside him, matching his wobbly trajectory with effortless grace.
“How does it feel?” she called over the wind.
Zephyr looked down. The world was below him. The nothing was below him. The gap between the edge and the air — the gap he’d spent sixteen years being terrified of — was below him, and he was above it, and it turned out that nothing, seen from the right angle, looked a lot like everything.
“It feels,” Zephyr said, wobbling violently and not caring even slightly, “like the opposite of falling.”
Zephyr never became a graceful flier. His technique remained, in the polite words of the Temple instructors, “enthusiastic.” But he flew every day for the rest of his life — badly, joyfully, with the specific kind of courage that only belongs to someone who knows exactly what they’re afraid of and does it anyway. The Temple of Winds eventually added an optional railing to the Pinnacle staircase. It was Zephyr’s idea. He never used it himself, but he liked knowing it was there — for the next hatchling who needed to know that being afraid didn’t mean being broken.
Characters
Section titled “Characters”- Zephyr (Skywisp) — A Skywisp afraid of heights
- Cirrus (Skywisp) — Zephyr’s clutch-sister
- Elder Nimbus (Skywisp) — Ancient temple elder