Faithrys story

Waking up, the hard way.

A wind, a cold breeze, flowed through my body, making me clutch my arms to my sides, wishing I had put on a coat. The light from the fluerescent tubes in my home shone through our living-room window, cutting a swath of darkness from the night, and casting a pool of white around me. Small droplets clinging to the grass of our back yard, the last signs of the passing rains, glistened to rival the stars themselves, which hung high above me in their firmament. Not far away, I could hear traffic; the growl of motorcycles, the screech of brakes. Somewhere, perhaps two or three houses away, someone was playing his or her music much too loud. The rustle of leaves, the trees surrounding me... My skin, pale from underexposure to the sun, almost seemed to glow...

I didn’t care.

I hardly gave a thought to all that, my gaze was turned somewhere else.

In the depth of night, the stars had gained a new companion; a new star, a green star, looking about the size of venus, from this point of view.

-That- had my attention.

I blinked my weary, gummy eyes. I am the sort of person that needs his sleep, I was rarely up that late, back then. I stared, my eyes transfixed, but as beautiful as it was, I saw no change, and I had yet to learn patience. I yawned, my eyes blurring with tears, my eyelids sinking slightly. I turned back to my house, which wasn’t that far a walk from my current location: my back yard. I yawned again, my jaw locking, as usual, leaving me to ‘coerce’ my mouth closed with a firm blow to the side of my jaw. I took a step, closing my eyes for a moment, mumbling to myself: “Geez, exhaust-*yawn*-ion sure hits har..”

Darkness...

Normally, falling asleep, to me at least, is like sinking. That time; it was like being sucked down...

***

Golden light pierced my eyelids, turning the world behind my eyeballs into a yellow, veined... well, world. I wanted to roll over, but from somewhere in the back of my mind came the suggestion that such action would be inadvisable. I’m not one to start a fight in the early morning, least of all one in my own brain, so I tried opening one of my eyelids gently. I scored moderate success; it opened, but as my eye was immediately assaulted by direct sunlight, it closed again, and refused to open again. After some gentle coaxing from my mind, however, it decided to try again, first one, then the other. It went easier, this time.

I’ve never seen the sun rise before, it was beyond beauty; I saw the golden sunlight crawling across rooftops, through the trees, across the streets...

My Brain: Eh... Eyes, is this right?

My Eyes: Yessir!

My Brain: And we’re swaying in the wind? Sense of Balance, care to answer this?

My Sense of Balance: Yes, sir, we -are- swaying slightly.

My Feet: We seem to be clenched around something feeling remarkebly like wood.

My Brain: So, we are perched in a tree... Eyes, how high are we?

My Eyes: Well, let’s put it this way: I can see a V of birds cruising by somewhere below...

My Everything: AAAArg!!

Well, that was pretty much what it felt like; my body always seems to boot up part-by-part in the morning, and that morning... was odd.

I found myself in a tree I could not quite recognise, then again, I’m no expert on trees, but what I -did- know was that the branch I was standing on - no, perched on - was a significant distance from the ground. A nauseating, vertigo-inducing distance, actually.

I was so busy hugging the tree that I never even realised the most important part that had changed, besides my sleeping-place...

..Me..

It was the fact that my thin, silvery, needle-like beak pierced the bark of the tree I was so desperately hugging that brought my attention to the fact that I did indeed posess such a bony addition, which drew my gaze down, wa-a-ay down! After a little careful maneuvering, I managed to get a look at the most of my body. I was brilliant, no, I don’t mean brilliant as in smart, but my colors! I was befeathered in metallic green, crystalline blue, ruby red, in short, I wasn’t going to be hiding anywhere anytime soon. Sitting in that tree as I was, I was probably a beak-on, ‘scuse me, beacon to anyone who cared to look up slightly: the sunlight was causing my feathers to light up like a bloody christmas tree! Well, okay, that’s exaggerated, since, though they ensured me that hummingbirds, as I was quite sure I was, truly earn the name ‘gems of the sky’, a christmas tree would probably be considerably bigger than me.

Oh, I’m raveni- ehm, raving? So I’m very proud of my feathers, is that so bad?

Well, after admiring my rather awe-inspiring plumage, I managed to remember most birds have wings, and, after spending some time to -carefully- check if I had those, I found to my greatest relief that, indeed, they were present. They were short and angular, hanging behind me like a fantastically feathered cloak, typical hummingbird wings, from my perspective. Now, as you sniggering cubs can see, I tend to the non-morphic side of furrydom: my wings are located on my shoulders, an extra set of lesser shoulders below them for my arms, a deep, round chest for flight-muscles, avian-style legs with backwards-facing knees, with my body tending slightly towards the diagonal, rather than the vertical. Actually, I’m more a big bird with arms and some mild anthromorphication than a highly anthro animal like the Elders you know. Yes, Trixie, you can sit down now, I know that you’re trying to prove that I’m not really that big, but I hate craning my neck, so sit back down.

(Some of those damn kids are bigger than I am, *grumblegrumble*.)

Now, after discovering I had wings, and toes that could firmly curl around the branch I was on, I managed to relax a little, moving away from the trunk and finding my point of balance. Gingerly, I started working my wings, up and down, up and down, trying to figure out how they worked, the massive muscles in my chest tightening powerfully at every downstroke. Eventually, I figured out how to turn and twist my wings for maximum lift. I managed to nearly lift myself off of my nausiatingly high perch, but I was actually starting to become rather thrilled by the prospect of flying, rather than falling. The sun was near it’s noon-point when I finally gathered enough courage to step off of my perch and attemptto fly. I fell, that’s obvious, but what I noticed was that my falling-acceleration was significantly smaller than it was supposed to be, and I hadn’t even opened my wings yet! With joy in my heart, I spread my wings and started beating them... and continued falling! I was slowing down, but not fast enough! Desperately, I tried beating harder and harder, my short wings rising and falling with ever increasing speed, until they suddenly found a rhythm. A heavy droning filled the air, like a heavy bass as my wings blurred with their speed, surrounding me in a halo of multicolored light as the brilliant feathers became an indistinct, glittering blur. And I was flying, I was actually -FLYING-! I needed but the slightest twitch of my most exquisite fanned tailfeathers to chose my direction. Combining the rate of my wings and my tail, I could easily fly in every direction without having to turn my body! I’m probably the only fur that exists that can fly like a helicopter without resorting to magic.

What’s a helicopter? Well, it’s like a plane, only it can hang in midair, fly backward, move sideways and gain or lose height without having to move forward. It moves it’s wings very fast to fly. A bit like me, but if I ever try to fly by turning my wings in circles, it would only look silly.

Back to the story, okay?

As I just said, I was flying, flitting left and right and loving it, until I was starting to get tired. I was going to have to land. Now, I prefer to consider myself wise, but honestly said, I hadn’t thought as far as that. Slowly I lowered myself to a decent looking branch, and flew forward, opening my clawed feet to grasp it as I approached it. It’s bark-covered length hit my feet solidly in exactly the right spot, my toes grasping the branch firmly... and at that moment of precarious balance, the wind pushed me, right under the tailfeathers! For a moment I was hanging upside-down, then I was falling: branch, branch, trunk, branch, branch-branchbranchbranchbranchbranch GROUND! Luckily, I fell on a rather thick pile of leaves, which broke my fall, and my thickly muscled chest broke the fall of two acorns and one -very- pissed off squirrel, which I had apparently dislodged in my fall. As I lay there, a large number of leaves drifting down to cover my aching body, I wondered if I should sue the wind for sexual harassment, since the place under my tailfeathers is rather private... but she and I were going to be close for a -very- long time, so I decided to drop all charges.