His wrist throbbed faintly now, heat pulsing under the wrap. He lifted it, unwrapped it just enough to look. The hoop. The anchor. The star, the mountain, the feather. Simple. Permanent.
This one went deeper than skin.
He lay back on the bed, arm resting across his chest, careful not to jostle the fresh ink. The room was quiet except for the muted sounds of the city outside and the low hum of the air conditioner. North’s presence as he got ready for bed and got under the covers of the adjacent queen bed was a steady, familiar thing, like a wall that didn’t need to announce itself.
Fly stared at the ceiling for a while, thoughts slowing, then loosening their grip.
The ache in his wrist became rhythmic. Manageable.
He closed his eyes.
Sleep took him not all at once, but in layers, pain, memory, purpose folding in on themselves until there was nothing left to hold on to but breath.
The world was wrong. It wasn't the beach or the plains, but a place of sickly purple light and shifting shadows that moved like oil on water. Fly stood on a surface that felt like neither ground nor cloud, a strange, yielding substance that muffled his footsteps.
Something was happening to his body, a weightlessness that felt more like home than his own skin.
He cried out, something warping in him, something interfering. A searing pain ripped through his shoulders and back as bones cracked and reshaped against their will, a brutal, tearing agony. His wings exploded from his back with a wet, ripping sound, a storm of white and gray feathers unfurling in the muffled landscape.
They rustled, each feather a needle scraping against his nerves. His face elongated, jaw and nose fusing and stretching forward into a sharp, wicked beak, the skin pulling taut and hardening. A cry was torn from his throat, not his own voice, but the piercing shriek of a bird of prey, a sound so loud and sharp it seemed to cut through the oppressive silence of the dream world.
He cried out again, falling to his knees as his body contorted, the sense of being dragged into something he hadn't agreed to overwhelming him, something sacred and honored now violated and perverted.
While he writhed on the strange ground, his vision swimming with the purple haze, he saw North. He wasn't whole. Part man, part something immense and heavy, with a dark, shaggy head and shoulders that seemed to bow under an invisible weight. He was on his knees, too, his massive frame shuddering with the same violation, experiencing the very same thing.
Their eyes met across the expanse, and it was as if a circuit closed, a raw and electric connection forged in their shared torment. Shock, cold and sharp, coursed through Fly. North... he was here in this dream? With him? The realization was a fresh horror, a confirmation that this nightmare wasn't his alone. Something vast and formless, a shape of pure hunger and shadow, coalesced in the distance and began to reach for them both with tendrils of absolute cold. That's when he woke up.
His heart hammered against his ribs, his breath coming in ragged gasps. He turned to look at North in the other bed. He was also sitting upright, his chest heaving, his face pale in the moonlight filtering through the window. They simply stared at each other across the small space, a silent acknowledgment passing between them.
"Did you just..." Fly started, his voice hoarse and raw.
North ran his hands through his long hair, a gesture Fly knew meant he was trying to ground himself. "Yeah."
Fly nodded, swallowing against the dryness in his throat. "Did you..."
North's eyes found his, and for a moment, the usual calm was gone, replaced by a flicker of the same primal fear Fly felt. "Yeah. Something...dark."
North hissed at the same time Fly did. His chest was burning over his heart. He pulled off his shirt at the same time North did, reaching for the light. He looked down, a half-formed trident was etched into his skin.
He touched it, the sign of brotherhood both grounding him and scaring the fucking shit out of him.
“North? What’s going on?” Fly frowned and looked over at him. Just below his newly inked tattoo, the same broken trident was visible.
“Something happened to you out there on the water, didn’t it?”
Fly was shaking now, as if it was freezing in the room. “Ye-s–s. The wave. My insertion was right, then it wasn’t. I should have died out there. The physics were wrong. You?”
North nodded. “Yeah. The sand…the earth…it wasn’t there when I tried to hold.”
“What do we do?”
“We wait for the call.”
“How do you know there will be a call?”
North touched the trident. “We’re all connected.”
Future location of Turning Point Equine & Therapeutics and The Little Pink and Brown Dance Studio, Pungo, Virginia
