He rose, stretching carefully in the confined space. His wounds had healed enough that the movement brought only faint twinges rather than stabbing pain, although his left wing still felt stiff.
“I am coming.”
She paused at the inner door, looking up at him with an expression he couldn’t quite read. “Will you be okay out there? The cold?—”
“I am made for cold,” he said automatically. “The ice is my home.”
Curiosity flickered in her eyes, but she only nodded and turned to unseal the outer door.
The cold hit him as soon as they stepped through the outer door. Not painful but welcome. It rushed into his lungs like clean water, sharp and pure and achingly familiar. He stepped past her into the pale light of a Martian day, and for a moment he could only stand there, breathing.
Home.
The word echoed through him, hollow and full at once. This was home. This frozen expanse, this endless white, this sky the color of old rust. He knew it in his bones, in the scales that rippled with pleasure at the touch of frigid air, and the instinct that made him turn his face towards the horizon.
But it was also wrong. The contours of the ice were different—valleys where there should be ridges, smoothness where he remembered jagged peaks. Millennia had carved new patterns into a landscape he’d once known by heart.
“Adjar?”
Her voice pulled him back. She stood beside the habitat, wrapped in her thermal gear, watching him with worried eyes above her breathing mask.
“Sorry.” He hadn’t realized he’d walked several meters from the door. “I am… remembering.”
“Good memories or bad?”
“Both.” He turned to face the open expanse, where the ice stretched towards a horizon hazy with suspended dust. “This place. I knew it. Before.”
“Before you slept?”
“Yes.” His hands curled into fists at his sides. “But it is different now. Changed.”
She moved to stand beside him, her presence small but steady. “A lot can change over millions of years.”
Millions of years.
The scope of it threatened to crush him. He’d known, on some level, that he’d been asleep for a long time. But standing here,seeing the proof of it written in every altered ridge and smoothed crater, the reality almost brought him to his knees.
Everything he’d known was gone. Everyone he’d known?—
His wings snapped open. The movement was involuntary, driven by something deeper than thought. She stumbled back with a startled sound as his wings extended, each wing stretching wide to catch air that wasn’t there yet, aching for the freedom of flight.
“Adjar—”
“I need—” he said roughly, his voice almost desperate. “Please. I need to fly.”
“Then go.” She gave him an understanding smile. “I’ll be fine. I need to check the equipment anyway.”
He shouldn’t leave her. Every protective instinct screamed against it. But with the pressure building in his chest and the fragments of memory clawing at the edges of his mind, if he didn’t move he felt like he might shatter.
“I will return quickly,” he said. “Stay near the habitat.”
“I’m a grown woman, Adjar. I can?—”
But he was already moving. Three running steps, a powerful leap, and his wings caught the cold thin air with a sound like cracking ice.
Flight.
For a single, crystalline moment, everything else fell away. There was only the wind beneath his wings, the strain of muscle against membrane, and the glorious rightness of being airborne. He climbed in a tight spiral, wings beating in powerful strokesthat carried him higher and higher, until the habitat below was just a dark speck against the endless white.
