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Maybe fear was too strong a word.
It wasn’t the elevation that bothered her. Standing at the peak of a mountain, looking over the edge of a sheer precipice dropping fatally mere inches from her feet, was far from a foreign experience to Rinkah. Navigating the terrain was simply second nature, something she had no need to think of consciously at all, and the views from the mountain of the valleys stretching out endlessly before her made her heart feel at peace in a way little else did.
Still, there was little that could prepare her for the feeling of all the earth suddenly dropping from below her. Even climbing on the back of the pegasus, she could still feel the ground through the winged equine’s sturdy frame at first. But once its enormous, feathered wings gave a massive thrust and all of the coiled energy sprung from its legs, Rinkah’s insides lurched as if she had been thrown clear into another dimension.
Until now, she didn’t think for an instant that she had so much as a shred of an instinct in her to cling to the nearest object when the sensation of falling flooded her. But here she was, breathless and holding fast to the pegasus knight’s waist (which initially, she had been rather loath to do, unless it was absolutely necessary—she found to her chagrin that it was). At least she had managed to stifle the urge to cry out.
Rinkah gritted her teeth and stared to the side, the thought pressing on her mind of when Aki had asked her only minutes ago, maybe not-so-genuinely, if she was scared to fly on the back of a pegasus. I won’t let you fall, Aki had reassured, presumably dousing one of the most common fears. And even if you did, he would catch you. (Having seen the maneuvers that the pegasus knights were able to execute in battle, Rinkah didn’t doubt this.)
She still wasn’t scared. It was just different, unexpected—that’s all. But, unable to let the impression rest that she might be, she had agreed.
And here she was.
“How do you feel?” The pegasus knight’s voice broke through the flood of panic that had taken over every muscle in Rinkah’s body, and she turned her head just enough to catch Aki’s profile in her vision, slightly obscured by the feathered hood of her cloak. In contrast to Rinkah, Aki’s expression was completely relaxed and peaceful, with a contented smile pulling gently at her lips. She sat straight, gripping the reins gently, with a confidence in her core that… until now, Rinkah hadn’t really felt. But with her arms wrapped purposefully (if somewhat reluctantly) around the pegasus knight’s torso, Rinkah could experience almost as if it were her own the balance of tension that kept Aki—and by extension, her--rooted expertly atop the pegasus’s shoulders.
Rinkah sifted through her mind for an appropriate response, and she forced herself to gaze out again over the expanse of Hoshidan forests and hills far below them. “Not so bad once you get used to it,” she replied tersely, finally almost able to ignore the sense of sheer nothingness beneath the soles of her feet.
“That’s what I figured.” Rinkah could hear Aki’s smile widen. “That’s how it was for me, too.” The pegasus knight grew silent again—doubtless, she had been drawn back into some memory of her early training as a knight.
Rinkah protested in her mind that their situations were different—but already, the initial rush of adrenaline was beginning to fade. Her thighs rested securely just in front of the pegasus’s wings. And against Aki’s back, Rinkah could feel her own heartbeat gradually returning to rest. And as they soared, Aki’s pegasus didn’t give the faintest hint of losing balance or drifting off course. It was a strange, physical harmony—indeed, quite different from anything Rinkah had experienced on land.
Rinkah anticipated that Aki would say something else, as talkative as she often was, and she glanced forward again when only silence followed. They had climbed to a considerable height now, and the dry, blustering winds rushed past her ears and left a cold redness on Aki’s cheekbones—or maybe that was a blush. The pegasus knight’s wide maroon eyes shone with joy as she looked out across the landscape below them and, every now and then, looked sideways back to Rinkah.
It wasn’t that, on her own, Aki was clumsy. Far from it—in battle, she wielded her naginata with a focused grace that Rinkah almost wouldn’t expect for how shy and maybe even scatterbrained she could come across in conversation. Perhaps flying, Rinkah had started to wonder, was simply an extension of that, even if just for recreation. The Flame Tribe warrior still wasn’t sure that she enjoyed not being able to feel the earth beneath her feet. But Aki looked almost like a completely different person from who she was at ground level: more self-assured, even liberated, gazing over the bluish vastness of Hoshido beneath them as if it were all her domain up until the spine of peaks and canyons that signaled the border with Nohr.
Somehow, even for just a moment, Rinkah shared that impression. Even standing at the highest peak in Hoshido wouldn’t be able to match the pure exhilaration that had slowly spread through her at seeing what felt like the entire continent at once.
“If it’s not your thing, we can certainly go back,” Aki offered, and admittedly, as her pegasus tilted to turn their course slightly, Rinkah’s stomach protested again just a little.
But Rinkah had only finally stopped shaking at the thought of the emptiness below them, and maybe even didn’t mind so much sitting so close behind Aki, sharing her body heat as the winds tore the warmth from them. She gave a silent but deep breath, her eyes resting on the horizon as she allowed herself to relax just a little against Aki’s deceptively powerful form. “This is fine,” she murmured, and was glad that the pegasus knight said nothing more.