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Ekio first met Ayx’l when he was studying at the University of Southern Icarus, when he was a mere nestling of three local years.
Ekio was three months Ayx’l’s senior. Not that bad of a difference; they were both students there, rushing through the school curriculum with lightning speed so they could get a start on their lives.
As far as couples went, Ekio and Ayx were as different as could be.
Ekio had known where his life was going, while Ayx’l was someone who’d always believed she’d figure it out as she went along. Ekio didn’t know what had attracted her to him—the cynical scholar, who never planned to dye his hair, pierce his webbings, or go sky-rolling during Icarus’s infernal summer months on his flesh wings.
Axy’l was the polar opposite: the hot-blooded, optimistic adventurer. She had her wings tattooed everywhere in swirly designs, her ears, nose, and toe webbing pierced with pretty gemstones, and braved even the most dangerous sports and activities available here on Icarus.
Ekio fell crazily in love with Ayx. It was as instant as love went—the first time he’d met her outside class, flying haphazardly inside the grand, fluting vertical hall of the university as she sang and greeted fellow students; she sucked him in with her energy and joy. Ekio loved Axy’l’s antics, the way she gave light and color to his otherwise dull, eventless life.
And when they both graduated, Ekio planned to get them a shared above-ground eyrie, as well as an accompanying underground dwelling where they could escape the harsh Icarus summers for months at a time.
“When we take our only vacation,” Axy’l had said, “I want to go to the Thanatos mountains. I want to see the suns and the stars.”
But then Ekio disagreed by saying, “That kind of altitude is dangerous. Our heart might not take it.”
“But it’d be beautiful.”
“It’s the only vacation we got. Shouldn’t we find somewhere more relaxing?”
“Exactly because of that, it would be our only one—shouldn’t we go somewhere worth remembering?”
And so it went on and on, the forever debate about where their post-wedding vacation would take place. And the date was growing closer.
Ekio finished his undergraduate a mere five months before Axy’l did and immediately hopped into a postgraduate in Pre-Historical Archeological Text and Philosophical Studies. A fancy name for a glorified librarian, his studies mostly comprised handling the old books and scrolls in UoSI’s monumental caverns that held its knowledge.
Here on Icarus, lives went by fast. The sapiens lived short lives compared to other species similar to them, and even compared to some of the planet’s native, eight-limbed fauna. When one only lived to about twenty-three local years of age before the inevitability of death called, traveling to see the beautiful glacial mountains of the planet’s unique ecology wasn’t really at the top of one’s bucket list.
Axy’l’s studies, on the other hand, were as sporadic as she was. She had wanted to be an architect at first, but then she changed programs and studied graphic design. Now, she frequently talked about wanting to write poetry or master photography. A single job could never satisfy her; Axy’l wanted to learn everything and experience everything, push herself, and battle the harshest conditions to achieve her dreams.
And so, on days when Ekio spent his time cataloging the library and studying the books and scrolls of antiquity, Ayx’l often played and flew and slid through the clouds surrounding the university’s monumental columns and spires, waiting for her lover’s day to end so she could see him.
It was one such day when Ayx’l accidentally burst through a ceiling window in the rocky room, chiseled by generations of sapiens, crashing wing-over-wing on one of the building’s many eyrie-like platforms.
“Qu,” Ekio exclaimed to himself as the body of his fiancée crashed behind him.
He turned and flapped his wings to land close to her. She’d gotten herself hanging there, on one of the school library’s many perches, decorated with steel and stone bars for climbing. They might have wings, but when given the chance, most still chose to perch on solid furniture.
“Are you alright?” Ekio asked.
Axy’l hung there, upside down, as she looked up at her fiancé and smiled. She was beautiful and youthful. She was such a healthy woman, young by the pterosapiens’s standards, but she never took care of her safety as well as Ekio hoped she did. Their starfish-shaped hearts, as powerful as they were, could not stand the perilous activities she’d always put her body through. Sometimes Ekio thought she might give him a premature heart attack just by being herself.
Axy’l tapped her foot against one hanging branch of the library building before flopping herself over, flapping her webbed wings to get herself upright again, landing on the same eyrie as Ekio. She was agile and always so full of life. Ekio was head-over-heels.
She raised her wings, and the last remaining fingers of their homo sapiens ancestors—according to their best historians—spread to display the elegant tattooing on her webbing.
“And your host, the great, the wonderful, the marvelous Axy’l al’a Kill’o Ka’t, does it again!”
Ayx made a fancy bow, crossing her legs for effect.
Ekio could not help smiling at her antics, despite the worry she’d just put him through.
They stood inside the university library’s vertical hall, with its eighty-seven levels, immense side chambers, and repeated echoes of conversation. A few others looking for philosophical reads turned their heads from their high perches and shushed them.
The University held one of Icarus’s biggest libraries that comprised literature from all of antiquity. Built on the side of Mount Cerberus, underneath the planet Icarus’s twin suns and azure sky, the impressive building was chiseled directly into the rock face, hanging halfway down the cliff. The interior had eyrie-like platforms along with bars and ladders for the students to rest and climb, using their feet and wings to get to the shelves that held the books. Knowledge was important to them; it contained the meanings they sought and dreams they wanted to achieve.
The students all got their best education here, the knowledge taught at an urgent rate to match their short lifespans. One learned everything from nuclear science to literary genius to post-modern art in the course of nine months of study. Ekio thought of work and pay and how to get permanent housing for himself and his fiancée. Axy’l dreamed about sky-rolling under Icarus’s suns and about flying among the stars.
Ekio loved working here. Some might find cataloging and copying down old textbooks boring, but Ekio saw this as connecting to his and his species’ past. It was how he connected to his humanity.
“When are you off work?” Ayx asked expectantly. “I want to take you to dinner at the Salamander Bayou. Then… if we could finish before the second sunset, I want to go sky-rolling just before we turn in.”
“Ayx,” Ekio said with a shake of his head, “you should really do less dangerous sports.”
“Why not have a little fun when your body still allows it?”
Ekio sighed as he strolled back to the piles of books he’d been looking at. He’d categorized them into schools of thought: the idealists on the far right, the nihilists on the far left, and everything else listed in the middle. He picked out a book that had one of their fourth-century philosopher’s names engraved on the cover. Holding it with his webbed toes, he blew on it to get rid of the dust.
“Because we can’t afford extreme activities, Ayx’,” he said, correctly cataloging the book. “The more we put our hearts through, the faster we melt the wax that holds these fragile parts together.”
“Isn’t it better to use that life to your full potential? To enjoy it as much as you can? You’re still so young, Ekio, yet you speak like a jaded twenty-year-old.”
Ekio turned to face her.
“The flame that burns twice as bright, burns half as long.”
Saying that Ekio raised his arm-wings to punctuate his point. What remained of once were five total fingers on his forelimbs, two elongated digits, the remnants of the last two fingers of the bygone homo sapiens, which grew long and claw-like, attached to the rest of his body with flesh-colored membranes.
“We have these wings, but they come at a price. The heart does not support them. Humanity is not meant for the skies, Ayx.” He paused. Then, “You should take better care of yourself. Our kind lives short lives.”
To retaliate, Ayx’l also raised her wings. A sign of strength, when a sapiens felt challenged by a peer. She showed him the size of her wings—not as long or as large as his, but beautiful and decorated and full of traces of herself. This is me, her wings said. This is who I see in myself.
“You say that, Ekkie, as if you’re old. A mere six months and five days does not make you wiser than me.”
She then took a moment to gather her words. She folded her wings to her sides, her eyes staring into the distance. The walls of the cylindrical library building were sanded down and painted in terracotta with various designs. Figures that told stories from myths to obscure historical stories.
“‘I do not fear death,’” she quoted. “‘For I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.’”
Ekio did not want to argue. He didn’t doubt her—if anyone he knew did not fear death at all, it would be Ayx. And that alone terrified him.
Instead of answering, he tapped his foot on the “existentialist” pile of books in a gesture of relaxed completion.
“I’ve decided to get off early today,” he said to her. “Let’s go have dinner at the Salamander Bayou so you can go sky-rolling.”
At that, she cheered and flapped close to him so she could embrace his much larger body with her wings.
The library was one of the many spires that radiated from the university’s central building—a vast, echoing chamber with thousands of side rooms and hanging perches. One had to reach here to leave the building.
In the middle of the yawning cavern of the main hall, there stood a peculiar statue, cast from iron. UoSI’s own famous centerpiece, talked by every student who went here.
The original was an old stone statue that the paleontologists had excavated some five hundred local years ago, and it had become the symbol of the sapiens’s self-discovery and their past. It stood some whopping fifty feet tall and showed the semi-familiar creature—the homo sapiens, who had left fossil traces on Icarus—on his head, limbs out as the gigantic insect-like creature flew above him. Its tail-like appendage held an instrument that erased parts of his forelimbs. Where its tool had touched, there was the all-too-recognizable shape of the pterosapiens’s two-digit wing.
The creationists believed this depiction to be their maker; the evolutionists disagreed. Ekio did not know what to think. Much remained to be discovered about themselves, where they came from, or why.
They flew past the hanging hallway to the vertical lobby and dove. Exit holes existed on every level, each with its own eyrie projecting from the painted wall. Ayx’l made a pealing laughter as she went straight for one that hung some sixty feet off the ground and flew straight into the clear air under the two suns.
Of course, Ekio followed closely behind. His eyes stung when the blazing vast planes and the sky took over his vision, the white and light brown soil brightly reflecting the afternoon sunlight.
The cyan sky was dominated by Icarus’s twin suns. The orange dwarf Prometheus and its evil, scorching twin—Nemesis—the white-hot fireball holding it captive in their eternal dance. They were eclipsed by Icarus’s two moons, Daedalus and Asterion, visible in their crescent shapes even during the day. Cirrus clouds hung in feathery filaments.
Ayx’l led the way as Ekio followed her. She swirled and danced to the wind, folding her wings to roll one second, gliding with wings out for the next. They let their powerful hearts carry their webbed wings over the mostly barren terrain to patches of vegetation and farms. The cracked land beneath them turned into mossy grass and fauna-like trees.
The Salamander Bayou was a dining experience built upon the wetlands set inside the Dafne forest—forests of breathing colonies of the Dafne plant, static, root-bearing plant-like organisms with beating hearts and lungs that were reproduced by their egg-like seeds.
The Bayou was built upon a patch of wetland pond where the giant salamander, one of Southern Icarus’s extolled delicacies, was farmed. The eyrie was built over an erect wooden skeletal base, with perches and platforms for dining.
They sat over artificial branches as the servers flew to them with freshly cut salamander meat, which they ate raw and with exotic spices, tearing pieces off with their feet and sharp teeth, evolved to be proficient in hunting fish.
Even after millions of years of evolution, their species still preferred aquatic food over others.
“Have you talked to the professors about our vacation?” asked Ayx as she ate. Her words were muffled by the food.
They could see beneath the floor of interlacing woodwork the farmed livestock paddling underneath—giant whitish masses decorated with pink dots.
Like all the other mobile, complex fauna on Icarus, the giant salamanders had a total of eight limbs, though the front set had evolved to be scrawny, single-jointed, hanging appendages they used as antennae. They had three sets of eyes—two at the sides of their heads, one on top of their hip bones.
They were sized like small carts. A prehistoric sapiens would never have dreamed of catching such prey.
“I have,” answered Ekio. He’d always stayed on top of such things. Life was short. “I’ve planned the wedding in two weeks. We’ll wed after I finish work and leave immediately after the ceremony to catch the last of the sunlight. The vacation will take me a full two weeks off work.”
In a couple of months, they would go into the summer months, and Icarus would begin its plunge toward Nemesis along its elongated orbit. Most sapiens would’ve gotten underground to hide from the heat and the dangerous radiation.
If they still planned to take their literally once-a-lifetime vacation this year, they would have to plan their wedding early.
“I want to go to Mount Thanatos,” said Ayx, repeating her thesis yet again. “My dream is to see the mountain ranges and stars before I die.”
“You’re too young to think about that.” Ekio meant her talk of death. “Nine years of age is far from halfway through your life cycle.”
“Yet you act like you’re old enough to be on your deathbed,” Ayx teased. “Come on—it’s once in a lifetime. We’ll never see it again.”
“Thanatos is too dangerous—many die there every year. Research has shown by putting our hearts and lungs through that kind of altitude even once in our lifetime can lead to an early death. Why don’t we choose a safer seaside resort? It’s a popular spot among new couples.”
Ayx’l made an unhappy expression with her bottom eyelids, and her beak-like lips twitched slightly to release a rattling call from her throat. Ekio nudged close to her and rubbed the side of his head on her neck, trying to cheer her up.
“I’m just… I’m just worried about you.”
“I know.”
“I want you to live a full life. I want us to grow old together, be happy and healthy and have enough time to achieve our dreams.”
“I know…” Ayx’l sighed.
Just then, the server wearing a rough-fibered hygienic robe trotted to them with a platter held in his mouth. The dessert was a variety of Icarus’s native fruits, cut open to reveal their colorful seeds and soft, juicy pulp.
Ekio picked up one with purple-colored skin and orangish pulp with his toes and offered it to his fiancée, suddenly feeling like a selfish asshole.
“You know… If you really wanted to go…” he said as he watched her eat, awkwardly scratching his head with his wing digits. “Let’s go to Thanatos, then.”
She perked up and stared up with her yellow eyes that had round, sharp, black pupils, evolved to spot prey sauntering below the shallow water.
“Really?” she asked, hopefully.
He smiled back, useless to deny her anything.
“Of course. Let’s go see the mountain and the stars.”
They finished dinner before the second sunset by Icarus’s sun Prometheus that evening. So, after they left the Salamander Bayou, Ayx’l had her chance of sky-rolling during the last half an hour of sunlight.
Ekio perched nearby and watched as she picked out the tallest of the four-hundred-feet Cronus trees, his heart gripped by an invisible hand as he watched her falling head-down from its branches, doing full three-hundred-and-sixty-degree rolls in the air before landing gracefully on the ground.
⁂
Their wedding happened two weeks later—just as Ekio had planned—after he got off work that day. They had it outside, in the expensive tree-dwellings that resembled open nests, carved wooden columns holding up a canopy of breathing flowers with hanging, tentacle-like filaments.
The sapiens had stopped living on the ground, which had used to be populated by their natural predators, the eight-limbed, four-eyed beast the sapiens called the ud’ioogg. There were still songs in their culture that warned against the ud’iooggs; remnants of a bygone, half-forgotten past. It was Ekio’s job to record everything and interview the elders from the most remote tribes to get a glimpse of their ancestors’ fear of nature and death.
It was easily the best day in Ekio’s life—as he saw his fiancée, now wife, draped in a layer of lush tree fiber decorated with tin-lined feathers, the piercings in her toe and wing webbings shining in multiple colors.
They said their vows over a field of wetlands and completed the ceremony by flying together in a large circle around the trees, their bodies bathed in the afternoon warmth of the suns as they chased and glided after each other. Icarus’s moderate wind carried their wings.
Then they landed, gracefully and together, and received the blessings of families and friends.
There was then music, fly-dancing atop perches and shelves, and many delicious aquatic foods. The guest list was enormous because both of their families attended, and it seemed to Ekio that all his wishes were already coming true. He knew he was going to love this woman for the rest of his life.
The party ended shortly, so they could move on to the next task on their busy schedule. Before sunset that same evening, they took their things and went off on their honeymoon.
⁂
Despite Ekio’s concession to her wishes, Ayx’l ended up deciding she’d agree to Ekio’s suggestion and take their vacation at a seaside resort instead. It wasn’t because she was consciously making him happy by taking fewer risks—she had said she’d gladly risk her own life for the once-in-a-lifetime experience—it was because she didn’t want him to make the same sacrifice with her.
It wasn’t completely a concession—the resort they ended up choosing provided a view of the Thanatos mountain range, long and winded and signature as formed by the melting of billions of years of ice formation, caused by the fluctuating climate resulting from the gravitational pull of Icarus’s binary suns.
The resort was picturesque: their rooms in a tower built on the bluff rising over the ocean, each level comprising five eyrie-like chambers with five doorways to allow the guests to exit. There were perches around each door where they could rest, talk, and watch the ocean from a height they were used to, ingrained in their evolutionary biology to avoid predators.
They lounged around in their downtime, went for spas, swam in the ocean with their webbed feet and fleshy wings, and basked in the warmth of the suns. When they wanted to look at something more interesting than the horizon, they could simply turn their gazes to the west at the range of Thanatos, with its winding paths and caps of glaciers, giants overlooking the golden sand and emerald waves.
Ekio often caught Ayx staring at the mountains with wanting in her eyes. Sometimes she would do it while conversing with him (about philosophy, mostly), her eyes distant and longing. She would smile, but her mind would seem to wander elsewhere.
“It’s like your soul still belongs to danger,” Ekio would say, half joking.
“We do not have souls, Ekkie,” she would answer. Then she’d smile back a little sadly.
He knew she still longed to go there and sail above the clouds—to throw herself to the sun, in a way, as how Icarus had done according to the mystical homo sapiens.
The waves were a distraction, however. Ayx loved the ocean and swimming. She loved catching the little fish with her feet, flying low over the water. She’d wait after the tides fall to tread along the beach to pick up skeletons and shells of aquatic life that had washed ashore.
Here on Icarus, the tides were high and frequent thanks to its two moons. It sometimes rose over two hundred feet, washing over everything around the beach, so that the sapiens seeking vacation here had to stay on the bluff until it fell. But when the tide subsided, it left arches and spires of rocks that stood like ancient sculpture over the soft sand of the beach.
“What if these were built by a culture long before us?” Ayx asked Ekio.
“That would be preposterous,” Ekio answered. “The archaeologists would’ve discovered something if they existed.”
“What if they just hadn’t?” Ayx argued. “There’s still so much land on Icarus unexplored. Just think. How many expeditions have we sent to the bottom of the ocean? Or even to the frozen poles? How much of our own history is lost to time, never to be rediscovered? Surely, Ekkie, you don’t think we’ve known enough about ourselves and where we came from? There’s still so much about this world and our species that we don’t know.”
As they talked, standing over the bluff looking down on the high tide, the herded mantelopes from the farms in the distance sang a mournful song.
Other sapiens species were found on Icarus, but they stood out against the native fauna like a sore thumb. The mantelopes may have been intelligent like them at one point, but now they had lost that sapience, and all they still had were tunes that must have been remnants of old, bygone oral history. No more than a cross-species memory.
Now, the pterosapiens farmed them, herded them, and used them for ground transportation and for carrying cargo.
“How do you explain it, Ekkie,” Ayx continued as Ekio was distracted by the song, “that we as a species do not share the chemical make-up, genetics, or body structure with the other animals on this world? How is it we, along with our relatives, the mantelopes, or the titans, or even the grotesque temptors, appear to share the same ancestry—yet no one has yet to find out where that common link started?”
“You’re talking creationism, Ayx.”
“But do you not believe what I say? What about the statue that stands in the university’s lobby? What is that creature holding the pen to the fate of our ancestors?”
“It was ancient art, Ayx. We don’t even know if it was meant to depict a real entity.”
Ayx looked over the tides and sighed. It was sunrise; the first sun—Prometheus—was peeking over the horizon, throwing flame over the scaled surface of the water. Most of their philosophical debate started with something arbitrary, but they always ended up on the meaning of existence.
Not that Ekio did not enjoy their debates. He just wished Ayx could keep her head away from so much pessimism. Some of her thoughts scared him.
“Let’s talk about something else,” he suggested.
“Okay.” Ayx took a deep breath. “If we have kids, who do you think they will take after?”
Ekio smiled genuinely.
“I want them to be a mix of both of us. A little of your adventure, a bit of my cynicism. Not too much adventure, however. I’d hate to see my children’s health fail before mine did.”
“But if that’s what makes them happy?” Ayx asked. “If this is just the life they want? If they are like me and want adventures, even if it might mean a shorter life?”
“But if they’re anything like me, there’ll be things they’d still want to do, and a preventable shorter life would be detrimental to that goal.”
“But consider they’re not? What if they’re more like me and want to enjoy life to its fullest every second they live?”
Ekio said nothing for a while as he thought over her words.
The day was bright now. Early-rising birds got an earlier start on their busy schedules. But this was their once-in-a-lifetime vacation; this was supposed to be relaxing.
Ekio gazed up at the sky, cyan-blue and lit up by the binary stars. Fly too close to Nemesis and one would surely burn through one’s heart and life all too quickly.
“I guess then,” he finally said, “I’m only happy for them they know what they want, and choose for themselves the road they want to take.”
In the end, it did not matter who their kids took after. Ekio would be happy knowing they were—even if it would kill him to see them burn out before him. It wasn’t unheard of—the lifespan of twenty-three years was averaged within a large sample pool of unique individuals. Among the pterosapiens, some managed to live to thirty, while others would be dead at sixteen.
A price was paid when they were granted both flight and intelligence. It was a poetic fall—the imperfection of humanity; the sacrifices having to be made to result in something spectacular like them. If creationism was real, then this would be some cruel joke of their creator, and death would be life’s punchline.
The homo sapiens—if they really existed—were lucky and wise. One did not want wings if one could live a full life; the sky was not freedom but a prison.
⁂
“Alright, Ayx.” Ekio raised his micro camera, pointing at his wife standing proudly over the bluff, with the fluting vacation hotel in the background. “Stretch your wings for me?”
Ayx’l did as he’d suggested.
It was high tide, the seawater reaching over the rocky bluff, making it look like the shore. Prometheus shone brightly in the sky just behind Ayx as she posed for the photo.
Ekio snapped four or five pictures, capturing the way the light bounced off of his wife’s beautiful skin, smooth flesh, and graceful webbings that made up her wings. The tattoo design swirled and twirled and danced; the ornamental tassels she wore on her head waved in the salty sea breeze. This would be their first and last vacation, and they were going to have it remembered.
Even as she posed, Ayx talked and laughed with her husband. Her silvery voice was pleasant and calming.
Ekio loved her. Never loved her more.
⁂
They left for home after the two-week period, bringing back photographs and memories and the souvenirs Ayx had found on the beach.
Wedded and happy, they quickly got the next part of their lives in order and moved in together. By the time Icarus’s scorching, dangerous summer months came along, they were already living in their underground dwelling, with Ayx one month pregnant.
The sapiens’s gestation period was short, and it took only five months for Ayx to give birth to their first child, Judyll. The new parents were ecstatic and lavished their love on their newborn daughter. Judyll learned to fly within two and a half months, a week faster than the average pterosapiens nestling. By the time she was nearing her first birthday, Judyll was already researching for universities she wanted to attend.
Just then was when Ayx’l gave birth to their second child, another girl whom they named Xeroyl, who had Ayx’s adventurous spirit, despite looking more like her father with her squarish face. Like her sister, she loved her parents, and just like her, she was quick to grasp the use of her wings.
The family lived together in their above-ground eyrie during autumns, winters, and springs, and retreated to their underground den during the harsh summers. This they did even as Judyll started attending UoSI, and Xeroyl found her first job. The photo of Ayx that Ekio had taken at the seaside resort hung on the walls of whichever den they lived in at the time, a timeless likeness of their mother at her prime and her happiest, whom both girls looked up to.
Ekio stayed at the university and soon became a professor there. When he didn’t have classes, and when his children had their own activities, he’d spend time in the university’s humongous library, dwelling on the meaning of life, while his wife still pursued her dreams of adventure outside the building, gliding and rolling and putting her wings to full use within Icarus’s sky where he wouldn’t go.
After their marriage, Ayx quit school and started a job in photography. Eleven months later, she’d left that job and started her own tattoo studio, where she’d put her artistic skills to use and painted gorgeous designs on the wing webbings of young adventurers just like herself. There she remained to this day, and she’d often said it was her dream job. Like Ekio, she was content with where her life had landed her.
With their children grown and their lives on a proper track, the couple was happy and content. And even though Ekio occasionally showed concern for their youngest, Xeroyl, whose similarities to her mother made her more susceptible to early heart problems, he was happy with where they were. As far as Ekio was concerned, they’d successfully raced against time and won over the invisible deadlines they’d marked out. They’d achieved their dreams within the span of their lives.
Eight years passed, and Ekio was working in the library, writing up his own research paper, when Ayx’l burst through the university tower’s tall ceiling window.
She dropped, her figure a graceful mass of curves and flesh tones, plunging downward like a meteorite attracted by the planet’s gravity, burning through its all-consuming atmosphere, crashing wing-over-wing on one of the building’s many platforms.
She crashed, but this time she did not get up.
It took Ekio a moment to realize what was going on. When he did, it was as if it had been his heart that was subject to the violent attack.
He rushed over, first on his feet, then with flaps of his wings. He landed close to her and held her limp body in his front limbs, cradling her close to his chest, where her weak heart beat against his.
“No, Ayx,” he said, shaking, tears rushing uncontrollably. “Stay with me, please.”
She looked up with weak eyes and gave him a content smile.
“I’m sorry, Ekio. It looks like my time has come.”
“Don’t say that. I can still get you to a hospital and—”
But Ayx’l only shook her head, and Ekio choked on his tears.
He knew Ayx’s heart hadn’t been in the best shape for the last few weeks, and she was passing middle age, at a time when the most short-lived pterosapiens started to feel the claws of death closing around their overworked hearts. Many died around this age.
But Ekio had been in denial about Ayx’s failing health and pending departure. He did not want to believe it, did not want to see or think about it. He had tricked himself into thinking that she would be fine, that they’d live their old lives together despite her more extreme lifestyle constantly putting stress on her heart.
He tried to make himself speak.
“We can still save you.”
“You can’t. You know you can’t.”
What hurt more wasn’t the pale, ailing look of her, so fragile now after a life of vibrant energy. What hurt the most was Ekio knew she was right. Many sapiens died of heart failure every day, and many would be sent to the hospice to live out the last minutes of their lives, though the survival rate was lower than 0.01%.
Despite their technology, despite what they could achieve with atomic science and their vast libraries filled with philosophies, the sapiens could never conquer their greatest adversary of all—Death.
Humankind wasn’t meant for the skies. Sooner or later, they would all feel the weight of the yoke, known as divine retribution, the punishment for their hubris.
But Ayx’l was still so young… a mere seventeen years and two months, still a youth in Ekio’s eyes. Far from the curse of old age.
“Stop talking, Ayx…” Tears blurred his vision. “You won’t die.”
“I’m sorry, Ekkie. I lied to you when I said I’ve achieved all my dreams.” Axy’l’s wing, what had become of the ancestral species homo sapiens hands, tried ineptly to wipe away her husband’s tears. “There’s still one thing I want before I die.”
Ekio tried to look her in the eye despite the sadness gripping his heart.
“What is it, dear?”
“I want to see Thanatos. I still want to go there and see the mountains and the stars, fly there and feel the glacial air against my face—”
“Qu, please,” Ekio said. “Not all attacks are lethal. I know you can make it. Oh, please, Qu—”
“Please,” said Ayx’l. “Can you take me to the other side of the mountain?”
“But I have to get you to—”
“Don’t cry, Ekkie. Remember what I’ve always said? ‘I do not fear death—’”
“‘For I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born,’” Ekio followed with the rest of the quote, barely able to keep the tremble out of his voice, “‘and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.’”
Ayx’l then smiled proudly. Her eyes, trembling in the harsh grip of death, still twinkled her special light.
“Take me there, Ekio.”
His face softened. He kissed her, feeling her warmth and her wings and every part of her he’d grown to love. Then he held her with his prehensile toes, flapped his wings, and lifted her into the air.
He flew through the window instead of the lobby, where the statue of the pterosapiens’s supposed creator stood. He carried her high and high until the tower broke around him into the expanse of the sky. Her weight meant nothing to him; he flew with her to the West, where they’d spent their honeymoon together.
The wind blew harshly as Ekio beat his wings to their limits, wanting to get her to the place of her dreams. The ground rolled underneath them—the great planes, the breathing Dafne forests, the farms of the giant salamanders and the titans and the mantelopes, and the colonies of the grotesque temptors.
His wings grew tired, yet he persevered. The ground beneath turned into the cliffs and sands of the bay, looking out into a vast ocean of the unknown. It was at low tide, and Ekio could see the strange rock formations on the beach when he looked down. The scenery came from an artist’s most intricate brushstrokes.
Never had he flown such a distance, at such a height. Having been too concerned with preserving his heart, Ekio had never let himself live the way Ayx had lived. Yet, it was as if his heart was beating for the very first time, in a strange waltz that carried him higher than he’d ever been.
“See, Ayx,” Ekio cried over the wind, “Thanatos is closing in! Look how gorgeous it is!”
And it was. The mountains were beautiful. An awe-inspiring vista, with spires, arches, and balancing rocks, shaped by Icarus’s melting glaciers and presented in multi-colored layers. Ayx raised her head, and she was sighing at the picture.
With her in his grasp, Ekio rose higher.
It was the last moment of clarity and life. But somehow, Ayx’s heart seemed to beat into the staccato of rapture as he took her to the sky.
They started the ascent to the mountains as Ekio pushed his strength to its limit. His breathing was labored as the air became thinner, and the vegetation growing on the mountains became increasingly sparse.
Then, the muscles twitched, and Ekio tumbled when he hit a stray branch before him. He rolled in the air, his grasp slipping as they both fell to the dirt and rocks on the mountain cliffs. Ekio’s wings cushioned his body as he flipped on the mountainside.
He groaned, his heart beating faster as he raised his head, making out Ayx’s form lying some feet away. They were almost at the top now; there was snow here, and the temperature was icy cold.
“Ekkie?” Ayx’l asked blindly from where she lay, her voice a faint whisper.
“I’m here.” He crawled his way to her, using both his wings and his feet. He said to himself, “I do not fear death. I do not fear death—”
The slope was acute now; every inch felt closer to some eight thousand feet plunge to the ground and an agonizing death of shattered bones. The long-lost evolutionary fear of humankind dreaded height even though their kind had learned flight.
Ekio crawled closer, just a little… and the tip of his wing could touch hers. She gave him a faint smile. He was out of breath, all the muscles in his wings screamed in the agonizing push to his body’s limits. His wings hadn’t been trained for physical activities like hers, since he’d been living in fear his entire life.
When Ekio finally flapped to her and grabbed her shoulders, he could see her grateful eyes filled with love, and the tattooed pattern on her wings standing out with the backdrop of rock and dirt and snow.
With her in his feet, he took off once more.
This time, they climbed nonstop, up the mountain, up the glaciers, up the summit where the clouds hung from Icarus’s cyan sky.
“For I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born—” Ekio whispered under his breath as he felt the cool fresh air touch his face.
The vistas opened up to the most breathtaking view Ekio had ever seen in his life: green forests, endless oceans, mountain peaks rising and falling in many shapes. Ayx gasped beneath him. Her sigh of contentment gave him joy.
He rose higher, higher, until the air turned cold and the altitude burned his lungs.
“I do not fear death. I do not fear death—”
Ekio continued to fly toward Icarus’s two suns. Flew toward the deadly, hostile Nemesis, not toward the prison of the sky but breaking it for the first time to freedom, the scorching hot caress of the suns burning, burning. Burning like a thousand stars through their punishment for mankind’s hubris.
“I do not fear death,” Ekio repeated once more.