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There wasn’t much left to do in the old camp other than to be lost in thought.
Couriway leaned back on his hands absentmindedly as he dangled his feet off the side of the rock face that walled the eastern side of the settlement. His faded golden wings stretched back, flapping once, twice, in an attempt to dislodge the dust that had stuck between the feathers. He only succeeded at tossing up the sand covering the ground and making him ever more uncomfortable. The sun overhead seemed to be hotter by the day, so he had temporarily discarded his cuffs and rolled up his sleeves and pants in an attempt to cool down a little. It didn’t help much, though.
He could see a mirage in the distance; rippling water, fading into the sandy fog. If he were more desperate, he would try to search it out, but there wasn’t much room in his head to care anymore. It had been a while since he had, in any case, even as rations ran out and his throat grew parched. He coughed dryly at the thought.
The camp below had fallen into disrepair. The walls to the west and north hadn’t been fixed in a while— not that there were many things that were alive (well, alive enough) to breach them anymore— and, if he looked closely on the eastern side, the gate had fully collapsed. Paths where people had walked were still packed down into nonsensical trails. The bonfire at the centre had been left unused; he had taken to using a smaller one that he set a few metres to the side. Most of the tents had been packed up and folded neatly, their former occupants’ belongings carefully packed into bags and buried on the outskirts with their owners. The one that remained was Couriway’s.
Sometimes he wanted to fly again. He would soar, he thought, up, up, up into the sky, feeling the wind on his face, and he might be able to hear the now-foreign voices of his old friends as they flew on their own artificial gliders behind him, and he would keep going and going and going until he was close enough to reach the sun before falling back onto the scorching sand on shivering wings. Maybe then he could hear something that wasn’t his own voice, or his own footsteps, or his own breathing— stars, how he hated the sound of his own breathing now, after weeks of that being all he could hear. At least if Feinberg was alive, here, Couriway would have a reason to throw himself off this cliff for good.
He stared off into the sun as it set over the distant horizon. Maybe, if he looked long enough, he could watch the black spots dance across his vision and picture his friends’ faces plastered onto their shapeless forms.