Aria fell. Once a long time ago she had dreamed that the sky could catch her, that if she released her hold on the world, it would wrap her in a sun-streaked embrace, and she would be safe. But now the sky was an empty thing, a sucking void. Somewhere beyond the howling of winds and the slashes of ice crossing her body, she heard the distant cries of Katka, and once the gleaming hull of their ship flicked in her peripheral. But that was all. The ship did not turn around. No one dove after her, not even Katka.
They were too close to space. Too close to the mirrored bowl that clung around the edges of their atmosphere. The Pass.
She was lost.
The cold bit her wings, and she did not flap them, couldn’t. It’s suicide to go through the bowl, Katka had told her. Suicide to pass through the mirror. How many times had they argued about this?
Aria’s eyes were torn open by the wind. She saw the sphere before her—a slivery opaque shell, her reflection caught in it: wings tangled around her body, her crystal plummeting after her, letting out a rising shriek of warning. Aria fell upward. Beyond the mirror, inside it, she saw a new world.
The unknown region.
The inside-out.
The mirror shivered, flexed, gave way.
Aria crossed her arms over her head—
—and it twisted inside out around her. The scream of her crystal sliced into silence. She was falling up now, toward the clouds and the globe, and her whole body knew it was wrong, that this whole world was wrong. Something unknowable and terrifying filled her. It was pulling her in, faster than she’d ever gone in her life, faster than she knew anything could go. It wanted to suck her in. It wanted to destroy her.
With that thought, she pushed her wings out into the teeth of the wind. But it only caught her and threw her aside. It tore her in two and then shoved her below; it snagged her arms and wrenched them in their sockets; hair lashed her face like blades; and the big globe rolled belly up under her, swelling to swallow her flailing limbs.
The speed matched the screaming in her mind, the terror that splintered through her and the burning in her lungs and the blackness creeping around her vision; as the globe swelled ,and opened it’s yawning mouth, and the blackness came from behind and below and she thought to herself, fly, fly! -- but the wind caught her wings and spun her like a kite, and she saw a thin bit of silver flicker in the void, and then a huge claw lunged out of the darkness and snatched her.
Her consciousness snapped like a thread.
(More to come)
