From Moving Crates to Killing Gods-Chapter 89: Strange Light

The pack dropped. My brain ran the numbers in less than a second, distance to the ground, current speed, time before impact. None of the numbers were good.

I couldn’t use the vines. They were anchored into the mountain wall, and if I Switched anything out of the rock I’d be pulling the only thing keeping us attached to the side of a cliff. I couldn’t use the rocks either for the same reason. I needed something with no structural consequence, something small, something I had on me.

I yanked a hair from my head. I held the strand between two fingers, barely visible, and locked onto the falling pack. My spatial sense stretched toward it, mapping the volume, the shape, the speed of the fall. It was already well below me and accelerating.

The mental boxes formed. The hair, the pack.

Switch.

The hair disappeared. The pack kept falling.

The silence that followed lasted maybe two seconds. It felt longer. My hand was still raised, fingers pinched where the hair had been. I stared at the empty space below me. The pack had already vanished from view, swallowed by distance and the rust colored canyon waiting at the bottom.

Wip had been in that pack.

She had walked in herself, turned around so she would be facing outward, and rested her tail along the bottom of the pack like she was settling in for a comfortable afternoon...

I had told her not to complain about the view.

The thought felt heavy and stupid, the way regret always felt. I’d known her for exactly one day. She couldn’t say anything except her own name. She had spent most of that day bringing rocks back and forth like it was the best game she’d ever played.

I didn’t know why that made it worse.

"Wip..." I said quietly.

I blinked when a voice answered from my right. "Wip. Wip wip wip." The tone sounded annoyed.

I turned my head slowly.

Wip was hovering close enough to my face that I could see the tiny movement of her whiskers, perfectly level with my nose, tail extended, ears high. She wasn’t falling. She wasn’t anywhere near the floor. She was floating in the air with the calm of someone who had always been able to do this.

Her expression, to the extent that a small round animal could express things, communicated something very clear. You panicked, that was unnecessary. I am fine, what is wrong with you.

"Wip wip wip wip wip." she added. 𝒻𝑟ℯℯ𝑤𝑒𝑏𝑛𝘰𝓋𝑒𝓁.𝒸𝑜𝘮

I stared at her. She stared back.

The wind pushed her sideways a little and she corrected automatically, paws touching small surfaces in the air that weren’t visible. Something solid appeared and vanished beneath each step as she walked through the sky.

"You can fly." I said flatly.

"Wip." she confirmed... probably.

"You’ve always been able to fly." I continued slowly.

"Wip." she repeated.

"And you didn’t think that was relevant information when I opened my pack and invited you in?" I asked. "When I put you on my back and started climbing a vertical cliff face, when you could have just flown alongside me this entire time without risking death?"

She blinked her large dark eyes and then turned to look down into the canyon with mild curiosity, as if the drop was an interesting feature and not the thing that had just rearranged my entire cardiovascular system.

I let out a slow breath. "Next time lead with that." I told her carefully. "First thing out of your mouth should be ’Hi, I’m Wip, I can fly.’ Very simple."

She flew back to my shoulder and sat down, her tail curling against the back of my neck. I resumed climbing.

I was grateful I had been last. The others were ahead of me and hadn’t seen the pack fall.

Finn’s voice carried down from somewhere above. "We’re almost at the top." he called, sounding slightly strained. The voice of a man who had been climbing for hours and was ready for it to be over.

In the last section Wip shifted occasionally on my shoulder, just a warm presence in the cold, a small reminder that at least one of us was having a good time.

We pulled ourselves over the edge one by one. The top of the mountain was wide, flat, and completely exposed, pale stone stretching in every direction with nothing to break the wind. The canyons spread out below on every side.

Finn bent forward with his hands on his knees and breathed. Kira straightened, pushed her hair back, and studied the horizon with the focused calm she always had when she was calculating something.

Coco turned to look for me and froze.

He stared.

Wip was orbiting my head in a slow, relaxed circle, paws stepping lightly on invisible platforms while her tail drifted behind her like gravity had become optional.

Coco’s mouth opened.

Phinyx turned, saw Wip, and tilted his head, like he was trying to decide if his eyes were lying to him.

I looked at them, puzzled by their expressions, and said. "Oh yeah, she flies."

No one spoke for a moment.

Finn slowly straightened, his eyes following Wip’s orbit around my head. Kira pressed her lips together, her expression shifting through something complicated before settling somewhere between exasperation and wonder.

Coco raised a finger, lowered it, then pointed again. "She’s just... the paws. What are they landing on?" he asked.

"I don’t know." I answered honestly.

"Why didn’t you tell us?." he continued.

"I found out about thirty seconds ago." I said.

Wip completed another orbit and landed on top of my head, settling as if choosing a comfortable chair.

After another moment of silence we started moving again. We spread out and walked around the mountain top, checking for any dark water pools or any other formations where a small fluffy thing like this one could’ve come from.

But after two days of searching while walking towards the eight outpost we only found one thing.

A cave.

It wasn’t large. Just a dark opening in the stone, it reminded me a lot of when we faced exile and hid inside caves and tunnels.

But this cave felt different, no wind or sound came out of it.

When we came closer to the entrance the only thing we saw was a subtle light.

A slow pulse deep within the cave, rising from the darkness like something breathing. The color fluctuated between violet and gray.

Wip, sitting on my shoulder, had gone completely still.

"What is that?" Finn asked quietly.

Nobody answered him.

I looked at Wip.

Her tail wasn’t moving.