Stars and mountains fell before you.

You crawled across the world

The world trembled beneath you.

You devoured the sky.

-Anonymous

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Miro woke up slowly.

At first, it was confused, and then traveled straight onto extremely confused. It appeared to be… in a tree?

Securely placed in what appeared to be a hastily constructed bowl of leaves and sticks, Miro rolled up to the edge to get a better look at its surroundings. The tree that the nest occupied was enormous, giant limbs stretching out from a thick trunk and bursting into a thick canopy. A number of other nests, each one differently sized, were tucked into various corners of the reach of the tree. Avynne was tucked into one of the larger ones, a ball of feathers gently rising and falling with her breath. The sun hadn’t risen yet, and the pale light of the moon shone down on everything, gilding the dewed leaves silver.

Miro suddenly remembered what had happened the previous evening. After they’d been removed from Otto’s house, Avynne had decided to head on home. Without much else to do, Miro had accompanied her. She hadn’t said anything about it, but Miro felt that it had been the right thing to do.

Taking a moment to carefully consider its trajectory, Miro bounced onto an adjacent limb, and then another, slowly making its way towards Avynne.

Some of the branches felt less steady than others. Miro took note of the size of each one and began jumping only on the thicker ones, aware of the leaf-strewn floor far below. With one final leap that made its gel jiggle, Miro landed on the side of Avynne’s nest.

The impact loosened some of the sticks making up Avynne’s nest, and Miro nearly toppled out of the nest. With a rising screech of panic, Miro bounced off of the nest, rebounded off of a nearby branch, and landed squarely on Avynne’s back.

Avynne woke up with a gasp, trying to get out from under Miro. The slime hurriedly pooled to one side of the nest, allowing her to get her breath back.

Feathers fluffed, she pulled herself up into a curled ball and rolled onto her side, watching Miro. “Good morning.” She frowned, thinking for a moment. “Is it morning?”

Miro had no idea whether the present time counted as morning or not, and its surface rippled with uncertainty. She shrugged, sitting up cross-legged. “I am sorry if your sleep was uncomfortable. I am… not the best at nest-making.” She shrank as she made the admission, almost sounding guilty about it.

Miro dismissed the apology immediately. It’d thought it was back on Olivai’s chair cushion at first - the nests had been more than comfortable enough.

Rolling forward, it paused in front of Avynne and gave her an inquisitive chirp. She tilted her head curiously. “What is it?”

Bobbing onward, Miro tentatively hopped onto Avynne’s lap, and she made a startled noise. It immediately began rolling out, but she put her wings on it. Miro hesitantly rolled back, and Avynne began patting its top.

After a few minutes of that, she simply rested her wings on top of it, and they stared at the sky. It was a pretty sky, with only a few wispy clouds to block their view of the starlit canopy an unknowable distance away. The snow-capped mountain far behind Avynne’s tree loomed upward, stretching to the sky in an attempt to spite the ground.

“You are very nice,” Avynne softly said. At first, Miro wasn’t sure she was speaking to it, but there was nobody else nearby. Who else would she be speaking to?

She left at that for a moment before continuing. “I am not a very friendly person. Nobody home wants me to come back. Nobody here wants me to stay.”

Miro inflated slightly, pushing as comfortingly as it could against her stomach. She gave it a gentle pat, smiling faintly. “Almost nobody. But even Olivai seems to think of me as trouble.”

She rested her sharp elbows on Miro’s surface, and the slime swallowed a pained chirp. “I want to be helpful to someone. I want to be useful.”

Avynne sighed deeply, leaning against the back of the nest. Miro partially deflated in relief as her wings lifted. “I am useless back home. I cannot fight as well as the others, I cannot cast magic at all.” Peeling a twig away from her nest, she muttered, “I cannot even make a proper nest.”

Miro remained quiet as she spoke. It wanted to tell her otherwise, wanted to tell her how happy it was to even know Avynne, but it knew it would only sound like burbles and whistles and chirps.

Avynne wasn’t useless. She could make a home in a tree, she fought Daveen easily, and she knew how to make people happy. Miro was the useless one.

No, it was worse than useless. There wasn’t a single person Miro had actually helped since arriving at Caro Lias. It’d been summoned by who was apparently a bad person, but even there Olivai had said Miro was a failure. A mistaken summon.

It couldn’t speak Avynne’s language, but if she could talk to herself, so could Miro.

It began to tell the stars how it felt. A steady stream of low noises and watery sounds came from the slime as it explained its worries and pains and fears to an uncaring sky, sending its feelings into the late night.

At some point, Avynne put her wings around Miro. It kept going, an endless expulsion of everything that Miro had been thinking about during its existence.

It had been born into the world with no idea what was going on, tricked by its summoner into tricking others. It’d nearly been blown up on a number of occasions. It’d made a number of mistakes.

What was worse than all of that was the knowledge that Miro could do nothing to make up for those mistakes.

As it warbled its hurt at the dark sky and sang to the stars and the moon, something strange began to happen. A curious pressure began to build up inside Miro, concentrating behind its surface. It couldn’t bring itself to care, too consumed with its lament.

Miro didn’t notice when liquid began flowing from its surface. It couldn’t even tell from where it was emerging, but it felt… right.

As Miro continued to sing, Avynne joined in. Her song was quieter, a sharp harmony sitting behind Miro’s strange melody. The result wasn’t pleasant to listen to, but Miro had a feeling it wasn’t about sounding good.

They carried on, both of them staring at the sky and both of them crying without knowing why or how to stop.

Until abruptly, it stopped.

Miro halted mid-note, Avynne’s song faltering to silence. The nest was a good bit more damp than it had been, but Miro didn’t mind.

It didn’t know how whatever had just happened had happened. It didn’t know why Avynne suddenly seemed like the only person it could talk to, even without the ability to speak. It felt emptier than it had in a long while, a strange lack of hunger crossed with a deep tiredness that made sleep seem distant.

But now, after its uncomfortable, unhappy, useless little song, Miro felt better.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Once the sky began to tinge orange, Avynne began getting ready. She changed into a black-stained shirt which might have been white at some point along with a heavy apron, insisting that Miro stay on the other side of the tree as she did. Miro obediently waited for her to be done, and when she came back, she brought Miro down to the ground.

The long-dead leaves were crunchy beneath Miro’s surface, and it instinctively hardened its surface to compensate. It moved in a small circle, testing its movement. After a second or two, it decided it was satisfied, and Miro began rolling off.

At least, until Avynne’s claws latched onto it, and they both lifted into the air. A shrill squeak escaped Miro before it realized what was going on, and Avynne laughed. It wasn’t a mean laugh, which felt… strange. Miro wasn’t entirely sure how to feel about it.

The woods rapidly fell away under it, the trees growing distant. Avynne’s grip was neither hurried nor stressed, unlike Miro’s first experience with flight. It was much nicer this time around, and gave a significantly different perspective.

From so high up, Miro could see more of the forest and the landscape surrounding Caro Lias. The mountain was the most dominant feature, blocking much of the sky behind them, but a thick carpet of trees rolled down from its base to approach the small town far below.

Caro Lias itself was much smaller than Miro had thought. Compared to the mountain and the forest, the town was a small huddle of buildings only a short distance from the woods. It was so insignificant next to them.

But, Miro considered, Olivai and Otto were down there, and so was Bordi’s shop. The town itself might not have looked impressive from this distance, but its contents were the important part of it.

Miro was much the same way, it supposed. Slimes were held in low regard from what it could tell, but it knew it was different. Exactly why or how it was different was a thought for another day.

As it watched the trees racing by, it saw through the foliage… something. Miro wasn’t sure what it was, but its shape from above was similar to some of the houses it had seen from Olivai’s tower window.

It tried to squeeze ever so slightly out of Avynne’s claws, wanting to get a better look. A loud shlorp followed the attempt, and Miro was quite suddenly falling through the air.

Miro released a shrill wail as it hurtled towards the ground, spinning uncontrollably. It could barely see anything due to its speed, but it clearly heard Avynne’s startled cry.

Its mind raced as it fell. How much would this hurt? Would it just be like a particularly hard bounce? What if something popped it?!

It suddenly remembered what had happened only a minute earlier. It’d made itself harder - could it do that now?

Compressing inward, Miro felt its outside solidify, and it tried to lift itself with its ability. The fall abruptly slowed, just in time for Avynne to blur underneath it, missing Miro entirely. Avynne squawked, trying to turn around in time. Startled, Miro forgot to keep a hold on itself, and it sped downward.

Cutting its vision off, Miro braced itself for impact, an involuntary scream ripping from its mouth.

It crashed through leaves and twigs, and then through another much harder layer, before slamming into a surface that didn’t give.

Miro went almost perfectly flat for an instant from the sheer force before springing up to its proper shape, bouncing at least five times its own height into the air. Settling, Miro brought itself up… and deflated with a wheeze.

That had been terrifying.

Pulling itself together, Miro checked up on itself, making sure all of its gel was where it should have been. There was a hole in the ceiling where it’d crashed through, and the floor was covered in… there was a ceiling?

Looking around, Miro found itself in the middle of a large building. It had a tall ceiling with plenty of holes in it, not just the one Miro had made, with pillars holding up parts of it. Half of a second floor was hanging over the other side of the room, although it’d partially collapsed. A staircase sagged against the moss-blackened walls, sections of a rotting railing nearby.

Miro didn’t pay attention to any of that.

Slimes of every size and color were sitting on the counter running across the side of the room, beneath tables on the second floor, hanging from ornate fixtures just barely holding onto the ceiling, peeking out from peeled floorboards.

All of them were perfectly still.

And all of them were watching Miro.