The next cycle, Kaleb awoke before Iowara. He waited quietly in his bedroll, but as the man’s quiet breathing continued, Kaleb decided to get up. There was some odd feeling in his stomach. Part of it was excitement, and the other part was dread. As he left the tent, he realised that his life had changed so suddenly and abruptly that he was, to be honest, lost. He had taken a leap into the unknown, and it only hit him now –after the fact that he had landed on his feet– how improbable and how dangerous that leap had been. If this pillar had not had its own field, he would have had to lash himself to it to sleep, and he would have been rotating and spinning along with it for all this time. It would have been a nightmarish trip –and no other pillars had yet appeared, despite its constant and not insignificant movement. How far away were the other pillars? He shook himself. He was dwelling on things that didn’t come to pass. But they were still things that he’d done without truly making a decision to live with the consequences, without even thinking them through. Kaleb walked away from the tent and around the surface of the fragment. This was the first day of his life in a new direction. There was always the sense that he had something to return to when he had stayed on Haethea, even when he’d voyaged to the top and bottom of the pillar. But now he felt… adrift in the world, and now that his focus of getting off the pillar was gone, he had the far more amorphous vision of visiting cable city, a place that Iowara had told him was far less singular than he had anticipated. As he was walking, Kaleb spooked some grey gulls who took off into the mists, wheeling and crying in their peculiar way. It was odd standing on a pillar where every footstep he took was downward. It rolled underneath him, and the mists changed their orientation as he moved. He experienced a moment of dizziness at the peculiar movement of himself relative to the clouds, but his years of climbing in every direction held him steady, and he walked on over the rocky, warped surface off the pillar.

He eventually found an outcrop on a short edge of the fragment. It was hard to tell, but it was one of the only pointed areas of the small pillar. The whole thing was shaped rather like an arrowhead, and this bit would be the tip. He sat and watched the mists, just as he had been when he had first seen this pillar. Just like back then, all that surrounded him was the vista of orange. He sat there, thinking about the life he’d left, and he smiled. It had been a wonderful home, really. He couldn’t necessarily say why he wanted to leave, or why he had been so obsessed with the idea of going to cable city. It just seemed that the world was so much bigger than just that little bit of it. It seemed that there was something bigger than he had ever known out there, in the world, and that he was missing out. And look at him now! Riding through the mists on the back of a veritable mystery. The world really was filled with extraordinary things. He picked up small rocks that lay on the pillar, and began throwing them high into the mists. Some of them fell off and away, following the parallel field, others hung in space before either returning to the fragment or finally falling.

Kaleb’s attention turned to watching the grey gulls as they swooped and hunted among the scant vegetation and shrubs. He had first learned how to use the windsuit by watching them go about their flight. They would beat their wings and rise up into the sky, and the ease with which they managed it made it seem like nothing he could ever do, but he watched them closely anyway, and eventually he had begun to see the efficiency with which they navigated the mists, and how to apply that to his own movements. When they were in the air, he noticed the way that they angled and turned. They barely shifted at all, and their bodies, so awkward the ground, were fluid and limber in the mists. He had watched their heads, as he was watching them now, which seemed to move separately from their torso as it angled and dipped on the currents of air. It was elegant –beautiful, in fact. He had come to appreciate how extraordinary the grey gulls were. They had taught him how to fly, in the end, and he had enormous appreciation for that fact. They were creatures he looked up to: they flew where their mood took them, and made their home wherever they wanted. He had envied them, and tried to copy them.

He watched them wheel above him now, adjusting their flight even between the parallel field of the world, and the attractive field of the pillar fragment. Such complex problems as the meeting of those two fields weren’t things that could be figured logically on the fly. It was in the motion of their bodies, the curl of their wings, it was all instinct and ability applied through practical learning and application. It was a skill, not something that needed to be figured out rationally. He briefly wondered at his own thoughtless flight from home, and compared his act to the flight of the gulls.

As he watched the gulls he wondered if it was a reasonable association to make. Was he like the young grey gull, who flailed around and fell and couldn’t fly making its first leap? He had heard that many of the creatures died on their first flight, unable to judge the necessary distances or abilities they would need. He watched as a grey gull descended, it beat its wings, slowing its fall, and then it gently touched down on the surface of the pillar, as easily as he might take a step. Learning to fly had been like learning to walk, every step was accompanied by a fall after all, but it was in the act of catching yourself and balancing upright that you learned to walk. To walk was to be falling, but in a direction you wanted, and only as far as you could keep supporting yourself. In a way, what the grey gulls were doing was something similar. It was a trust in their own faculties and abilities, and even though they might have the advantage of years of evolution… but he had a set of wings now too.

He watched the grey gulls more intently, ignoring his conscious thoughts, and instead trying to predict their movements from the wind currents around them, and what the motions of their bodies did to the direction of their flight. They still had an overwhelming advantage over him. He sighed and closed his eyes for a moment, before sitting back up. He supposed it was about time to eat. He looked up at the gulls again.

Yet just at that moment, he thought he saw another shape in the mist above them, and he tracked back, and then let out a small cry. There was a golden wing hovering in the mists, waiting for its chance. The gulls had not seen it yet, and would be taken by surprise. He leapt to his feet, and wondered what to do, then he reached down to grab a rock. What am I doing? He thought to himself. It was the natural order, the golden wing also needed to survive, and to do that it had to hunt. He heard an alarm cry as he raised his head, and saw the golden wing suddenly begin its descent upon the grey gulls. He felt his heart jolt in his chest. The golden wing was at the very edge of being one of the monsters that plagued the pillars. It usually refrained from attacking humans, but it could, and sometimes did, take small children as prey. It was an enormous thing, far harder and sharper than the grey gulls. It was named such because of its colouration, which allowed it to blend in with the mists and hunt from afar. As he watched, it tilted in the air with extraordinary precision, performing a backflip by tucking its wings into its sides and descending like a rock. It thrust its beak out in front of it and then, in a motion almost too quick to see, beat its wide wings once extremely rapidly, and suddenly it was moving far faster than any rock. The grey gulls squealed and cried and scattered for the pillar fragment, but as they beat their wings rapidly, trying to gather momentum, the golden wing was already among them. It was like a spear, it ignored several gulls which were not its prey, who were blown aside, panicking and disoriented, until the golden wing’s talons firmly gripped upon the body of one of their brethren, and its large cruel mouth filled descended on the neck of its prey, and it spread its wings and slowed before beating them again in a slow laboured way, and it rose again, up and off into the mists, the bewildered grey gulls left behind crying pitifully after their compatriot.

Kaleb stood there, the rock in his hand. He began to have the peculiar sensation that he was watching himself rather than living his own life. He dropped the rock on the ground. Had his moment of hesitation left that gull for dead? He felt a peculiar sensation inside, was it guilt? That he had learned from the gulls, and had let them die? What was the point of such a feeling as that? Why should he intervene in the order of such things? He sighed and closed his eyes trying to clear his head. What was the point of such speculation? The gulls were masters of the air, but the golden wing was even more impressive –and it had been beautiful, after all, as it had plummeted through the mists, cleaving them like an axe, sharp and direct as a knife. In the end, he could learn from it too, he thought. He replayed the moment it had tucked its wings in and flipped in his mind. It was engraved there, the sudden change from hovering to accelerating downward.