Kaleb pulled Iowara’s terminal out again. He had been asleep for only four hours – and it had hardly been a restful four hours either. The mists were the same orange as ever, and nothing disturbed their idle serpentine motion through the air. Yet Kaleb started at every sound, and every shadow seemed to him to hide ominous grasping fingers. He decided to move on, even though he could still feel his exhaustion from his earlier altercation, and while his eyes felt as if they were filled with dust and his skin seemed tacky and covered in a layer of sweat and grime. It would set his mind at ease to move. He checked his location again. It would take him a few days travelling at a fair speed to make it to the settlement he had set his eyes on after altering course yesterday, but it was a journey he would be happy to take.

Arbistrad was the name of the settlement Kaleb had chosen to head for, or it was according to Iowara’s terminal. He would have to fly as horizontal as possible from here, as if he did not, he would probably drop to below the level of the settlement he was aiming for and have to climb back up, thanks to his lack of thrust and the parallel field’s constant downward pressure.

He didn’t bother to eat anything as he set off, only quickly drinking some water before he put on his pack and then leaping off the pillar and into the air. He extended his field into the shape that the windsuit arranged, and coasted along. In the distance he began to make out, and finally hear, a cacophony of grey gulls, all flying as a great group. He had seen few of the beasts since he had come to the pillars, and he wasn’t sure why – they were as common as could be at his home. The sight of a large number of them caused him to feel a great comfort. The birds usually knew when trouble was around, and they were excellent at predicting storms: they would not fly at all if one were approaching. Feeling eminently reassured, he re-centred himself and the flying creatures disappeared among the pillars and the mists.

After his sleep, he at least understood that he didn’t need to panic anymore. He could reflect more reasonably on the events he had been party to. It must not have been something common, he thought, or Iowara would have told him about such things as people being able to control other individual’s fields. He must simply have been unlucky. None-the-less it was a wake up call. He would be far more careful in his engagement with the pillars, and he would exercise much more caution in his approach to settlements, and the people who lived in the pillars. It was odd anyway, that man with the dark hand, living alone in an abandoned place… Kaleb could infer that if there were people living together in a settlement then at least they might not possess the same horrifying appendage or presence as that man. He still didn’t feel comfortable about approaching anyone just yet, though, and so he decided that he would sleep rough among the pillars for the time until he reached the settlement. He wasn’t sure if it was the wisest decision, that he may be more vulnerable if he slept alone exposed on the pillars, but he was shaken by his last encounter with a person, and he didn’t feel courageous enough to try and make contact with any of the smaller villages and individual houses that dotted this area of the pillars. Instead, he actively avoided the little lights that shone out from the pillars, giving these places as wide berths as he was able to. He would watch them, however, and with great interest see people moving along the walkways, and repelling across the chasms between the pillars with their fields with an ease he envied.

Kaleb was forced to rest often and for extended periods of time as his use of the windsuit wore him down. Even though it was incredibly efficient, he simply did not possess the power to be able to use it for a truly long period of time. His muscles hurt more deeply than from the mere exercise. He had felt field exhaustion before, but the slow grinding exhaustion of flying for such a long period of time was something new to him. The severity of it caused him to be nearly immobile as he awoke several times, and he was forced to implement a series of stretches in an attempt to have his body move again.

It took Kaleb much longer than he had thought to reach Arbistrad, and he realised that he had slept and awoken close to five times before he even neared the settlement. The food he had received from Iowara was running low, and while around him the pillars seemed to be growing more lush, he wasn’t sure what would be edible of the organic matter. He supposed he could always go and hunt grey gulls if he had to. As he moved further along and as no further incidents presented themselves, he slowly released the stranglehold that his nerves had over his body and state of mind. Maybe, he thought, Maybe I was just unlucky that time. He began to more idly circle the pillars, noticing as he did so that the environment had changed. The mist was thicker here, and the plant life of the pillars that he encountered also changed. He wondered whether the plants caused the mist to gather, or the mist caused the plants to form in that way. Upon seeing some of these plants, he had initially believed that some wires must have fallen down, but he understood now that what he was seeing were in fact the long shapes of both some kind of soft, wiry branch and equally long and matted roots. Each of them wound themselves about the pillars and each other in a chaotic dance. Kaleb had never seen such large organic structures before. All the plants on Haethea were small, barely reaching waist height at most. The plants here however seemed to extend for hundreds of meters! Further, even, as he could not tell exactly where one ended and the next began, so compex were their interwoven branches and roots. Some pillars seemed to literally disappear beneath the heavy coverings and veils of these plants. They seemed to be grasping the pillars, holding onto them. Across these organic lines, other structures had been built by settlements or communities. These in turn were then overgrown by the rope-like plants or their roots until a kind of mutual reinforcement had occurred in certain areas. These combinations of plant and architecture seemed more like the traditional form of building on Haethea –soft and rounded in their forms, and with the haphazard charm of the interaction of the ordered and the unplanned.

After circling, making sure that there were no people around, he alighted on one of these structures, looking at the complicated knot of roots and branches and steel tubes. He figured that plants, at least, wouldn’t bear him any ill will, and only their innate character as either poison or toxin would be of any harm to him. He stooped on the walkway and saw that even the perforated structure of the floor had been overcome with the soft forms of the plants. As he walked along, he ducked to avoid the tendrils of the roots above him. Occasionally there was evidence of a cut in the flora, where clearly someone had tried to train the ropey vines to the structure of the walkway. He wondered who it was who did the upkeep on such a strange architecture, but he was still too nervous to find them or ask them anything about it. He spread his wings again and took off into the mists.

This environment, to him, was more alien than any he thought that he would encounter in the pillars. This was the first time he had seen something that had truly made him realise that the world here would be different than the world he had come from, not only the people, nor the buildings, but even the plants and animals themselves… He had heard no stories about these things –perhaps they were considered too trivial by those that had told them, perhaps there was no drama in such things, but the peculiar plants and their overwhelming scale, claiming even the surface of the pillars themselves; Kaleb thought that this was something truly extraordinary.

Eventually, as he saw from the terminal, he was approaching Arbistrad. He could even see the many glowing points of light, stacked in tiers above each other, giving the pillars they wrapped around a striated appearance. The mists were brightened and altered in colour in a halo about these shining pillars where the settlement was based, and beside them the confusion of wires and cables grew more pronounced. With a pounding headache and a sore body, he pressed on, hoping to reach the settlement on his next flight. As he dipped nearer he did not notice that from the crowds of eyes that wandered up and down the walkways of the town, there were two sets of eyes that watched him intently as he approached.