Sister wasn’t playing fair!

She had learned a new trick! A flying trick and she wouldn’t tell me how to do it. I watched. I extended my [Sight] to watch. But no matter how much I tried to copy Sister, I couldn’t do it.

Sister said my body was built wrong. That my wings needed to move in a different direction, she said when I flew, my wings went up and down and that the curve of each wing was what caught the wind and allowed me to fly. To hover, like Sister, my wings would need to move front to back, sideways.

I tried, but Sister was right; my wings just wouldn’t move that way. I would have to find another way, and I thought I might have an idea. Sister didn’t have wings; she flew using Qi and Dharmic power. By cycling those energies throughout her body, she was able to attain lift and flight.

Sister had taught me how to use [Sight], so it only made sense that if she could learn to fly, I could learn her version of [Flight]. It gave me something new to focus on. Instead of watching how Sister flew, I watched how she manipulated her energy to make it possible for her to fly.

I was beginning to understand how to channel my energy, but it was hard. The connection between my beast channels and Sister’s meridians helped. It made it easier for me to follow the patterns she was cycling, but it was still hard to get my energy to copy that pattern.

Sister wanted to practice fighting as a team, so I decided to work on the new way to fly later. Sister would be so surprised the next time we played tag, and I could use her own trick against her. I could already see the look of surprise on her face when I tricked her.

It was hard to surprise Sister; she could use [Sight] even better than I was. But it was possible. When Sister found out I could create and place a map inside her inner ocean, she was surprised. When I was able to make a Dharmic construct and make the map permanent, she had hugged and kissed me in happiness.

Sister’s hugs and kisses always felt good; they even helped get rid of some of my wing feather’s dandruff. The only thing better was when she scratched the spot behind my beak, between my eyes. I couldn’t reach that spot, and Sister’s scritches were the best! That always had my eyes twitching and all my wing and tail feathers fluffing.

The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

Sister wanted us to practice linking two of our skills.

[Gust] was a skill I’d learned even before hatching. It was one of the skills all Rocs were born knowing. It was a skill passed down by the ancestors that were part of our bloodline. That had been a confusing time for me. It had been overwhelming to listen to all those voices at first until Ancestor had shooed the other voices into silence and took over the role of mentor.

He still spoke to me occasionally, but his advice and attempts to guide me had stopped mostly since Sister had advanced and we had survived the Heavenly Tribulation. I think I had grown too powerful for him to push his thoughts past my mind’s barrier.

It was sad not being able to speak with him anymore. But Sister said that was a part of growing up. You had to leave some things behind, even as you gained something new. I didn’t understand it until Sister pointed out that the down feathers I had been born with had been lost to give me stronger feathers that let me fly.

She was right, but I still wish I could speak with Ancestor.

The [Gust] skill was an easy manipulation of stored wind. My wings were curved enough to always have a pocket of air trapped. That trapped air allowed me to glide at times. By channeling my energy, I could create a type of barrier that collected that pocket of air and blast it forward.

It was really useful when dive-bombing a target from a greater height. The blast of air didn’t explode, not precisely, but it did create a disturbance in air currents that left targets disoriented for a few seconds.

When combined with Sister’s skill, that disoriented effect stacked with the vibration of sound that Sister’s technique produced. If we timed it perfectly, anything Sister targeted became stunned, unable to react as she stacked different attacks until whatever she was killing just shattered.

I had complained the first few times Sister had done this. It was a waste of meat, the shattered bones and organs making whatever we killed wasted. It was only possible to eat if you wanted your meat served with bone splinters and seasoned with intestines and bile.

I didn’t.

She had explained that not all kills were food. I understood that sometimes you had to kill to protect, so I was OK with Sister’s explanation.

Sister and I had gotten really good at this combined attack. The first time we had found out, we could do things like this had been an accident. But with practice, we had gone from it rarely working to almost every time.

Sister said the few times it didn’t work were her fault, that she had guessed wrong when activating her skill. I wasn’t sure if she was telling me the truth or trying to make me feel better, but every time we failed, I noticed that the bond between us got a tiny bit stronger.

The ability to act as one got a little bit easier.

Sister said that was the good thing about mistakes, that we learn from them. And as long as we are learning, we are getting better. I think she might be right because I noticed that each time we practiced and got better, we got better at everything we did together.