Einar wasn't sure how long he'd been flying, but he was sure he was hopelessly lost. After winging out of the glade where he had first entered this forest, the impossibly tall evergreens had slowly fallen away, opening up to a picturesque meadow, complete with wildflowers of pastel colors dotting the softly rolling carpet of fine, bright grass. Short, stocky trees with round canopies scattered across the landscape. Einar reveled in the openness, the clarity of the air, how peaceful the view felt. Back home there wasn't anything like this.
He banked hard, feeling the pull in his flight muscles as he controlled the turn, tight, tight, tight, before diving steeply toward a little creek. He skimmed over the crystal water, awarding his reflection with a rare grin. He reached out to brush his fingertips across the icy creek. His face dissolved behind a tail of mist, his fingers sweeping over the tiny bumps in the water created by rocks with breathtaking speed.
He pulled up to land on the bank. Well, he tried to land, but his legs stumbled when he alit on the bright grass. He barely caught himself before he tripped into the shallow creek. "Oof," he mumbled to himself. His legs had gotten used to flying, apparently; he had never stayed airborne for so long before. His wings, too, were feeling the effects of his journey: his shoulders felt mushy and limp, and his flight muscles fared no better. When he tried to lift and fold his wings, they barely moved. The longest feathers dragged on the ground. "I guess I should rest."
He had started talking to himself a few hours ago, commenting on the scenery and his flying, and generally thinking out loud. At first he'd been somewhat embarrassed at this, as if someone were there to hear him and judge, but eventually the embarrassment passed. Now he murmured every other thought aloud, for all the forest to hear.
Einar stretched his arms above his head, smiling slightly in the gentle sunlight and soft breeze. It was nice here, but he couldn't banish the thought that he had followed the map on his phone for nothing. But what had he been hoping to find, anyway? A secret clan of other Winged Folk who weren't part of the Winged Society, who wouldn't think of him as a curse on his bloodline? A magical cure for his disfigurement? "Yeah, right." But why had that message found him?
He pulled his phone from his pocket. No Service, proclaimed a banner over the top of the screen, right under a warning that he only had 18% battery left. He let the phone go into low power mode. "I don't need service to check old messages." He clicked over to his emails, sitting down on a thick patch of grass. Since he hadn't gotten any new mail since that morning, the one with the map should be at the top. But the emails at the top were old spam and junk, a few from school. His mouth pinched slightly. "Should be right here…" He swiped down, going back through the last few days, his mouth tightening more and more. Emails didn't just disappear without being deleted! Why couldn't he find it? He wanted to write a reply, try to get an explanation from the sender. Then he remembered that there was no service out here…wherever he was.
Einar thought about where he could possibly be, until he realized that going through that portal in the ocean rendered all of his geographical knowledge useless. He could be in a different world, one with no people like him, or even no humans. He might not even be in a parallel universe, but a world far from his, with no similarities at all. "I have to get back." He would rest here for a while, maybe take a nap, and head back the way he came. Try to find that portal in the mossy forest, and then maybe he'd have one or two bars of service and he could find his way back home.
Einar sighed. He should have stayed in bed that day. A distant mutter caught his attention — on the western edge of the sky, dark towers of clouds were rumbling as they approached. Now Einar groaned. The rain and wind would make flying difficult normally, but with his wings as sore as they were it would be nearly impossible. He needed to find shelter of some kind to wait it out, and to keep the worst of the rain off his wings.
He stood. The open landscape seemed slightly less inviting now — more open in an exposed way. The little clumps of short trees wouldn't provide any cover from a storm of this size; up in the clouds as his house was, he had seen his fair share of thunderheads and hurricanes, and this one would be a monsoon by the time it arrived, complimented by lightning and roaring thunder. He would need something better than little trees to cover him.
With his wing muscles protesting, he took off again. Maybe he could spot something from above, before the winds picked up. The air was already fighting him. Up and up he spiraled, nothing sturdier than a particularly large tree anywhere in sight. Up and up he continued, still finding nothing better than the bigger tree. The storm wasn't waiting for him to hide, rolling toward him as fast as it could.
Einar dove, folding his wings as tight as they could go to his back while still giving some measure of control over the descent. The air stung his cheeks and eyes, and tore through his hair as he plummeted. The winds from the storm were catching up with him now. It grabbed for his feathers, his clothes, anything to tear him off course and send him crashing to the ground. The sun was completely blocked out now by the massive tower of dark clouds, leaving the meadow in shadow. Tears streamed from between his squinted eyelids as the big tree loomed closer. Now Einar could see that this particular tree was much bigger than the other trees dotted across the landscape, three or four times bigger with a wide canopy. The roots arched partway out of the dirt, or maybe the dirt had eroded back from covering them.
Leaves and branches and the ground were suddenly too close, too fast. Einar tried to pull up too late. The ends of the branches were sharp, catching on his shirt and slashing at his skin, not slowing his fall at all. He burst through the layer of leaves, empty space surprising him as he went from crashing sideways through leaves and small branches to free falling. The ground rushed up with blinding speed. Dull, numbing pain and the beautiful view from underneath the tree's canopy were Einar's last recollections before it all went dark.
Hive was delayed by a storm, and it irritated them to no end. They didn't have very sophisticated emotions, but agitation was one of their few feelings that could be felt clearly, and frequently. They flickered back and forth, their wings itching to keep moving. But they couldn't fly in the rain, so they stayed tucked irritably away in a dead, hollow tree. It had once been an amazing sight, tall and majestic. The trunk had been nearly the width of a tall human's height; Hive thought it might have been 'six and a half feet', but the terms made little sense to them. Human feet weren't that long, and many other people had feet much shorter, or longer! Or too many to count. People weren't just humans, of course. Any sentient being with a personality was considered a person in the many, many eyes of Hive.
Thunder rolled, then cracked like a celestial whip. Several bodies fell from Hive, momentarily stunned from the concussive impact of the sound. They swirled in tighter, condensing on a limb that had somehow fallen inside the hollowed tree trunk. This storm was going the same direction was Hive. They could only hope it would dissipate before it reached the new cryptids, but the chance was slim. They were only a few hours away from the high evergreen clearing, Hive's best guess at where the newcomers could have arrived. The storm was very determined. It would most likely reach the new cryptids before Hive. They buzzed, aggravation growing. They would be grounded by the rain for several hours, if the aggression of this storm was anything to judge its size by. The front would reach the clearing and Hive would still be hiding from the tail end of the rain. Hive just hoped they would stay, despite the stormy welcome.
