Fly High

    17 – Elf

 

    David had the sudden notion that Romana was an elf. Not a tiny, pointy-eared green-shirted forest sprite (although come to think of it, she was tiny, wore green, and her ears were kind of pointy).

   The woman herself strode past him, saddle over her arm, and summoned her mount with the grim face of a soldier filing in for her final deployment briefing. Odd.

   Really she was more like a Tolkien elf. She was stoic, and dignified, and courageous. And ever since he’d caught sight of her in Waterfall City after the chaos of the pteranadon attack – bright spots of colour still high in her cheeks and her breath steaming in the night air like mist from the falls – that had been how he saw her. Then, of course, things returned to normal and he was embarrassed he’d ever had such romantic thoughts so he never said a word of it. In time, he’d forgotten the insane urge he’d felt that night to grab her and just blurt it all out.

   So it was extremely disconcerting to have all of this rush back to him just as he was about to launch off a cliff for their Wingmates’ compatibility assessment.

   Romana was already in the air. And from SSL DeLar’s expression, David was falling behind. He dragged his attention from the finer features of the picture Romana made – silhouetted against the afternoon sun on her Skybax – back to Freefall and tried to keep it there.

   Urging the pteranadon off the launching platform he tried to recall what DeLar had said about the sequence of obstacles that made up the test. Two winglengths ahead of him, Romana’s fine blonde hair beneath the line of her helm sparked in the sun like pulled gold.

    The test did not go well.

 

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Kind of reaching there, but it worked out.