The sand on the dune suddenly writhed, and a terrifying claw burst out of it.
The arm flailed once, and the dune began to flow, slowly revealing the humanoid shape buried beneath the sand.
A pair of massive shoulder pods rose behind her back. The scorching sand, baked all day under the sun, pressed its heat through her voidskin. Heat rippled across her second skin, forcing Kai'Sa upright at once.
The chitinous plates of her helmet folded back one by one, overlapping as they retracted, like an insect tucking its wings back beneath its shell.
Kai'Sa stared blankly at the endless yellow desert in front of her, then at the arm sticking straight up out of the sand nearby. It took her a full second to come back to herself before she hurriedly started digging the sand away.
Bit by bit, the sand parted, revealing a head wrapped in armor.
With the return to daylight, Zihark's right hand, raised high in pure survival instinct, finally dropped.
"Zihark, Zihark! Are you okay?"
How could he possibly be okay? His heart was pounding, his head was buzzing, and his legs felt weak. He had never ridden a roller coaster or gone bungee jumping, but he was willing to bet this had been even worse than either of those.
Zihark did not want to speak. He only shook his head.
The giant wings pinned beneath him refused to respond. Judging by the feeling, they had probably been crumpled like a wad of paper and folded into eighteen different shapes. Thankfully, since they were part of his voidskin, he could not actually feel pain from them.
Kai'Sa reached out to pull him up, but he shook his head again.
The wings were buried in the sand and still attached to his back, so he could not raise his upper body at all. The sand beneath him began shifting again as the voidskin started devouring and reclaiming the damaged wings.
Seeing Kai'Sa start to worry and imagine the worst, Zihark removed his helmet and deliberately put on a calm expression to show that he was fine.
"Why aren't you looking at the sky?" he asked, pointing upward. "Look there, not at me."
Before, they had been viewing the sky from the bottom of a shaft. Now it stretched out before them in full, and only then did they understand that the sky could look like this.
The sun was still some distance above the desert horizon. Its fierce light spilled across endless clouds, dyeing the entire sky a brilliant gold. Kai'Sa looked up once, and that was enough to captivate her completely.
Zihark lay on his back staring upward too, but his attention was elsewhere.
He was replaying the feeling of flight in his mind. Even though it had been an awful experience, he had still managed to grasp something from it.
The voidskin had memorized those sensations and shared them with him. If he climbed to a high place now, he was confident he could at least perform a successful glide.
True flight, though? Not without some magical help.
As a human, his back simply was not broad enough. Once the wings grew too large, his back could not support enough muscle to power them. Too little strength, too much body weight—there was no way he could beat the air and circle overhead like a real hawk.
And even standing with wings on his back threw off his balance. Unless he could retract them the instant he landed, there was no hope of touching down steadily.
If he connected the flight muscles through his arms, that would solve the lack of power. But then he would lose the use of his limbs in combat, which just raised another question—if that was the case, why not devour a bat and use membrane wings instead?
And that brought him right back to the same conclusion as before.
Insect-like elytra would suit him better.
Completely lost in thought, Zihark failed to consider one ancient creature that was both powerful and surprisingly understated.
Then again, this whole flight had been completely unexpected in the first place.
All he had meant to do was have the root fling them up to the surface. In his imagination, they were supposed to land with nothing worse than a moderate tumble. He had never expected to be launched that high.
He had miscalculated. The instant the root seized them, panic had made his control falter, and that was what caused the accident.
If there was ever a next time, he would have to avoid making that mistake again. If he had not happened to absorb a sand falcon beforehand, they might not have walked away unharmed.
To make sure Kai'Sa did not miss the sunset, Zihark had taken a reckless gamble. But it had been the only method he could think of.
If he had tried forcing the void scars in the shaft wall to pull back and open a path for them to climb, the loose wall of sand might have collapsed outright. Those roots were the only thing holding the shaft together.
And besides, there was no way to see whether hidden roots were buried inside the sand wall. If they had been unlucky enough to touch one while climbing, that would have been a disaster too.
As for the sudden switch in position just before landing, that had been a conscious decision after he regained his nerve.
By then, he already knew they were not going to die.
Zihark did not know whether Kai'Sa's shoulder pods could grow back if they broke. On top of that, his armor made him sturdier than she was, so taking the lower position to cushion her seemed like the better choice.
Thinking of Kai'Sa at last brought his focus back to the girl in front of him.
The voidskin did not provide her with extra nutrition, and intense exercise burned away fat. With no chance for anything to accumulate, twelve-year-old Kai'Sa had already lost her baby fat, leaving her face more mature than before.
Her head was tilted upward, hiding her face from him. The line from her chin to her neck formed a clean, graceful curve. Freshly washed, her skin looked smooth and fine, lovelier than the shining horizon in the distance.
Then his eyes shifted lower, and he realized Kai'Sa was sitting sideways on his thigh with her legs folded, holding one of his hands in both of hers, looking unusually well-behaved.
Meanwhile, he himself was buried in the sand with only his head and arm exposed. Anyone seeing them might have thought they were at a beach instead of in the middle of the desert.
The angle of the sunlight was annoying, slanting into his eyes and interfering with his view of Kai'Sa glowing under the sun.
The moment the wings had fully retracted, he sat up immediately.
Kai'Sa noticed his face suddenly close to hers, and the corners of her mouth curved into a smile so lovely it was almost intoxicating. She leaned in and kissed him lightly on the cheek, then tipped forward and rested her chin on his shoulder.
She leaned the weight of her heart against him and went on gazing at the sky in complete peace.
Zihark was more than willing to use his back to shield her from the lingering heat of the sunset.
He turned his head slightly, scanning the surroundings. They were in the middle of the desert, but not far away lay a stretch of rocky wasteland. Wind-eroded stone pillars stood on the earth, and whenever the breeze passed through them, it produced sharp, tearing echoes.
The great golden eye in the sky slowly began sinking into the horizon, and the golden glow of evening had already deepened into blazing red clouds.
Kai'Sa clearly had not had her fill. She suggested climbing somewhere higher to watch the sunset.
So the two of them climbed onto a massive bare rock. By now the sun was no longer painful to look at, and they could watch it directly with the naked eye.
But while they watched the sunset, they also noticed something beneath it.
Far away in the same direction as the falling sun, short of the horizon itself, there sat a settlement of no small size.
Its architecture was distinctly Middle Eastern in style. Most of the roofs were domed or pointed, and the walls were thick with small windows, built to soften the extremes of temperature. Only, instead of whitewashed walls, everything shone in a warm golden yellow, like sunlight made solid.
With their vision, they could even make out people moving through the market, and the colorful awnings over the roadside stalls were striking enough to catch the eye from this far away.
Kai'Sa looked once—
and could not look away.
In a daze, she said, "Zihark... I want to go over there."
[End of chapter]