Problem was, it’s sort of a nice setting image but it doesn’t want to go anywhere. 

🐦

Taking flight hadn’t been the easy part; it’d been terrifying, horrible, and, for more than a couple minutes, Parastoo had been absolutely certain she was going to die.

But every child did it, dove from the next, caught the wind, spread their wings, and flew – or missed, and tumbled, climbed back up and tried it again.  Every child had to fly, if they wanted to ever be an adult, if they ever wanted to really leave home.

Her older brother had trudged away, refusing to climb up to the tree again after seven falls.  Seven…!  Only her uncle had made more, and he had been laid up for a year with a broken wing that refused to mend.  They still told the story, of how by the time his wing was healed, his mother herself shoved him out of the nest, rather than deal with him anymore.

Parastoo wasn’t going to be one of those stories.  She’d caught the air on her first flight, caught it and followed a thermal and drifted for a while, tasting the air, before swinging back just long enough to catch the pack her father was swinging out towards her. It wouldn’t have all that much in it – a fledgling had to do for themselves – but she was the youngest out of the nest, so it would have more than it ought.

She’d flown for hours.  The trees nearby were already taken, and, besides, you wanted to go as far from your home nest as you could.  Her wings ached; her whole body ached.  She’d caught two pigeons and something nasty and scaly, the latter when she flew over a lake, but she was unwilling to stop until she’d found her tree, not sure she could start again, not yet.  She didn’t want to walk.  Grounders walked, and she’d managed to fly.

Taking flight hadn’t been the easy part, but it might have been the easier portion.