Submission (#3510) Approved

                Out of all the places he had visited so far, catching carriages and hitching rides with Nobles from one region to another, Lunarity really had to admit Ealei was his least favourite place so far. The wood was slippery thanks to constant rain and abundant moss, the rocks were about as slippery, and any misstep would toss him into the ocean where he had no place on being. There were mangrove roots down there, deep and unwelcoming and full of predators, like prison bars for the worst of monsters.

He shuddered, focusing on placing one paw in front of the other. This wasn’t a common path, so he’d been told, but it was safe enough from one village to another, and it was only another few villages before he could catch a ship from Port Phthalo and head towards Palu’au to fairer places that weren’t going to pitch him into the ocean. Unfortunately, it meant taking a boat, and the one that had gotten him here had been bad enough. Seasickness was not his favourite activity, and neither was hiding in a Noble’s tail already full of six different kittoms almost as sick as he was.

The walk up the branch to the next village wasn’t an easy one, and he’d reverted to four feet on the bark for it. It meant sticking his backpack just behind his mane, and it was pulling pretty uncomfortably, but he did prefer staying somewhat more balanced, and he still didn’t have a pomu to hide his backpack in his shadow. It had gotten him a judgmental look and a sharp whispered comment from another kittom two villages prior, but he could handle comments. A little bit more than having less than a foot on either side of him of wood that he could walk on, and not find himself falling into the depths of the crystal-clear water below. A little too clear, if someone asked him.

To avoid looking down, and because he was a bit sick of staring straight ahead, he lifted his chin to the skies and scanned the canopy. The leaves were in full bloom – they always were, though he felt on some level that they probably shouldn’t be at this time of year – and the sky beyond was dark; puffy clouds not quite rolling with thunder but definitely thinking about doing so. He paused, briefly, without realizing that he was standing on the thinnest portion of wood that had existed in the past two hours.

Cumulonimbus.

He knew that word, somehow, spoken in a different accent, hissing and uncomfortable and by a low, gravelly voice. Cumulonimbus. He thought, for a moment, of writing it down, one more fragment of a memory he might be able to use.

But he took a deep breath in instead, feeling out the syllables of the word and how such a sharp tongue-twister could hiss like a lizard and be twice as soothing. The fur in his mane rose, ever so slightly. He bolted forward, suddenly sure in his pawsteps, and dove for the nearest treetrunk with an opening into its depths. It was likely to be someone’s house, or a brief rest stop, but he wasn’t taking chances.

Lunarity’s paws slipped across the moss, launching him forward with their lack of traction, and he leapt from one branch to the next, sure he would make it, sure that the strength of his haunches was more than the distance between the two branches, the last two he needed to cross before he was safely inside a tree.

The rain crashed down as his back paws left the branch, sudden and unforgiving and unstoppable. The rain crashed into his fur, heavier than he was. Right of weight overtook right of way. He reached forward with his front paws, hoping, hoping--

His claws, retractable and barely existent, opened. They caught the branch, just barely, and not nearly enough. The wood was wet and he was still a kittom, misjudging his strength and the ability of his claws to sink into the wood.

He fell. He fell silent, barely an exhale escaping him, eyes wide and tail to the ocean and plummeting like a stone, nothing between him and the ocean below. The mangroves were tangled everywhere but here, opening a gap between him and the ocean that existed almost nowhere else in Ealei at this altitude. He’d been here before. He had done this before. He’d fallen like this before, somewhere else, in a place like this and nothing like this at all.

He stared up at the canopy, watching the rain pour down from blackened clouds, incapable of any thought but a single word.

Cumulonimbus.

There was nothing to expect, no future moment that ended his fall, nothing but an everlasting present, slow enough that he could have counted the leaves above his head, fast enough he had no idea how long he had until he hit the water.

But a cumulonimbus cloud is famous for its updrafts that fuel it, and he wasn’t enough of a meteorologist to know that. He had no possible way to know that, no one else in the area to have noticed that he was falling. The wind picked him up anyway, sodden kittom with a backpack barely heavier than a feather, launching him sideways, not quite enough to invert his direction of fall but enough to change it, enough to break it.

He tumbled in the air, ears over curling tail and feeling about the same, and abruptly found himself inside the leaves of a small tree, somehow, miraculously unharmed.

Something in his head ached, stun turning briefly to shock and then to dizziness. He blinked, slow and unsteady, opening his still-blue eyes to see a village he expected to pass the next day surrounding him, the ocean far below, and the rain pouring on.

“Well, that could have been worse,” Lunarity murmured to himself. His eyes closed, opening and closing several times before settling in, and he slept.