Face of Eternity : The Little Angel

Sleepiness was hard to overcome this morning. It fought my attempts to wake up at a decent our.

In my ever present battle with low energy levels, I had to fight on a second front too. Dreams were not kind to me. I always looked forward to the sound of my systems booting up in the morning, signaling the end of a nightmare.

As icing to the double layered cake of internal battles, I still had guilt looming over my crystal heart for all those I couldn’t save in Urnan. Sometimes it felt like I was getting over it, and other times it felt like a freshly carved wound on my soul.

Maybe I just needed to get up and walk it off.

With bad dreams, I’d usually cling to my plush unicorn, who always took away the bad feelings. But she wasn’t here to protect me, so I had to reach for the next best authority figure in my life.

Just above the bunk bed where I’d been sleeping, a man with a fedora over his face was catching some Z’s.

I tugged on the trench coat he used as a blanket a few times.

“Uncle…” My tugs became more forceful until he woke up. “Uncle, wake up.”

“Hmm?” He hummed, curiously blinking his eyes after throwing off his hat. “What's wrong?”

“I had a bad dream again,” I said, climbing up to him and scrunching under his coat. “It was really scary.”

“Bad dreams end when you wake up.” He smiled, giving my head a comforting rub. “How about I show you something to take your mind off it?”

He leapt down from the top bunk, then put his hat neatly on his head. I took his hand and we quietly walked out of our cabin into the train car hallway.

We were the only passengers out and about on the train right now. Everyone else was still sound asleep.

“Yalda, can you tell me what a train needs to move across the ground?”

Let’s see…trains run on coal. Then again, he didn’t ask what the fuel source was.

A train has railing on the wheels that make it go *CHUGA CHUGA*, but I think the question was trying to go a bit deeper than that. Or maybe, the answer was simpler than my complicated train of thought. Pun intended.

Trains need tracks!

“Tracks.” I answered.

“Very good. So it stands to reason that this train would need tracks to move at all, correct?”

Well, yeah. Right? How could a train move if it didn’t have tracks to go across?

If he hadn’t shown me then, I would have thought this train was the same, but things were a little special here.

This train wasn’t running on normal tracks, it wasn’t even on tracks at all. It was flying! Flying high over a huge lake!

“Wow!” I uttered as Uncle lifted me up onto his shoulders at the end of the caboose. I could see all the way to the frosty blue horizon. A few twinkly morning stars still remained even as the sky began to brighten.

“I can see my house from here!” I shouted.

“How can you see our house from here?” Uncle poked me in the side. "We don't live anywhere near this place."

“Oh yeah,” I snickered. He's so gullible. “Hey, Uncle…” I poked his forehead from above, “how come the train is flying?”

Apparently, once these trains hit a certain speed on regular tracks, they can take off a few dozen meters up using mana streams in the air.

The mana stream didn’t just act as a track for the train, but also as a fuel. It would pass through the engine and power the whole thing as it chugged across the sky. No obstacle could keep the train from reaching its destination.

“If you ever have trouble flying,” Uncle started, “just remember…if humans could get this heavy mechanical marvel up in the air, you can do it too.”

What wisdom! Uncle’s super smart like that. He may be the wisest person I know. Or, maybe that seat was occupied by a talking tree, but that’s beside the point.

Now I was excited to start flying again! My wings needed a good stretching.

“Uncle, can I fly for a few minutes?” I asked.

“I think that’s an excellent idea,” He approved.

One excited jump got me off his back and into the air, my feathery wings spawned out of my back and I took flight. The train continued to race away.

Uncle jumped over the caboose railing and spawned his own wings, but his were more like refined pieces of blue glass, loosely hovering together.

He flew over to me, then pointed to a mountain not far away.

“We’ll head to the spire of that mountain, there’s something else I’d like to show you.”

High altitudes weren’t any trouble for me. This would be a piece of cake!

Uncle took the lead, going at a steady speed. I kept up right behind him.

His speed began to pick up the further we went. I tried to match, but quickly fell behind.

“Doing alright back there?” Uncle turned his head back mid flight.

“Y…yeah!” I raised a proud fist into the air.

Flapping my wings so fast just to keep up was making them really sore. My breath was getting heavier the faster I went.

“Uncle!” I tried to shout, but my strength was waning. “Slow down!”

He immediately turned back and caught me in his arms. I snuggled up to his side and caught my breath. My wings wrapped around him.

He let out a chuckle, smiling like this was his plan all along.

“You’ve been doing great so far. I’ll take you the rest of the way up.”

It might have been a combination of my lack of sleep and how I was still recovering from some recent hard battles, but I took him up on his offer.

Now that I wasn’t focusing on flying, I got a look around at the dark land below. Most of this land past the lake was forest. There were a few houses and barns. With my night vision active, I spotted some nocturnal animals finding safe places to hide for the coming day.

A couple of early birds were chirping. They looked similar to a robin, but with blue bellies. A few of them flew beside us in a V formation, eventually gliding back down to the trees.

"How were the birds able to keep up with you going so fast?" I asked.

"They were following the draft of my wings," he replied. "It's how birds travel together for such long periods of time without feeling tired."

"Ooh, I see."

Maybe I needed to learn that. Was that what he wanted me to do when he was going so fast?

Uncle finally got us all the way up to the tippy top of the mountain. The echo from up here was going to be amazing.

"Yeecola!" I sang off the mountain, hearing my voice echo forever away.

Way off in the distance were all sorts of cities and houses just peeking over the curve of the horizon. My telescopic sight was such a gift. I wondered if they could hear my singing.

“I bet you can see a lot up here, can’t you?” he asked.

Being so high up was really amazing. It really felt like I was gazing down on all of mankind, seeing the whole planet that we lived on.

“I can see everything from up here,” I marveled at the sight.

“5…4…3…” he was counting down to something. What was it? “2…1…”

A bright light flashed in my eyes from the east. The brightness would have been blinding to a normal person.

That’s the sun. It’s sunrise!

“Uncle, look! Look! The sun!”

“We're so high up, that we're the first to see it today.”

Even though I could see the sun, the ground was still dark. It reminded me of the dream I kept having where me and daddy were standing on a cliff, looking down at a sea of shadow. I don’t like that dream.

“Uncle, do you think we’ll find daddy soon?” I asked.

“We have an idea where he is,” he replied. “Once we save Yamin’s town from those demons, we’ll get to the capital and find transportation to him.”

This whole journey started because we had to find daddy. But before getting to him, we had to stop demons that were taking over a town.

All this stuff about defeating demons and darkness…it was scary. I’d faced down a few demons so far, and they were all just as nightmarish as anyone could imagine.

The nice thing about nightmares is that you wake up when they finish. So at least there's something to look forward to at the end of the scary tunnel.

“Uncle, do you think were ready to fight the demons in Verrenville?”

He nodded.

“We’ll be ready. I’ll make sure of that. Let’s just worry about getting there first.”

In a few hours, we'd have to find a boat to get to the mainland of Erdareich. I had a feeling it was going to be a busy day.