Trust Exercise
#11 of The Life and Times of Jarzyl Mintaka (Slice of Life Stories)
Two fledglings have some fun together.
This story is self-contained and can be read alone. (4,061 words)
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A three-legged dragon stood alone in a small, quiet room. His name was Atlas, and the young dragon's wings were held open to hold a pair of metallic frames, each with various hollow pipes of varying lengths--these two frames formed a single musical instrument called a wing harp, which he was playing. Some wing harps were designed to played while in flight, but this particular pair was meant for stationary use.
Atlas took a deep breath, then he flapped his wings down. A melodic sound emanated from the wing harp as air was forced through the rows of hollow pipes. It was a straightforward concept--a dragon's wings were designed to catch the air, and a wing harp would take that moving air and make it resonate to produce music. But though the idea was simple, actually playing a wing harp was surprisingly tiring on the wing muscles, and it required special coordination to produce proper music instead of just discordant sound.
By carefully controlling the position of the flight control scales on his wings, Atlas was able to selectively block the wing harp's pipes and create different musical notes. Reading off a sheet music book placed on the floor in front of him, he began swinging his wings back and forth, playing a simple tune as practice.
The tip of his tail tapped to the rhythm of his music, helping the dragon fledgling keep his beat. Much as it was tiring on his wings to flap repeatedly at a constant pace, there was something innately satisfying about the activity. Occasionally Atlas would wince when he accidentally played the wrong note, but it was very rewarding when he reached long stretches of properly played melody. The music flowed and repeated, rising and falling like the gusting flow of a warm afternoon's wind.
Unlike drums, trumpets, or even just a singing voice, a wing harp was a special sort of musical instrument which could only be played by fledglings or adult dragons. Hatchlings lacked the muscle strength in their wings to fly, which made it impossible for them to properly play a wing harp. It hadn't been very long since Atlas had made his own maiden flight and officially become a fledgling. At first, learning to play a wing harp had just been an exercise to train his wings, but now it was quickly becoming an addicting hobby.
As he finally reached the end of his simple tune, Atlas flapped his wings one last time and then held them still, letting the wing harp's resonant hum fall back into silence. It was a simple melody with basic harmonics--easy enough for even a beginner, but still the music had a life of its own. "Not bad. Not bad at all," he murmured to himself.
Leaned back on his hindlegs, Atlas used his sole forepaw to adjust the wing harp's left shoulder strap where it was chafing against his jet-black scales. As a three-legged fledgling missing his left foreleg, he was slow and awkward while walking or running, yet in the air he was just like any other dragon. His wings were just as capable as any other fledgling's, and that was something he was proud of.
Playing a wing harp took strength and dexterity, so this was something he was proud of too. Steadying himself, Atlas curled the tip of his tail around and used it to flip the page of the music book in front of him, turning to a new musical piece. Then he once again brought his wings into motion, sweeping them back and forth to produce a new musical tune that was slightly faster than before.
The wing harp Atlas was playing was old, with small spots of corrosion visible in some of the metallic pipes, but it was still capable of producing rich musical tones. Any odd sounds it produced were from Atlas's accidental mistakes, as his inexperience meant he would occasionally set his flight scales in the wrong position and play the wrong note. Much as he would have liked to own this wing harp, it wasn't his. It was borrowed from the school's musical department and would have to be returned after his practice session was done, but that didn't matter. Atlas let himself get lost in the flow, concentrating on the melody and moving his wings automatically. He was the only one in this studio room, and the walls were soundproofed so that the music wouldn't reach any nearby classrooms. It was just him and the music.
Playing a fast tune on a wing harp required as much flapping power as a continuous climb in flight, and as he finished this musical piece, Atlas was panting from the exertion. He carefully lowered his wings until they were drooping on the floor, letting the wing harp's weight rest on the ground. It was fun to play the musical instrument. It was fun to attend music classes at school and feel himself getting better slowly, but it was also just fun to hear the melodious sounds he could create.
Glancing at a clock on the wall, Atlas realized that he'd gotten caught up in his music and lost track of the time. It was currently midway through the afternoon and his classes for the day were done, but the young dragon was waiting for one of his friends to finish her own classes which ended slightly later, and so he had spent the last hour in this studio practicing with a wing harp. Now it was time for him to go.
Moving over to the side of the room, Atlas carefully unstrapped the wing harp's two separate halves from each wing and put the instrument back into its hard case. Carrying the case's handle in his jaws, he trotted over to the studio door and pushed it open with his shoulder. Then he headed for the music department to return the instrument, after which he would go find his friend.
Jarzyl was dangling upside down from the ceiling. The claws on all four of her paws were extended, helping her to grip onto one of the light fittings near the centre of the classroom. If a teacher had come across her in this state she would have gotten a good scolding for this mischievous behaviour, but the class room was empty.
Jarzyl glanced around. Everything was inverted, and it was a weird feeling to have blood pooling in her head and her tail. How had she gotten into this state? She'd been waiting for one of her friends to come find her after her class, and boredom had quickly set in. Dangling from the ceiling hadn't been her initial goal--at first she'd just wanted to try doing backflips off the wall, then that had escalated into climbing up the wall's noticeboards, which had then become climbing onto the ceiling to jump from light fixture to light fixture, and now she was dangling upside down in the middle of the classroom.
The only thing Jarzyl was wearing was a lime green bandana tied around her neck, contrasting nicely in colour with her orange scales. Carefully releasing one forepaw, the fledgling tightened her bandana's knot to ensure it didn't come loose, before adjusting the position of the cloth to make sure her clan insignia was nicely centred over her chest. Then she gripped the light fixture again.
It was surprisingly comfortable. Dangling from all four paws stretched her joints but wasn't tiring at all, and Jarzyl felt like she could have held this position for some time. But then slightly later than usual, a familiar three-legged dragon fledgling came limping into the classroom.
"What...are you doing?" Atlas asked slowly.
Jarzyl twisted her head to stare at her friend. Whereas her own scales were a warm, amber shade of orange, Atlas's scales were black as soot. He was like a void of colour--dark and quiet and clever but somehow always willing to put up with her antics. "Hey. You're late," Jarzyl said to him.
Atlas bowed his head slightly, but he didn't look very apologetic. "I was in one of the music studios and I lost track of time."
Jarzyl tried to flick her neck frill, but dangling upside down meant that her frill was already raised off her head. "Is playing that wing harp really that fun? I find it just so tiring. I'm definitely going to choose art class, not music class."
"I think it's fun," Atlas replied. He walked over towards Jarzyl and stared up at her. "So what exactly are you doing up there? Are you just messing around again?"
Jarzyl tried to think of an witty answer to explain her behaviour, and failed. Instead she nodded her head towards one particular spot on the ground. "I'll show you. Stand right there and look out the window."
Atlas cocked his head to the side. "Why?"
"Just do it. Stand right there on that floor tile and look out the window," Jarzyl insisted.
Atlas hesitantly turned towards the classroom's windows. "What? Are you looking at something? What am I supposed to see?"
"Wait for it and you'll see." Jarzyl tried to keep the grin off her snout. "You have to take one step to the left. A bit further... A bit further... Ok now take a step back... And another. Just one more." Atlas followed her directions, which left him standing on the ground directly below her.
"What am I supposed to be--ooh!" Atlas grunted in surprised as Jarzyl abruptly released her grip and dropped from the ceiling, spinning in mid-air to land on his back and knock him to the ground.
Sitting down on top of her friend's prone form, Jarzyl proudly spread her wings open. "Trust exercise! Too slow, you lose! Haha, I am the best." Hopping onto the floor, she grabbed Atlas's wing and pulled him to his feet.
Atlas looked slightly annoyed, but not very surprised. He snatched his wing out of her grip and furled back up. "I wasn't too slow! I could have dodged out of your way, except that you would have crashed into the ground and injured yourself. You're welcome."
"Mm, sure. Just admit I'm the best, because I am."
"Are you sure you're a fledgling? Because you sure act like a hatchling. One day you're going to have to grow up, you know that?" Atlas replied.
Jarzyl stuck her tongue out at him. "Eh! Who's going to make me grow up? You? Nah." She leaned in and gave Atlas a lick on the side of his neck, which made him frown--licking was generally a friendly gesture, but it was more common between parents and hatchlings, deriving from how young dragons didn't have the dexterity or discipline to properly groom their own scales. This made Jarzyl's gesture simultaneously friendly and demeaning.
Atlas sat back on his haunches and irritatedly wiped at the spot on his neck which Jarzyl had licked. "You just like to bully me, I think," he told her.
"Indeed!" Jarzyl agreed. She scampered over to the side of the classroom where her desk was, and she started pulling on her flight harness. A flight harness was common draconic equipment--the grid of straps went over her body, to allow her to fly or walk while also carrying various pouches containing her books and stationery. "So where are we going on this fine afternoon? Let's go fly circuits around the city! I feel like practicing my flying."
Atlas shrugged. He walked over and sat down beside her. "I don't feel like doing circuits. I won't be able to fly very fast, or very far--playing the wing harp was tiring. And why do you always get to choose what we do?"
"Because I have the best ideas, obviously. But fine. I'll let you choose." Jarzyl playfully used her tail to poke Atlas's side, making him unfurl a wing to shield his ribcage from her tickling. "We can go anywhere, do anything you want! The only requirement is that it must be adventurous."
Atlas was quiet for a moment, then he nodded. "Ok. I've got an idea."
A while later, the two fledglings were standing atop the roof of their school building. The blazing midday heat had died down, leaving behind an afternoon sky filled with scattered clouds and sunshine.
As a nocturnal dragon, Atlas's eyes were far more sensitive to light than Jarzyl's, so he reached into his flight harness's shoulder pouch and took out a pair of goggles with blacked-out lenses. Sliding the goggles over his eyes, the darkened optics cut down on the glare and let him operate outdoors during the day without being blinded.
Jarzyl watched her friend as he donned his dark goggles. She had tried wearing those goggles before, but they were so dark they just made it near impossible for her to see anything. She was a diurnal dragon, Atlas was a nocturnal dragon, but they were both dragons and they were friends. As was the common belief for most people in the city, being a nocturnal or a diurnal wasn't really an important distinction anymore. Once upon a time in distant history, nocturnal dragons had been hunters in the night, while diurnals had ruled the day, but now they all lived together in the City of Wings.
A cool breeze made Jarzyl's neck frill flutter. "So where are we headed? I thought you said you don't want to fly today?" she asked.
"I said I didn't feel like flying circuits. I never said I don't want to fly," Atlas replied. He walked right up to the edge of the rooftop. It was common for dragons to come and go from rooftops, but at this time the school wasn't too busy and the rooftop was empty except for the two of them. "There's something I've always wanted to try, but which I can't really do alone."
"Huh? What?" Jarzyl prompted. Between the two of them, she was usually the adventurous one while Atlas was the more cautious, but now he had an excited look. Even with Atlas's eyes hidden behind his dark goggles, Jarzyl felt like she could sense the eager glint in her friend's eyes.
"I want to practice something called... inertial navigation," he said to her.
"Huh? What?" Jarzyl repeated.
Atlas turned to face the wind, and he half-unfurled his wings to test the air. "Inertial navigation. You remember during the first few classes flight school, they did a basic introduction to navigation?"
Jarzyl nodded. "Yeah? Navigation is... It means knowing where you are and where you're going--that's what they said."
"Location and direction, exactly. So I was reading ahead in the textbook, and it mentioned that they are actually several different ways to navigate. You can navigate just by looking at landmarks, using the sun, the moons, or the stars at night, or even following another dragon in flight. That's visual navigation. But inertial navigation means relying on things you don't see, but that you feel." Atlas leaned back on his haunches and tapped his head with his forepaw. "It means using your internal compass for direction, and your internal sense of balance for staying level. So what I want to do is practice that, by trying to fly in a straight line with my eyes closed."
Jarzyl had been nodding along, right until this last sentence. "Wait, what? Eyes closed?!" she exclaimed incredulously. "Is that a thing we're going to do in flight school?"
"No, not in flight school. The textbook just mentions the different types of navigation and how to use them, but it never suggested trying to fly with eyes closed." Atlas smiled a toothy grin, in a rare expression for the normally nonchalant fledgling. "That part I came up on my own. It seemed like an interesting idea."
"It sounds crazy. I like crazy, but that's real crazy", Jarzyl told him. She wasn't sure if she would even dare to walk with her eyes closed, let alone try flying. "You're going first."
"Of course. Let's go!" Without any further word, Atlas sprung off the rooftop and into flight.
"Huh. Huuuuh!" Jarzyl inhaled and exhaled deeply, and she nervously tapped her forepaws on the ground. "And you always said that I was the one with the crazy ideas!" Then she leapt into the air after her friend, pumping her wings hard to catch up.
Avaeria's airspace was heavily congested near the city core, where there were always countless dragons flying from point to point, but now the two young dragons headed out towards the calmer, less crowded sectors. The air was free and open, with clusters of residential towers and commercial buildings reaching up to various heights.
Atlas felt the air sweep past his wings as he swept over the city. Being able to fly meant being _free._Free to go wherever he wanted, and to taste the open skies. Glancing over his shoulder, he could see Jarzyl flying beside and just behind him--they were both still relatively inexperienced fledglings, but it was a faint point of pride that (for now at least) his flight seemed slightly more graceful and easy that Jarzyl's awkward wingbeats. She had always been stronger, swifter, and more agile on the ground than him, but in the air it was more even.
Picking a landmark at random, Atlas turned until they were heading right for a vertical, metal lattice tower which stood taller from the surrounding buildings--a shield spire, for the city's storm defences. "Ready, Jarz? I'm going to try flying for that shield spire. Watch out and give me a warning if I'm flying too far off course or getting too low to the ground, ok?"
Jarzyl nervously rocked her wings in acknowledgement, altering her flight path right, then left, then back to straight. "Ok...? Are you sure about this? This seems crazy!"
Atlas didn't overthink it. "I trust you. Ok, here we go. Eyes closed...now." He aimed for the spire, then shut his eyes.
It was like a sudden transition from day to night; except that as a nocturnal dragon, Atlas would still have been able to see at night, but now he had nothing but complete, total darkness. Faint, meaninglessly imaginary colour patterns danced in front of his closed eyes, but he had instantly lost all visual cues.
A dragon's primary sense was vision and their eyes had tremendous optical resolution, but now Atlas ignored all that in the interest of his experiment. With eyes closed, he tried to rely on his internal sense of balance and direction to keep him flying straight and level. Yet without his eyes, he had no way of actually checking for himself if he was still flying straight, or if he had gone entirely off course. "Am I still going straight?" he asked.
For a moment there was silence, and Atlas suddenly felt isolated and lonely, then he heard Jarzyl's voice from his side. "Yeah... Yeah! You went a bit to the left when you first shut your eyes, but now you're just flying straight. Uh... this is crazy."
Atlas grinned, but he kept his eyes closed. Without interrupting the steady pace of his wingbeats, he rolled slightly and made a small turn back towards the right. He could feel his internal compass shifting, telling him just how much of a course correction he was making. "How about now?"
"That's good. You're flying right for the spire," Jarzyl replied. With Atlas's sense of vision gone, his other senses felt like they'd gone into overdrive, and his hearing seemed just a bit more acute. Jarzyl's voice was the only thing he could hear besides the rushing wind, but then he started to hear the faint sounds of her wingbeats, just out of sync with his own.
There was something almost hypnotic about it. Atlas felt his mind drift to random topics and memories before suddenly snapping back to his flight. Without his sense of vision, there was so much less information to process and things were just so much simpler. Flying was normally a relaxing, peaceful activity, but this took things to another level entirely.
Jarzyl could feel both her hearts beating hard, pounding in her chest. She felt hyperaware of the airspace all around her. She glanced from side to side, up and down, repeatedly checking that they weren't approaching any buildings or any other dragons in flight. There wasn't actually that much to look for in the open air, but she still felt nervous because she was acting as watch for not just herself, but for her friend too.
Was Atlas really flying blind? With the dark goggles he was wearing she couldn't actually see if the nocturnal fledgling's eyes were closed, but Atlas wasn't a liar. He was flying mostly straight, occasionally drifting in one direction or the other only to recover after a few seconds.
After a few minutes, they were coming up towards the shield spire Atlas had first aimed at. The buildings in this city sector were slightly taller, and Jarzyl was getting increasingly nervous. "Ok, we just passed the border for sector five! You can open your eyes now."
"Are we getting close to the shield spire?" Atlas asked her.
"Uh..." Jarzyl squinted at the shield spire and tried to estimate the distance. "Soon. About a minute's flight. Maybe half a minute. Are your eyes open yet? Don't crash!"
"Relax. Half a minute is still plenty of time," Atlas replied. He sounded so calm, rather unlike her. Almost like he was somehow falling asleep mid-air.
"Nggghhh!" Jarzyl made an uneasy noise, and she kicked her legs through the air before tucking them against her body again. "Can you just open your eyes? This is stressing me!"
"Eh." Atlas said nothing, and he just kept calmly flapping his wings at a steady pace, not changing his heading.
"Are your eyes open?! Hey! I can't actually tell because of your dark goggles! Open your eyes and fly properly! Stop trusting me to keep you safe! This is so stressful!!" Jarzyl yelled at him. They were really approaching the taller residential buildings now. There was still a reasonable altitude separation between the buildings and their flight level, but the shield spire was tall and they actually might hit it.
Atlas said nothing, but then suddenly his flight shifted into a sharp descent and he dived right towards one of the nearby buildings.
"Atlas!" Jarzyl screamed her friend's name in panic, but then Atlas pulled up and did a vertical loop, spinning fully over in an aerobatic move before returning to level flight.
Beating his wings hard, Atlas gained altitude until he was flying right beside her. "Relax, I'm not going to crash."
"Stop messing with me!" Jarzyl could see that Atlas was grinning. She tilted her wings as if she was going to ram into him, and he dodged out of her way smoothly. "This was such a stupid idea! Why would you even want to try flying with your eyes closed, and why did you ask me to help you do it? Arrgh..."
"It's good to try interesting things sometimes," Atlas retorted. "You mean you've never wondered whether this was possible? Never wondered how good your internal compass was?"
Jarzyl flicked her neck frill up and down. "Of course not! Why would I?" Turning sharply, she started flying back towards the city centre, particularly to the one outer neighbourhood where her home was.
Atlas followed after her, keeping up easily. "Hmm, well I think it was a fun exercise. It was quite relaxing, actually. Do you want to try it? I'll watch out for you."
Jarzyl snorted and shook her head. "No. No, no, no. Nope."
"Are you sure?" Atlas asked.
Jarzyl tried blinking her eyes closed, but she couldn't last more than a second before panic started to set in. Even though she knew that the air was all open around her, it was still terrifying to imagine crashing into a building or the ground. "No! No, thank you. I fly with eyes open, and I like to know exactly where I'm going, thank you very much!"
"Oh well." Atlas chuckled. "Haha, thanks for indulging my curiosity anyway."
"Let's go do something less stressful," Jarzyl muttered, and she headed home, with her friend flying right beside her.
END