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_Well some say life will beat you down Break your heart, steal your crown So I started out for God knows where I guess I'll know when I get there

I'm learning to fly around the clouds What goes up must come down_

~Tom Petty

"Are you certain of this, muinteoir?"

On a bright and sunny day in the city of Strumvald, a most unusual youth asked this. He was not human but walked upright as a human would, as tall as the average man's shoulder. His face almost resembled that of a common fox in shape except that his ears were a little too large and his fangs protruded a little too far over his lip. Rather than the yellow of most canines his eyes were an unfathomable glossy black. Three wing bones longer than his arms extended from the edge of his hands to stretch a leathery membrane from his sides that served as wings. The tips of his wings faded to a chalky white and the long hair pulled back between his ears, and tied in the style of the times, was of a dark brown. Head to toe the creature's fur was a golden autumn hue otherwise. Most were right to call him bat though most would instead invoke the dread name for his kind, vampire.

"My dear boy, your ancestors have done this very thing for generations and lived," said an elderly human nearby. His beard was well trimmed and he stood with an air of dignity that spoke of a well learned man in demand for his intellect. His midnight blue robes showed any number of stains from soot, oil, and chemical experiments gone awry. As haphazard as the robes may have been, and as old as his wrinkled and pale face seemed, the same ambitious fires burned in his mahogany eyes that had burned in his youth. None were as keen of mind or so determined to unmask the ways of science as the muinteoir Lorenzo Montillado.

"True, but I'm the one perched atop this bridge in his drawers ready to leap."

"And once we have discovered the method by which you were meant to fly we can begin constructing wings for me. Then I shall take my turn on the bridge."

"I feel ridiculous. Everyone is staring at me."

"You are a vampire in broad day light. They are likely just curious. Now then, cease your complaining and recite our experiment."

"I am to leap from this bridge over the river and attempt to fly to you on your boat down stream from here."

"Precisely."

"I almost wish I had never been orphaned. The vampires must have a better way to teach flying than this."

A sharp crack broke the air along with a yelp. The young bat reached a three clawed hand behind him to rub beneath his short tail where the Muinteoir's ever handy ruler had landed.

"Self-pity never served anyone, Skylur. Had you been raised by your own you would be nothing more than a savage living in the mountains, a complete and utter waste of your intellect and talents. Fate granted you the opportunity to cultivate yourself as a true gentleman for the cost of a minor inconvenience in learning to fly. Count your blessings while I move into position down the river."

Skylur continued to rub what he was sure would turn into a welt while he watched his teacher vanish into the milling throngs. Though it was just after noon on a business day and the streets were positively bursting, none dared to draw within three paces of the bat perched upon the stone railing of the Cobbler's Street Bridge. Children were ushered to the far side to cross. Waist coated gentlemen escorted ladies in their lacy hoopskirts with wary glances. Though Strumvald was an open port where many races mingled, Skylur was accustomed to wary glances and occasional glares. It was part of living in the city, if you happened to be a vampire.

Some stopped to watch the spectacle and a few people began to whisper loudly to one another. Skylur felt certain he heard more than a few giggles. His keen ears laid back along his head in an effort to protect himself from knowing what the gawkers were so interested in seeing.

With glossy black eyes Skylur squinted against the day to watch his instructor row to the center of the river. The sea breeze began to blow as he stood, rippling through his short fur in ways that called to his ancestry joyously.

Weeks of studying bird wings, speaking to hawkers, and standing atop windy hills lead to this single moment. His muinteoir insisted on planning every detail and had made Skylur do the work for each step. He drew in a deep breath recalling all the trials and research. The meticulous sketching of the wings he had been born with in an effort to understand his own body. In his heart and soul Skylur knew his muinteoir was right, this was what he had been born to do.

Skylur lifted the eight-pointed star of brass he always wore as a pendant and touched a reverent kiss to the cool metal. First his arms spread out, then delicate wing bones stretched until the vampire's wings reached more than twice his short height from tip to tip. His legs bent in a crouch and then sprang with a leap casting him out into the void. The powerful muscles in his thick chest pulled both arms down against the air with a sound like sails unfurling in the wind. Skylur's stomach lurched and he hung weightless in space. Again and again he struck at the air around him faster than most men might wave their arms. The wind rushed against his face just as below the glossy green river was rushing, rushing up towards his flailing feet. Skylur felt the joy of the moment give way to his heart stopping panic and then the world went dark, and wet.

"I think I nearly had it by the end," said a still damp bat. He and his muinteoir had returned to the tower in which the old man lived and worked. Some years ago it had been refitted to serve as a windmill so the groaning of great wooden gears was always present in the early night when the sea breeze came to shore. Book cases and tables filled with half finished notes, models, and experiments seemed placed in a haphazard fashion about the tower room. Finding a place to stand was only slightly less trouble than finding an empty chair to sit in so the bat had long ago taken to the habit of simply gripping one of the rafters between his talon tipped feet and dangling when he came to his muinteoir's windmill.

"I saw you jumping and waving your arms like a lunatic. It lacked precision, grace, purpose. Nothing at all like the hawks," said the elder from an old iron stove. He prodded away at the fires inside with a metal poker as though it might boil his kettle of water faster.

"I felt it though. That first beat I felt myself lift up."

"I saw no such thing. I applaud your optimism but it is sorely misplaced. You must think logically, rationally. Never get caught up in flights of fancy while experimenting."

"Just how many times did my son jump into the river?" A third was present for the gathering, a man of hardened features and swarthy skin. Though he was broad in shoulder and still strong in arm, age had lined the man's face and turned his immaculate hair silvery white. A polished oak cane leaned against the only empty space on the tower's stone walls the fatherly man could find, which he himself leaned against as well with folded arms. He dressed in all the finery of a proper gentleman, his shirt was spotless and white, his slacks pressed cleanly, his tawny waistcoat perfectly buttoned, yet there was a hardness underlying it all. That hardness unnerved most people especially given his wolfishly yellow eyes.

"Too many for my liking."

Something muffled came from beneath a towel as the upended youth tried to scrub the water from his fox-like muzzle.

"Try it again without the towel, boy," the muinteoir said with a sigh and gave up on his stove.

"I said it was forty-three."

"You might have spent more of your focus on flying than counting your failures."

"I never counted them. A pair of girls nearby were keeping tally to each other."

"Then you should have paid more attention to flying than to women."

"I wasn't paying them that much mind," he said a bit sulkily. Though Skylur had grown to the age of a young man he never truly saw anything truly attractive in ladies, whatever finery they might don. Other boys his age, or so he guessed since no one knew his birthday, seemed fixated upon the opposite sex and this privately worried him. Skylur pushed the familiar concerns for his place in the world aside and focused on the task of dressing himself while dangling from a rafter by his talons.

"Mind well you do. Women have been the downfall to many a great man through history. I have not labored on your education all these years to have some little tart twist you about her finger."

"Let him be, Lorenzo. It's natural for a young man to be distracted by the fairer sex." The wolf-eyed man interrupted with a smile. "Skylur, you said you felt yourself lift at first?"

"Yes, father." The vampire answered while working at tucking his white shirt beneath the belt of his pants. The shirt was sleeveless but slit along the sides to allow his wings freedom. The only purpose it really served was to provide a collar for his black tie and a white background beneath his gray waistcoat.

"Even were that the case, which it well might be, he fell. There is no denying the failure of today's venture. What remains is to ponder the evidence gathered in our trials and decide the next course of action," said the Muinteoir with a grumble as he shuffled a stack of books out of a thickly padded chair. The elderly man flopped back with a grunt then steepled his fingers in a pose that always implied deep thought on his behalf.

"I am quite certain I felt it, however briefly."

"You are convicted, boy?"

"Absolutely, Muinteoir."

"Then fetch your violin. Perhaps a little music will aid me in devising our next action."

Old Lorenzo leaned his head back to glower at the ceiling as though it withheld the answer from them. Skylur curled his body even as he released his hold of the rafter to land lightly upon the floor. Finding his way through the labyrinthine layout of the room proved as challenging as it always did. Though his wings folded neatly along his forearms their extra length jutted just enough to occasionally brush against precariously stacked books or bump into finely tuned scales.

His violin he kept near the door of the room. Its case leaned against the frame opposite where the swing of the portal may have threatened his precious instrument. Skylur's clawed fingers lifted the carefully polished violin with delicate reverence. He turned his head to cradle the chin rest, mindful to keep his snout clear of the bow now held delicately between clawed fingers.

With his usual natural grace Skylur began to draw the bow. The notes came forth softly at first like the gentle flow of the very river he had thrown himself into so recently. The melody gathered itself together and rose in volume until the running of the river gave way to the rolling of gentle waves. An occasional pluck of the strings let out a lonely call. Skylur let his eyes drift shut and his mind wander along some nameless beach beneath the moon though he and his audience stayed within the confines of the muinteoir's tower. As the nocturnal sonata wound itself to a quiet end the swarthy man gave a polite clap.

"One of your pieces?" The wolf-eyed man asked.

"Yes, sir. I call it 'To Sea by Moonlight'." Skylur began to play again.

"He has an ear for music," said the man to the muinteoir.

"Yes," said the reclining old man, "and a most excellent grasp on the theories and mathematics behind it. If only he could soar half so well as he plays. The problem must lie in the method of flapping."

"Did the two of you try not flapping?" The wolf-eyed man took Lorenzo's icy glare in stride. "It just occurred to me that every day I walk along the docks I see gulls hovering in the wind. They never flap or go anywhere. Maybe all you need is a good wind to go aloft."

The music ended as Skylur lifted a hopeful glance to his Muinteoir. A slow transformation came across the old scholar's face as the idea seeped into his mind. It took root and outgrew his doubts until finally he leapt from the cushioned chair in a flurry of falling books and scattered papers.

"Precisely! If the problem lies in the flapping then we negate it in favor of gliding. Oh happy day to think that those obnoxious sea rats should finally serve some purpose," said the elder savant with excitement. No book, scale, or instrument was safe as he began to rush about the room gathering up a heavy woolen cloak and filling his pockets with papers and charcoal sticks. Skylur had already snapped shut the case on his instrument and set it safely aside from his teacher's whirlwind.

"Are you coming father?"

"Of course, this is your big night."

It seemed perfect. Only a few clouds marred the night sky overhead. A swift sea breeze swept across the harbor to where Skylur perched atop a wooden lamp post. Waves lapped against the stone walls of the city dockside. He was again reduced to nothing more than his knee-length drawers and the small, eight-pointed star pendant he always wore. There were no bystanders to gawk, nothing to distract at this late hour. Despite having been awake since dawn he felt alive under the full moon, perhaps for the first time.

Lorenzo and his father sat out on the water bobbing on the gentle waves in the muinteoir's little boat. They were waiting for him to leap, just as he had leapt from the bridge, and catch the wind beneath his wings.

Skylur rose to his feet again. His arms stretched out slowly to test the tug of the winds sweeping past him. Like sails unfurling his wings opened gradually. He dug his talons into the wooden post beneath his feet to keep balance. A wide smile took over his expression as he realized the air itself might well carry him aloft that night.

The whole affair was nearly ruined as something like a finger brushed the back of his neck. Skylur twisted about and almost fell the dozen feet to the cobblestone street below trying to find the thing that had touched him. It alighted on the next lamp post in the line, a ghostly figure fanning out widespread wings so like his own. The newly arrived creature settled itself in a crouch then rose and turned to face him.

Ghostly pale was the first impression it gave him. As thin and small as Skylur himself was yet somehow more delicate and supple. Only with a bit of thought did he recognize the darker patches coloring its fanged muzzle and clawed limbs. Darker still was the mane of hair that fell from between its large, pointed ears. There was no mistaking what he saw, another bat atop the lamp post nearest to his, perhaps the only other vampire in the city.

Every terrible story he had ever known for his kind was swept aside by two realizations; that a female of his reclusive race now stood before him and that where he wore little she wore nothing. He forced his gaze back out across the harbor with the gentlemanly determination ingrained in him by his wolf-eyed father.

"Oiche maith." Something in her delicate, accented voice strummed against his heart, even if the words escaped his comprehension. It sounded so like the old tongue his muinteoir had tried to teach. All Skylur could do was stare back at her with his mind fumbling for something to say and hoping she knew a more modern tongue.

"Hello?" she asked hesitantly with ears folding themselves back along her neck.

"Good evening." With a sweep of his wings like a courtly cloak he bowed low still standing atop the pole. The familiar greeting let him respond at least in automation. She bowed in kind to him though too rigidly and more like his own gesture than a proper curtsy.

"Oh, yes it is. Are you out to see the moon as well?" She wrapped herself in her wings like a short cloak. It did nothing to ease Skylur's tension or the indefinable allure of his visitor.

"No, I came for the sea breeze actually. I am Skylur, Skylur Moonsong." He bowed again and watched transfixed as she mimicked him once more.

"Chesmira of the Sio'mili coven. Is Moonsong the name of your coven?"

"No, it is my adoptive father's name. You are the first vampire I have laid eyes upon."

"You have no coven then?"

"I would not even pretend to know the term."

"They are our families; the coven lord, his wives, and his children. If you were not raised in a coven do you know how to fly?"

"Of course." He practically blurted the words with a puff of his chest. Muinteoir Lorenzo had always preached honesty as a virtue of truly intelligent men and his father had raised Skylur on the meaning of honor. Why he lied he could not say but something changed in her expression. "I had to teach myself, naturally, but it was well worth the trials."

"You cannot be very good I think."

"I can strike a running deer with ease."

"You hunt deer?"

"What else?" She gave a silent sweep of one hand towards the city around in answer. The nightmarish stories of his breed came to mind once more. They were stories of monsters in the night carrying away children and slaying indiscriminately until a hero put an end to the beast. It seemed impossible she could suggest such wickedness to him.

"You mean humans?" he asked with heart in throat.

"Of course. They are chreiche."

"That would be evil."

"Why?"

"Why? Because they are rational living souls as much as you or I."

"We are born higher than them, predators supreme. Humans may do many things but they will always be of a lower order than us. We are the nobility placed over them."

"It is the duty of nobles to care for and serve those beneath them. Even by your views I would be a tyrant to take life that is not mine. A noble would protect them rather than hunt indiscriminately. If predator I am it will be on my terms and no other's. I hunt the animals of the land, not the innocent humans."

"What if they tithe willingly to their lord?"

"Even if some fool would submit to that torment the last thing I should want is a taste for human blood."

A slow smile crept across her features with the dawning of a new realization. "They taught you to fear yourself. Did they tell you their blood would make you a monster? That it might make your deer seem less after?"

"I'm not afraid of any such thing." Skylur folded his arms together across his chest as much as his wings would allow. Her teasing tones had a way of setting the fur along his neck on edge he rather disliked.

"I can see you wearing one of their holy symbols around your neck from here. I think it tells you to be afraid to be a Draiochta."

"No," he said with a narrowed gaze and wrapped one hand around the star, "It says I have a choice in how I live. I'm choosing to better myself above the lot of a blood thirsty beast. I am an intellectual taught by the best mind in all of Strumvald on nearly every subject there is worth knowing."

"You think well of yourself. Let me see you fly."

"To what end?"

"You said you were taught on everything worth knowing. There is nothing worth more to the Draiochti than flying," Chesmira said with a self-satisfied smile.

"A gentleman always permits the lady to go first, at least among civilized society."

"If you think I will not lose you too soon."

He watched transfixed as she spread her wings and sprang from the lamp post into the breeze. She had called his bluff and called him a fool all at once. In this one terrible moment the only other member of his race he had known was lifting up into the night sky, perhaps to leave his lying tongue behind forever. It was a moment both terrible and beautiful for in the graceful motions of her body something deep inside Skylur stirred. An understanding no amount of study or speaking with hawkers could relate to him.

Skylur leapt into the night behind her and felt the wind beneath his wings like a missing friend that had always been behind him, waiting to be noticed. His arms pulled forward into the night wind even as his body moved with the unseen currents, guided by an instinct bred into his race as much as he was guided by the weeks spent with his muinteoir watching the birds and standing atop windy hills. In that moment he finally knew the joy he had missed his whole young life and he knew what he wanted then more than concert halls and published works. It flew just barely ahead of him now.

"I say, did they just take flight? Both of them?" Muinteoir Lorenzo squinted against the moonlight in vain, trying to catch some detail from his little rowboat on the water. He could tell two silhouettes had just flown from their perches along the docks. He could also tell they were too large to be birds. Beyond that, the elderly man could only make conjectures.

"Yes, with him chasing after her," said the wolf-eyed man in growling tones. The night held no mysteries from his eyes which only seemed to put him in a mood for gnawing his tongue in frustration. "He's too young for this."

"Oh come now, how can you be sure that was even a woman?"

"I'm sure."

"Dreading meeting her family then are you?"

The glare and growl that followed had made more than a few men repent their crimes yet the old savant seemed to pay no mind at all to sharing a boat with such a dangerous temperament.

"Skylur is a well-bred and educated young man," said Lorenzo with a dismissive wave of one hand. "Be at ease, he's too rational of a mind to do anything hasty."

Dawn had come and gone hours before yet Skylur felt no need to either rest or stir. Chesmira lay in the crook of his wing nestled close to him. While he wondered on life she slept soundly against him, less a stranger to his senses but still no less mysterious than before. He considered her with his dark eyes and even lifted a hand to comb lightly through the curls of raven hair that fell along the cream of her body. The touch made her seem no less dreamlike or fragile, as though he might wake at any moment to the sound of his father preparing breakfast.

They lay beneath an ancient oak tree atop a grassy hill. The city of Strumvald lay within his sight below, already busy bustling with its daily business. The familiar gothic stonework that characterized the many towers and spires of the city looked older to him than it ever had before then, like a tawdry antique. It all seemed so far removed from where he was now.

His fingers traced down along the arm she had draped over his chest until they came to where her wing bones joined with her hand, something he had only ever known from his own body. As familiar as she seemed to him she was still something alien to his life before then.

Her stories of growing up among the wilds were nothing like what he had read in his muinteoir's books. Chesmira spoke of the intrigues between covens as complex as anything human society offered. Like some fairy tale she had even fled an arranged marriage with another coven lord. There were nights soaring among the peaks of the mountains and forests that never knew a human foot. It called to him as sweetly as any siren of the Devil's Straight.

Tales of his childhood with his father seemed dull by comparison yet she had listened to every word. She was fascinated with the daily life of the city and the most common of things. Learning to ride horses or play violins seemed mundane but captured her attention as well as any bard may have done. When he confessed to having lied about his flying she only said he was a natural for the Draiochti's greatest gift.

Then his thoughts wandered to what had come after. Just as all he thought he had known of vampires was stripped away by her, so too was everything he thought he knew of women. No book of romantic tales could convey what he had felt in the early dawn with the two lovers entwined. No human woman's smile or sigh had ever given him such longings. No writer had ever told him how precious the moments after with her asleep by his side would be.

Skylur looked to the city again. His father waited there along with a full day of study under Muinteoir Lorenzo, easily one of the greatest minds of his age. A man like Lorenzo Montillado knew people of influence both in the sciences and the arts. There was no doubt he could make a living publishing and composing. It would not be a rich life but it would be comfortable enough given how Skylur loved his literature and music. Were she someone else, Chesmira might share that with him.

He let his hand brush down against her back while he thought. She was raised in a culture vastly different to what he had always known. In the city she could only find disaster and unease. It was a world he himself was raised to know and still found life hard, prejudice common. Better he should leave behind what he knew and enter her world of eternal nights away from human rules and fears. To stay with Chesmira, and know she was safe, meant living in her world by her laws. His faith told him to stay by her side and a part of him greatly longed to obey that tenant.

"Still awake?" she asked with a yawn. So many would have found the sight of her fangs so bared terrifying. To him it was an answer to the most terrible problem in his young life.

"Not for much longer."

"Are you still thinking?"

"No, I think I'm done with that."

"Oh? So what now, my lord?"

"Now I shall lie down and rest until the night," he said with a kiss to her cheek. She smiled and reached her hand back to comb through his hair.

"And after that?"