As a child, Heidi had always enjoyed watching the clouds float by overhead. She would lie beside her brother for hours, watching the fluffy white puffs meander across a flat expanse of beautiful blue. Though Seraf was gone, she still enjoyed the clouds. She would never tire of their foreign beauty. There was a magic in the fact that there were so few ways to describe a cloud. What was it, but a white, cottony-looking object in the distance above her? Occasionally a cloud would take on the appearance of something familiar– a diamond, a sword, a swirling scarf. But these were names for a particular (and more importantly transient) cloud– not clouds in general.

After meeting Skuff, she was able to really experience clouds. The angel-boy, with bones that were hollow-but-hard, offered one day, to let her taste a cloud.

“What?” she’d said, disbelief in every line of her young, scar-darkened face, disbelief in violet eyes. Even her hair, as gold as the sun rising in the east, seemed to radiate her skepticism for his offer.

“I can let you touch a cloud, Heidi. Would you like to try?” He had smiled then, so perfect and beautiful a smile that she could not help but be intrigued.

“Alright,” she said, placing a small pale hand in his tan, gloved one.

“Sit on my back,” he instructed, helping her get into position, seated on the back of his hips. Her legs he wrapped around his front, crossing her ankles for her, and her arms he looped around his neck, warning her softly not to choke him. She nodded, still not truly believing that what he had offered was possible.

She had only seen his wings the one time– the first day he’d traveled with them. But as he stood there, face upturned to the azure sky, arms spread outward beneath her clinging limbs, he whispered words in a language she didn’t know. The words felt old, rolling off his tongue in a terrifying, beautiful way. His body shone white-gold, and when she blinked away the spots, white feathered wings stretched out on either side of her.

Heidi gasped, reached out to touch one. “Ah-ah,” he murmured, and she instantly jerked her hand away, wrapping it tightly around him again. He crouched, legs bending, and she had just enough time to second-guess before he leaped into the air.

Wings beating, wind rushing. Her hair was blown every which way. She kept her eyes wide open, watching the countryside shrink to almost nothing below her as they gained altitude. He kept rising, and rising, and rising, until she felt her lungs starting to ache, and she whimpered slightly, a pitiful little sound like a sad puppy makes.

He nodded, jet locks waving in her face playfully in the breeze, and he stilled his wing-movements. She squealed happily, recognizing his shift into a simple downward glide.

“Look,” he murmured, pointing to his left. She followed his direction, and gasped.

A cloud.

Not just a cloud, but a cloud that looked like a shield. She reached out to it, fingers missing by scant issues, and Skuff banked, taking her directly through it. Before she could react, her head had passed straight through the cloud.

“Ah! It’s cold!”

He laughed. “Clouds are made of water, Heidi, didn’t you know?”

She blinked, drying her face with the sleeve of her white sundress. She licked her lips, lapping up the moisture there. “I do now.”

He chuckled, then said softly, “Hold on, Heidi.” She blinked in confusion, but grabbed on tighter, not sure what he was going to do. He pulled in his wings with a snap, clutching the feathers close to his body, and they began to plummet, streaking toward the ground like a white arrow. She shrieked, part of her terrified– but part of her was thrilled. At the last possible moment, he threw his wings open, air instantly striking the bottom of them and lifting him up. They skimmed across the grass, dipping over the surface of a lake, the toes of Skuff’s boots making little ripples in the water. As they neared their earlier campsite, the former street rat flared his wings upward slightly, slowing until he could set his feet down at a light jog.

“Skuff,” Heidi muttered, eyes frozen open, face clutched against his shoulder.

“Hm?”

“That was amazing.”

He laughed. “I bet you’ll never cloud-watch the same way again,” he teased.