They were pale and willowy, nearly see through. Hardly something on which to lay the hopes of a civilization. And at first not many did. The sky folk of Nyoxria are a cautious people. Their home doesn’t allow them the luxury to be anything else. The largest planet in the cluster, Nyoxria’s surface is unreachable, constantly battered by the boiling turmoil of a hideous storm. The Nyoxrians adapted to this through simple means: they live above the clouds. If clouds they could be called. More alike they are to a ravenous beast, such a beast that has no form, lives no life, and feels nothing but hunger. This beast covers the entire planet, a brilliantly colored canopy of unbreachable cosmic anger. Looking down on this technicolor churn, the Nyoxrians exist in their floating citadels. Gothic spires rising from behind turret dotted walls, arranged to guard massively elaborate keeps that loom out over the long horizon of the giant planet. While many are fortresses, to label them all as such would be an oversimplification. Surrounding these citadels are villages and towns, varying in size and level in their construction, nonetheless floating lazily through the vaporous atmosphere. No naming distinction is made between the different types, and the Nyoxrians call them all the Voltum.
Aer lived before the Zyrma came, with their corrupted cosmic steads and metal giants, when there were still thousands of Voltum dotting the planet’s outer limits. To those approaching the planet the Voltum appeared as numerous as freckles on Nyoxria’s heated face. Aer’s parents lived in a Voltum resembling a small village. A hovering island of seven structures, it flew on the outskirts of a great grouping of Voltum that centered around a magnificent citadel. They were not Nyoxrians of renown, though the social structures and circumstances of Nyoxrian community prevented anyone from living too separate from anyone else. Often location and type of Voltum was determined through no more than personal preference, and with Aer’s family it was no different. If anything, Aer’s parents were known for their beauty.
Nyoxrians are tall and slender humanoids, graceful above all else, as demanded by the precarious nature of their environment. In the dark, and night does not come as clearly to Nyoxria as other planets, they emit a faint glow from within. While the light is a constant, the colors range as drastically as those of the storm. Nyoxrian’s number and placement of features, everything from eyes to appenditures, varies greatly, and they place much value in asymmetry, seeing beauty in lopsidedness. Three arms on the left and one on the right is seen nearly as favorably as having five eyes split between three heads. Aer’s father was a being in possession of five limbs, and their unique placement allowed him to switch between any three of them in order to move. His mother’s figure was rarer still, her having been blessed with nigh on eleven appendages, not all of which could be given the label limb. And that was merely his parents. There was one famous relative who had managed to grow only half a head and another that boasted one hand with eleven fingers. Consequently, Aer’s family was known for its crooked elegance, and, therefore, Aer was considered unusually ugly. For he had a terribly symmetrical appearance. Two legs and two arms, two feet and two hands, even four fingers and four toes. He had only one, clearly defined head, and two eyes. Every appendage was equally matched and proportionate in a way that felt unnatural to the Nyoxrians. And then there were, of course, the wings.
Every Nyoxrian had two stubs, equally spaced, on their back. A glaring symmetrical weakness that nature had not thought to dispose of. Aer’s wings were worse. A protrusion of this symmetry that sought in some perverted way to emphasize the fact of their existence. They were small at his birth, and in his early years his parents thought they might stay that size, just barely larger than the bumps the rest of them shared. It was not to be. The wings grew as he did, soon becoming the defining feature of the young symmetrical Nyoxrian. His parents were rightfully embarrassed by his appearance, though in the same way their handsomeness had failed to gain them much station, so did Aer’s ugliness fail to impede him. Perhaps had he been more keeping with his familial beauty, his gifts would have been discovered earlier. As it were, he lived a quiet and secluded early life. As secluded as possible in the close confines of the boundless Nyoxria sky.
As an adolescent, Aer was a quick learner, and ever active, a rare quality among his peers. Nyoxrians are stationary beings. They do not move much. This is in large part a contributor as to why, despite the nature of their existence, it is uncommon for someone to be lost to the planet’s storm. No one tumbles into the abyss. Nyoxrians do not take the chance. Aer despised this. Even before he first took flight, he would test the limits of his parent’s patience, often bounding from end to end of their Voltum, getting dangerously close to oblivion. When another Voltum came near enough to dock, which was admittedly an infrequent event, Aer would be the first across and the last to leave, and the only one to travel the bridge of connection multiple times. He dreamt of having the space to truly run, and felt a sense of imprisonment that is not easily exaggerated. A wild thing born of a most stable species, Aer craved uncertainty and adventure, all the while being presented with a definite, fixed path. Life is simple on the Voltum. The Nyoxrians know what they must do to survive, they had perfected it over the thousands of years during which they’d lived above the storm. Protect each other, maintain their flying homes, and never fall. It was the last one that Aer struggled with the most.
Many times did Aer nearly pay for his boundary pushing antics. On more than one occasion he would have been lost had a friend, or relative, or one time a complete stranger, not been there to heave him back from the edge. Some wonder if he had fallen earlier, known about his gifts sooner, might that have changed something? It might have, perhaps, hastened events, though by and large Aer’s story would have played out the same. As it were, Aer did not first take flight until he was nearly an adult. And it came by way of what, for anyone else, would have been a final and fatal fall. When Voltum dock they lower half a bridge from each side, similar to a drawbridge, that universally interlock in the middle. With early adulthood came natural foolishness, and Aer had taken up a liking to sitting on the edge of these bridges as they disconnected. He took great thrill from jumping between the gaps, waiting until such time as the feat was decidedly impressive before attempting it. Fearless as he was, some people say he must have already known, even if only on some instinctive level, the capability of the things on his back. Aer’s wings had at this point outpaced all his other features by great lengths, and when extended stretched a span easily twice the length of his body. They were the texture of light feathers, though they had none to speak of, and emitted the same warm, yellow-gold light that Aer himself did. They didn’t hinder his movement, as his father had often worried, and neither were they still the fragile extremities of his extreme youth. There was a strength exhibited in those wings, a power that might have been apparent sooner, had the Nyoxrians allowed themselves to remember what it meant to be free. The first time Aer used them was because he fell. He’d taken a great leap from bridge to bridge, but by some unlucky joke of nature, or some fortunate act of god, been knocked off course by a sudden and forceful wind. He plummeted toward Nyoxria’s great storm, and it boiled under him, as if anxious to receive an offering. Those present could do nothing but watch in horror as Aer fell, his mother’s scream the only sound that reached him as he approached the roar of the storm. And then they could see him no more. Yet it was not the clouds that had engulfed him; the boy had glided out of sight. There was a sound very unlike anything they’d ever heard, an immense and rhythmic beating. Aer landed unsteadily behind his panic stricken mother, her many appendages quivering in both fear and awe. His mind shifted through apology after apology, but he never needed to give one. She clutched him tightly at the waist as his magnificent wings curled around them. That day Aer was no longer the ugly one, but the one who could fly.
And fly he did. Aer had been given his ever desired freedom, and he had no intention of squandering it. The young Nyoxrian spent nearly all of the next few years in flight. There was rarely, if ever, a lengthy period of time during which he did not soar in the upper limits of the massive planet’s atmosphere. It is worth mentioning here, had he not been who he was, Aer would have lived the rest of his life simply as the one who could fly. No external factor compelled the following series of events to unfold, as many now conspiratorially believe. His parents knew who he was better than most, but any of Aer’s friends, and there were many, would say the same. That he was accursed with an inextinguishable sense of importance, that inescapable need to go beyond the bare minimum. There is the amount of purpose one needs to survive. And then there is the awful compulsion to do more, to be more. In Aer’s case, as with any who are great, the need is more than a want, it is a pressure. An assurance that one is not just better, but important. In this case, such an ego is more rational than what often plagues those of a more terrestrial disposition. Yet soaring close to the stars, Aer could not find that purpose.
This, in part, led him to consume knowledge. The Nyoxrians are careful documenters, and one of the largest treasures kept within the confines of their citadels are massive libraries written by those with nothing else to do but sit and watch. They are the scholastic masters of the cluster, and keep vast cosmic-scale volumes beyond the imagination of other planets. Aer pursued learning with enormous vitality, and now he was unlocked to do so in a way no other Nyoxrian had been able to before. For going between Voltum is a laborious task, and not always in the traveler’s control. Intended destinations stray from the projected atmospheric course more often than they stick to it. This manifests in such a reliably unreliable fashion as to give another reason why the sedentary style of the Nyoxrians comes as no surprise. Aer had, in these first years of flight, visited nearly all of the most famous Voltum.
The Nyoxrians are careful documenters...
But he had done so as a sightseer. Now he returned to the cathedral-like libraries with simple goals. Aer alone knows where his search began; it's where it concluded that remains certain, and the general thread he followed to get there can be approximately traced, starting with a fascination with the Voltum themselves.
The mystery of these magnificent flying dwellings is a closely guarded secret, so much so that the majority of the Nyoxrians themselves do not understand how they function. This doesn’t come about for lack of reasoning. They must be protected. To this day the Nyoxrians are severely limited by the number of Voltum that exist. There is debate on whether any new ones are being produced at all, or if the process of constructing them has been lost for millennia, and only now in the years after the Zyrma are the Nyoxrians beginning to notice the crisis. However, even in the time of Aer there was marked decline. Even centuries before the wars, wars that caused over half the known Voltum to sink smoking into the merciless storm, there was an existential feeling of dread among the graceful natives. The Nyoxrians knew as long as they lived above the clouds their days were numbered. Aer no doubt found the legends, they were not as popular in his time, but known nonetheless. Legends that speak of a time long past, when the surface of the planet was open to them, and they lived and multiplied in a way now impossible. And it was on this thread that Aer pulled, piecing together the tale of his people in a way that had not been done, not been possible to do, in living memory.
The work Aer did was not written down. He didn’t have the temperament to do so. But he talked. He flew from Voltum to Voltum, from citadel to village to town, speaking with his people. And among his words was a clear ideal; the Nyoxrians were not supposed to live in the sky. This does not seem controversial now, but it was Aer’s inadvertent preaching centuries ago that made it so. There was a common sentiment in his time that Nyoxria had no surface, and that the Nyoxrians had always lived in the air. Aer was often forced to argue against it with a trivial, if effective response: If that is the case, from where did we come? He did most of this work over the course of his first few years of full adulthood, which Nyoxrians marked by the slowing of growth. Aer had stopped growing, but his wings had not. In the last year of his life they spanned nearly four times his bodily length, to the extent that almost no dwelling, even in accounting for the absurd variety among Nyoxrian forms, could account for his massive wings. And it was in this last year that his purpose solidified. For the Nyoxrians truly are a community, and despite the many thousands of varied Voltum that they span, they can unify in ways distinctly surprising to other species. And they did so then, around the pure hopefulness of Aer’s message. They were meant to be below. The one hiccup being, of course, that the storm was still there. Until, one day, when once again Aer fell.
There were many witnesses. Aer had been perched upon an imposing tower, one that was connected to the second largest Voltum fortress in existence. At this point in time, he was an impressive figure. No longer did his people look with disdain at his contorted symmetry. They revered the upright simplicity of his form, dominated by the massive, softly glowing wings. His years of travel and study made him an impassioned orator, and Aer commanded the attention of those in attendance. Many had come to meet the one who could fly, and listen to what he had to say. He had been speaking on legends, telling the story of the Nyoxrians as he understood it, rallying them to the need to devote study toward solving the problem of the storm. It was an active speech, punctuated by dives off the face of the tower toward the rolling clouds below. At every dive the crowds would gasp and stare, and every dive he would risk straying closer and closer to the flashing lightning far, far below the safety of the Voltum. The legend goes that Aer discovered the ability he was about to demonstrate on his own.
Though if the tales of his restless nature are to be believed, it is far more likely that, as on the day he learned to fly, it was an accident. Furthermore, the last dive he took, the dive that stunned the planet, looked much more like a fall. A gust had pushed his wing under him, and they looked tangled as he plummeted faster and faster toward the hungry abyss. There were gasps and murmurs from the onlookers as he passed the previous furthest point he’d touched, and continued to speed downward with no appearance of slowing. There were a brief few seconds of realization, by those that had mapped the trajectories of Aer’s dives, where he passed a point of no return. He would touch that angry barrier. And then he did. And some closed their eyes. And those that didn’t exclaimed loudly. For he didn’t touch the storm. It parted around him.
Aer was not in the grasp of the storm for more than a few seconds, he’d pulled his wings around and glided sharply back skyward, but it was long enough to see it fall away before him. Any other Nyoxrian would have flown hastily back to a Voltum, and collapsed in a grateful heap, only stopping to think and ponder at the implications once safety was assured. Not Aer. Wings extended, and letting out powerful beats, Aer tried his luck again, letting himself head once more into the storm. And again it parted. Not yet satisfied, he went at it once more, nearly grasping for wisps of the multicolored clouds that vibrated with electricity. Still they eluded him. By the time he climbed the distance back up to the Voltum on which he’d been speaking, there was nothing the Nyoxrians could do but greet him with roaring cheers. The one telling them they must find a way back to the ground had shown them the way down. That day Aer was no longer the one who could fly, but the one who was chosen. The one who would save them all.
Word of the feat spread fast, faster than Nyoxrians cared to spread any news. There was much work to be done. Untold amounts of preparation, and countless questions that needed answers in the meantime. But what the Nyoxrians did mattered little, as it turned out. The focus still remains with Aer. As he’d traveled more and more, as some kind of common sense missionary, he’d spent less and less time in the libraries. Remarkably, after showing his ability to move the clouds, Aer’s studies increased. They became a furious hunt, consuming his mind in a way that was remarkable enough to leave such an impression on those close to him, that it stays a remnant of the story. And not retroactively added as a way to explain the end. It is noted that at the time it was seen as a positive pursuit, the young Nyoxrian exercising a certain amount of the care that, while not his personal nature, was well expected of his people. So the preparations were continued while Aer went on a quest to answer the questions.
He ventured further and further into the clouds. It was a radius that he exacted on the storm, a protective aura. This was learned when, after delving too far down, the storm closed over top of him. The briefest moment of panic gave way to careful composure once Aer realized gravity would inevitably lead him back above the clouds, for as lost directionally as he might become, his wings knew how to take him up. While he embarked on his dangerous quest of discovery, and trial and error, his brethren lashed together three Voltum in a way that had never been tried before, nor since. It seemed that anything Aer touched exuded his aura and so repelled the storm. Their plan was to make a grand ship that as many of them as possible could ride down to the surface. In his early days of learning, Aer had discovered all there was to know about the Voltum, including how to make them descend. So they built the ship on his instruction. It was the single greatest engineering process the natives of Nyoxria had ever undertaken, save perhaps the initial launch of the Voltum themselves. Had Aer’s doctrine not been spread so widely, had he not commanded such loyalty, the act would not only have never taken place, it would have been violently spurned. A demand of resources to this extent had never been commandeered by one individual, and has never been since.
Then Aer disappeared for nearly a cycle's length. Work very nearly stopped. Inquiries were sent out to the many Voltum he moved between, but word was slow in coming. A few were beginning to worry, when one day they saw the great warm span, and Aer alighted upon the central Voltum of the great ship. He announced he had seen the surface. The cheers were deafening. It is said the emotion that took over the Nyoxrians that day was more than what they’d expanded a thousand years before, and a thousand years since. Aer’s parents, who had traveled the vast distance from their home Voltum to join their son on the ship, were the only two that noticed the demeanor of their son. His face did not join in the revelry. Even the opposite, the cheering seemed to berate him, souring his expression into one of near anguish. Others will hear the testimony and say he was, at this moment, lost. That is not the case. Aer was burdened, but his resolve had not waivered. A horrible burden of purpose had set him on this course, and he had only to look in a mirror, no, feel the weight on his shoulders, to know the two grand reasons why he alone could see this through.
The ship was nearly ready, the Nyoxrians who would go first to explore the surface of their home decided. So it was that Aer announced he was to land on the surface. While he had seen it, he had not touched it. Had not felt it beneath his feet. Once this was done, and done safely, he would come back for his people. This caused a renewed frenzy. It became a lavish festival. A date was set, a party that all those intending to follow with their own first step would attend. They would send off their chosen with fanfare deserving of a savior, and the turning of an age, as those who lived at this time were sure that this would be. An end would come to their days floating wistfully through nothingness. They would move on solid ground.
Leading up to the day he was to descend, Aer was not seen. There was no one to notice that he was gone. And where he was, no one ever learned. Though when everything is properly considered, there is but one place he could have been: In the central citadel’s massive library.
It was the only indoor structure that could contain his incredible form. The day he was to leave, there came the single largest gathering of Nyoxrians ever recorded. Along with the three Voltum that comprised the ship, every single one that had floated by in the past year had stopped and docked, creating such an interconnected chain of them as was practically dangerous in its construction. But the caution that was so ingrained to the Nyoxrians no longer felt necessary. Today marked the beginning of their pilgrimage home. There was a central platform from which Aer was to launch, and everyone oriented around it, waiting breathlessly for him to emerge. Aer came out from the middle of the three Voltum that made the ship. He wore a large billowing robe that flowed out in many tendrils around himself. It was so huge as to cover his wings, and some even rolled their many eyes at the young ones' pageantry. They had to remind themselves he’d always been a bit of a strange youth, and that was what made him so special. A dull roar of excited chatter accompanied his walk out to the edge of the platform. All cramped and twisted in an effort to get a view of the chosen, who curiously had not yet spoken. He never would. The audience assumed he would call for quiet. He never had to. Once at the edge, staring over into the depths of the storm he had conquered for them, Aer let his robe slip away. The silence that fell was immediate, that of pure shock. His wings were gone.
His wings were gone...
Aer’s back held nothing but two violently bloody stumps. Ripped and torn, they were a gruesome reflection of each Nyoxrian’s own bitter stubs. The brilliant wings were no more. Not a word was said, not a word was needed. As linked as the Nyoxrians are, they shared the rush of realizations as one. Aer continued to stand in silence, his tall form once again ugly in the eyes of the people watching. And then he stepped forward. Before the murmur, before the questions could be asked and the explanations demanded, before the yelling and the blaming could begin, Aer took a simple step forward and plummeted off the edge. He fell with a horrible speed. For those who had watched him soar for years, dancing above and below and between their numerous homes, it was a terrible sight. Aer shot downward, slicing through the air, and was swallowed by the monstrous storm in an instant. And in an instant he was no longer the chosen, no longer the one who could fly, but the one who’d gone mad.
There is no way to say what could have taken place in the depths of that citadel, in the time preceding Aer’s last fall. Or, as is more probable, the time since he broke through the storm and laid his eyes on Nyoxria’s hidden surface. Aer was mourned by some, but called foolish by most. A liar and a deceiver by others. Some did blame him, thinking that he was their one chance at redemption. Though speaking to Nyoxrians now, he is remembered more as a tragic hero, who was given too serious a burden at too young an age. Strangely enough, the wings are hardly ever mentioned. It is as if they want to forget the gift that one of them was given. In the many years after, the Nyoxrians did what they did best, they continued to protect each other, care for and maintain the Voltum, and live out their quiet lives exiled above the clouds. A greater story would not come to their people until the arrival of the Zyrma, and the horrific wars that followed after. As for Aer, somewhere in a central citadel library, a scholar sat down to inscribe the chronicle of Nyoxria’s chosen. And after much deliberation, he concluded the tome thus:
He fell with a horrible speed...
Aer, our anointed, traversed a span of existence as grand as any Nyoxrian soul could fathom. He was alive in the promise of his youth, and the holiness with which he undertook his duty did, in spite of what many now believe, echo throughout our people. Permit me, if my words incline towards partiality, to avow my belief in the essence of this truth: Alas, but for some unspeakable malevolence, known only to Aer himself, he would have guided us to the surface, where we could have discovered our own freedom, unbound from the shackling sky.