They walked to a less-travelled bridge, erected when Drallum was a collection of taverns and brothels around a port. It wasn’t wide enough to accommodate city traffic, meaning it had fallen into disrepair. It was rumoured to be dangerous, but so was what they were about to attempt. Rotting bridges were the least of their worries. 

No matter how vague, writings about the Sea were saturated with birds and bridges. At first, Cora dismissed it as imagery. Symbolism to try and explain the unexplainable. Then they considered the likelihood of hundreds of different authors all from different places and times, choosing the same metaphor. Birds were said to occasionally fly off the edge of the world and dive into the Sea. Particularly at bridges and crossroads, where the boundary between worlds was said to be weakest. All manner of writers agreed on this, from an ancient nun to a university professor whose sex scandal Cora had read about in the paper. 

They stood shivering, the rush of the river failing to drown out their thoughts. In recent weeks it had become faster and higher, a torrent of murky grey water. They held up the vial, considering that it probably should be taken over multiple days. They considered how long multiple days were. They shut their eyes and downed the mixture in a single gulp.

First, they felt sick. Then the pain hit them, so bad they couldn’t muffle their screams. Every bone in their body twisted and cracked. Their muscles were torn, compressed, bent into strange shapes. Their organs began to push against their skin, forming an incessant drum-beat of agony. They stopped thinking. Time ceased to mean anything. Their world condensed to a single, bright dot of pain. 

They didn’t want to live, but they didn’t die. The pain eased, and their mind returned. Piece by fragmented piece. The pain was never far, and it threatened to return every time they tried to perceive their body. It was different, but that was all they could glean. It had wings. 

They had forgotten, in the haze of fear, that flying was something people aspired to. They had never understood hot air balloons, when one summer every idiot with ready cash was going up in one. It seemed a lot of fuss for a few moments in the air. They spun and dived, buffeted by the wind, and gained a new understanding of stupid balloons. Of course everyone tried to fly. 

They flew into the mist, racing towards the horizon. Mist and mirrors. Everything around them was bathed in silvery grey. Wreathed in a cloud, they flew up until the city disappeared and directions lost meaning. 

They kept moving, spinning in aimless circles trying to collect their thoughts. Something nagged at the corner of their mind, something strange yet familiar. An awareness. A sense, as natural as sound or sight. It had a soft, fast heartbeat and was older than consciousness. Cora tried to shut off all of their mind save this awareness, letting it guide their flight. 

The awareness burnt. It was reacting to something. The sky was changing. It was heavier, full of soft, dancing hues of light. Cora felt sorry for all the poetic types that hung around taverns abusing substances. If they were given a glimpse of the thing that wasn’t sky, art would never be the same again. 

Cora had seen the sea before. Their parents had packed up a hamper and scrimped for a train ticket to a crowded tourist trap in the pouring rain. Cora had gazed out at the vast, grey expanse of water, and begged for five more minutes. They were bribed back on the train with boiled sweets and emphatic promises of next year. There hadn’t been a next year.

The Sea was different. It had the same vastness. The water was a little too viscous, and full of symbols. It moved so fast that some of those symbols were letters, and some of those letters formed words before falling apart. The water gave Cora a disconcerting sense of being watched. When they stared into it, it stared back. They twisted their head to the side, and could have sworn they felt it blink. 

The voice that fell from the sky was too human. It was a thousand human voices synthesised into something alien. It wasn’t emotionless, but the emotions it contained were unrecognisable to a human. “Cora? What are you doing here?” Cora avoided asking how it knew their name. Even if they answered, it wouldn’t get them anywhere. They thought hard, trying to project their words outwards.
“What are you doing to the city? People are dying, and you’re watching. You don’t- can you feel malice?” The voice hesitated. 

The mouthpiece of cosmic randomness wasn’t meant to hesitate. In that moment, aeons passed. Cora became sharply aware of how high up they were and of how much death by falling would hurt. Their mind spun. The letters crashed together with renewed intensity. “We aren’t-” the voice was drowned out by the spinning. Both of the water and inside their head. They fought to stay conscious, but the blackness hit. They fell.