Queen of the Jungle – Melissa Bandara

On days like this, Hestral felt he was one of the only beings alive. If he didn’t look down into the rolling Rorschach dust clouds below, and just focused on the complete blue saturation of the sky above, he felt powerful and at peace and powerful.

There was something about blue, and the little white stretch marks shifting in the sky’s body that calmed his racing heart. It was why he came up early for his shift, flying through the brown fog with his beak closed and goggles on, to just breathe. He spread his wings, his primaries spreading out like a giant’s soft fingers. Their brindled markings caught the light. He was surprised that the lines, the absence of colour in the light, could be replaced by sun-streaks on such clear mornings above like this.

He was lucky. It was hard work to perch and observe the human and avian crime below, no less dive to intervene, but he was lucky. He was worried, though, that it was starting to get to his head, alongside the thinner oxygen. The power.

From the tower, they looked so minuscule. Ants below, their problems and organisation routine and petty. The air billowed gently through the filigree roof above him, caressing his facial feathers like an intimate friend. The austere pattern had been added in three hundred years ago to commemorate the bicentenary of peace between the Avians, in part aided by the Ciel Task Force’s unscrupulous observances of—and interference with—the crime and shenanigans going on below.

He sat down, clawed feet dangling over the edge. He rocked them back and forth, feeling like he was walking on air.

Brianna Bullen

The building had archways looking out in all four directions. He sat to the north, watching the ocean, seeing seagulls glide with their feet skimming across the surface to pluck fish for the markets. It was honest work, and so was his. He looked up at the ceiling of the sandstone archway. Names of enlisted officers were graffitied on every brick. If he hit two years of service, he wanted his name to be written—embossed, even— beside Lefere C’iel Augustus, beloved heroic albatross, ace flyer of the first division. Sit above his chickenscrawl.

He was becoming an Icarus; he wanted to fly higher.

It was lucky they made him work with a partner. A logical thinker to prevent Hestral from getting too birdbrained, too full of big ideas. They believed he would be tempted to fly away on the job. It only happened one time! But that had been enough. He would sulk that they only wanted him for his sharp eyes and speed for how he had excelled in their tests. An ace flyer, though, needed a champion grounding force. Think of the Devil. Don’t even need to speak his name for him to appear. For such a big avian, Albie was deft and light on his wings. Those wings were over Hestral’s eyes before he had heard him, curled up over his face from both sides. A strange Peeka-Boo.

‘Still dreaming of flying through the universe, space cadet?’ His brother-in-wing’s love-heart face taunted him with what he could not have.

It ruffled his feathers. ‘I’m just falling into that blue. Don’t even have to move.’