The war nonwithstanding, the hospitality of the hotel I was staying in wasn't bad. Hekshanians have a sort of morbid interest in Mites, although I don't know why. We learned back in high school that it was possiable the two races evolved kind of like eachother, but that doesn't explain it. Mites don't feel the same way.

My brothers and I weren't typical Mites, though. We were something altogether different, another race entirely. Preformers. We lived for that, and that alone.

That, and ritual. Ritual said I would write home when I got to the hotel room. The letters weren't elaborate, were nothing special and for the most part went to friends and cousins. I'd mention anything funny that happened during the week and that would wrap it up. Alix tripped over the bass during rehersal before the show and it had made a sound kind of like a computer farting- that's the kind of thing I write home about.

It's three flights of stairs straight up and creeky. I don't like stairs and I like them even less with the sword over my shoulder. Right about the second landing I wish I'd let Alix have it, because it's heavy to lug up and down and all around the galaxy. I'd think of a way to get it up the steps with less effort, but by the time I actually convince myself that even thinking about it would be worth the effort, I'm already at the door of my room and clicking the key in the lock as I hum. Well, that's life.

The room's exactly the same as I left it before we left, towards the evening. Housekeeping will probably stop by around noon tomorrow, when I'm asleep and can't answer the door. Oh well.

I cross the floor, toss the sword onto the false wood-topped desk against the wall. It clatters there, some of the rust flakes chipping off and making small piles on the shiny surface. That's going into the letter too, the fight over the sword. I do a three sixty and jump back-first onto the bed, hitting, bouncing, looking up at the cracked ceiling.

Every once in a while, we wind up being banned somewhere as a band. I think that's terriably cool, personally. I don't think Alix or Chris really think about it much, though. Every band should be illegal somewhere, I think. It's like a trial you get to go through. Do you change, and un-ban yourself? Do you fix what they say you did wrong and sugar pop yourself up so everyone can listen to you without feeling the least bit disturbed, or do you keep your original sound and original philosophy and original self and keep at it even though some people don't like what you do?

Because all three of us are in it together, I don't know what I personally would do. But it doesn't really matter, because as a group the choice we made was to be true to ourselves and our own philosophy.

I write some of this down on a free pad of paper the hotel left on the nightstand with a pen that has their logo emblazoned on it. You know the food on Hekshano is god aweful. At least around this town. They eat bland and way too fast. I guess those kind of go hand in hand, cause if you can't taste something why take a long time eating it? It isn't my thing though.

I'm still in the middle of the letter when I hear Chris and Alix thump up the stairs. It's not their feet on the stairs that I recognize or their voices or anything like that, it's the fact that Alix is very loudly calling me an idiot. Ahh, brotherly love. I'd throw something at the wall, but I'm too lazy. Instead I just call back at him. "Get ye to bed, Sir, before the battle ensues!"

"Ooo. You're going to talk me to death." He'd keep poking fun, and so would I, but he passes further down the hall after Chrisodeo and into their own room.

Tomorrow, we get on the plane that jumps off to Contura. That's our next big show area. It's getting harder and harder to keep moving from place to place, so after that we're probably going to get as near our original home as possiable and set up there. It's been fun, yeah, but times are getting dangerous and it's better not to push our luck.

I've always had trouble sleeping the night before a flight. Maybe I'm worried I'll oversleep and miss it, or maybe I'm just anxious. Either way, that combined with the fact that the beds here aren't designed for avian races. Can't blame the Hekshanians for that, they sure don't have wings. But all the same, it means I have to sleep on my stomach, which I don't do well. So flipping and flopping, still riding the excitement I always feel after a performance, I lie here.

I must have fallen asleep, because I'm waking up now. Jolting up, somewhere between too fast and too slow, feeling blurred and confused. At first I'm thinking back to what my dream was...something involving a house on roller skates and me fighting an alien virus. So I blink in the dark best I can, trying to sort wheeled houses from reality.

Then I realize that the shaking and rattling that the wheeled house in my dreams was making is still being made, and it's filling up my room like an overflowing bathtub. The weird light on the ceiling and walls isn't sunlight and isn't lamplight. It's something else, seizuring in from the window. I try to get up and get over to see, stumbling and weighted with sleep. I make it out of the bed, make it across the floor and lean on the desk for support. I'm slow on the wake, I always was. It isn't until the scraping sound on the wood crackles up to my ears that I realize my fingers are touching the blade of the sword.

Something shot from the blade to my brain just then. Maybe it was my mind just waking up, or maybe it was a realization shocking me into wakefulness. Maybe it was something else. But I finally knew it. I recognized the sounds that until now I'd only heard on television. I knew the origin of the light. Bombs, bullets, war. It was happening here, on Hekshano and it had caught me off guard.

Of course you hear the rumors while you're traveling in wartimes. But truth is the first casualty of war. What really happens is usually left to whisper down the lane and can be blown just as out of preportion as if it's in the papers or on the broadcasts. So you stick to what you yourself know.

This just happened to be one of the cases I would have prefered not having to stick to my own knowledge on.

You have to imagine yourself in my position at the moment. Waking up and realizing that the city is being bombed around your ears leaves you somewhat paralyzed. Like me, you can get out of bed and wake up. But more likely you'll freeze, lock your brain up and find you're unable to move. I was a little beyond that, but just because I was already on my feet. I wanted to look out the win dow, but at the same time I felt things in the back of my mind saying 'what if, what if.' What if when I walked to that window, I got hit by gunfire? What if a bomb hit and I was impaled on flying shrapnel and lay on the floor bleeding to death? But standing here wouldn't help me. What if a bomb hit the building and my only hope was to jump out the window, but by being frozen here I wouldn't make it in time? These are the thoughts that rammed into eachother in my head and had me stuck in place, unable to think of anything else.

I was in the war. I was in the war. Until now it'd always seemed a million miles away, like it could happen anyplace I wasn't. It's like you hear the statistics about houses being broken into or something on the tele, but you don't expect yours to be broken into. So you never see it coming. I never saw it coming, that's for certain.

Knowing the state of shock that this sort of situation can put you in, I probably would have stood there unmoving until I was either found, or killed. But there was a clattering sound of metal on wood again, waking me up. I hadn't even noticed my hands were shaking, six claws twitching with a nervousness that takes you right out of your own body. The sword had noticed, though. The rusty, junky, heavy sword had been against my hand, had shaken when I had shaken. It clattered and brought me back. The symphony outside was making my stomach and lungs vibrate, the explosions beating in the air, but with the clatter of the sword, the shock went to the back of my mind.

I didn't have a purpose, I didn't feel a mission burning in my stomach. I felt no less confused than when I had woken up. But now I could move. I clapped both hands down on the grip of the sword, turned, folded down my wings and ran. I went at the door shoulder-first, feeling panic starting to crawl up from below my stomach, down where I was feeling the blasts. The doorknob stopped obeying me, I was struggling with it and the sword in my hands, not wanting to let go of the weapon despite how useless it would be in reality. Clawtips slipped uselessly on the metal, I fumbled, the knob clicked but went nowhere.

Everything is so simple when you're not being mind-raped by uncontrolled terror. The door wouldn't listen, didn't listen, eventually listened and I scrambled into the hallway with all the grace of a terrified horror movie heroine, only clinging to a sword and full aware that I could be killed at any second, but by something I wouldn't see coming.

Hallways are never menacing until you're already menaced. Long, empty, and you keep expecting it to either open up and swallow you whole or for something to come around a corner, ugly and completely undefinable and rush at you. All the doors had been flung open, no sounds I could hear besides the gunfire and shattering outside. I ran for Alix and Chrisodeo's room- it was a meter away but it seemed to take a year to get there. The floorboards shook like an earthquake, but I knew it wasn't that. The building rumbling around me, I nearly fell into the room my brothers had been staying in.

Sheets were thrown off the beds, their things were still there, but they were gone. Maybe evacuated, maybe taken, I had no idea. I could feel my legs wanting to just fold up, wanting to kneel down on the floor and throw any rationality out the window. Everyone wants to do that when they're panicked and something else goes wrong. Everyone needs to break down. My knees bent, I started to drift down towards the floor. I could feel the fur on my wings scratching the carpet, felt the pressure of the bombs coming through the window and onto my face. I would have fallen, I would have laid on the floor until something came and blasted the room to peices. I would have, but holding the sword in my hands, the tip hit the floorboards on my gradual sink and jarred me to a halt. Again, the rusted thing woke me up.

I don't know if I believe in fate, ghosts, or anything like that. I don't know what I thought of the sword, why it kept doing this, or if it was just coincidence. I don't believe I had the time. Because I woke up again, and I took the chance that had been given to me, and I ran.

The building rattled like some giant toddler had gotten up and was trying to bring it down with their stubby child hands. I lurched from side to side, streams of chalky substance leaking from the walls and ceiling. The drywall was cracking, insides pouring down on top of me, but I kept running. Not down, not to the ground. There would be fighting in the streets, more danger on the ground. In the stairwell, I climbed up, my heart squirming in my throat, choking out air. I felt sick, I felt broken, I felt like I must have been hit with something somewhere and had to be bleeding. I just didn't know it, I just wouldn't know it until I had time to look. No time now, no time to stop and panic.

It was like climbing out from the throat of a dragon, the stairwell was creaking and tearing itself apart around me. Steps from higher up came loose in the shaking of the bombs and threw themselves down, the walls were splitting open and tearing themselves apart. I ran the best I could, I tripped, I fell. My shins scraped far too fast and far too long against the rim of the steps- I could feel my fur tearing out and my skin being burned away on my pants. I cried out, but couldn't stop. My brothers could have gone this way, I told myself. They might be at the top of the stairwell. And so I forced myself up the crumbling steps, tripping and stumbling, gasping for breath, throwing myself against the top level door and spilling onto my side against the rooftop.

Shingles are so warm, even at night. You don't expect them to be. I could feel the warmth slinking through my cloths and against my skin. All the warmth from people below had come and trapped itself in the shingles. The building shook under me, trying to rip itself up and run somewhere else. My hair stuck to my forehead with sweat, with panic, with dirt from the ceilings and walls. My leg throbbed. The sky throbbed back, echoing flashes of white and red. Flickers of fire on the ground, the sky smogged with debris. I could see them sweeping in and out of the clouds, planes from someone's side of the war. The semicircle flashes of bombs going off were painted on the smoke, something you see in photography but never in reality.

But I had to keep moving. I couldn't lie there staring upwards, hurting. Still and on my side, I flexed the muscles in my wings. I couldn't hear it in the crying of warfare, but I could feel the clicks as my bones shifted themselves and hitched together. The skin and fur went taught, spread into sails behind me- I could feel that too. It hurt to move, it hurt to roll over, hands still wrapped in a death grip on the hilt of the rusted sword. Using the old weapon as a crutch, lifting my wings behind me, I could feel the heated air from the explosions on my face. Standing slowly, tilting into the wind.

It's a thing you have to train yourself to do well, flying. Mites are gliders, not flyers. Like a kite. In this moment, that is what I told myself. To be still, to spread my wings, to hold the sword and to let the air take me upwards on its own. My legs dangled as the wind lifted me, pushing me up and away from the building. I waited. I could smell the oil from the bombs' fuel in the air all around me, I imagined I could feel them streaking so close to my wings they would tear right through the tightened skin. There was no way I would open my eyes, not until I had drifted in this cocoon of my own making.

I did drift. Through some miricle, nothing knocked me from the sky. My legs became numb from hanging without circulation. The explosions subsided, but the gunfire picked up their slack. I knew what had to be happening down there. I'd heard, I'd read, but I had never seen it myself. I didn't want to see it now. The smoke must have been what saved me, sweeping around me and hiding me from the ground.

When I opened my eyes, when I let myself control the glide, I brought myself down roughly on another rooftop. Where it was, there was no way to tell. Everything looked the same, anyway. Things were quiet now, sick quiet, puncutated with the sound of buildings sliding in on themselves. Nothing moved, no one was moving down below. It was just me and the sword. We were alone.

I don't know what happened to my brothers. I don't know what happened. But in my own way, the bite of rusted metal into my hands was something meaningful. In my own way, the clicking folding popping slacking sensation of my wings returning to their normal size was an opening number for the show I would try to put on. In my own way, I was playing a song to the burnt and bombed city. In my own way, I would get them back.