First Flight

The ledge holds no more comfort. Wind tastes like distance now, like all the mornings you watched your shadow grow wings.

You have memorized this sky in pieces—a scrap of blue, the silver belly of clouds, the way light bends where nothing holds it.

Below, the world breathes in shapes you don't recognize yet. Your claws remember stone. Your lungs remember stillness.

But the air is calling in a language older than fear, older than the soft nest that held you in its palmed hands.

You fold. You leap. You become.