Imu soared through the moonlit sky of the North Blue, the chill night air rushing past him. the massive leathery wings beating a steady rhythm against his back. Below the ocean stretched endlessly in every direction a vast expanse of dark water dotted with the occasional lights of distant islands or ships.
The feeling was wonderful.
A genuine and unguarded smile spread across Imu's face as he performed a barrel roll which is reveling in the sheer freedom of movement.
No ship, no constraints, no boundaries just the open sky and the power to traverse it at will. He climbed higher, until the islands below became mere specks and the air grew thin and cold.
'This... this is true freedom,' he thought, the wind whistling past his ears. 'To fly without restrictions.'
As he glided on an updraft Imu's thoughts drifted back to his previous life on Earth. 'Modern Earth,' he mused, 'with its airplanes and helicopters. Humans could fly, but only sealed in metal tubes, dependent on complex machinery and fossil fuels. They conquered the sky through engineering, not through their own power.'
He remembered reading about the early pioneers of flight Leonardo da Vinci with his sketches of flying machines, the Wright brothers with their first airplane at Kitty Hawk and the countless daredevils who had strapped on makeshift wings and leaped from towers and cliffs, only to crash to earth in broken heaps.
'They tried so desperately to mimic the birds' Imu thought a touch of melancholy coloring his memories. 'They dreamed of soaring like eagles, of feeling the wind beneath their own wings. But none of them succeeded. Their attempts were clumsy, dangerous, ultimately futile. But this attempts also built the foundation of flying machines.'
He remembered the footage he did seen of base jumpers and wingsuit pilots - humans coming closest to natural flight, yet still falling, still dependent on parachutes to survive their descent. 'Always falling, never truly flying. Always temporary, never permanent.'
'And now here I am' Imu thought, stretching his wings to their full span, feeling the powerful muscles flex and contract. 'Flying. Truly flying. Not in a machine. Not with artificial aids. With these wings part of me, an extension of my will and power.'
He dove sharply, plummeting toward the churning sea below, pulling up at the last moment with a triumphant cry that echoed across the water. The spray from his near-miss misted his face, cool and refreshing.
'They would have given anything for this,' he thought, thinking of all the humans throughout history who had dreamed of flight. 'The inventors, the artists, the dreamers. All of them longing to touch the clouds, to see the world from above, to know the freedom of the sky.'
Imu leveled out, cruising at a comfortable altitude, the moon casting his shadow across the waves far below.
The North Blue spread out beneath him like a map, its currents and weather patterns visible from his vantage point. He could see storm systems brewing in the distance, schools of large fish disturbing the surface, even the faint glow of bioluminescent creatures in the deep.
'This is better than any airplane flight' he thought with satisfaction. 'No cramped seats, no safety instructions, no turbulence. Just me and the sky, and beneath boundless ocean below.'
As the night deepened, Imu felt no fatigue, no desire to rest. The exhilaration of flight filled him with energy, with purpose. The stars above seemed brighter and clearer than he had ever seen them in his previous life which was untainted by city lights or pollution.
"Sleep?" Imu laughed, the sound carried away by the wind. "Why would I waste this glorious night sleeping? I have the entire sky to myself, an endless ocean beneath me, and the freedom to go wherever I wish."
He banked again, heading north toward a cluster of islands he could see on the horizon. 'I will fly all night,' he decided with a sense of joy and liberation warming him despite the chill air. 'I will explore every corner of the North Blue from above. I will watch the sunrise from a place no human has ever seen it. I will greet the dawn not from the deck of a ship or the window of a building but from the sky itself.'
With that decision made Imu pushed his wings to their full power, shooting forward like a dark arrow across the moonlit sea.
The world below was his to observe, to understand, to command. And tonight, he would claim the sky as his kingdom, reveling in a freedom his previous self could only have dreamed of.