Saturday Afternoon

Long before anyone remembered calendars or borders, the sky learned to share.
The First Wings
According to the oldest surviving texts, the world was once as it is now, grounded, heavy, certain of gravity. People walked, climbed, sailed, and dreamed of flight the way they dreamed of immortality: wistfully, foolishly, and from a distance.
Then came the Year of Ashened Moon.
A star, not a meteor, not a comet, passed so close to the world that midday dimmed into a copper dusk. Birds fell silent. Tides stumbled. For thirteen minutes, every shadow pointed the wrong way. Scholars later argued whether it was celestial radiation, divine intervention, or an accident of physics never meant to touch a living planet.
What mattered was what followed. Children conceived during the next nine months were different.
Not all of them. Not even most. But when the first winged child was born, the midwives thought it was a deformity. Two soft ridges along the shoulder blades, like folded leaves beneath the skin. By the third day, feathers pushed through. By the fifth, the child stretched, instinctively, and the room filled with a sound no one could name, the hush and rasp of wings learning themselves.
Panic spreads faster than understanding.
Some children were hidden. Some were worshiped. Some were killed out of fear before their wings fully unfurled. And many, far more than history likes to admit, were simply abandoned where cliffs met air, left to let gravity decide whether they belonged. It was decades before a pattern emerged.
The Balance
Half of all children were born winged.
Not by region. Not by bloodline. Not by faith, class, or choice. A winged child could be born to two ground-bound parents, and two winged lovers might produce a child with smooth, unbroken shoulders.
The world resisted this randomness at first. People searched for causes they could control: diets, prayers, alignments, sins. But the ratio never shifted. Always close. Always infuriatingly precise.
Half the world could fly. Half the world could not.
Eventually, someone gave the phenomenon a name: The Balance.
The Age of Division
Flight changed everything, but not in the ways the early dreamers imagined.
Winged people called Aeri by later scholars could cross mountains in hours, scout storms, and carry messages faster than any horse. They were invaluable in war and trade, and that made them dangerous.
At first, rulers tried to own them.
Winged children were conscripted young, trained to fly in formation, branded with sigils of loyalty. Cities built roost-towers and sky barracks. The ground-bound later, called Terrene, were told this was protection. That the skies needed guardians. But the skies, it turned out, did not like chains.
The first Sky Uprising began when a winged courier refused to deliver an order that would lead to the burning of a valley. He tore the seal from the message midair and let the ashes scatter over the capital like black snow. Others followed.
Winged militias formed, striking from above, unreachable by walls or moats. The ground-bound responded with ballista, nets, and early firearms. For nearly a century, the world lived in a constant state of looking up in fear.
Historians call this period The Broken Horizon because no one could look at the sky without imagining violence.
The Accord of Feathers and Stone
Peace came not from victory, but exhaustion.
Neither side could erase the other without destroying the world they shared. Winged cities starved without farmland. Grounded nations were blind without aerial scouts. Trade collapsed. The weather went unwatched. Crops failed because no one warned of storms in time.
The Accord was signed on a high plateau where flight and foot met equally.
Its central law was simple and radical:
Wings were not a weapon.
Flight was not a rank.
And no child would be claimed by the sky or the ground before they chose for themselves.
Winged and ground-bound councils were formed together. Architecture changed ramps and spires, towers with wide landings, streets designed to be seen from above. Schools taught flight safety alongside walking. Jobs once divided by ability were redesigned for cooperation.
The Balance was no longer something to fight. It became something to live with.
The World Now
In the present age, wings are ordinary and miraculous all at once.
On any given street, someone might step aside as a shadow passes overhead. Cafés have open roofs. Hospitals have vertical entrances. Some people bind their wings under coats to blend in. Others decorate theirs with paint and charms, declaring the sky part of their identity. There are still tensions.
Some ground-bound people resent the freedom of flight. Some winged resent airspace regulations and weather taxes. Love between winged and ground-bound people is common and complicated, especially when children are born, and no one knows which side of the Balance they will fall on.
Every birth still carries the same quiet question. Midwives still check shoulders with careful hands.
Parents still hold their breath.
And when wings appear or don’t the world did continue, half rising, half rooted, bound together by a history written not just in books, but in the endless conversation between earth and sky.
Because once, long ago, the sky came too close. And it never fully let go.