The Three Feathers - The Magnificent Journey of Joshua Aylong by Stefan Bolz Page A

the Pegasus’ hind legs were already pushing off loose rock.
    “Here it is!”
    Krieg jumped up and into the steep incline of the creek bed. The Pegasus followed and they both ran up the slippery path.
    “Don’t stop. Just keep going!” He reassured her.
    As they made their way up the steep mountain side, the entire path up to the waterfall began to crumble and break off. And when Krieg and the Pegasus finally reached the top, there was nothing left of the path below. The sheer cliff was smooth, without any interruption as if the path and the plateau had never existed.
    Panting, they stood on top of the cliff. Krieg’s joy of having escaped certain death was overshadowed by the pain of losing his friends. He still couldn’t believe what happened. Krieg had lost many fellow war horses and each one was as painful as the last. The sense of loss was a familiar one to him.
    “I’m so sorry.” The Pegasus must have heard his thoughts. When he looked at her, he saw it in her eyes—the knowledge of her having gained her life at the price of someone else losing theirs. She suddenly lost her balance and sank to the ground. Krieg stepped toward her not quite sure what to do.
    “I wished for someone to come and free me for so long. I knew I couldn’t do it on my own. And then I felt your footsteps on the path and there was the small hope that maybe this time… Several travelers came before you, but I never felt an anger so strong or the will to live and to give life that I felt in you. When you stopped at the fork I hoped you would come and try.”
    “I think I heard you.” Krieg thought.
    “I didn’t know that death would be the price for my freedom,” the Pegasus replied.
    “Many of my fellow war horses died for me in the war, as I would have died for them. But we live and we must honor those who died not with more death but with our lives. Otherwise they died in vain.”
    As the sun rose behind them, flooding the landscape with golden light, Krieg could feel that, despite his words of wisdom he knew to be true, the loss of his friends cut deeper than he wanted to admit. There might be another battle for him to fight—the battle between the promise of a good life as payment to them and the sheer finality of losing their companionship. Only time would tell.
    * * *
    The next day passed in a haze for Krieg. They found a spring a little further south that carried clear cold water through a meadow where the snow and ice had melted almost completely.
    “It will take me some time to get my strength back,” the Pegasus thought to Krieg. “And when it comes back I will go and look for your friends. For I know your thoughts are burdened with their absence. But do not trust a hope. Time flows at a different speed at the bottom of Hollow’s Gate than it does up here. You can spend one day at the surface and it will be close to a week below. ‘The Great Deep’, as it was called, has its own laws and what you believe now might not be true down there.”
    “You are saying that Grey and the red one have been down there for almost a week now?” Krieg could not fathom that they lay dead somewhere at the bottom of an ancient world where their bodies had already began to disintegrate.
    “Do not let your thoughts go there,” the Pegasus interrupted him. “It is a dark place from which you cannot see.”
    Krieg looked at her. He could sense her lightness of being below his grief. This lightness was something he had not yet found within himself. “You never told me your name.”
    “My name is Wind,” she replied. “I got it when I first learned to fly.”
    “I always thought the legends spoke of Pegasus foals that could fly right out of the womb,” Krieg answered.
    There was a pause when she looked at him.
    “No one has told you.”
    “No one has told me what?” Krieg replied.
    “No one has told you how a Pegasus gets her wings?”
    Krieg saw a smile in her that suddenly seemed to flood through him as well.
    “You