The Sheltering Sky: Flight of Fancy

By Cherie Noel

In the time after the meteors brushed past Earth, a host of deadly new disease sprang into being. Mankind rushed to find vaccines, cures, and even ways to manipulate human DNA to enable humankind to better fight off the onslaught of new diseases. Failing on all counts, a handful of intrepid scientists sought instead to find ways to alter man enough to survive in the brave new world he would inevitably find himself part of.
The scientists succeeded only in creating a far worse disease, one mockingly called Ravineux for the near insatiable bloodlust it created in the initial stages... the Ravineux virus cemented a terrible change altering all it affected forever from homo sapiens to homo avius or homo vorax. The Ravineux, as those of the homo vorax species came to be called, spread over the face of the earth like a plague, until the remaining humans were few and far between... and the only hope for human kind’s survival lay not with the humans, but with the Flyers or homo Avius...

Come into the story of a young man who did not know he could fly, and of the man who taught him to soar before he ever had wings.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cherie Noel
• Release date: Aug 24, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301040858

Cherie Noel

Butcher, baker, candlestick maker...ummm, eww, every chance I get, and I surely would if these damn characters would ever shut up. Born in West Palm Beach, Florida and raised...er, is all over the damn place a sufficiently descriptive term? No? Then how about this? Tinker, tailor, Indian chief...Ooooh, especially when smexy men are involved (!), only under duress, and did the cheek-bones give it away?Seriously? I’ve lived in Washington D.C., Virginia, Upper Michigan, Texas, New York, California, and Alabama in the United States; Hessen in Germany, London in England, Masirah Island in Oman and...sometimes it was in a house, sometimes in a tent, and sometimes anyplace I could find to lay my head.I’ve been in love with words since before I drew breath, and I don’t see that ever changing. I write stories. Sometimes I write music with them, sometimes they’re poems, and lately, to my great delight, M/M erotic romance. Yum. Smexy man to the second...or third power...now that’s the kinda math I can get behind!!The hair curls or frizzes as it will, the eyes are green and tend to look in two different directions—no, really—and the rest is subject to change. You know the guy who didn’t know if he was a butterfly dreaming he was a man or a man dreaming he was a butterfly? Yeah, that’s me, but substitute drag queen for butterfly and wacky, wild ex-Army chick for man.

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Flight of Fancy

Sheltering Sky

#1

Cherie Noel

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Cover Artist: Scarlet Tie Designs - Zathyn Priest

Editor: Val Hughes

ISBN: 9781301040858

Flight of Fancy © 2013 Cherie Noel

Attention Readers: This book uses Ameriglish. English speakers from other countries should consider themselves warned… there will be donuts rather than doughnuts.

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PUBLISHER: Rocking Rooster Publications

~~yes, yes… we’re a wee little house, but we’ve got the rockin’ cock-a-doodle-doo~~

~Underneath the sheltering sky

Where air flows clean and warm,

We fly far from the ravening beasts,

In sky rest safe as mother’s arms,

Then sing we will

A di-de-le-day

A di-de-lay-di-dee~

~~fragment of a children’s song sung among the People after the Asteroid came~~

Dedication

This one’s for Piper and MJ because they dream of a better tomorrows; then they invite the rest of us to help build those brighter days.

This one’s also for Sarah; she made sure to lay some grain by, that her neighbor might not hunger.

And always, always and forever, this one’s for my Balthazar; long may you dance among the stars old friend, and bring beauty to the face of night.

Prologue ~ Myths and Legends

Cam and Tolly lived at the edge of the wasted city, in a small enclave with a few other homo avius families. No matter what the People or the Ravineux said, they were just as human as the others. Camden didn’t know why they were different from the others. Sometimes, when Tolly and the other elders drank fermented fruit juice, he would tell Cam their clan was more like the Ravineux—but then he called them homo vorax—and he would never say why, or tell Cam the reason the Ravineux called their people Les Oiseau. Cam knew the names had something to do with the place named Coo-beck where Tolly had lived before he became Camden’s Pa-paw. That was back in the last days of the great civilizations, and Cam didn’t know of a single other person who had lived during the civilization. Not one.

Perhaps because of the way he kept one foot in the past, and one in the present with his stern blue eyes turned forever toward the future, everyone sought out Cam’s Pa-paw Tolly for advice. When Cam looked into his rheumy old eyes and touched the birch-bark thin skin on the backs of his hands, he reckoned Tolly was older than the sun. In their enclave, Old Marle was the only one close to Tolly’s age, but even she didn’t have the silvered badges of wisdom that he wore proudly on his head, chest and chin. While Cam’s chest burned with pride that his Pa-paw Tolly carried visible proof of his wisdom for all to see, he loved the place beside Tolly’s eyes more, where laughter had worn down deep, smooth furrows. When he was very small he asked Tolly about them.

Pa-paw, what are these?

Cam reached way up to pat the chubby fingers of one hand against Tolly’s face, in the space between his Pa-paws eyes and his then chestnut hair. Tapping the fingers of his other hand against his own face in the same place, Cam found only smoothness.

Do your eyes try to hide in the skin around them? Did the monsters scare them before you brought me to this place?

Tolly’s eyes turned a deeper blue for a moment, and then he wrapped a powerful arm around Cam’s little shoulders.

No, sprout. These—

And here he ran first his own, and then Cam’s fingers outward along the tracks. They started nearly in his eyes and fanned out in a tiny delta.

They are the paths worn into my flesh by the feet of every laugh brave enough to climb from my heart, where they are born, to my eyes and then escape out of the corner here to find their own home in the wide world. The Ravineux—well, they’re our enemies to be sure, but sprout, they’re as close to the humans of old as we are. There are monsters aplenty in the world, sprout, and the Ravineux are fierce and wild… but never make the mistake of thinking them merely beasts.

Cam felt the truth of Tolly’s words take root in his belly, and so he lay his head down against Tolly’s shoulder. The silvery blond fall of his silky hair draped half-way down Tolly’s back. As he wrapped his little boy arms around Pa-paw Tolly’s neck to ask his next question, Tolly brushed the hair back from Cam’s face. Looking down at Cam with his thick white eyebrows raised and the soft smile he saved for Cam alone curving the corners of his lips up, Tolly nodded to encourage his question. Cam twitched his thin shoulders as he rested one delicately boned hand on Tolly’s burly forearm. He flashed his Pa-paw a look filled with the dread intensity only small children can muster when peppering their elders with nigh unanswerable questions.

Will they walk across my face too? Until they wear down paths?

Tolly’s arms tightened around him.

If I have my way Sprout, then yes, they will. Yes.

Cam slid from Pa-paw Tolly’s lap then, and ran to the patch of sun that fell through the rusting metal bars of their window. His