Read Online The Three Feathers - The Magnificent Journey of Joshua Aylong by Stefan Bolz - Free Book Online Page B

eerie sound as the path to the waterfall crumbled. Then this too quieted down until there was no more sound at all. For a while, Joshua felt suspended as if in a no man’s land feeling nothing but the wind under his wings.
    Then he broke through the fog and as he looked down he saw Hollow’s Gate far below. It was unlike anything he had ever seen. From up here he could see shades of green interspersed with dark indentations. There was a large area to the west that looked like ancient ruins, geometrical patterns of dark color within the shades of green. He saw two great lakes to the southwest that looked like tears of deep indigo, and a massive ice formation reaching up the sheer cliffs in tongs of silver. Just as he began to wonder why he couldn’t see any sign of the falling wolf, everything suddenly went black.
    * * *
    …And then there was nothingness. Joshua felt as if he was suspended in complete darkness. He wasn’t even sure if he was still flying, so still was the air around him. He experienced himself as both tiny, no bigger than a grain of sand, and simultaneously stretched out and completely encompassing the whole world. It was as if his mind expanded many fold in all directions reaching deep into the earth and far into vast space. He knew at that moment with absolute certainty that there was more to him than feathers and skin and bones. But before he could even think about this and as suddenly as the blackness came, it went, and Joshua found himself back in the air over Hollow’s Gate.
    After reorienting himself, he decided to fly as close to the cliff as possible. Maybe there was a fighting chance he could see the wolf somewhere. Part of him was horrified of finding his friend and wished he would be spared having to look at him. He wanted to keep Grey in his memories as he had known him, not as he would see him with his body broken somewhere at the bottom of Hollow’s Gate. Another part wished he would still be alive somehow but that option seemed completely impossible right now.
    It was strange to fly along the massive cliff that spanned from the surface high above all the way down to the bottom, a straight five thousand foot drop. The rock was smooth and had almost no cracks or indentations of any kind in it. From here Joshua could see the cliffs stretching in both directions meeting in a perfect circle far in the distance. The sheer size of it was stupendous. He couldn’t escape the feeling that the circular shape was not a natural phenomenon and that this place was in fact created, formed by something other than what natural laws would allow—a force more powerful than anything he could imagine.
    Eventually he landed. Where the ground met the straight cliff wall, it sloped upward in a gentle curve until the soil touched the stone. It was as if the earth here had been pushed toward the cliff and up at least fifty feet. When he found his bearings, Joshua decided to walk along the cliff for a while, hoping to find his friend and at the same time hoping not to find him at all.
    As he walked along the massive wall, he couldn’t help but feel smaller and smaller, almost insignificant, as if everything he had done and everything that he was amounted to nothing in the end. He had lost his new found friends almost as soon as he had found them. He was at the bottom of an abyss that seemed to hold no hope for ever getting back to the surface. And even if he were to reach it, what then? Emptiness spread within him and he could not remember ever having felt so alone. He walked for hours and lost all sense of time, his thoughts caught in an endless spiral of despair from which he could not escape. That’s why he didn’t hear it at first.
    So deeply immersed was he in his own world that it took him a few moments before the eagle’s cry reached him. He only started hearing it when he heard the second sound: the howling of a wolf. It couldn’t be that far away. It sounded eerie at first but then, before he saw