[Oraniel]
An hour passes, perhaps ten, Oraniel did not know. He flew blindly, choosing direction only so he would not hover in place and surrender to the strange exhaustion creeping deeper into his limbs. The smooth blue stretched without end, giving him no frame of reference. His sense of distance began to warp. His wings throbbed with dull aches that should not have existed. The air felt thicker, as if resisting each movement.
He tried to focus on his breathing. But his breaths came slower. Longer. He became aware of how heavy his eyelids felt, as if each blink demanded more strength than before.
He blinked once, forced and deliberate. The sky flickered again, darker than the last time. A deepening shade lingered for several heartbeats before fading back into the infinite blue.
His pulse stuttered.
The world dimmed further. The blue sky rolled into a bluish gray, muted and heavy. When it lightened again, the change remained, as though the brightness had permanently lost a layer.
Panic scraped through his chest.
It was happening faster.
He changed direction again, wings beating harder despite their growing weakness. He wanted to scream, but his throat felt tight. The vastness around him swallowed sound and sensation. Nothing gave him an anchor. Nothing gave him direction.
Blink. The sky darkened again.Longer this time. He could not stop his mind from drifting to sleep.
He forced his eyes wide open once more, but they trembled. His vision swayed. The endless blue rippled as though seen through a sheet of vibrating glass.
He had never felt so disoriented.
His wings wavered. His body dipped in the air before he caught himself. His consciousness stuttered in and out like a lamp flickering in a storm.
The fatigue forced his eyes to close.
His forced it to open.
The darkness rose faster now.What had been blue turned slate gray. And when it lightened again, the gray remained as a stain across the bright facade.
He inhaled shakily. He could not tell if he was rising or falling. He could not feel the direction of the wind. His surroundings blurred and spun, though the world was nothing but sky.
He blinked again.
A deeper shadow overtook everything.
When it finally lifted, his vision did not return fully. The sky stayed darker this time, a washed out twilight hue. His heartbeat echoed as though from a distant chamber.
His eyelids fell again.
This time the world did not lighten afterward.
The darkness stayed.
His wings folded involuntarily as his consciousness wavered and then broke. The last thing he felt was the strange sensation of falling through a place that had no air and no wind, as if gravity itself had forgotten how to pull him.
He tried to open his eyes one more time, but they did not respond.
Midway through his descent, Oraniel slipped fully into unconsciousness, swallowed by the deepening dark that had waited behind the sky.