The next night, Owen flew.
He transformed off the stern, in the dark, when the ship's navigation lights were the only illumination and the nearest shipping lane was forty kilometers east.
His wings caught the ocean wind and he rose high, soaring up into the night sky until the Aureline was a lit rectangle far below and the horizon was a clean line between the dark water and the stars.
He flew for two hours. Not racing anywhere. Not burning off frustration, exactly, though there was some of that. Mostly he needed his actual body, his real form, the size and weight and sensory experience of being what he was rather than the compressed approximation of his humanoid form.
The ocean smelled different from two hundred meters up. Cleaner. Older. Like something that had been here before anything else and would be here after.
Then he thought about Dominus.
