I was looking for my brother. He had gone missing. Taken by the Ground Dwellers, no doubt.

You see, the Ground Dwellers had not been healed. They were grimy and crude. Still feasted upon human flesh. It was not like that here in The Sky City.

Years ago, a sort of apocalypse occurred. A disease blighted the land below, spreading from person to person, killing them just to come back as a half-life and forcing them to consume the flesh of their brethren for food, that is, until a cure was created.

Alchemists put together a mystical brew that transformed the most fortunate of us, the Sky Dwellers, into a higher being. We were no longer the undead, confined to a diet of sinful flesh, but a whole new creation. With the concoction came a new power—an ability to fly. We could force gravity to bend to our will, and with that, we partitioned ourselves into the clouds. Not to mention that insatiable hunger was quelled, and we no longer had any use for food at all.

My brother and I liked to escape from our dreamy city every once in a while. Most nights, we would venture down to The City Below and watch from dark corners those inhabiting our old village.

Sometimes, there would be a stray original holed up in one of the lofted apartments, darting their eyes this way and that for a half-life’s inevitable arrival. Most of the time, though, there were only the Ground Dwellers, talking around a dining room table over a pint of slugbeer and a deep-fried arm or leg.

Our old home never seemed to come into a new life. It remained stale and dark, no hint of a new tenant. Not that I would appreciate it much if some half-life had moved in. Sometimes, when the winds stirred, the breeze would catch on my sun-yellowed curtains and cause them to flap out of my never-closing window. When the whiff of dank abandonment would catch my nostrils, I knew it was time to head back up.

But Alex, my sweet brother, would always linger. I knew he missed home. Even when we were once Ground Dwellers ourselves, he never once made a wayward comment about The City Below.