[img]http://jp24.r0tt.com/l_e6d3ec80-7394-11e5-804d-e9e775c00024.jpg[/img]
[sup]art: [url=http://mattdixonart.tumblr.com/]Hollow by Matt Dixon[/url][/sup]

Name: Gus

Abstract: Not a robot.

Detail: Gus was born into a charming family that lived comfortably on a lesser-known sky island. The family commanded a few respectable courier airships that delivered mail and messages at a price fit for kings, but their strongest asset was their dovecote. The largest and best-trained population of carrier doves and pigeons was bred and selected by Gus' proud family, world-famous for providing the pigeons that delivered the most important messages throughout history: the burning of Garn, the approach of the Pale Claw by sea to the Port of Ent, the marriage of Princess Soesslye to Yn the Ogre King. No one was prouder of the pigeons than Gus.

Little Gus loved the birds. He volunteered to clean the dovecote daily, learned each bird's food preference, and claimed to speak and understand their warbling language. He was often caught perched on the dovecote roof or high in a tree, wearing makeshift wings made of patchwork and pigeon feathers, determined to take flight. He fell from a branch once and broke his arm; but the minute the cast was off he was out again, running with the flock and flapping his arms, an excited warble in his throat. Visitors asked politely about the child's peculiarities and were told, happily, that it was just a phase.

Gus was eleven years old the night the moon rose huge and bright in a cloudless sky. The pigeons were restless, flapping and fluttering in a frenzy of feathers, and refused to be quieted. Afraid that the birds would hurt themselves, Gus opened the dovecote and watched them swarm into the starry sky, toward the moon and the mountains and a light flickering in the distance, as if they were possessed of a soul-deep need to chase it. Gus felt it, too. Something was happening out there without him.

He stole the key from his mother's coat pocket, rushed across the island to the barn, and rolled out the smallest courier kite -- precisely the thing he was forbidden to do. Gus had never been taught to fly it, but he'd watched his brother a thousand times. It wasn't hard. Soon the engine rumbled and clanked, and Gus put on his gloves and goggles -- and with a shift and a push and a turn of a knob, the little flying machine rolled and knocked fast down the grassy hill, then lifted, then soared over the edge of the sky island, with stars above and a glimmer of trees and rivers below. The pigeons flocked all around him, and it was the most amazing moment of Gus' young life.

The kite sputtered and creaked and went silent. For a moment, Gus glided quietly among the soft flap of the pigeons' wings, and then the trees and the ground rose up toward him. Frozen out of fear, Gus clung to the controls while the trees slammed into him.

When he woke up, he was made of copper.

He didn't know that a passing magician had imbued his dying consciousness into a discarded machina. He didn't know that the magician had waited four days before declaring the experiment a failure, and had left him there in the woods. He didn't know that the wreckage of the kite had since been cleaned up, a funeral had been held, and tears were still being shed for him.

All Gus knew was that he couldn't see the island in the sky -- just the trees, and the grass, and the rocks.

He wanders still, traversing the wild and curious landscape with slow and rusty limbs. Each morning he stops, and he warbles in a hollow, echoing voice. The pigeons come to him and perch on his outstretched arms.