A woman stands in a clearing in the woods, singing a wordless song to a golden bird perched on her hand. Hovering behind her, suspended in a flowing white cloth, with wings spread, is an angel matching her song note for note. Suddenly the golden bird stops crooning to the song, and the woman also stops.
"Draconis, you can come out now," her voice lilts across the clearing. From the shadows appears a man dressed in a black outfit with two stiff wing-like projections coming from the shoulder blades. His unruly hair resembles flames and his hazel eyes pierce the woman with their intensity.
"How did you know it was me?" he asks as he touches the dark blue crescent and pentacle symbol on his forehead in his personal greeting. The woman touches her kite symbol in like response, and the angel titters at him before vanishing into the woman.
"You know that Thor here does not trust any intruder into his domain." The golden bird squawks in protest. "Yes, I know. Other than me, that is," she scratches the bird under his curved beak to placate him.
"You are the only person I know of who can befriend a phoenix that easily, Bell," Draconis says exasperatedly. "But you didn't answer my question. How did you know it was me?"
"I knew you would be coming to walk me to Yggdrasil soon. Shall we go?" Her blue eyes sparkle with mirth as she watches Thor fly off into the trees. "Are we flying or walking today?"
"We walked last time. Lets fly this time." Bell laughs as wings sprout from their shoulders with a shower of loose feathers. With a powerful downbeat from their wings, the pair leaves the ground and find a thermal rising from nearby. Draconis hangs back a little to admire Belldandy; her radiant russet hair flying behind her, snapping in the wind, and her earrings jingling like wind chimes. His thoughts wander to when he first saw her, they were just children then, when she had passed her first goddess training test. Suddenly a pink blur blasts past him, snapping him from his reverie.
"Sis!" a childish voice cries as the blur crashes into Belldandy. "I wanted to take you to work today!" The blur sorts itself out to be a young girl with an inverted teardrop symbol on her forehead and a slender hammer strapped onto her back. She is connected to a pair of large metallic wings with rockets on the ends.
"Oh you did? I'm sorry, Skuld, I didn't know," Belldandy says as she hugs her little sister tight.
"What in the cosmos are those?" Draconis exclaims when he recovers from the shock.
"What? Oh, these! My latest invention, the Skuld flyer 5000!" Skuld proudly proclaims, showing the faintly rust colored wings off. "At full power, it can break the sound barrier from a complete stop. Cool, huh?"
"Um... Yeah... Cool." Skuld sticks her tongue out at him for his sarcasm.
"I think they're wonderful, Skuld," Belldandy proclaims and smiles beautifully at her sister. "Lets all three of us fly to Yggdrasil together then." Both Draconis and Skuld nod at the suggestion, then they all start off towards the towering structure of magic and metal that houses that most powerful of computers, Yggdrasil.