Welcome to Gaia! ::

“Come on then, keep up.”

Lithian flushed, breath making a thick cloud of steam in front of his lips as he trudged upwards through the snow and ice despite his now protesting muscles. Osirith, Larinel, and Pravis — older than him by two, three, and four years, respectively — had urged him into this ‘exploratory’ journey despite their instructors orders not to travel more than twenty paces outside of the main camp without adult supervision and permission from a guide. When he ventured an uncertain glance down and back towards said camp, now barely visible through the rising, snow-dusted wind that seem to be a near-constant presence on the continent, he heard laughter from in front of him and jerked his head around again.

“You don’t say you’re tired already, are you Bhardvaris?” Pravis asked, intonation just one slice short of mocking. He stood already perched at the top of their current ‘mountain’, though in practice it was just another high, sloped and icy hill. The real, cliff-like, jutting mountain ranges were miles ahead yet. “I thought strength and endurance were supposed to run in the family. The ‘Stone Soldier’, isn’t that what they called your mother in her day?”

“Maybe he gets more from his father,” Larinel provided, grinning, and Osrith snickered. “I heard the man was guilted into choosing gaili like the rest of his family. Would likely have ended up ysali if no one had steered him straight.” Larinel glanced down, watching Lithian climb. “Maybe we oughtn’t to have brought him on after all. He is built a bit like a girl.”

Pravis snorted. “Is that your excuse for looking at him like you do?”

Larinel’s eyes jerked up and over, his expression hurt and defensive. “An ugly girl. I wouldn’t be interested even if he had the right parts.”

Lithian’s cheeks burned, and he opened his mouth, but eventually decided to save his breath and focus his energy instead on getting to the top. When he made it, Pravis beat a congratulatory pat against his shoulder.

“There you go, Bhardvaris. We knew you could do it.”

Lithian panted and coughed at the harsher-than-necessary contact, still winded, but nodded, attempting a half-smile despite the fact that his lips felt chilled and chapped, the rest of his body simultaneously overheated and freezing in different areas. “Are we…going much farther?” he asked, trying not to let too much of his insecurity seep into his voice and failing. “Indurai said we shouldn’t—”

“Aww, come now…you’re not nithering out on us already are you?” Pravis asked. “We just got started.”

Lithian’s tongue flicked uncertainly over his lower lip — definitely chilled — even as he reached up, rubbing at one of his horns as he glanced out over the sweeping frozen tundra to follow and then back briefly at the ever more distant camp where the rest of their fellow students and instructors, as well as travel guides, were.

The excursion to Aisko had been pre-planned for some of the top ranking young adepts in training, and though Lithian had never attended formal classes — all of his tutors paid for privately by his parents and brought to his home for personal study — his mother had thought the excursion would be good for him and spoke with the instructors in charge of the trip to arrange a slot for him. He was easily the youngest there, however, still only thirteen and barely into his adept training, and on top of that, the fact that he hadn’t schooled with any of the other trainees seemed to have set up an invisible barrier between him and the rest of his peers. Though none of them said anything directly to him, Lithian felt a definite air of tension from most everyone there other than Araceli — who he’d traveled with before with his family. Thus, when Pravis had invited him along for excursion, he had been desperate enough to show some degree of camaraderie that he’d felt obligated to say yes despite their reckless disregard for the rules.

Now, he was beginning to second-guess his choice. Though these boys put on a ‘friendly’ front, a good deal of their dialogue felt like less than that — like they had something against him, though he did not know them well, and he couldn’t begin to figure out where he’d gone wrong. It made him uncomfortable, though, to be so far from where they ought to be with unfamiliar ‘friends’ who didn’t necessarily seem to want the best for him.

Seconds before opening his mouth to say that he really thought it would be best to head back, Pravis spoke up again, touching his hand more gently to Lithian’s shoulder this time.

“If you’re really that tired, we’ll go back, alright? But if you go back, we all have to go back because we can’t just let you wander around out here alone — you’re the youngest of any of us, and what if something happened to you?”

“Yeah, and if we all go back,” Liranel said, more openly irritated, “then we’ll have come all the way out here for nothing because we haven’t even begun to s**t around yet. You know how much we could get away with if we just made it out to that blank?”

Lithian flushed, second-guessing himself. Again. “I—”

“Ey, he can make it a bit further, right?” Osrith asked. “He’s holding up pretty well so far, aren’t you?”

Lithian tucked his chilled fingers under his coat and nodded, losing his nerve. “I’m fine. We can keep going. I—”

“Well done, then!” Pravis cut in immediately. “Way to be a soldier about it. Race you all to the next bluff!”

And, before Lithian could blink, Pravis was up, molding the ice and snow to his will like a craftsman with his hands to clay and sailing down it the next moment like an ice dancer in his element. Liranel blinked, snapped out several quick complaints of ‘unfairness’ and then followed suit, bending the air instead and using the wind as a simultaneous sail and net for his body as he glided down after the older boy. Osrith huffed, but sent Lith a brief, teasing grin before chasing heedlessly after his friends — also an aiskala dovaa, but not nearly so graceful about it as Pravis.

Lithian breathed heavily in defeat, cheeks warm with embarrassment as he followed gracelessly after them. He felt he would do well not to slip, let alone travel quickly. And, as it turned out, he did not manage to make the trip down without several slips, scuffing and banging various parts of his body despite his best efforts to be careful. The last rather major unintentional slide began with a quick yelp as he lost all his footing and a long messy scrape and roll down the hill before a final, humiliating tumble into a — thankfully soft, if frigid — pile of snow.

Laughter greeted him when he worked his way out, nursing bruised head, horns, and ego as well as shivering to the point where his teeth felt like they wanted to chatter their way out of his head.

“Aw, hey then…at least you made it, right?” Pravis asked, ‘patting’ his shoulder again nearly hard enough to knock him off balance.

Lithian wrapped his arms tighter around himself, nodding.

“So.” Pravis clapped his hands together. “Who’s up for a game of seekers and runners?”

Liranel arched his eyebrows, looking briefly incredulous. “Isn’t that a game for ten-year-—” At Pravis’ look, however, he changed his tune with a dismissive shrug.

Eyes flicking to Lithian, an unfriendly grin took over the other boy's face. “Volunteering to be our ‘seeker’, then?”

Lithian tensed, blinking. “I—what? I can’t—”

Pravis jutted in before he could continue on. “All votes for Lithian as the seeker say, ‘Aye!’”

A chorus of, “Aye!” from all three of the other boys drowned out Lithian’s miffed objection, and before he could even ask for a refresher course on the rules, the others were whooping and dashing off. Lithian’s shoulders sank and he curled in on himself as he frowned, trying to will away the chill and shutting his eyes. He was supposed to shut his eyes, right? And count? Gods, but he couldn’t remember what to count to or whether he had to find all of the others or just one, and…

Shaking the thoughts away, Lithian began counting to himself, rubbing the pads of his fingers against one another inside his cloak. The last he’d played this game, he had been a child, in his family’s garden, laughing in the year-round warmth of the Celestial Plane as he chased after and hid from his siblings in turns. The tune to this game on the other hand, felt stilted somehow. As though instead of playing with him, he was the toy for their amusement.

But, Lithian supposed, in the end it didn’t matter much. They weren’t really hurting him after all, and if this was their idea of fun, at least it would be over soon enough and they could all head back to camp. He simply hoped they wouldn’t be reprimanded too sharply for their rule breaking.

After mentally counting through a hundred ysali tears, Lithian opened his eyes, squinting out at the bleary expanse of snow and ice ahead. The wind had begun to pick up again, or so it seemed, chilled streaks of it biting at his cheeks and stirring up ever more loose snow than before and making the new snow from the sky fall in wilder patterns that made it difficult to keep track of directions.

Which way had they all gone? He couldn’t even see skid marks, let alone tracks.

Huffing, Lithian began his search. At first, he moved in earnest, trekking out over the frozen, snowy tundra and searching all the obvious small outcroppings of rock or miniature bluffs or jutting stacks. After some time searching produced no results, however, and the winds continued to pick up, doubt settled in.

Where were they? Had they managed to forget him somehow? Were they lost? Had they gotten attacked?

For a while longer, Lithian managed to convince himself he was exaggerating the issue, but when the sky began to dim, dusk settling in and the air growing colder still with it, real concern took over and he started calling out.

“Pravis! Liranel! Osrith, I can’t find you! I don’t want to play anymore — I’m cold! Are you alright? We should go back!”

The more he called, though, the frailer his voice seemed to sound over the rising wind, and the more it sank in to him that, in the process of wandering around and trying to find the others, he had lost absolute track of direction. On top of that, the sky was far too blanketed with snow and cloud cover to so much as pinpoint the exact direction of the setting sun even if he could remember which way camp was relative to that, which he couldn’t. Lithian’s pulse gathered tightly in his throat, beginning to start up a quicker, panicked rhythm.

He breathed out, fingering the edges of his cloak and pulling it in more snugly around himself. “Don’t panic, Lithian,” he murmured to himself, repeating Araceli’s oft-given advice to him aloud as a form of self-calming. “Panic and you die. You can do this. I’ll make it back. They probably just lost track of me. Or…forgot. Or maybe they’re lost too. But whatever happened…we’ll make it through, and in the end it will be alright. In a few hours—”

A shadow rippled over him, and Lithian froze in his tracks. He shut his eyes, devoting several seconds to prayer — prayer that the source of the shadow wasn’t what he feared it was — before venturing a glance upwards. His breath stalled in his throat. Not one. Not two. But six dragons blotted the sky, far too close for comfort.

They were diving circles around each other and then sweeping low and skim gliding just above the surface of the frozen earth, almost as if playing a game or dancing with each other.

Lithian shrank back against the nearest cluster of upraised boulders, instinctively trying to make himself small. Less visible. So long as they didn’t spot him—

A single pair of fierce, tidal blue eyes locked on his. For an instant, he felt riveted — tethered to this other creature by something beyond the physical, beyond mental. Peisio, he realized in the next instant. These were peisio dragons, and for a single moment, Lithian forgot his fear, forgot the cold, and remembered how he once felt about dragons: his awe and respect for their majesty. He could feel the pulse of their magic in tune with his, vibrating on the same inner wavelength.

Then, the dragon roared, angling its body towards him and, behind it, three more, and Lithian remembered in the span of a second all the very real reasons to fear — not fawn over — these creatures. At least, however, their magic was familiar to him. Thus, when they spat a torrent of water him, surging forward like contained typhoon, Lithian’s instinct guided the pulse of his movement. He didn’t even need the bottled water at his waist because the dragons had just provided him with all the weapon necessary.

With a dip and pull of his own magic, Lithian redirected the piercing shot of water, guiding it instead into a coiling circle around his body — as though the weight of the water were planets in orbit around his own weight, the nucleus — and with the swinging pendulum of weight, he released the surge forward again when it was aimed back at the dragons. Powerful enough to barrel the first three into each other, and while they were recovering, he dealt with the fourth.

In his distraction and natural focus on the peisios, however, Lithian unfortunately forgot entirely about the last two in the cluster which he’d managed to lose track of in the fray. They waited, strategically perhaps, until he finally finished with the water dragons before moving in. Breathing labored and already-worn muscles stinging with exhaustion, Lithian’s heart sank when two new shrieks split the air. And not something so familiar as peisios, no: two, ice-white and fierce aiskalas.

His odds would have been poor on a good day, fully rested. Here, in his current state, Lithian was beginning to be convinced that the universe wanted him dead. When the first aiskala dove down, roar cracking the air and drawing up an icy flurry in the wind, Lithian ran. Sharp snow, magically enhanced to bite violently at his skin as he fled — he was convinced — made seeing clearly near impossible, but he ran anyway, stumbling, slipping, cracking his knees against the ice and then only just barely throwing up a surge of water in time to knock the charging asikalas off his path before scrambling upwards and trying to find somewhere — anywhere — to hide.

‘I’m going to die, I’m going to die, I’m going to die — Abronaxus protect my family, my sisters and my brothers, my father and my mother, thank my healers who helped me to live this long and help my teachers not to let the burden of my death cause them guilt for too long. Let—’

Lithian yipped, arms flying up to shield his face as his entire body toppled, slipping on an unexpected drop and sledding down the slope to follow. Terrifying though it was, Lithian still found spare moments to be grateful that his entire body save his face was covered in cloth, the only thing saving his skin from being shredded on the skidding ice. When he came to a messy, tumbling stop at the base, adrenaline alone gave Lithian the wearwithal to spot a narrow overhang just to his left, hopefully too narrow to let a full aiskala in, and he scrambled against the ice, feet scraping uselessly several times before he finally found his footing and made a dash for it.

Not a moment too soon, he darted beneath it, tucking his body as far back in the narrow crevice as he could manage. Probably an awful idea, he considered in retrospect, now that the beasts could simply take aim and freeze him to death where he cowered, but instead, that didn’t — miraculously — seem to occur to them. Both shrieked and snapped, goring his lower calf once with the narrow swipe of a claw, but otherwise largely failing to get at him. They snorted in icy breaths but, in the end, grew bored before doing any permanent damage, and left.

Lithian, for his part, collapsed on shaking legs as soon as their sounds petered out into the rising wind. It might well be a snowstorm soon out there, he thought, and the notion sounded oddly calm in his head, despite the searing, throbbing pain in his calf, openly bleeding. He moved to reach for the stoppered flasks at his waist, but found his fingers stiff and shaking, dropping the first cork before accomplishing anything at all, and he eventually re-stoppered it, gritting his teeth and sinking to a curled sit. His magic was bled dry. He was exhausted, and quickly freezing to death.

Perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad. At least it was quiet here, and ice was a type of water anyway, wasn’t it? So in a way, he would be going out in his element, as desired. Better, in any case, to fall asleep in the quiet and never wake up than to be gored or frozen to death and eaten by dragons. Seconds away from laying down and coiling up where he sat, Lithian heard voices.

Distant enough at first, he almost ignored them, shoving them off as a trick of his dying brain. When they sounded again, though, closer, the sound tugged at Lithian’s rapidly shutting-down thought processes.

‘Live, Lithian…maybe it’s not your time yet.’

The exhausted portion of him — the part in pain that liked the idea of a quiet nap — struggled against his own mental urging, warring with himself. But when the voices sounded again, closer still, he bit at his lip, whining and biting harder until bled and then forcing himself up. “Come on, Lithian…let’s…go…” His fingers shook, arms weak as he dragged himself out from under the narrow overhang that had almost certainly saved his life. “Help.” He swallowed, shutting his eyes and cursing how weak the word sounded. He tried again, scrambling up and out. “Help! Anybody? I don’t…know where I am or who you are, but I…I need…”

His voice was too quiet. No one would hear him. Whoever was out there would already be gone by the time he got anywhere. Lithian shivered, stumbling out through the now near-blizzard conditions and wondering blankly why he thought this was a good idea in the first place.

His last, blurry recollection sometime later seemed to be from a viewpoint of himself collapsed again, prone on the snow and blinking upwards at a dark figure. Everything faded out for some time after that.