Welcome to Gaia! ::

Character: Lithian
Stage: Adept
Luck: 73 ( +5 )
Creature: Peisio Dragon x 5, Aiskala Dragon x 5
Success Rate: 6 - 100

Win x 5: (35 x 5)/2 = 88 exp
Win x 5: (40 x 5)/2 = 100 exp

Total: 188exp +0 LUK, levels to ?? with ??exp left over, +?? stat points to distribute, +5 peisio orbs, +5 aiskala orbs

Word Count Required: 3,000+ (Current: 5,725)
Final Word Count: -

Ashen City glimmered in the light of day like a well-shined gem. Pristine. Resplendent. The crown jewel on a continent where the goddess of light reigned supreme and all her loyalest subjects flit like wingéd birds between the eves of buildings and up into the golden sky. Lithian sat in a pillowed nook at a second-story window’s edge overlooking the city, book in hand, but currently half-closed, since his sister had entered the room.

“You should come with me,” Ysette was saying. Her characteristically strict posture, dark features, and sharp, simplistic attire looked grossly out of place amidst the decorum: white and gold plush bedding on a mattress with too many pillows large enough to sleep a small family, embroidered curtains, and pale, marbled statuettes to decorate the top of an intricately carved and painted vanity. “While you’re down here it would be good of you to make an appearance…show your face a bit more. You could even meet with the man who arranged this event — and fronted the fees to provide our current quarters. Showing up is the least you could do to express a bit of gratitude.”

Lithian avoided mentioning that the room looked built for a twelve-year-old orderite girl, not a foreign visitor, and he didn’t dare point out that he felt like a fleck of black pepper in a snowstorm when he was amongst Ysette’s orderite ‘friends’. At least on the Plane he was not an alien, and on Eowyn everyone was an alien, so it hardly mattered. Even on Soudul, he had generally been mistaken for a native — a part-oblivionite hybrid and “lesser” but still one of them. Here, he felt like a walking freak show when he went out on the streets, and though he was generally treated with civil, tailored responses, it was more than obvious that he set a good bit of the population on edge and did not blend in.

He hated it.

“Lithian, are you even listeni—?”

“I’m meeting someone, actually,” Lithian said. Slipping a marker into his book, he set it aside and he glanced to his sister. “Sorry,” he murmured, not meaning to cut her off. “Yes, I was listening. But I can’t attend anything now. I promised someone I would help them scout out some of the herbal growth in the area, and I wouldn’t want him to think I bailed on him.”

“Him.” Ysette eyed him sternly, suspicious. “You didn’t bring that hybrid—”

“It’s not Casseth,” Lithian said, emphasizing his friend’s name. “He’s actually a pureblood dovaa that I met at one of the early spring fire festivals, if you’re curious. He’s a firani.”

Ysette arched an eyebrow, but otherwise looked largely pacified. For the moment. “Mm. And how long will you be spending with this nameless dovaa?”

“I don’t know how long Vyren wants to look. I shouldn’t be later than sundown, though. It would be near impossible to spot anything but night flowers after that anyway. Why?”

“You should come to the dinner,” Ysette said. “It will be formal, but fairly late, so you ought to have time enough to clean and dress appropriately. I would like to see you come…”

Lithian dipped his eyes, diverting his gaze to the window and the glittering city beyond. “Yes, sister.”

“Lithian.”

Lithian glanced back towards Ysette, blinking at the softening of her tone. “Hm?”

“You don’t have to.”

Lith flushed, and pushed a smile onto his lips. “I came all the way down here, didn’t I? I might as well show a spot of gratitude for our hosts. Besides…” He tilted his head, hesitating a moment before saying, “I don’t see you often enough these past few years…it will good have your company.”

Ysette looked momentarily startled, but eventually gave a quick sliver of a smile. “Good. Many will be happy to see you there.”

“Who’s this man I’m going to be showing my gratitude to?” Lith asked, slipping his legs down off of the window bench and setting his book aside completely as he stood.

“Andorynn Wymrith. He’s a man of politics, powerful, well-positioned, and well-liked…he’s a good man,” Ysette said. “And it will please him to meet more of our family.”

“Then I will do my best to do our name proud,” Lithian answered.

Ysette dipped her head in acknowledgement and reached for the door. “Enjoy your flower picking, brother.”

Lith huffed, but by the time he opened his mouth to respond, Ysette was tossing him a wink and disappearing out the door as she shut it behind her. Alone again, he snorted. “Flower picking…” Ysette’s comments aside, Lithian did have somewhere to be, and he didn’t want Vyren waiting on him. Thus, putting thoughts of a banquet dinner and forced formalities out of his mind for the time being, Lithian slipped into boots, trousers, and tunic more appropriate for tromping about in the forests and grasslands, slipped a book on herbs and a city map into a leather satchel, and started out the door. Ignoring the looks he received from the passers by, Lithian walked until he reached the city limits, and waited out by the west gate, his agreed rendezvous point with Vyren.

As he leaned idely against the white brick, fingering over the hem of one of his tunic sleeves, all that remained to do was not fidget in the meantime and keep his tongue more to himself when Vyren did arrive.

No reason to be nervous. It wasn’t as though they were courting.

Lithian jerked, startled out of his musings by Vyren’s call. As he spotted the boy and recognized him, however, Lith relaxed, smiling as the other approached and slipping the herbal guide book — which he’d taken out to glance over while he waited — back into its satchel.

“And hello to you. I’m well,” he answered, nodding his head briefly towards the open gate before starting their walk out, once Vyren had caught up with him. “And you?” he asked, since it only seemed fair. “You look like you’ve had a busy morning already.”

The sun beamed overhead as they moved out, almost a perfect high noon that seemed to glint with unreal resplendence over the rich grassy fields ahead and forests beyond. Serenia was a beautiful continent, something Lithian rarely gave it enough credit for, and as they made it further out from the city walls, he found himself calming with each step. Breathing deeper. Smiling more easily.

Though he had grown up on the outskirts of a city, that had been his homeland; the foreignness and overbearing sense of propriety and unspoken cultural expectations here weighed on him. At least, away from it all, he could appreciate the landscape’s elegance without the same feeling of looming wariness radiating from the city’s inhabitants.

Lithian winced at the initial question. “Not in a bad way, just…I suppose I tend to notice when a person looks tired? But not that you look poorly,” he hastened to add. “Just, ah…” He cleared his throat and opted to let that topic die for the moment. “I hope it did not go differently in a way for the worse.”

At the latter question, though, Lithian brightened, some of his previous concern edging out as they moved onto other things, and he reached into his satchel.

“I don’t know how much you’ve read yet of either of those tomes I showed you at the library, but it’s alright regardless. I thought that we could start with looking for some lilaia blooms…” After pulling his book out, Lithian thumbed through the pages, opening to the marked one and holding it over to Vyren to show him the illustration therein. “They’re small, pale yellow flowers with teardrop shaped petals and just the faintest spot of violet at the tips, near white towards the center. They don’t grow much larger than the tip of your thumb, but shouldn’t be terribly hard to spot against the greenery since they come in clusters. We’ll find them mostly in the shade and near the larger, older trees and decaying logs once we get to the forested area. For gas poisons — really, any of the ysali toxin you might inhale — lilaia is the first plant most turn to. If the person poisoned is capable of drinking, it can be steeped into a tea, both the leaves and petals, though the petals, oddly enough, have the strongest healing properties. If the patient is unconscious or having convulsions, though, it is often dried and burned for the fumes. They have a rapidly easing and negating effect on the noxious gasses, stalling the damage to the throat and lungs…”

Lithian paused, realizing he’d already babbled on for a good while, and flushed, rubbing absently at one of his horns as they approached the edge of the nearest thicket.

“I’m sorry, you…probably weren’t all that interested. You can…shut me up any time you like…”

Lithian laughed, relaxing at Vyren’s genuinely enthusiastic attitude and nodding. “That’s them,” he confirmed, still smiling, and moved up beside Vyren, dipping to gather up a few lingering strays on the ground before adding them to the firani’s bundle. “For the best effect, since they’re so small, herbalists generally gather quite a few clusters before either drying or brewing them as a group. Shall we keep searching?”

Lithian lead the way — in some sense of the word — as they continued, though in the end Vyren seemed entirely capable of keeping up and ever-eager to plow on ahead as they gathered. Lith, for his part, answered Vyren’s questions and then some, spending well over an hour in the end detailing what he remembered of herbal remedies, ysali poisons, and dragon magic as a whole at his companions request. By the time the sun had passed high noon, they had a healthy cluster of lilaia blooms as well as several smaller bundles of other herbs helpful for various types of local poison.

Hence, when Lithian first heard the alluring babble of a nearby brook, he didn’t bother trying to resist its call. Instead, he sent a teasing flash of a grin in Vyren’s direction, and then darted out towards the source of the sound.

“Hot?” he asked over his shoulder, not even considering the potential pun as he stopped at the river bank and dipped into a crouch, reaching to unfasten his boots.

The white light of midday glimmered over the water’s surface, dancing atop each peak of the wavelets like stardust caught in flux in the current. After pulling his boots loose and setting them aside, Lithian stood again and shivered, sinking his toes into the wet, pebbled sand of the bank and shutting his eyes at the cool, familiar feel of his element. Eventually, he shook himself from his reverie and reached down to his belt, unbuckling the leather fixture that held his flasks in place and carefully setting those aside before lifting his fingers to the laces of his tunic top and plucking those loose also. When he had shucked his top and folded it carefully beside the rest of this things, he shook his head again, three thick braids of blue falling loose down his bare back before he ventured another glance backwards, towards his companion.

“You can’t say it isn’t the perfect weather for a swim…” he said, a smile edging at the corners of his lips as he brought one braid forward and began feeding his fingers through the weaving to unfasten it. “Though I suppose, if you’re not of a mood to join me, you can keep picking flowers, since you know them all by now, mm?”

Lithian blinked, fingers freezing in his hair midway down the braid when Vyren began to undress. For several long moments he stared, forgetting himself entirely as Vyren’s hands moved over his clothes and shed them with relaxed, practiced ease. As soon as he caught himself, of course, Lithian jerked his eyes away, cheeks flaring with fresh, uncalled for heat and fingers stumbling as he tried to convince them to go back to their previously assigned task.

‘Unbraid your hair, Lithian,’ he chided himself mentally. ‘This is not a complicated task. Quite the contrary, it’s a highly mundane task, which you have performed any number of times in your life, and you’re going to make an absolute mockery of yourself if you don’t…’

Pants.

Vyren was taking off his—

Lithian closed his eyes. Curbing the instinct to clear his throat, Lithian bit his lip instead, his blush conquering new territory of its own accord: down from his cheeks to his neck and up to the tips of his ears.

‘Concentrate.’

Perhaps swimming had been a bad idea. A very, very bad idea. Nodding in abashed silence as Vyren spoke, Lithian kept his lashes lowered, not yet daring to lift his eyes while he dedicated his fingers to the task of finishing with his hair. Why did his body insist on making even simple tasks complicated? He barely knew Vyren, and he knew full well he wasn’t romantically attracted to him. How could he be, after such brief exposure? But apparently, that mattered little?

When he finished with his braids — long hair falling in loose, pale blue waves over his shoulders and down his back in stark contrast to his dark skin — Lithian stepped out further into the river and curled his toes against the current, relaxing at the feel of it. Eventually, after an extended pause, he allowed himself to look up and watch Vyren as he floated.

‘Or,’ his mind provided unhelpfully, ‘perhaps it was a very, very good idea.’

Lithian shoved away that train of thought. Hard. And waded out deeper. Though the possibility of shedding his own trousers occurred to him, he opted against it, his body already far more unfortunately enthusiastic than he was comfortable with. Not something he was in the mood to let show.

“You’re very welcome,” he said instead, smiling and relaxing genuinely once the majority of him was submerged. Water calmed him, always had, even long before he’d chosen his clan. “I’m happy to be of help.” After only a moment’s debate, Lithian’s smile flickered, edging upwards at the corners into something bordering on a grin before he shot a look in Vyren’s direction. “Want to see a trick?”

At Vyren’s response, Lithian’s smile broadened into an open grin for a fleeting moment before he sank fully beneath the waves.

Once submerged, Lithian shut his eyes, savoring the sweeping, enveloping sensation of home and safety that always came with being immersed in water. Then, he kicked off. Using a sizeable nearby boulder as a springboard, Lithian darted out into the river’s middle, swept his body into the direct pull of the current at its strongest point, and reached out with tendrils of his magic with his own body as their focus. There — just as he pivoted back to swim directly beside Vyren — he yanked, plucking at each key point of his internal energy, and dissipated entirely into the river.

The sensation was disorienting, to a certain extent, every time. To have his body split, dissolve into the river itself until it was no longer his own but part of the current, was an ever-fascinating, ever-jarring experience. From one instant to the next, he went from a single sense of self contained in the confines of a solid body, to something innately fluid. His senses panned out like a web of awareness, almost omnipresent, picking up each dart and bend of the current as it rippled over the rocks below, each twitch of a fish’s fin and each twitch and sway of an aquatic plant as it bent with the flow. It was dizzying. And addicting.

As such, it always took several moments of awareness for Lithian to ground himself in reality again. Several moments to remind himself of who he was and not lose himself to the eternal, siren call of the water. Interestingly enough, this time it was Vyren that helped jerk him back into his sense of self.

As his senses rippled around and then focused in on his companion, Lithian remembered his original intent, and gathered himself in the form of a small tunnel of current. Pivoting as a miniature whirlpool, Lithian coiled, like a water snake, around Vyren once, twice, and then up, breaking the natural surface of the water like a wave from nowhere and arching over the firani’s head. When he rejoined the river with a splash, Lithian clipped his connection, reforming into the confines of his natural body with a snap, just behind Vyren’s back. As his lungs drew in air greedily — they always felt deprived after being forced out of existence — Lithian’s cheeks heated with a pleased flush.

“Eventually,” he said, still a bit breathless, “I’d like to be able to give the water more shape when I try that. Like…I don’t know, a fish, or a dragon when I break the surface. But it’s hard enough to try making a shape like that when I’m in my own body and putting all my energy into it, so…I imagine it’ll be some time. It took me a good while just to learn how to meld with water in the first place.”

Lithian flushed, heat swimming up from the base of his neck to the tips of his ears at the comment and pooling in his cheeks. Despite showing passive and polite interest in the past during their interactions, Vyren had never devoted even remotely so much sincere attention to Lith, and his enthusiasm was far more than Lith had anticipated.

“I—it’s…it’s really not terribly impressive,” Lithian said. “That is, it’s not all that complicated…well, I mean, it is complicated. It took me some three years or more to get very good at it, or, that is, where I could do it reliably, though I’m still not all that proficient, but…what I meant was, all peisio — at, er, at least those that train in battle spells — will learn it eventually. Usually it’s used as a form of self defense under attack or rapid travel through waterways…”

Lithian drew a breath, running a hand through his wet hair to guide it back, out of his face, and trying not to make a blunder of his sentences.

“To do, it’s…” He paused, thinking and trying to come up with the most appropriate method for describing it. “For me, at least, it’s a good bit like bending any other body of water, the primary difference being, instead of focusing my magic on an outer source, I push all of it inward. It’s…a good bit like convincing my magic to treat the entirety of my body as just another piece of my element to be bent to my will, and…then you pluck at the strings of it, and mesh. I…suppose it’s difficult to explain, but it is almost addicting, you know? I have always felt that, when we choose our clan, it’s more than just deciding which element we wish to ‘control’ — it’s picking what element we trust to become a part of us for the rest of our lives, and from that moment on…our bodies do, to an extent, want to be one with our magic…”

Realizing how long he’d babbled on, Lithian flushed anew, and clapped his lips back shut, sending Vyren a sheepish glance.

“Sorry,” he mumbled. “I would try to teach you, but I do not know if there is even an equivalent spell for firani, and I am hardly an expert to begin with. I’m sure there are many who could explain it better. We…” His attention paused and caught briefly on a glinting rivulet of water rippling down from the wet tips of Vyren’s hair and over his chest. Lithian jerked his eyes away and swallowed hard, clearing his throat. “Well, I’m very refreshed. Are you ready to not be wet? That—that is, to go put clothes on. Er, so that we can go back to doing…things…with plants…and clothes.”

Wincing at his own choice of wording, Lithian wondered why Vyren even bothered trying to communicate with him.