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I should actually roll

Raemos awoke early that morning, his body stiff and sore - as he'd known it would be from the start. He stared up at the familiar ceiling and listened to the sounds of the cabin, falling back on the habits that he'd once had in his childhood.

The cabin had its own sounds, as did the desert outside, but his family changed the cabin's sounds - its aura, he supposed - in ways that he found interesting. It was comforting to hear the sounds of their presence and to know that they were alive, if not awake. It was such a small place - even if it had it's own 'rooms' - he could hear everything. Every breath they made, every sob, every snore reached his ears in some way, the pulse of his family.

The sounds of the cabin were wrong.

He could hear Mallew's snores, but they were far too faint - even for his father, who was not a loud snorer. They were ragged, like gasps.

His mother's snores, usually significant, were not present at all, and came from the wrong place. Raemos suspected that she had fallen asleep on a chair.

His sister's breathing was hardly audible - just enough for him to know she was still there and still with them. She'd been crying in her room when he'd gone to bed, and he'd heard her move in the night.

Poor Vona. Their father was terribly injured. Injuries were no longer a stranger to Raemos, nor was constant access to good-quality healers. They were alone here, among the desert and the sheron, with only the sun, the sand, and the occasional other rancher for company. Neither Sonia or Vona could heal, and Raemos certainly could not. Vona had been afraid, and so was he - he didn't want to lose his father.

Raemos got up and groomed his hair with his hands, tying it back into his usual dreadlocked ponytail. He shook out his clothing and put it on, wincing as the cloth brushed over his recent bruises and wounds. He shifted his belts, snugging them tight and strapping on his sword and wand before leaving his room. It wasn't a room so much as a cubicle, with a cloth 'wall' separating it from the rest of the cabin and giving him what privacy it could. All the 'rooms' were similar, opening out into a main 'hall' of sorts or, in the case of the store room, into the main kitchen, pantry, and eating area.

Raemos's room and Vona's room were near each other, and he looked into her's first - so often uninhabited these days to find it uninhabited still. Light desert blankets lay bunched on the floor and he carefully picked them up, straightened then, and folded them over his arm.

He moved to the kitchen where, sure enough, his mother slept on a chair. She was supine, back arched, her head back and her mouth wide and snoring. Raemos could see that her face was stained and blotchy, and a handkerchief lay, discarded and abandoned on the floor. Raemos looked at her sadly, but decided to let her sleep. He gently draped one of the blankets over her and moved on to the room where his father lay in such a tremulous state.

He pulled back the curtain, and was not surprised by what he found. There was little change in his father - he still seemed like a powerful man brought low, his bandages still stark and stretched over his dented and cracked frame. Vona was there too, asleep by the side of the bed. She looked like a wreak, her hair askew and her sleeping clothes rumpled. Raemos knew his sister had been crying, even without looking at her face, and he felt himself begin to cry again. He rubbed his eyes and covered her with the blanket gently, smiling at how, in sleep, she held their father's hand.

He left the room and drank deeply of a tankard of water and ate the last of the fruit sandwiches that they had brought with them before, with a cricking of his neck and a tossing of his shoulders, he began his morning walk.

He liked how universal mornings were in their qualities. They were a dark, still time, a moment of trepidation and uncertainty before Seren's light rose in victory over the night. A halfway time, when the world's people were asleep, but the rest of the world was not. It was a time wholly for nature, free, briefly, of the confines and torments of civilization. Raemos had always loved mornings and how free they made him feel. In the soft light, he felt, as he did only rarely, that he was not an abomination or some horrible cacophony of ideals and flesh. In these quiet times, he felt right, like he belonged, and the most wonderful part was that the moment didn't end abruptly. There was a transition that made the rest of the day pleasant as well.

He found himself, though, missing the mornings of rural Serenia, with their soft, moist air and quiet birdsong. The desert morning was cool, but dry and silent.

Usually.

He heard an odd sound in the air - a combination of stomping and shuffling and snorting. He looked towards it, and saw - in the near distance - the herd of kargoth his family kept, their large shapes looming out of the flat lands like boulders.

He walked towards them to investigate. He wasn't expecting trouble - predators usually attacked the sheron or, sometimes, the kugel, leaving the large beasts alone. Still, it was always good to check.

He could see, as he approached, that they looked uneasy, and he couldn't blame them. Mara had been seen near the ranch, and he could imagine that their unnatural stone would unsettle even the large, inflappable animals. They shifted in their herd as if uncomfortable and he approached, softly crooning to them as he had been taught, when he saw two stony shapes among the kargoth.

Raemos fell silent, cloaking himself in shadows as he snuck over, his heart beginning to pump faster, washing away his aches and pains briefly in a battle-ready tide. One was a rock mara, easily recognizable from its roch-hewn shape, but the other was unfamiliar. It was not made of metal and, though clothed as the mages had been, but stone, yet it was more sculpted and beautiful than the rock mara, garbed in jewelery as well as cloth. It tapped at its fellow, magic streaming from it to mend cracks in the rock mara's stone carapace.

One of the kargoth stomped close, murmuring uneasily, and - without any hesitation - the sculptor mara took its hammer and, without even looking, cracked the kargoth in the knee before returning to work.

The kargoth trumpeted a scream, and soon all was a chaos of stomping feet and tossing heads. Black rage, with a bit of gleaming fear, erupted forth from Raemos, making the darkness around him boil. He sent an arc of magic out at the sculptor, hitting the rock mara instead and constricting it with choking darkness.

He made a squeezing gesture with his hand, and the rock mara shattered, the magic disspating into a cloud of miasmic darkness as he drew his gleaming sword.

The sculptor mara stood and faced him, seemingly oblivious to the crushing chaos around it.

"Life form detected." it said smoothly, "Non quadrupedal. Facial recognition is active."

Raemos stabbed out with his magic, dashing in to close the space between them as he turned his magical blow into an uppercut, before letting the magic shift around him, cloaking him in its power. The mara swung at him with its hammer. Clouds of sand swirled in Raemos's magic, kicked up by the kargoth as they trumpeted and screamed. They were goading each other, he knew, communicating their panic and fear. It would build into something terrible and powerful, he knew. He had to end this quickly.

He let his sword fall and shoved his magic forward with both hands, slamming the mara again and causing it to stagger back. This mara had no openings like its fellows, no way to send in his magic and stifle it's fell light.

Raemos increased the pressure of his magic, making it solid as he he slammed the mara again and again, pushing it around before slamming down. He thought he'd had it - it was the same sort of blow that had smashed the rock maras so long ago - only yesterday.

It stood, cracked like plaster, and it's magic shimmered around it. Raemos watched in horror as it was made whole again. A healer he realized, understanding, the sculptor is a healer! it made sense in a bizzare way.

Seeing an oppurtunity, he shoved with his magic again before the mara had finished, pushing it back under the powerful feet of the kargoth. He heard it stream, like flint on stone, and saw its magic float away, back towards the Maralan region where it had come from.

He turned to the kargoth as it moved away, to find that his worst fears were being realized. They were turning, stomping and frothing as a group, and were beginning to move - slowly now, but beginning to pick up speed. They were a storm of flesh, able to destroy anything in their path.

A stampede.

Raemos blanched - he had to stop them.

He ran out of their way as their crushing feet thundered past him, and like any mage, reached for his magic.

A web of dark magic spread from his fingertips, clinging to each kargoth as it touched them, wrapping around them and slowing them down as they panicked. Raemos knew that they could not be happy about the magic - in fact, it likely upset them further. He ran over to them as they were pulled to a stop by the powerful magic strands and, swiftly, began to work a sleep spell over them, struggling against the animal's strong minds.

Finally, though, he did prevail, and they fell together into a pile of fur, limbs, and trunks in an unnatural sleep. He removed the holding spell and headed back to the cabin to report to his parents...