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Character: Ataya
Stage: Apprentice
Luck: 1 (+1 from Akara)
Creature: Ysali Dragon x 6
Success Rate: 81 - 100

Win x 3: 7.5 ( cool exp (+3 LUK)
Loss x 3: 4exp (+1 LUK)

Total: 12exp, +4 LUK, Levels to 5 with 2/5 exp left over, +12 stat points to distribute, + 3 Ysali Dragon Orbs

Word Count Required: 1,800+ (Current: 2,019)
Final Word Count: -

Ataya curled his toes.

The light of a single, wavering candle lit the text before him, a yellow-orange glow and long shadows wavering across the page to the pace of his breath. But he barely noticed, too engrossed in the story within the pages to care. He would have cast another light for himself, brighter, except for his sister curled up and presumably asleep on the cot beside his. And it didn’t matter. Despite his lack of night vision, he could see perfectly well enough, and his mind’s eye vision of the unfolding fantasy in the story before him distracted him wholly from any mild, outside inconveniences.

At least, until something outside thunked loud enough to make him start, his head jerking up from the page and eyes wide and round. After a long stretch where nothing but the low, wailing moans of the wind sounded, dampened further still by the walls of the house, Ataya narrowed his eyes a fraction. His pulse still stuttered in his chest, but with his attention from his book already severed, curiosity won out in the end, and he set it aside, face down and open atop his sheets. He slid his feet out from under the covers and over the side of the bed.

As he stood, curling his toes again against the cool, wood-panelled floor and biting back a shiver, he glanced to his sister. Ought he wake her? Or not?

The wind whistled gently, and Akara stirred, but eventually, Ataya opted to step out without bothering her. It wasn’t that scary. Surely it was nothing, right…? He padded out of their room, ignoring the anxious flop thrum of his heart as he stepped into the hall and squinted at the long shadows. His imagination always provided him with an infinite number of suggestions for what foul things might be lurking in the most innocent of places, but he swallowed down those concerns as best he could and lifted a palm.

Murmuring a simple spellword, light gathered at his fingertips, condensing into a small but efficient ball which hovered in the cup of his hand as he stepped out. It cast long shadows down the hall and spilled into the living room. Narrow, dark strips, like waiting ghouls, ready to leap out at him. He hastened out of the hall and into the main room, tip toeing his way towards the door as quietly as he could manage and allowing his light spell to grow a fraction once he made it further away from the bedrooms. As he peeked out one of the front windows, ushering the curtain aside and squinting into the darkness, he frowned.

He saw nothing, at least. And, if there was something, it wasn’t as though he could do much about it, but…

Shoving aside his insecurities, Ataya reached for the front door’s latch.

Ataya screeched.

Whipping around at the touch and whisper and half tripping over his own feet in his haste to turn, he clapped a hand over his mouth as though that — somehow, belatedly — might swallow his cry back up or muffle it so that neither parent heard. In the aftermath, he stared at his sister, heart thump, thump, thumping in his chest like a startled bouken kicking against his ribcage with its back feet. When it finally, finally registered that it was indeed Kara in his company and not some hungry phantom of the dark out to swallow him alive and devour whatever fragment of a soul he might have inherited from his mother, he whined and sank against the door, limbs weak with his previous fright.

“Kara…what are…?” He frowned, the rest of the circumstances falling fully into place as he pushed himself up to a proper stand and drew his orb of light in, shrinking it in his palm so that — just in case their parents were still sleeping — it was less noticeable. “What are you doing up?” he whispered.

Ataya’s cheeks pinked, but he kept quiet as he looked away, squinting back at the window, and then to the door. The prospect of peeking out into the dark had been intimidating before — who knew what was out there — but with his sister at his side, suddenly everything seemed a little less intimidating. And, there was infinitely more room for adventure.

“Slaying dragons,” he said, keeping his voice low as he reached for the door’s latch. “What does it look like? I heard something outside…”

At the door’s first creak, Ataya immediately whispered a quick muffling spell, dampening the already quiet sound to near silence. As soon as it opened wide enough, he slipped through and stepped out onto the grass. He curbed a shiver as the night breezes danced through his hair, slipping through his clothes and skittering down his neck. Even with Akara close, he had to admit that the familiar space outside their house looked significantly more intimidating in the dark. Swallowing back his nerves, he called on two more small orbs of light, and they lit up the grass as he moved out, dancing around him like over eager firebugs.

Five paces out, he glanced back towards his sister. “Coming?” he asked, and he prized himself on not sounding half so uncertain as he felt.

Ataya blinked at his sister’s words, fear temporarily forgotten. “I didn’t mean really slay dragons,” he said. “I was being…” He trailed off and eventually shook his head. It didn’t matter. Now that they were out and he had company things were far less intimidating and much more exciting. With his lights and his sister and no parental control, they could even explore — on their own. “Nevermind. If you want a bow, maybe that would be a good idea…do you really think you could hit something if…?”

He nudged the thought away. Now that it looked as though there was nothing in the immediate vicinity, there probably wasn’t anything dangerous at all around. It was really the same land that it was in the day, after all. Nonetheless, he moved towards the stables to go fetch Akara’s practice bow with her. Once inside the protective space there, warmed by the body heat of the hastars, he hummed and eyed the walls, gaze lingering on one of the daggers Father had been training them with. He wasn’t very good with them, but Mother and Uncle Lithian had refused to teach him offensive magic, so he supposed something was better than nothing.

He pulled it down off the shelf and strapped its sheath to his belt. As he moved back towards the stable entrance and looked out, his pulse hummed with excitement despite the shadows of night, and his orbs of light hovered around him.

“Have you ever wondered what’s further up the mountain?”

Ataya hummed, and then nibbled at his lip before starting out. “This way.”

Orbs of light trailing after him, he started up the mountainside. They didn’t make it terribly far. Ataya didn’t want to go that far on their own in the dark to begin with, but that aside, it wasn’t even that long before the novelty of exploring over shadowy rocks and trees ebbed and his bed began to sound disproportionately appealing. Somewhere around that point, just as he was about to turn back and say that perhaps they had sufficiently explored now after all, something moved. A long shadow to his left that skittered through, breaking up the cone of light provided by one of his orbs, and Ataya spun around, instantly stiff and wary. Rigidly alert. His eyes searched the surrounding short, dry grasses, rocks, and gnarled trunks.

“Akara…” he began, “I think we should—”

Something hissed, spat, and made a garbled snarling sound as it emerged from a rock a mere handful of paces in front of him. His fingers fumbled at his belt, attempting to draw the one weapon he’d brought with him, but before he so much as saw more than a glint of green scales in the obscure light, he felt claws on his skin. Ataya screamed.

“Kara—Daaddddyyyy!”

Dragons. Darkness. Screaming.

Ataya couldn’t see — nothing but scales, claws, teeth, and shadows before him — and it took him longer than it should have to recognize that the screaming was his own. Immediately after, it stopped up in his throat, nothing but the wild pound, pound, pound of his heart filling the space between his ears. It would be fairly pathetic, he thought, to die like this.

Then, Akara’s hand gripped his wrist.

When she yanked him upright, he stumbled, limbs shaking, but managed to get behind her, happily taking refuge as she drew her bow. He ought to help, part of him noted belatedly, but he didn’t know how with no offensive spells in his arsenal, and the instinct to run — ‘Run, run, run!’ — currently drowned out most all other thoughts, making it difficult to concentrate. So, he stood frozen. Locked between competing instincts and effectively rendered useless for both.

“Come on,” his sister’s voice registered distantly as he watched — in a daze — while the dragon disintegrated to dust, “we have to get back down to home.”

Is that what it looked like when all dragons died? What happened to their bodies? Would that be what happened if he died? He’d never seen anything else die like that. It was always a creeping chill. Stiffness. A blank stare. Perhaps blood. But this…

Akara’s grip yanked him on down the mountain, and Ataya shook himself, shoving the thoughts away as best he could — though they lingered stubbornly in the back of his mind — as he fumbled after her. More snarls sounded from the sides of them as they ran. More dragons? How many dragons generally travelled together at once? Were they all ysali? What if there were worse things out there?

Ataya’s throat stung, something dangerously close to a whimper bubbling up as they ran along, and he pushed his legs though they hurt. He had to keep up or he’d fall behind. But he couldn’t. “Kara—Kara wait—” he panted. “I—” His foot caught, snagging on a rock in his haste and inattention, and he yelped, crying out as his body tumbled forward and inadvertently jerked loose of his sister’s hold in the process. “Kara—”

A glinting shadow burst from the rocks to the side of him and Ataya curled inwards, hands immediately moving to curl over his head protectively. But it didn’t go for him.

“No,” he insisted as it dove for Akara instead, “you can’t—”

He pushed up on wobbly knees, gathering energy in his fingers on instinct: a panic-induced, knotted ball of convoluted magic, dark, roiling and unconfined. Whatever it was, he slung it, and the dark mass lodged into the dragon’s side like a shadow with substance, unfurling around the ysali’s body and swallowing it up. Immediately, the dragon screeched — a high pitched, wailing hiss as it tumbled backwards off his sister — and Ataya watched dumbfoundedly as it scrambled around, twitching and crying before dissipating into nothing.

Had he…

…actually killed it?

He swayed in place, dizzy from the expenditure of energy and wholly uncertain still about what exactly he had just cast. “Kara—” The sound of scrabbling claws on rock over the whistling cry of the alarm spell cut him off, and Ataya jerked around just in time to see three more ysalis emerging from the surrounding shrubbery from whatever nest they’d all originated in.

Ataya whimpered, and moved behind his sister.

One minute, they were going to die: be shredded and poisoned and turned into food for the smallest and most pathetic of all dragon types. Ataya felt dizzy, exhausted, tingling all over and light headed, his pulse a wardrum between his temples, and he couldn’t breathe. When a rush of air passed over them, combined with the low thwump of larger wings, he made a small choked sound. Of course, something even bigger had come to compete over which would eat them.

Then — one, two, three — silence.

Ataya held very still beneath his sister, eyes squeezed shut, breath unsteady, body shaking. Any second now—

“Ataya.” Father’s voice. Low. And strict.

Ataya curled up tighter, and broke into tears.