Welcome to Gaia! ::

Ataya shifted across the sheets. He rolled onto his stomach. Onto his back. Back onto his stomach. Onto his side. He curled his toes, stretched them, laid his arms above his head, down at his sides, pulled the sheets up and then shoved them away. Eventually, he twisted and flopped on his back again, breath quiet and coming in small, white puffs from his lips as he frowned up at the wooden planking above his head. The soft slap of the ocean sounded outside, and the hull of the ship gave low, creaking groans with every sway.

But all Ataya could think of was Marcus Ysaride’s laugh. The way the city gleamed like nothing he’d ever seen. Even the streets looked beautiful. Pristine. Perfect. And absolutely empty of hybrid faces.

At length, scowling as he did so, Ataya rolled back onto his stomach once more, propping his chin on his pillow and bunching it up under him before giving up, shifting, and hopping down off the cot. Quietly as he could, he slipped out of the lower bunkers, past his sister, mother, and uncle, and up the ladder to the deck. The ocean air nipped at his cheeks — brisk with the tail end of winter — but fresh and pleasant. Salty. And open.

The true vastness of the ocean when they were out upon it was fascinating to Ataya — thrilling, even, in its own way — how grand it felt to be surrounded by so much space. He padded barefoot over the deck to the ship’s starboard edge and leaned himself against the rail, eyes trailing down to watch the clap of each new wave against the hull as it cut forward. The sea glimmered, and Ataya’s eyes widened, entranced for a moment.

He had seen similar effects on occasion on the beachfront bordering his uncles’ house, but this was different. More, somehow, and alive with how deep the ocean was here. After some minutes of simply watching, he headed back below, to his sister’s bunk side to shake at her gently.

“Kara,” he whispered. “Kara, wake up, you must see this…”

“The ocean,” Ataya insisted, not sparing his sister a second for a proper explanation before catching her wrist and guiding her up to the ladder leading up deck. Once out again, he crossed to the rail, raising on to his toes to better peer over the edge. “Look,” he said. “There’s creatures glowing in the water, so much more than at our uncles’ house…it looks like stardust. And the stars…” He tilted his head back, eyes catching the soft glint of the vast expanse of twinkling pinpoints of light overhead. “Isn’t it beautiful? Uncle says the Celestial Plane doesn’t have stars…at least that’s one thing we get that they don’t…”

After an extended pause, he dropped his chin back level and spared his sister a glance, studying her face lit by starlight. A moment later, he shot her a grin verging on mischievous.

“I bet you could swim here, too, without Mother or Uncle up…didn’t you want to earlier?”

Ataya blinked. “I suppose,” he admitted. “I think it’s prettier at night, in a way…the light looks so vivid on dark water…like anything could be lurking in it…” He gave Akara a surreptitious, sidelong glance, “…biding its time…” He took a half step closer to her, “…waiting, and waiting…before rising up from the deeps to swallow the ship whole.” He accompanied the final statement with a hop and grasp of his sister’s shoulders, mimicking some ‘dark beast of the depths’ sinking its maw in. Sort of. “What,” he said, grinning lazily as he perched his chin on her shoulder, “you can’t tell me my fearless sister is afraid of a little dark water…I’d go with you, if we could find a rope and a way up for me after. I don’t have your talents with the water and wouldn’t want to be left behind.”

Ataya hummed in thought, eyeing the side of the boat. He could likely create himself a mock ladder to climb back up, if need be, out of ice. Several icicle spires — a platform, maybe. He wondered if he could create a flat of ice thick enough to hold his weight. At his sister’s decision, his gaze flicked back to her, eyebrows arching.

“Well,” he said, “you first. I’m not diving until you do.”

Ataya’s pulse stuttered in his chest. To be honest, he hadn’t been entirely certain his sister would even take him up on the challenge. It hadn’t seemed intimidating when daring her to. It was mysterious, lovely, dark, and deep. But with his sister in the water, wet and waiting, and himself faced with the prospect of following her…

He tapped his fingers against the rail. “One moment,” he said, though it might not have been loud enough for her to hear. “I’m…judging it…” He squinted. After some extensive period of vacilating and hesitating and no small amount of coaxing from his only sibling, Ataya drew a breath. This, he thought, was likely actually a very, very terrible idea.

Dysarrin would not approve.

Not that Dysarrin’s approval meant a great lot, or that he tended to have the best ideas himself. He didn’t. But Ataya could hear his voice in his head just the same. Not drink it. Not touch it. Not swim in it. Ever. Ataya crouched and touched his hand to the ship’s hull. Beneath his fingers, his magic rippled out, a path of frost white-blue down the side and down, down, down to the water. When it reached the ocean, he pulled, freezing and bidding the water upwards. In a relatively short period of time, he had a ladder built for himself. Humming, pleased with himself, he edged over the rail, and tested it with his weight, assuring that it would hold it before starting his way down.

When he made it to the water’s edge, he lifted a foot out, toeing the water testingly. They weren’t moving terribly fast. That made things easier. He gave a pulse of magic, frosting and freezing the water immediately around his toes, and then another pulse, and another, the lob of ice thickening and growing outwards. Eventually, he brought it in, bringing it into contact with the hull and then frosting it further still to base it against the wood, quite literally freezing it in place. Once satisfied with his work, he sat on the miniature platform of ice, level with the seawater, and eyed his sister.

“How’s the temperature?”

Ataya gave some hybrid sound between a squeak and a squawk at the affront, pushing out with his own magic and freezing a good portion of the water his sister sent his way. “I’m coming, I’m coming,” he insisted. “And it doesn’t. I was just…” He toed the water, “…asking.”

Then, shutting his eyes and with one last breath, Ataya slipped over the lip of his slab and into the open deep. His magic recognized the water, a subset of his own element through which he could pulse his power effortlessly. Easier, even, then trying to cast in air, where he had to summon together the particles. Here, everything he needed — every potential fractal, every piece of what could be frozen — was waiting not only against his fingertips, but his skin, arms, lips, neck, the tops of his eyelids and through his hair, swirling around him.

He breathed out, letting the bubbles climb upwards from his lips towards the surface before kicking off to chase them and breaking to the air above. Curious, he pushed with his magic, sending spires of cold out, hardening the surrounding ocean in thin tunnels of energy like hardening blood into bone with a pulse of will. He could sink it in any direction. Spire ice deep, deep below his feet or simply make loose, icy slush patches in the water. This being the first opportunity he’d had of any sort to openly try such things, the concept was thrilling. New. Trial, and error.

Pushing his wet hair back from his face and kicking off to catch up with his ice slab, he caught it, and shot his sister a grin. “A little bigger than our lake, I would say. You can’t tell me now that I don’t have the best ideas.”

“Mm. It’s the best,” Ataya confirmed, lips staying firmly curved upwards in self satisfied amusement. On noticing her shiver, though, his brow pinched a fraction, well aware that it was almost certainly a result of his arrival. “Sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have chilled so much. I—” Ataya trailed off.

In a moment, his eyes darted upwards and out. Something was coming. He couldn’t see it, couldn’t hear it, but he could feel the raw approach of magic. Powerful magic. Natural and rolling. Energy, like a tidal wave.

“Akara…” He gripped at his slab, pulling himself atop it and crouching, eyes narrowing into wary slits that judged the dark skyline, scouring, but finding nothing. “Something’s coming. We should get out. Something large…”

Then, he saw them.

One — two — three great dragons, blotting out stars in the shape of their bodies, their magic roiling around them like a storm. The ocean responded to them. As naturally as the push-pull of the current, the surrounding waves built up, no longer lightly choppy but larger, growing into greater, lapping swells in a matter of seconds. In under a minute, the height of each one from trough to crest was nearly as tall as Ataya himself. And rising.

“Dragons.” He swallowed, reaching for the ice ladder he had created. “Akara, dragons. Up, up, up—”