Welcome to Gaia! ::

Detraeus shifted the weight of the newly shot dalak across the back of his hastar to balance it better before tightening the ropes on it. Making use of the reasonably calm weather — for a Terra Expanse winter — he had gone out with Akara in tow for a morning hunt which had stretched well into the afternoon, but wrought more than enough bounty to make it worth it: one large dalak and several uruus, small due to the season but plenty plump enough to make several good meals out of each.

The winds were present, but fairly gentle, the temperature below freezing, but not so frigid that it bit through proper winter gear. After arranging the meat, he glanced over his shoulder for his daughter.

“Enough, I think,” he said. “It should keep us for two weeks at least. Ready?” With a thrust of his wings, he was up, mounting easily and catching at the reins of his hastar. They had made good time over the course of the day, but would not want to linger too late, lest a storm catch them and spoil their luck so far.

Besides, he did not want to cause his mate any undue worry, even if the situation were not dire.

“Wrong,” Detraeus repeated. His gut chilled with the word, knotting with a sinking dread. From the moment Araceli had first divulged to him that she would bear his children, the fear had lingered permanent in the back of his mind: something would occur within the workings of fate to steal them from him. That fear reared its head at his daughter’s words. “Ataya…”

Ataya was always in trouble.

Gritting his teeth, Detraeus redirected his mount in the way Lyari had headed and started after him.

Ataya’s world tilted, swaying: back and forth, in and out. He kept his eyes shut, not wanting to grapple with the perpetual white that met with him every time he opened them. They would fix themselves. They had to. But until then, the absolute, unpinned sense of lost in nothing was not something he felt ready to face up to. His gut pained him.

He was aware that he was losing blood. He held his fingers to his side, stifling the flow what he could, but he didn’t dare ‘freeze’ the results, not wanting to damage himself with his own magic — as he, apparently, already had. Instead, his mind hop-skipped from one panic to the next blearily, as though in a dream.

What if he could never see again? Read again? See his sister again? His mother? His father? Dysarrin? He would be useless. Weaker than he already was. Helpless to better himself. Broken, and cut from the world.

He heard the approach of others only distantly, but Rannah’s stirring pulled him into a greater state of alertness and he clutched tighter at his gut with one hand, readying himself as best he could — horribly — for whatever might come. When Rannah stilled and his sister’s voice reached him, however, his posture weakened again: relief, guilt, shame, pain.

“I can’t see…Akara—” He leaned, meaning to dismount, slipping, and nearly crumpling in the process but half-collapsing against her so as not to completely fall despite his wincing. “I can’t—please…you have to—”

An instant later, another sound registered. The thudding of hooves, crunching of snow, and then hands were supporting his waist, his arms. His body felt like a twig against the rock of skin and muscle that propped him up.

“Father—”

“Too much blood. You must slow the wound at his stomach—”

“My eyes—”

“—or he will die from blood loss.”

Ataya fought uselessly against his father’s grip, shaking his head as the man went on. He didn’t understand. He needed his sight. For everything that he was. “Please, sister—”

“We should take him somewhere you can attend to him properly. I can aid you in cleaning his wounds. Your mother must know—”

“My eyes,” Ataya repeated. “I can’t. See.”

“Can you slow the blood flow enough to make it safe to transport him?”

“Take Rannah’s reins,” Detraeus instructed, voice tight — strict and rigid as ever but simultaneously disjointed, his internal mindset fluctuating as violently as a tempest. His son’s body was frail in his arms. Too light. Too fragile. As though it could be blown away in the wind easily as the sand at the tip of a dune, and his grip tightened at the thought.

He gathered Ataya into his arms.

“Lead her behind Erion,” he snapped, aware of his daughter’s weariness but hyper-focussed in that moment on the urgency of his son’s plight. “We head home. You may tend to the rest there.”

Ataya shook his head, murmuring more objections and clutching blindly. “Please…” was lost to the wind. Because Ataya’s life mattered more than his eyes alone, and in a matter of moments, Detraeus was re-mounted. He stretched his wings, Ataya cradled at his chest and spare hand on the reins.

“Come. Quickly.”

And so the path was started for home.

Ataya, for his part, struggled until the strength to do so left him. He was not going to die. He wasn’t. But he needed his sight. Father had to understand. His sister had to understand. He couldn’t…not…

By the time they reached home, though, his thoughts were as imprecise as the distinguishing line between fog and clear air: mixed, melding, indistinct, and ever-changing. He felt like a man drowning in thin air and he wanted—

—gods, he wanted—

—to see the world around him.

He felt like a doll in his father’s arms when they stopped and dismounted. His father’s voice, cool and outwardly ‘calm’, sounded hollow somehow. Desperate beneath the surface. Like a storm brewing, invisible behind a gauze of white cloud.

“Ara…”

Ataya was only distantly aware of the comings and goings around him. Part of that his rational mind attributed to blood loss, but a greater portion he knew was simply the overriding effect of tumultuous, roiling fears, blotting out most other thought processes.

He couldn’t be blind. He was already weak. Already hybrid. Already outcast. Already a disappointment. His magic and his intellect were everything that he was, and without his vision…

He couldn’t function.

He couldn’t leave the house, find his direction, travel—

He had wanted to leave soon, once he was self-sufficient. Visit Taliuma. And other cities across the desert and other continents for that matter. See the world and sample books from every library he found. Now, he likely couldn’t walk or cook a meal, or…

“His side needs tending.” Father’s voice. Mother’s fingers at his cheek. “Akara has slowed the blood loss, but he needs to be laid down and—”

“Mother…” Ataya shifted as his father carried him, moving in through the house — or, he assumed it was the house now due to the change in temperature, lack of wind, familiar smells, and sounds that had lead up to their presence there. “Mother, I can’t—” His throat constricted, and he felt himself being lowered, sheets and a mattress at his back. He turned his head to ‘look’ towards where his mother and father should be. But nothing. Of course, nothing. He squeezed his eyes back shut, shuddering and swallowing the pained knot in his throat as his fingers dug in and clutched to the sheets. “I can’t see,” he whispered hoarsely. “Tell Kara—tell Kara I can’t—I need to…she has to help—fix them…”

Ataya felt his sister’s magic in him, rippling through the avenues of his body like a current down gullies carved in the earth: cool, clean, and soothing. Despite his mind’s focus on his eyesight, his body was in great pain, and the extent of it seemed all the more obvious when, at last, Akara’s work began edging away at it. He wanted her focus elsewhere, but no one was listening and his tongue refused to properly cooperate.

When, finally, she did move to touch his forehead, he felt a flutter of hope. If it was simple, something just lightly damaged, then perhaps—

Her words dampened what remained of his optimism, like a douse of water on an already struggling wet butterfly, but he held his breath anyway. To which god to pray? Would any listen? Care? Do anything? A heavy, sinking ‘no’ seemed to be the answer to any and all of the aforementioned, Akara’s magic already diminished as it searched his eyes and depleting further as she struggled. He registered the sputter of her energy, felt the bed dip as her weight sank against it and heard the sheets shift. He knew from a rational standpoint that she had tried, given everything she could afford to the effort and arguably well more than that, but it did nothing to stop the sound that crawled up his throat, some undefined mesh between anguish and desperation as he shook his head.

“No—sister, please—” he said, struggling to push to a sit. But then, a hand was gripping him — his father’s, from the feel of it — and his father’s voice followed.

“She tried, Ataya—”

“But it didn’t work,” Ataya insisted, pitch raising in spite of himself. “It didn’t work—she has to try again, she can do something else, anything else, she—”

“She has already overworked herself.”

“But I can’t s—”

“Lay. Down,” his father ordered. “The both of you need rest.”

Ataya pressed trembling fingers to his shut eyes. “I can’t—I can’t, I can’t, I can’t…”

Something was communicated between his parents. He heard his father shift and stand and walk around the bed. Heard murmuring and felt the mattress shift again as though someone — likely his sister — had been lifted off of it. His heart stuttered in his chest, a new panic bubbling up, and before he could stop the words:

“Don’t leave me!” He jerked back up to a messy sit, ignoring the stab of pain and fumbling blindly with his fingers across the covers, trying to find a familiar touch. “Please—please, don’t go, don’t—”

All of him shook. His eyes stung. He felt everything he never wanted to feel. Pitiful. Meek. Helpless. He would want no one to see him this way, for it disgusted him; how could it not disgust others? But at the same time, the absolute, raw terror associated with abandonment in the face of the void that greeted him every time he opened his eyes shook him to his core, leaving him to feel like a husk battered by a storm wind, needing something, anything, to cling to. When he spoke again, his voice left his lips similarly battered and hoarse.

“Please…don’t…leave…”

Ataya tucked in at the touch, shuddering and not caring, for the moment how he looked — sixteen, and coiled against his mother’s chest like an infant. She was warmth, stability, love, and familiarity, and he clung to her like a rock, wanting never to recede. He heard his father’s voice, soft when he spoke to Akara, and then the pad of his booted feet moving back around the bed. Soon, his sister’s weight was being layered atop it, beside him, and he flushed, abashed at the degree to which he not only felt like, but was acting like a child. The embarrassment was not enough to make him object.

For now, if only for just this night, he wanted — needed — the company. Tomorrow, their uncles would be contacted. Lithian could see to him. Everything could be fixed. But in this moment, his family was the steady point to which he clung, his support and his shield at his greatest point of vulnerability, and no one had to know but them.

He could trust them with that, at least.