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Detraeus watched his son shoot.

From the moment he had jerked awake that night to a far too vivid nightmare until well after Ataya began firing arrows into the morning, the panic of losing his child had plagued him. It lingered still, well rooted under his skin and knotted around his heart despite the rational evidence that his son was in a far better state now. It relieved a part of him to see it, certainly, and gave him hope. But still, he hesitated. Watching, and waiting. Terrified in spite of himself that if he turned his back, it would be the last time he saw the boy breathing.

It was a fear more common than he would have liked. It didn’t help, of course, that Ataya seemed to make a habit of making his fears well placed. As dawn warmed the sky, though, and Ataya uttered another — Detraeus had lost count on how many, now — insistence that he did not need to stay to watch, he would be fine, Detraeus eventually, reluctantly forced his uncooperative legs to guide him into the house.

He wanted to speak with his mate anyway.

When he made it into their room, gaze tracing her shape on instinct, his heart knotted, fluttered, and weighed heavy all at once. He stooped and removed his boots before crawling in beside her, settling his weight at her back, and tucking his face in close against her shoulder, arm looping to a faint cling around her waist. Pressing his lips gently to the warm skin and scales there, he savored the brief moment where he could hold, draw on her comfort, and speak of nothing.

He knew, though, as he had told Ataya directly, that the night’s events were something she must be told of.

“Morning,” Detraeus rumbled, reluctant to pull away and keeping his eyes shut. “Some six hours in…” He held, fingers splaying over her belly as his thoughts turned, words gathering behind his tongue but none of them quite right or enough. “Ara…there is something…Ataya…”

Detraeus leaned into his mate’s touch, brow furrowed as he gathered his breath, but no matter how he tried to block it, the sight he had walked in on the night prior dwarfed his waking thoughts, sending a cold, panicked knot back into his gut. “Ataya…attempted to leave us for the gods last night,” he said.

Detraeus shook his head. “He is…better. And uninjured. I spoke with him, and he…” Detraeus trailed off and laced his fingers into Araceli’s trembling one’s, pulling her close against him as her state registered. “He is well now,” he promised, switching gears so as not to aggravate her upset further and praying it was true as he kissed the side of her head. “He is outside,” he added, and moved to sit up and guide Ara with him, reaching over while he did so that he could brush the dampness from her eyes. “I think…better as he is, he could still benefit from his mother’s company. He has always listened more closely to you than I. His sister will likely be rising soon on her own…”



Ataya rolled his shoulder, huffing at the building ache there. No matter how often his father forced training on them, Ataya still found his body upsetting strenuously after a certain point, and this was certainly the longest he had willingly worked with a physical weapon in…perhaps his entire life. It did help, however, with honing in on narrower targets and testing his ability to attempt differentiating finer details. The fine tuning process of the way he chose to cast and how to maximize efficiency versus results, of course, would be an extensive process that could take weeks, months, or even longer to perfect, but for the time being, he was satisfied that even a few hours was helping him to make some visible — hah, visible — progress.

He snorted to himself, flicking his wrist and stiff fingers in an effort to encourage life back into them. “Come now,” he goaded his body, “I ask little work of you most of the time. In the end, this will work best for both of us.”

He set himself to the process of finding his most recently loosed arrows.

Ataya blinked, pausing at his sister’s voice, and then hummed, something verging on an entirely-too-pleased expression edging into place. “Oh, I don’t know, dear sister, what does it look like I’m doing?” he asked as he plucked the last of his arrows free from his mark and moved back over towards her. “Who doesn’t enjoy being up in the wee hours of dawn in winter in their nightclothes getting in a little exhaustive morning exercise. You do know how much I love exercise. And archery.”

Stepping past her, he paused, and then — unable to resist — he tilted his head as the edge of his mouth curved up. Definitely smug.

“Watch this.” Reaching out with his free hand Ataya turned towards a tree near to the target location, but plenty far off enough to use as an accurate demonstration tool, and coiled his fingers. ‘Finding’ its trunk was easy enough given the still-falling snow and large blank of negative space that it left in the snowfall, and with that, he pushed, forming three small rings of ice up the trunk. Makeshift ‘targets’ easily small enough to provide a suitable challenge — smaller, already, than he had been able to pin down to begin with — before raising his bow and lifting an arrow. He nocked, drew, and fired. One. Two. Three. Each, he could tell by the splintering of his ice, on target.

“Not fast,” he said aloud. “Not particularly fluid. Not especially useful in a fast-paced combat situation, but then, never have I ever been…but accurate. When was the last time you saw a blind man shoot a five inch target at fifty paces?” he asked. “Oh, that’s right, you just did about a handful of seconds ago.”

He started again towards his arrows to retrieve them.

“The drawback, of course,” he said as he walked, “is that my arms feel like they are going to fall off at any moment, and I am not sure I’m prepared to be doubly cripple seeing as I’m just starting to get used to this one. It would seem an inordinate and unjustified bother to have to learn to cope with another so soon.”

Ataya hesitated. The line of questioning, while justified of course, brought his mood back down into uncomfortably serious ranges, drawing back all the memories of the night before and what had lead to it. Things that he was, already, embarrassed by and did not want to relive. He rolled his sore shoulders, rubbing at one with a frown as he moved back over towards his sister.

“It’s…a touch complicated,” he started. “I was…mildly upset last night, and…things…well, the sum of things is that I have been experimenting with my magic. Father mentioned something about ‘vision’ meaning a different thing from person to person, at least between the races, how oblivionites see in shapes, primarily, and I remembered travelling over with Father to the khehora encampment and how it was less…empty on the way over, somehow, being surrounded by snow, than it was in the house, for example, and I thought about negative space, and how I can feel my own magic and element, and even if I cannot feel or ‘see’ anything else, I can sense where it isn’t based on where my ice can be if I chill a room, and of course doing something like that all the time would be ridiculous and wasteful and exhaustive and coat everything in ice and later water but I thought that if I could just—”

The front door to the house opened.

Ataya flushed, wincing in spite of himself and shaking his head. “Nothing. Nothing’s wrong, I’m—Mother, I’m fine, I…” Ataya exhaled a withering, guilty breath as he frowned and wrapped his arms around his mother, returning the embrace. “I’m fine…now. I swear it. Really there’s no need to…over…” His last word came out in a mumble, “…react…”

Behind Araceli, Detraeus snorted at Ataya’s closing statement, but his gaze flit to his daughter and he notched his head, urging her over silently and waiting until she was close before dropping his voice. Loud enough for her, but not enough to carry. “Your brother,” he said, picking his words carefully and working to keep his voice even, “attempted to…leave this world last night. I found him coated in ice with his heart nearly successfully stopped. Though his mood has improved…” He eyed Akara, “…he must be watched over carefully. No matter what he says.”

Ataya tensed, posture going brittley stiff at his sister’s first outburst, and the composure he had put together over the course of the morning — however fragile — cracked, threatening to crumple. Despite all his best efforts, his fingers tightened at his mother’s hips, breath beginning to shake and a volatile tempest of emotions all jostling against one another at once: in his chest and in his throat as it squeezed down.

“You don’t understand,” he bit out. But the words were too quiet to be heard, and the increasing tremble to his limbs — anger, guilt, and grief all meshing together and feeling as though they were attempting to take his body over — did not make speaking, or thinking for that matter, any easier. “You don’t understand—you don’t understand—” By the time his voice raised loud enough to be heard, though, the front door was slamming shut, and with its crash, anger tipped the scale, winning out over the rest as he pushed away from his mother entirely.

“Ataya—” his father warned, but Ata paid it no mind.

He was already sprinting for the house. Careless of the mess he made and the energy he wasted, he sent a pulsing wave of frost in front of him, coating the house before arrival and allowing him to immediately find, grasp and yank the door back open. The ice there CRACKed sharply in deference to the recently-frozen-over entrance being used again, and moments later, Ataya was in. There, for a too-long moment, he stood, clutching to the door still and gathering his shaking breath and fluxing emotions.

He understood his sister’s hurt. Hurt himself when he thought of what he would have actually done to his family had he succeeded in his ends the previous night. But that hurt and guilt was torn by equal, shaking fury at the injustice that she so easily accused him when she didn’t know, she wasn’t there trapped inside of him, helpless in nothingness—

He squeezed his eyes shut, gritting his teeth and giving a more modest pulse of energy before him as he worked his way carefully through the main room and down the hall, towards his sister’s room, where he assumed she had retreated to. He wanted, still, to speak to his mother, and part of him — even as he reached his sister’s door — wanted nothing more than to flee back, find his mother’s embrace and hide there until the emotional sea threatening to swamp him ebbed. But he was not a child. And he was here, now, before his sister’s room.

Without knocking, he found the handle and opened it. That, apparently, was where his courage ended, because he could not force his feet, or his tongue, to move further. Instead, his knuckles went white with their grip on the knob, and it took all his remaining willpower to remain upright.