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Some bad days began poorly.

Others started normally, and then gradually deteriorated throughout over a series of small or large disappointments or goings wrong. Still others started with promise and proceeded well — even exceptionally so — all the way up until the moment of catastrophe. Tanarah, alone and wedged between two slabs of rock far out into the open desert near the edge of the Terra Expanse as a trio of firani dragons clawed at the earthy stack in pursuit of her, was experiencing the third variety of bad day.


Ten hours earlier…

Tanarah’s feet pounded over the earth to the beat of her pulse, slapping wet sand on each downbeat. In, two, three, four. Out, two, three, four. Miles out to sea, the morning sun was not yet peeking its color over the horizon. Its light, though, rippled warm over the drowsy, yawning sea. Aside from winter, early morning was the only opportunity to catch the air cool during lighted hours, the atmosphere still feeling n** of chill left over from the desert night. Not that Tanarah minded the heat. She quite enjoyed it, even. But there came a certain undeniable liveliness with crisper temperatures as a change from time to time.

When she finished with her run, jogging back towards her house pleasantly out of breath, she found her father on the back steps, knelt in a morning prayer. She slowed to a walk. By the time she did arrive, moving up onto the overhanging patio, he was rising to a stand and looked surprised to see her, but smiled anyway.

“Good morning.”

“What do you pray for?” Tanarah asked. It clearly threw him off for a beat, but he recovered quickly enough.

“All sorts of things,” Lithian said. “But mostly in thanks, I think…for all the blessings this life’s given me.” He eyed her. “And my children.”

“Do you think it makes a difference?”

“Certainly. I think it helps anyone to give thanks…to remind ourselves of what we have and be happy. To realize that even if sometimes we may want for more or feel slighted, in the end—”

“So it’s mostly for you, then?” Tana asked. At his blink, she clarified. “Or, you know, for whoever’s prayin’. It’s good for them to help themselves be happy by realizing what they have, and not really about the gods at all.” Lithian gave a small frown. “Or do you think the gods get real excited, when lots of people pray to them? And listen in to allll the people all ‘round and all of ‘em sayin’ ‘Thank you for this…’ or ‘Please give me that…’ and maybe sometimes they have contests, where they count up how many prayers they got that day—whoever has the most followers wins…”

The corner of her father’s lip edged up in gentle amusement. “I suppose I cannot say for certain the whims of the gods or exactly how all things work beyond the realms we walk, but…in my own imagining of it, the god I give my thanks and worship to is more mature, I think, than those of us here in the mortal coil. I do not think a contest for prayers is a particularly admirable goal for someone in their divine capacity.”

“But creating people just to war them against each other and prove you’re better is?”

“Mm.” Lithian eyed her. “You know that was not Abronaxus’ doing…”

“I don’t know it,” Tanarah said. “Just ‘cause I’ve been told it doesn’t always make a thing so. And even if there was a god so great and so good, why would he let things still be as they are? So that so many people are hurt and angry all the time and people like you and Papa have to let people into our home so you can use up your magic and your time fixing the problems gods let happen?”

Lithian allowed a long pause to stretch there, only to offer some convoluted semblance of a smile. “I do not know the answer to that either. But I think, perhaps, in the end…it is not nearly so simple as we might wish it to be. No matter the forces of good in this world, like night to day, they must be counterbalanced. A just god may always be stuck finding ground between the extremes because one cannot exist without the other and harmony, above all, is what keeps this world what it is…”

Tanarah shot him a narrow-eyed squint. “I think you just made all that up to avoid the question.”

Lithian chuckled lightly. “Perhaps,” he said. “I do not have all the answers for this world or the next, though I might wish I did, and sometimes…I do not even know how to properly tell what it is that I believe. These things are complicated and personal concepts, and I think to many of us, they vary in accordance with the individual.”

Tana grunted. “But you still pray. To your god.”

“I do,” her father said. “And I do believe it is good that I do so.” After dusting a thumb over her nose, he kissed it. “Whether anyone else believes that to be true or not is their business. In the end…” He leaned back, studying her face with a smile that, in spite of herself, made her cheeks warm. “I think we all come to a place at some point in our lives where prayer is what we need. Whether you pray to a god, or you pray to the sky or earth or sea, or the energy that gives you breath, that isn’t most crucial…only that when the world moves out of your control, you learn to let go and accept that you can only move so far on your own strength. Eventually, we all need more than that…and once you have done all you can, all that is left is to pray and be at peace. Pride and fear can do so much damage otherwise…”

Tanarah flushed and leaned in, giving him a quick hug and rumbling against his chest. “Yeah, well…even if you’re a little crazy, I still love you.”

His lips brushed the top of her head, kissing her hair. “And I you, little princess. Though if you’re going to turn down prayer, you may at least want to take a swim or a bath. You smell like your run.”

Tanarah gave an extended snort, and then was pulling away, shooting him before darting off down the deck. “See you after school, Da!”

“Tana—”

But then, she was gone, sweeping indoors to find her sister.


Six hours earlier…

“You won’t make it.”

“I will make it.”

“You can’t make that, Tana, it’s too fa—”

“Watch me.” Tanarah sprinted forward, and kicked off.

In retrospect it was not, perhaps, the smoothest or wisest of jumps she’d ever made in her life, her body colliding with and only just managing to scrabble and catch at the side of the building opposite. It winded her. Her chest hurt, likely bruised something, and below, surely someone saw—but then, she was up, over the lip and clear from view. After a hasty rubbing and dusting of her hands over her front, she glanced back to Li on the opposite side, shooting him a grin.

“See?”

Li looked relatively unimpressed. Tanarah paid him no mind and got to work on the task at hand: pinching at least one of each of the rooftop fruits growing in the open air garden there. She made it nearly all the way through before company arrived. One mad dash, a scramble over and down a wall and a three block run later, Tanarah was safely out of spotting and screaming distance again, and minutes later, Li caught up with her.

“You’re still loud and clumsy as a drunken desert leklan,” he asserted.

“Shut up and eat, freeloader,” Tanarah answered, tossing him a fruit — which he caught.

“Don’t well behaved and upstanding girls of monied families attend class about now?” he asked.

“The well behaved ones do,” Tana said. She bit into one of her spoils, humming and propping back against a crate. “I’ll go in…” She waved vaguely, squinting up at the angle of the sun. “Another bit or so. Apologize to my sister, she’ll likely have a word or two for me.”

Li shot her a squint. “You skipped and didn’t tell her or take her with you?”

“C’mon, you know she’d only have tried to talk me out of it, and she’s the one for keepin’ her skirts in a row. I don’t imagine she’d want to double our trouble and hop out. Works out better this way.”

Li snorted. “If She says so.”

Tanarah grinned. “So She does say.”


Two hours earlier…

Tanarah frowned, legs dangling over the lip of a rocky desert stack as the sun sank to the lower end of the red sky and thumb to her mouth, nursing a busted lip. As predicted, her sister had not been pleased with her ‘life choice’ of reneging on class for a morning. That, though, was anticipated and highly manageable. What she hadn’t anticipated was Danaiu’s attitude towards her additional time spent with Li, which she considered not only unprecedented and unfair, but none of his concern to begin with.

What business of his was it who she chose to speak or associate with?

The fact that he insisted on referring to her friend as ‘your desert rodent’ or ‘your dragon rat’ seemed only to make it all the more frustrating on two grounds. First, as Tana had explained to him with great fervency, Li was not ‘her’ anything. Period. End of discussion. Second, the implied insult in referring to his dovaa race made her scales itch, and she sometimes wondered if, despite the fact that both she and her sister passed as full blood dovaa, Danaiu forgot that detail at his own convenience.

In her irritation with him, she may or may not have been rougher than normal in their ‘hand to hand combat’ training with each other — and he may or may not have responded in kind, leaving them each with their share damages to explain to their respective caretakers. Tanarah didn’t care. Or, so she told herself. It wasn’t Danaiu’s business who she spent time with and that was that in its entirety. If he wanted to trade harsher blows after venting his frustrations in order to work through winding his undergarments into a bunch over things that weren’t his concern then she would happily step up to the plate.

No matter how she argued this with herself, however, a nagging, itching feeling picked at the back of her mind. Hence, her current retreat. Social person though she was, and much as she found her energy in the presence of others, associating herself with as many friends and companions as she could muster, when her mind was too busy for others, she enjoyed the open stretch of desert. It was, in the end, her home. A certain peace came with the rolling dunes, the caked red clay, and the jutting stacks of earth and stone.

And, she enjoyed the heat.

To sit with the sun in her face and the wind at her back, perched high above the rest of the world, blades at her sides as the rest of society nattered on far in the distance and long out of earshot. This appealed. The process of climbing, too, leant itself to clearing her mind, and so — upon returning home from the day’s events — it had not been long in before she retreated again and made her way to her current roost.

She could not have said exactly how long she stayed, only that by the time she started her trek back down the desert stack, the sun had just slipped beneath the horizon and that it was in the fading red light of evening that her boots hit the dusty ground. She intended to head home, make it back in before nightfall, clean, and explain to her parents where she’d been. The journey became more complicated than that.

For starters, she had trekked out further than she intended, but that caused few problems in and of itself. Then, her journey became subject to unanticipated and uninvited company. By some miracle, the wind favored her at first, so she noticed the great, glinting red-scaled bodies up ahead before they noticed her in turn: a hunting party of firanis, currently keen on determining each others’ fair ‘share’ of what looked to be a recently downed carcass. For several moments, she held her breath, stilling and keeping her shape tucked behind the nearest sizeable rock. She considered, at first, that she might simply wait them out.

A coward, she wasn’t. But nor did she intend to be a fool, or worse — a corpse. Therefor, knowing her own relative size and strength in comparison to not only the might of one of these dragons, but also their number, she held back. Better to wait, live, and learn, and surely after they finished with their meat—

Then, the wind shifted. A sidelong gust, sending the dust over the clay skittering from her side in an arrow-shot line towards the cluster of predators. Tanarah might have cursed, if that wouldn’t have blown any semblance of cover she had left. When two snouts lifted and red eyes narrowed on her, that ceased to matter, and she swore beneath her breath.

And broke into a run.


Present.

Tanarah was a good runner.

That much was true. But to run well, and to run well enough to escape dragons were two entirely different standards. Thus, even in flight, she prepared herself to turn. One, two, three, in. One, two, three, out. Her breath came in skirted bursts both ways past her lips and all she could hear was their approach: the roars of pursuit, the beat of great wings and pound of talons to the earth on lift off.

They had been some significant stretch away when she first spotted them, but she knew better than to think she had much time before they closed that distance. Ahead, however, her attention focussed on her goal: a narrow crevice between two jutting slabs of rock, shadowed as though it may go deep. Cornering herself, she knew, would do her no good, but if she could fit in far enough to escape the reach of their talons and their breath…

One, two, three, in.

She felt the wind of dragon’s wings beating at her back before looking, felt the energy in the air spike and ripple with heat as it drew breath and fire to its lungs, and in the last instant, she looked. Slinging a sidelong glance over her shoulder even as she pivoted her body, she careened into a skirting roll, missing the brunt of the follow-up pillar of fire that chased the space she had occupied only moments before, but not so much that it didn’t still sear the air and her skin on its way by. Bracing a foot to the earth, she pushed up and drew her blades.

Firani dragons were large. Not so large as gaili or even peisio, she knew that much. But a great deal more sizeable than anything she’d faced on her own before. So, when the first to attack snapped forward, maw wide, she wasn’t entirely sure what instinct — or foolishness — she could blame on moving forward with her blade wedging it between the beast’s jaws. When it reared back, she had the sense at least to release the weapon, and as it snarled and clawed at its maw, she took her ‘opening’ and after several less than successful attempts, managed to bury her second blade in its side beneath its wing. And again. And through its wing.

That dragon — as she would soon find out — would prove to be the ‘easiest’ of the lot. As it wailed and disintegrated, she snatched her second blade back up, and only just pocketed the first’s soul orb before the others were upon her.

In retrospect, she was not entirely sure how she made it to the crevice in the rock.

It was too far away, the dragons too numerous, and her on her own. She was pinned in several instances: a talon raked down her side here, a tail beating her to the dirt there. She concluded, as her weapons failed to find purchase and their purrs rumbled around her, that the answer was simple enough. They were toying with her.

In the end, it saved her her life.

The crevice was not wide. At first, she barely fit, and to the thunder drum beat of her pulse she thought for several instants that this would be it. Then, something gave. Her foot skidded, something cracked and she was falling, yelping, and sliding down a very much unanticipated downslope from the crevice into a—

—very shallow cave?

Tanarah squinted upwards through the dust and sand, coughing as she came to a stop in a heap at the indent’s base. It couldn’t have been far. It hadn’t felt that far, and that concept was further emphasized by the fact that, moments later, the dragons roared their frustration, light seeping in through the upper crevice and very near to her indeed. She winced at the volume, but in the moments after, felt a spark of hope. If they couldn’t fit in, then at the very least this was exactly what she’d hoped for? A space she could wait in for them to give up on her from?

Then a snake of fire came billowing through the crevice.

Tanarah pressed herself back, far as she could make herself fit as she curled down to the earth from the fire. But still it burned. Still it licked close to her skin, too near, too bright, and too hot like a dancing demon and her teeth dug into her lower lip not to cry out. When it came again, this time in greater supply and lashing in deeper like a whip, she did scream in spite of herself. Not like this, not like this, not like this, an animal cooked in a hole—

—but it burned.

When it caught her hair, singeing and then lighting it, she all but choked on a wail slammed herself to earth, desperately fumbling to douse it in grit and stone, but she couldn’t breathe. It was too hot. Too hot. Too hot. Salt tears stung the corners of her eyes, as much from shame, frustration, and anger as anything else. This wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair. Her slamming palm landed near to something that rolled from her satchel as she did. Face burning and body caked in salt, sweat, and grime, she squinted blearily through the haze and the growing dark at it. Outside the crevice, another dragon drew breath.

The firani soul orb.

In the moment it took the fact to register, Tanarah reached for it—unthinking, instinctive—and smashed, beating the gleaming sphere of red-gold to the cavern wall. She felt it burn through her, the heat of it licking under her skin and through her insides like swallowing fire, but not: because this was her fire. In her eyes, on her scales, in her breath. A moment later, dragonfire engulfed her, and she shut her eyes, breathing out.

She knew not how much of her hair had burned or where she might scare, how much blood she’d lost or where all her injuries were. She knew she still hurt from tip to toe and that her situation was highly unfavorable. But still, a ripple of a laugh bubbled up and squeezed out — half choked, half whined — but there. It quickly petered into a soft groan and she coiled forward, curling in on herself and gritting her teeth again to wait out the onslaught until the dragons’ interests died.

Only when eventually, finally, they did, did she force herself up, wedge her aching, burnt and bleeding body back through the crevice, and start out over the desert night to finish her trek home.

It had been, if nothing else, more of a day than she had bargained for.

Last roll.