Welcome to Gaia! ::

Ataya woke begrudgingly. Though his capacity to rise early when necessary had improved — marginally — over the years, his body still clung to the habit of treating daylight with distrust, grogginess, and much ill-tempered frustration that it had insisted on shining down upon him before he was ready. This morning followed suit with most, and as the desert warmed around him and Eowyn’s sun beat persistently down to remind him that it was time again to rise, it was only with substantial force of will that he got himself up and moving.

A good thing, however, as the case happened to be, since the ‘leftovers’ from the previous night’s skirmish were beginning to ripen and foul the smell of his camp. After freezing over, levitating, and tossing said leftovers — but not before seeing to it that each was stripped of everything of value — Ataya began the process of inspecting what else they had brought with them. Of the three men, two mounts had seen fit to remain in the vicinity and take up rest near to his own, and he took what time he could afford to attempt to identify what they carried.

Most was to be expected: travelling food, bedding, weapons, and what he was fairly certain was clothing. Then, his fingers happened upon something else. At first, he was unsure what to make of it — smooth, but hard, warm, but not magicked. Large and round…

A soft, snorting whinney from Rannah as she moved beside him and nosed his shoulder, breathing warm air onto him, stirred a thought, and Ataya tilted his head, giving the barest pulse of magic by way of experiment. Sure enough, the pulse was met with resistance. Weak, but there: an answering ripple of magic that could only come from another living thing.

“A khehora egg,” he observed aloud, letting his magic fade out and tracing the pad of a finger down its shell instead, thoughtful. “And still alive, at that…”

It would fetch a hefty price in any market setting, if he could find a buyer. Even as the thought occurred to him, however, the possibility of not selling it — and keeping it instead for his own — settled in the back of his mind. He knew his father’s opinion on the bond, but that was no discouragement; he had considered the appeal of attaining a bonded even as a child, when Akara first discovered Lyari’s egg. Under his current circumstances, though, upkeep — and the oddity that came with having to share mental space with another creature — were more pressing concerns.

Humming to himself, Ataya dismissed the thought for the moment. Regardless, the only current answer was to see that he secured the thing and brought it with him. Whether or not he bonded to it himself could be decided when it came closer to hatching — if it was far enough off that he made it into town by then — and in the meantime, it did no good to fret one way or the other about it. So, camping mess disposed of, Ataya washed his wounds, made a passable attempt at binding them, packed his things, secured the khehora egg, bound the two additional hastar to his own in order to guide them, and mounted to depart.

All in all, if not for the unpleasant addition of the side wound, the attack on his life had ended about as favorably as could be asked for.

As per Junjie’s recommendation, Ataya took up residence at the inn pointed out to him by the hybrid healer. He found it suitable. Not luxurious, but accommodating enough for his needs and not exorbitantly expensive, which he could not afford to begin with. He stabled Rannah there — with a small pinch of misgivings and several protective spells to alter him if anyone but he disturbed her — and then went about the process of storing his limited range of belongings.

The khehora egg, still as of yet unhatched, was among them.

After having set everything else out — his clothes, his instruments, his highly limited range of ‘practical’ weapons, including several small blades for skinning and excavation among other things — he let his attention dwell on the egg more fully, weighing his options. On the one hand, now that he had arrived safely in the city, he desired greatly to go out, traverse the landscape, explore the library, and perhaps simply listen and absorb the atmosphere and gossip of the hybrid city.

On the other, he did not want to leave the egg. Its only value, after all, was in hatching, and in order to benefit from that value, he need either sell it before that point, or be present in the instant himself. In the past, in considering the concept of a bonded, the thought of having something else other than himself in his own mind was off-putting to put it mildly. The power benefits that came with it, however, and the fact that his would be the dominant mind, made the thought less determinative, and the longer the concept rested in the back of his mind, the more it appealed.

It would, in the end, be his. Something living, useful, and thinking, bound to him and bred to empower him. His father’s problems with the concept were smoke in the wind.

This was not Malta, after all. It was not a friend or a child of a friend. It was an egg, alien and strange, and it had come into his possession. This, so far as Ataya was concerned, made it his charge and property. So, after some minimal arrangements to facilitate the endeavor, Ataya holed up for the moment in his rented room, dedicate the remainder of that day and the whole of the next to experimentation, reading, and spellwork that he could manage from the confines of that space with the materials available.

In the earliest hours of morning on what would be his third day there, well before the sun lit the sky and when the air still breathed the frost of a desert night, a shifting, tapping, and muted thnnkk caused Ataya — just having lain down to bed not a full hour prior — to stirr on the thin cotton sheets of his cot. The tapping continued. Soft. Towards the corner of the room.

He shifted his legs to the edge of the bed, trailed his hands back through his hair as he sat up to guide it behind his shoulders, and then stood, bare feet leaving tiny imprints of frost on the floorboards as he found his way across the room — to the egg.

It had fallen to its side. Not broken, but twitching still under his fingers when he laid a palm to it, the egg — or rather, the contents of it — continued to tap, tap, tap. Ataya waited the process out, feeling the dim hint of magic waving out in overflow from within despite being mostly entrapped. Then, it began to hatch. He could not pinpoint, physically, the moment it broke surface.

Its magic, however, and the bond as it formed were impossible to miss: like a tether, stringing his own energy into another and not so much changing it but bolstering and threading tendrils and layers in and between it. He felt as he was. Normal, calm, curious. But he also, as though suddenly split, simultaneous felt otherwise. Petrified. Trapped. Uncertain. In a dark and bleary world of cold and—

The ttkkk, ttkkk, ttkk of tiny talons tapping to and scraping against wooden floorboards sounded and then, when he reached—something damp, scaled, and warm pressed into his palm. A muted whimper of sound accompanied the press, and with that—want, safety, protection, shelter, food, hungry, hungry, hungry, question, question, question. Ataya found the litany of emotion strange and tangled, but simple enough that even in its newness, the concept of impression upon a caregiver and a need for safety were easy enough to decipher.

Then, it was crawling into his lap.

Ataya gave an objecting puff of a sound, nudging at it. “You’ll mind your own spa—” But in the instant he spoke, he felt the recoil, the cringe, the terror at having upset mother, and his hands moved before he fully processed the thought, stilling her tiny body where it was and murmuring, “Shhhhh-shh, shhh…” until her quivering eased. For it, she, was female. He knew it without knowing how precisely.

Then, he squinted.

“Mother?” he said to her. “I am no such thing, you know.”

A snout nosed his stomach. With that came the soft puff, puff of sniffing and observing. He smelled like…sweat, salt, and cold, dead things.

“Master,” he said aloud, pursing his lips at the ‘observations’ from his newly acquired lap demon. “I am your master.” And though he wouldn’t, otherwise, he was sure, something about the insistent keening want in his mind for some form of reassurance of their bond, he allowed his fingers to stretch out and gently shape the line of the tiny creature’s snout, petting up the grain of her scales and between her horns. The bubble of warmth and satisfaction that came with that made it oddly worth it. “And fortunately for you,” he added, intrigued already and curious as to what all the bond would entail, “I am the sort of master that thinks these things through ahead of time. I have no fresh meat since I knew not when you would be coming, but…”

Ataya tapped a finger to the hardwood, sending a tiny trail of ice fragments out and seeking a specific bag. When he found it, he coiled his fingers up with a murmured spellword, levitating several small hunks of dried meat and cheese from the satchel. After gathering them to him and crumbling one up into a very managable sized bite, he offered it. The sensation of a tongue in his palm was — while not entirely foreign — strange in this size and consistency and temperament.

“A name…” he realized aloud, off-handedly. “You need a name.”

The orakoi began to vibrate. It took Ataya a moment to recognize it as a purr, and for some reason it was far more satisfying than it had any right to be. Particularly when he hadn’t even wanted it in his lap. As it nibbled at his offerings, food wise, he trailed the backs of his fingers absently down her scales, thinking.

“Murdock.” He tilted his head. “Mm, no…hardly a girl’s name, in any case. Qin…zi…ana. Virmoil. Losterwych…Eralduit. Kurth…uh. Kurtha.”

She nibbled his fingers, tongue flicking the tips.

His lashes flicked down. “Do you know, my sister Kara, and my mother Ara are the only women I—well, and perhaps that girl I met just a spell ago, but I hardly see her as counting.”

Tired, tired, tired, tired…

Ataya yawned.

Thirsty.

He groaned. “Kara…Kara, Kara, Kara…” He squinted. “Zhan. Karazhan. There.” With a push of magic, he gathered cold, compressing and compressing until he had a solid, half-globe of ice formed and frosted to the floorboards the size of a frozen-in bowl. Then, twisting his magic, he pulled away at the cold, depleting it and sending it elsewhere in a groove, carving out the middle of the semi-circle. It left behind it a frozen ice bowl, filled with thawed water. He nudged her out of his lap. “Go on, then. Drink. Thanks to your fatigue—” ‘Or one of ours, in any case, but far easier to blame you…’ “—I am going to bed.”

The water was cool, cool, almost too cool on her tongue, but mother wanted—

“Master,” Ataya murmured from the bed as he dropped onto his cot.

—to have it drunk like this, so she did. She drank, and it was good, and she continued until her belly was full and her eyes heavy. Then, she was very lonely. Very, very lonely.

Ataya did not precisely remember allowing his lap demon onto the bed, but all else aside, the fact remained that when he woke, Karazhan was waiting in a coiled tuck, niched in the bend of his legs atop his bed, and he couldn’t muster enough bother to care and order her otherwise. For just this once, at least.

Just once.