Welcome to Gaia! ::

Lithian woke instantly.

He rarely remembered what woke him, and such was the case now. But, as per usual, he woke abruptly and fully: there would be no going back to sleep now. Fortunately, he noted as his mind took in the details, it looked as though dawn was fast on its way, the cave already filling with the soft, dull grey light of pre-dawn.

‘Cave?’ a groggier portion of his mind asked. Then, ‘Yes, cave…’ the waking half answered, filling him in with the finer details of the night before.

As they came, his attention flicked sidelong, seeking and finding the other smaller body in the room: Casseth. The boy was still dead asleep, eyes shut, hair tousled and loose on his sleeping mat, scales just barely catching the light of the rising dawn. He looked different, this peaceful — more childish, maybe, and innocent in a way his guarded and ever-animate attitude while waking had never let on. Lithian blinked, momentarily fascinated, then hastily yanked his gaze away when he realized he was staring, cheeks warming.

It was odd, he thought — the degree to which he wanted to look back. He’d never found himself even remotely so intrigued with any specific individual before, and there wasn’t anything particularly special, per se, to set Casseth apart, seeing as he’d only known him for a matter of hours or less the evening before. Multiple things about him seemed to draw Lith in like a magnet, but what those things were precisely and why they drew him in so surely was a complete mystery.

He’d never experienced such focused curiosity before.

Frowning, Lithian shoved the thoughts away, tucking them under his various other concerns, and turned his attention instead to the rest of the cave. Casseth’s father — Trilian, had his name been? No, Kilian. Kilian didn’t seem to be anywhere in sight, and Lith wondered briefly where the man had gone, but didn’t focus on it long. Another basic need took over his thought process, and Lithian huffed, pushing back the furs he’d generously been provided with despite a scarce supply and making to stand.

Unfortunately, though his mind was wide awake, his body generally took a bit longer to catch up, and halfway out of his sleeping mat, Lithian yelped, slipping on one of the looser stones, slick with only half-frozen snow and falling promptly on his a** with a cringe.

“Abronaxus…” he swore beneath his breath, lifting a scraped palm to his lips. “Why…?” At the sound of stirring, Lithian’s eyes darted over in Casseth’s direction.

Lithian flushed, offering an indistinct mutter of an answer at first as he drew out clean water, washing and then healing his own scrape before facing Casseth properly. “I—er, sor…mm.” He cleared his throat. “Sorry? I didn’t mean to wake you, I was just…” His eyes flicked towards the cave’s entrance, and when he realized, ‘I was just going to go take a piss…’ sounded a bit too vulgar, he found himself at a loss for how to finish his sentence. “I was…getting up. I slipped. I, erm. Did you sleep well? You look…”

After a brief glance over the entirety of Casseth’s morning ensemble, Lithian hastily dropped his eyes, cheeks burning all the brighter.

“…tired? Ah, and…sorry. Again. I’m…mm. I’m not particularly graceful. Naturally. Or at all…ever.” He rubbed at a horn, resisting the urge to nurse his newly-bruised a** and keeping his eyes stubbornly on the cave floor. “I hope you slept well.”

Lith blinked, startled out of his reverie by the last question. “No,” he answered in earnest. “I mean…I’ve encountered them, briefly, I suppose. Mostly on Eowyn. Shopkeepers or traders or the like. Travelers, sometimes. Two years ago, though, I’d never even set foot outside the Plane. Today…” He shrugged, abashed. “I still can’t say I know many people, not personally.”

He eyed Casseth, curious.

“Why? You’re a, er…” He flushed, pulling at his hair, “…good first impression?”

Lithian frowned, shifting uncertainly. He had never second-guessed the rules about hybrids and other races before. It was simply law, little more to it, and since he’d never had to deal with it himself or known anyone affected by it, it had never even occurred to him to wonder about the reasoning or justice behind them. It was as Abronaxus willed it; as Marcus Ysaride willed it. His god and his leader. Who was he an inept, innocuous adept in training to question rules that had been laid down centuries before his birth?

And yet, watching Casseth’s train of expressions, doubt — for the first time in Lithian’s young life — seeped into the back of his mind. Doubt in the laws he’d lived by. Doubt in what he’d always been raised to believe was justice. Bitter justice, perhaps, but ‘necessary’ as he’d been told.

By the laws he’d grown up with, Casseth would never set foot in the world Lithian had spent the majority of his life growing up in. Never see the things he’d seen. Never breathe that air, or experience what it was like to live in a place where there was no burning sun, no scorching desert, no frigid winter, only the gentle embrace of day and night and everything a growing boy could ask for.

He flushed, dipping his eyes, and in spite of himself — despite the fact that a deep, knot of guilt in his gut said that he would be lying even before the words left his mouth — Lithian said, “Perhaps one day you will see it. The Celestial Plane is all I ever knew for so much of my life. It’s…hard,” he admitted, rubbing sheepishly at one of his horns, “to imagine never having seen it. The rest of the world is beautiful too, though.” He bit his lip, remembering in a snippet his first experience traveling down from the Plane. “Whenever I’m back in the Plane, now, I always miss the stars. We have no moon or sun. Only day and night. Even if you never set foot there…” He shifted his weight, abashed, “…perhaps it is the Plane and the people therein that are missing out on you, not the other way around.”

Lithian blinked, startled by how readily Casseth jumped to his defense — even if it did turn out only to be his father. Perhaps, Lith reasoned, Cas was simply more used to living on edge. Regardless of his reasoning, though, it made Lith’s chest heat again with a giddy knot of undescribed warmth, a feeling that danced quietly inside him as he did his best to help and otherwise stay out of the way — since he had no goods of his own to pack — stealing surreptitious glances in Casseth’s direction as they went.

He did his best to describe the location his party had landed on Aisko’s shore and then explain what he knew about where they had moved since then. Unfortunately, ‘what he knew’ entailed little in the grand scheme of things, and Lithian felt ill-suited for giving directions. But Kilian seemed to understand the landscape far better than he — understandable, since he had apparently spent the last thirteen or so years living on Aisko — and he took Lithian’s poorly-laid words in stride without complaint, starting them off without hesitation.

How close they would get to finding the rest of his party, what they would do when they got there, and what they would do if they couldn’t get there all lingered as questions in the back of his mind, but for the most part Lithian kept quiet. Instead, he focused on the strange make-up of his company, how he would have thought himself mad if he’d tried to explain to himself what he’d be doing in twenty-four hours the morning before, and how Aisko could look almost beautiful with the sun rising over it — a white landscape painted pink and yellow with sunrise — whenever there weren’t six dragons and a snowstorm trying to see to it that you died before morning.

Lithian swung his arms as he walked to stave off the chill, watching his breath fold and curl over itself like clumsy ghosts. Then, he blinked, a thought occurring to him as he remembered the trick he played on similar such clouds of breath whenever the desert nights had grown chilly on Eowyn. Attention flicking to Casseth and then Kilian and back again — Kilian heading off their party and Cas lingering a bit behind, still looking as though he’d rather be asleep half the time — Lithian wondered what kind of shape would get the other boy’s attention.

After debating for a long moment, Lithian decided to settle for something reasonably simple first and held a long breath before breathing it out carefully, curving his fingers and shaping it with his magic until it was a small, prancing hastar — or, more or less. Eyes on Casseth, he urged it over, letting it dance briefly around the other boy’s head to see if he would notice.

Lithian’s cheeks warmed, red-brown with abashment even as his expression lit up, more than a little pleased that Casseth had taken well to the show, and he laughed beneath his breath, quiet but warm. He nodded, blowing out and molding the steam into a fish, swimming it through the air as best he could.

“The first time I spent a night in the Malro desert,” he said, speaking quietly so as not to draw too much attention from Casseth’s father, “I had never seen my breath make fog. I’d never been anywhere cold enough, but I couldn’t sleep, and when I found I could tug at it with my magic…” He trailed off, shrugging and rubbing at one of his heated cheeks with the back of his hand. “I’m sure you’ll be able to do far more useful things with your magic when you choo—”

A snippet of sound on the wind, familiar, but too faint at first to decipher, made Lithian freeze mid-sentence, brow pinching together. The second time, however, it sounded distinctly like his name — though barely above a whisper — and his eyes darted up and around, scanning the vast, frigid landscape. Knowing at least what direction to look in this time, Lithian’s eyes stopped almost immediately on a cluster of moving shapes. Before, they might well have blended into the landscape, but now Lithian felt sure they were not simply Aisko creatures but—

“Araceli!” Lithian stumbled sidelong in his haste to catch up with Casseth’s father, tugging lightly at the back of his cloak. “My friend—that’s my friend down there, I swear I heard her…she must be with some of our instructors looking for me.”

“Ara—” Lithian darted forward, immediately moving to put himself between his friend and his rescuers. He should have said something sooner, he mentally criticized himself. He’d known Araceli had issues with oblivionites, but nothing to do now other than try to keep everything from spiralling downhill. “Ara, they haven’t hurt me,” he promised in a rush, trying to get more words out at once than could seem to fit in his mouth. “They helped me, they saved my life, I would have frozen to death if they hadn’t found me, but I’m alright now,” he emphasized the last bit reaching out to touch one of her wrists in a nervous, stilling motion. “Please don’t attack them, they’ve done nothing but help me…”

Thankfully, two of the instructors — one aiskala and one ayrala — had followed closely behind Ara as soon as she’d dashed off, and though they also looked more than a little wary of Lithian’s newfound company, they didn’t look ready to let one of their adepts start any unnecessary battles.

“It’s fortunate you survived at all,” one of the instructors clipped, eyes on Kilian even as he motioned a hand for Lithian to move forward. “Come. We’d best get you back as quickly as possible. Your disappearance has caused…quite a stir.”

The other instructor, also tense but perhaps a fraction less so, kept diverting her gaze to Casseth before pulling her eyes up to Kilian and forcing a smile. “We are very grateful for your…aid. Do you require any compensation for your efforts? We are willing to extend any conveniences you require, so long as they are within our power to give, as a peace token for keeping one of our own safe with you.”

Lithian watched Casseth regretfully as he was ushered to ‘safety’ behind the first professor, and after concluding that his word was no longer needed in the situation, he sighed and touched his hand again to Ara’s arm instead, well aware that she was likely the tensest of them all. Thinking of anything else only lead him back to the fact that he may well never see Casseth again, and that thought weighed far heavier on his mind than it had any right to, so he shoved it away, not wanting to deal with it just yet.