Welcome to Gaia! ::

Light glistened over the ocean’s surface like a sheen of aedaun magic, rippling and bending with each swell and winking at the peaks. Lithian stood fifteen paces out from the shoreline. Submerged to his waist and clothed in nothing but simple trousers, the incoming waves lapped at his skin, lazy and gentle, dampening low end of his hair, currently bound in a single loose, thick braid down his back. Eowyn’s sun, too, poured warm over his shoulders, the air temperature so similar in heat to the warmth of the water that one could scarcely tell the difference. Breathing out, he shut his eyes and reached with his magic.

It rippled outward, dancing through the eddies and gullies of the tide and miniature currents. He plucked, pulling and shifting at different sections of water beneath the surface, testing the weight and feel of his element and centering himself in it. Once rooted, he began manipulating more elaborately.

Combining shifts and twists in his body with practiced loops, flicks, and turns of his wrists and fingers, he pulled the surrounding ocean into a collaborative dance. When he rocked, shifting his weight back and grounding his heels in sand, the ocean bent in to meet him. When he raised two hands in tandem, curving his fingertips as though molding the naked air, the surrounding water funneled upwards, twisting into an undulating coil of liquid. He pulled it into a spiral around him, then split it, dividing it into two, and finally three twining loops, moving like a ribbon dancer with an animate partner.

Then, he began adding to the ribbons from surrounding water. As they thickened, he kept up their spiraling, and pushed outward at the water immediately at his feet, funneling it into them and preventing any new from filling in. Push, twist. Lift. Push, twist. Lift. Gradually, the water level around Lithian sank, dipping in a concave bowl formation and lowering beneath his waist, to his knees, to his ankles, to his feet. Finally, fifteen paces from the shore, Lithian was standing on dry sand, a hand-crafted water spout coiling around several times his height over his head and all the ocean retracted from his center position at an arm and a half’s length in every direction.

At Casseth’s voice, Lithian’s focus fractured, and in that fraction of a second, the form of his waterspout sagged, weeping inwards. In his startlement, he still managed to catch and slow the fall, preventing it from crashing violently in on him, but the lot of it did come sinking downwards in fairly rapid order, tumbling to the ocean’s surface like a bucket poured out and rushing to fill in the space around him. By the time the surface stilled, all water even, he stood, soaked, and blinked abashedly in Cas’ direction.

“Cas?” On spotting him, some latent tension in his shoulders relaxed, and his expression softened into smile. “Cas.” Lithian shook his head, flicked his wings, and started for the shore. Upon arrival, he plucked at the trapped seawater in his hair, siphoning it out and sending it with a flick to scatter across the sand, drying his braid instantly. “I was, ah…meditating. Where were you?”

Lithian opened his mouth, but shut it when Casseth pulled him down, and felt a fresh, warm rush of giddiness at the statement.

‘I quit.’

It was finally over. Really and truly over.

When they separated, Lithian’s eyes were dancing, his smile almost too broad to broad to fit on his face, and he pulled Cas back in for another, lingering kiss before letting him go properly. “I love you,” he murmured, and reached down to twine their fingers. “I’m sorry I worried you. Come walk with me…?”

At Casseth’s go-ahead, they started off down the beach together. Lithian had things he could have been working on, but after the incident with Detraeus, he was especially strung out over the state of his relationship with Araceli — the main reason he’d sought out intensive ‘meditation’ to begin with — and time with Casseth, just Casseth, helped soothe his frayed nerves. They walked enough outside the range of the city that there was no fear of anyone judging their intertwined fingers or shared kisses, far enough away that they could simply enjoy each other’s space and relax in the company. And they spoke casually. When they’d made it some ways down the shore to where there were cliffs at their back, open, private sand before them, and an empty, glimmering ocean ahead, Lithian stilled.

“And I’ve been spending more time at the church of Abronaxus in the center east quarter,” he was saying. “One of the priests there used to work often with a local herbalist and physician in this city, but she is intending to move back to Soudul soon. He says it’ll open up a very useable little shop that’s likely to be sold at a quick buying rate. I appreciate your father’s generosity in letting me stay with you, but…I would like a place of my own. Something I can do. Some way I can help, and prove to myself, and my parents I suppose, that I’m not just waiting my life away…”

Lithian walked out to the edge of the shoreline, curling his toes in the sand at the line where each swell came in.

“I may buy the place…use what I’ve saved up from hunting, and the small healing jobs I’ve done so far, plus a piece of my parents’ capital and get myself settled. It has a small bed and everything.” He glanced back to Casseth. “It wouldn’t be a lot…but it’d be something. And you wouldn’t have to move in with me, obviously, but…” He nibbled at his lip, reaching up to rub at a horn. “You’d be welcome to…”

In truth, the idea of having a place not simply his own, but his and Casseth’s — theirs, as a unit — appealed to him more than anything. He was young, yes, but old enough to stand on two feet, and he wanted somewhere he could call theirs. Their space.

Lithian’s pulse picked up at the thought, and he reached, catching and tangling his fingers with Cas’ on instinct. “You’ll never be a burden on me, Casseth. We could…make do until you have a money source? You must have a good bit saved up from all your time at the pit, and until you found someplace new, you could help me around my shop…? I’m sure there will be so much to do, especially so when I first start, more than I would want to handle alone surely, and when you find a job and we gather enough money, we can find someplace proper together, combine whatever we’ve earned…”

He tried, but failed miserably to keep the overwhelming rush of hope from spilling into his voice. He wanted to tug Casseth in, kiss him hard, and cling as though by will and display alone of how much he cared for him, they could somehow materialize their emotions into everything they needed to achieve their aspirations. It was a ridiculous thought, of course, but the surge of feeling was there, along with the hope and want so powerful it felt like a physical entity in his chest. He settled for brushing his thumb over Casseth’s cheek instead and searching Cas’ face for sign of assent.

“We could even build for ourselves, if you liked…pick any spot we liked, pick here.” Lithian nipped at his lower lip and glanced out to the ocean, eyes alight in spite of himself. “Can you imagine a house here…?” He stepped forward, out ankle deep into the ocean, water so clear the sand was visible for boat lengths out. “Back to the cliffs. Protected. Just secluded enough from town no one would bother us, but near enough that we could both conduct business there, and the ocean out there, every morning at sunrise…”

Lithian flushed darkly, and rubbed at his elbow, abashed.

“Sorry. That is, obviously, we could think about any number of places…if you like the idea…”

Lithian blinked, staring, speechless for several seconds. “You mean it. You mean it?”

Like a flower blooming, entirely beyond control and driven sheerly by instinct, a smile took over Lithian’s face, so dominant it barely felt like it could fit all at once, and he wanted to squeak, giggle, leap into Casseth’s arms and cling. Under the circumstances, he settled for tugging Casseth into a forcible kiss, and then dragging him down to the sand with him.

Lithian lost track of how long the actual process of expressing his appreciation and enthusiasm for the turn in events lasted, but it was highly satisfying, to say the least other than the ‘minor’ inconvenience of sand in…unusual places in the aftermath.