Welcome to Gaia! ::

Ataya squinted at the words on the page before him, nose wrinkling up as he pushed hair out of his face. Mother and Father read to he and his sister every day and had begun teaching them their letters and how to recognize them some months ago. Ataya could write his name, all the individual characters of the common alphabet, and the Soudulian and Dovaa variations, but no words yet. And he was impatient, just the same. Every day, he had to wait for Mother or Father to pull a book off the shelf in order to hear the tales contained therein, and he wanted to access them himself.

“Achae…innurae, dravae…bhen…” Ataya frowned at the next letter, plucking at one of his ears. “Mmm…”

Then, out of the corner of his eye, he spotted movement. Immediately, his violet eyes darted off of the text and focussed in on the source: a ground spider, not significantly larger than the tip of his thumb, fat, and brown. He watched it for several long seconds, calculative, before reaching out. Judging with precision before pressing down, he pinched one of its legs to the wall with his thumbnail and pushed until it snipped cleanly from the body before he withdrew his hand. As it skittered erratically, fell from the wall, and then stumbled uselessly along the floorboards, Ataya tilted his head, ever amazed at how completely debilitated they became once crippled. Just as he reached out to pinch off another leg and see how long it took before the thing twitched, curled up, and died, he heard his name and glanced up.

“Mama?”

After an extended pause where he heard nothing, Ataya huffed, stood, and crushed the spider with the toe of his boot before starting off towards kitchen where he thought he’d heard his mother’s voice. With his chosen book still tucked in hand, he made quite the sight — overburdened, and severely out of his league, his childish frame dwarfed in comparison to the tome, though it wasn’t terribly large. It didn’t help that he sported an especially small, twiggy figure, even for a boy barely over five.

“Mama?” He peeped around the wall, into the kitchen. With Father having been gone for nearly a week now and their house being half snowed in twice, Mother was especially on edge — enough so that even he recognized it now, though his sister always seemed to see those types of things first — and so he made an effort to respond especially promptly to her calls, not wanting to agitate her concern further.

Father would be back, though; he knew it. It was only a matter of time.

Father could kill anything.

At the word ‘chocolate’ Ataya’s interest peaked, and he set his text aside on the nearest clean surface before grabbing up the offered spoon. It took all of one arm wrapped around the bowl to hold it up properly, but he managed — mostly — and stirred, watching the chocolate chunks meld into the batter like pebbles sinking into mud. Outside, a blizzard which had been upon them for what felt like an age now, howled, battering at the windows and doors, but kept securely out by both the house’s structure and careful defensive wards put in place before Ataya’s birth.

“Mama, when can…” Ataya shifted his weight back, adjusting his grip on the bowl to better support it and propping a portion on the kitchen counter. “When can you start to…to teach us magic? Like, real magic…”

On their trips down to Eowyn, their uncles had demonstrated some basic spells — as well as, of course, more complicated ones for show on occasion — and at home, he witnessed his mother’s seemingly effortless command of her innate magic. He had toyed with the simplest of magic concepts, at least getting a feel for what it meant to locate his own and pull on it, even if guiding it was largely uncontrolled at the moment. But he wanted more than that. Something that would do something, affect something.

“Like to…” Ataya considered for a moment, “…fight dragons — and bad people.”

“Can you show us now?” Ataya asked, intently curious. “I want to learn all the spells, and then, when I’ve learned all the spells, I want to learn a spell that no one knows, more powerful than all the others, ever.” He thought for a moment, and then glanced up to his mother. “Which one is the most powerful clan?”

Ataya wrinkled his nose at the poke, but settled on the cushions and tucked his legs under him without a fuss. “I’ll practice will all of the clans, then,” he said, combing his fingers through his hair to straighten it back out from where Mother had tousled it. “That way, no one will know anything I don’t, and nobody can think I’m not as good as them.”

Despite his parents’ best efforts to keep them sheltered from the crowds, over the years and the course of their various trips down to Eowyn to visit with their uncles, Ataya had seen the way people looked at himself and his sister. Seen the way they stared. Grimaced. Whispered. Spat. They didn’t know him, didn’t know her, didn’t know his parents, but regardless of their ignorance, they looked at him in the same way he imagined he looked at the spider on the wall: something small, weak, ugly, lessor. Something to be looked at with curiosity, maybe, or disgust. To be toyed with. Hurt. Or tossed aside at will.

An entertaining, worthless nothing at best, and quite possibly a parasite or stain on the world at worst.

He was going to prove them wrong. If he practiced hard enough, learned to read and look presentable, memorized tomes and made himself strong, he could show them he was worth more than that. That he was just as good as them, and that they shouldn’t make the faces they did. He was good, and one day, they would understand.

Just as he opened his mouth to ask another question, the front door opened.

Ataya’s head jerked to look as a frigid gust whipped through the room, chilling it instantly despite the fact that the door clacked shut again almost immediately after. And there — looking like an oversized bundle of mostly white-coated furs — stood his father.

Detraeus flushed and grunted, wings spreading and tail flicking to dust off the snow as he knelt and caught his careening daughter in his arms. His body felt weighted and stiff all over — some combination of overworked muscles, poorly-healed wounds and far too much cold — but at Akara’s warmth and rush of words, he shut his eyes, smiling in spite of himself and clutching to her as he kissed her hair.

“Hello to you, too, little princess,” he murmured. “It sounds as though you have been very busy…” When soft approaching footsteps sounded, he glanced up and felt warmth and relief flood him at the sight of his mate. After pressing a kiss to Akara’s forehead and thumbing over her cheek, he let the bulk of his travelling gear slip off to the floor beside him — heavy furs, newly attained food, and camping equipment — and stood. “And you…” He reached out and touched his fingers to Araceli’s waist, delicately at first, as though he could barely believe she were real. After a moment, though, assured that she was no figment of his imagination, he stepped in and tightened his grip as he leaned forward. He shut his eyes, laid their foreheads together, and then caught her lips in his: a whisper of a kiss that quickly diverged into something needier. “I missed you…” he admitted to the curve of her throat and shoulder after forcing his mouth off her lips.

His tail, now securely wrapped around her legs, showed no signs of relinquishing any such control.

Off to the side, Ataya huffed. “Daddy—” Then, he spotted something glowing, luminescent and blue-white, tucked amidst the things his father had brought home. “Did you kill dragons?” he asked, immediately darting in to investigate more closely.

“Mm…yes,” Detraeus responded to all inquiries. “Aiskala.” His hands, though, refused to stray far, regardless of the curiosities of his children. After plucking off his gloves and shedding his cloak, he stepped back in close to his mate and moved to circle behind her, settling his fingers at her hips and letting the tips of them edge beneath the bottom hem of her top until he found skin. Warm. Smooth. And familiar. He kissed her shoulder before glancing up to watch as Ataya began shuffling through his things to withdraw one of the spoken-of dragon’s soul orbs. “Careful,” he cautioned. “You would not want to choose your clan too soon…”

“I’m being careful…” Ataya said, though his words sounded distracted, attention clearly rooted on the swirling, luminous orb in his hands.

“Mm.” Detraeus shut his eyes and grazed his lips along Araceli’s neck before relaxing, looping his hands in a more loosely possessive fashion around her front, and tucking his chin atop her shoulder. “Dragon souls are nothing to trifle with.”

Ataya barely heard his father. He sat, knelt before his father’s traveling pack with a pristine, live orb cupped and swirling between his palms. A dragon’s soul, right before his eyes. When he spoke, it was barely a murmur. “It’s so cold…”

But then, he had always preferred cooler months to the heat of summer. Snow, to the desert. The chill, in an odd way, entranced him, and he wondered what it would be like, to wield the power of winter itself in his palms. To rob heat from anything he touched…

Like death.

“Ataya.”

Having barely heard any of the surrounding goings on after his attention rooted in on the orb, Ataya’s head jerked up, drawn out of his reverie, finally, by his father’s voice, stiff and low. Flushing and biting his lip, Ataya glanced first to the kitchen where his mother and sister had disappeared off to, and then up to his father before setting the orb carefully down and standing. His gaze flicked briefly over his father’s stance, his expression calculative.

At length, he asked, “Did it hurt bad?”

Detraeus blinked, startled, and then grunted with a roll of his shoulders. “Some.”

“Did you kill them all?”

“Mm.” Detraeus frowned. “Yes.”

“I knew you’d come home,” Ataya stated, chin up and confident. “I told Akara so. You’ll always come home. You can kill anything.”

Detraeus coughed, gaze jerking over to his son. “Mm…”

“You will always come home,” Ataya said, glancing up towards him, “won’t you?”

Detraeus’ brow furrowed, and he hesitated before reaching out and touching a hand to the back of Ataya’s head. “Go…help your sister to eat a hundred cookies, mm?”

Immediately, Ataya stiffened, eyes narrowing. “That’s not—”

“Ataya.” Detraeus held his stare meaningfully for a moment and then nudged his head towards the kitchen.

Ata scowled. “You will always come home. You have to,” he said, and as Detraeus listened, he could have sworn the unspoken ‘because I said so’ element to the declaration was palpable. Without another word, though, Ataya did as bid and followed his sister into the kitchen.

Lingering behind, Detraeus laid a hand loosely over his midsection where — below the thick winter furs he wore — a deep gash lingered from his dragon fight. As he watched his mate and children, warm and safe, he prayed Ataya’s will be done.