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Ataya slept fitfully.

In his nightmares, he lay helpless. His mind alive but body unresponsive. The world a dark blot around him as though he had been submerged in black ink, forever drowning without dying. Terrors came for him, manipulating him like a puppet, but without foresight or agency, he could only process that which occurred to him without the power to change or fight back. A ravvak appeared, swooping in on black wings, digging its talons in to perch on his face and plucking out his eyes with an ivory beak while his screams sank mutely into the void.

He woke with a cold sweat, trembling and aching in unfamiliar ways but relieved, initially, to register the world of the waking and recognize that his dreams were just that: dreams. The sheets beneath him were his, the smells around him familiar, the light behind his eyelids welcome. He was fine; his body was fine. He stirred, shifting to tuck his face closer against his pillow and nest in to sleep more. Instead, his fingers brushed another body. And hair. Massive, thick and buoyant curls.

A frown pinched across his brow.

Akara.

That was most definitely her hair, but why was his sister in his…?

Ataya rolled onto his side, opening his eyes to look over towards her—

And he froze. ‘Oh,’ he remembered with a sinking chill in his gut, ‘right.’

That.

Ataya shut his eyes, swallowing back his pulse when it lurched against his throat and forcing his breath out in a paced exhale. He was fine. His wounds from the day prior felt better, in any case, and they would find a healer. Someone would be able to do something. In the meantime, however…

The cloth of his pillow crackled with frost as he shifted up to a sit, and he grit his teeth, reining in his magic and gripping tighter to it. Breathe. Just remain calm. He was calm. Adjusting himself, he felt for the edge of the mattress with his fingertips, and then slid his legs along and over it. After finding the floor with his toes, he inched himself forward and off the lip, bracing and finding his balance. Exhale.

There. That wasn’t so bad. Standing was certainly doable. Magnificent. Now…

Brush.

Where was his brush?

Ataya frowned. He knew his own room well enough, and he did keep it neat, fortunately, but not so neat that he knew the exact location of any one item let alone every single object in the room. Worrying his lip between his teeth, he swept his fingers out: empty, empty, empty, empty—clack—

Ataya winced, hissing beneath his breath as his wrist collided with the wood of his dresser. Pursing his lips, he fingered over it, shaping out the items atop it. Books. Scrolls. Loose paper. A vial of—clk, thnnk—

—spilt ink.

Ataya swore, sending out a pulse of ice to stop the flow, at least temporarily cutting off the mess, though — from the overflow that blanketed out to coat most of the top of the dresser — he suspected the result was very much just that. Temporary. Gritting his teeth, he let his breath out in a slow push, eyes shut and fingers gripped to the dresser top. His brush was in his room. It couldn’t be that impossible to find. He took a step out, away from his bed and the dresser. One, two, three careful, seeking steps across the room, attempting to sweep and feel with his toes first, fingers outstretched and similarly brushing through the air.

He must look like a fool — or a madman — and the thought tightened his throat despite his immediate efforts to tamper it down. It didn’t matter. No one was watching and he—

Ataya yelped, an inarticulate outcry as his feet collided with something entirely unanticipated and his body jolted forward, off-balance. The object of his frustrations made a clattering, sliding sound on impact, his arms flailing in an effort to find something to cling to — which they half succeeded at — though, by the time he did get a grip on the offending object (a chair — what was a chair doing in the middle of his floor?) he was already falling. The angle and lack of balance in his position lead to a crack of his knee against something, the chair tilted back under his weight and, seconds later, both of them were toppling messily to the floor, the back of it atop him. After several moments of brittle, hanging silence with him stooped over, shoulders barely shaking, he whirled around, shoving violently.

“Get OFF.” A cone of magic accompanied the snarled words, ice spearing out from his push and rippling up in a line of icicle spires, splintering through the body of the chair in multiple portions like arrows in a corpse, wholly ruining whatever utility it might have had. “Useless…useless piece of…” His fingers bunched and released, his breath loosely ragged in his throat as he edged his way backwards along the floor until his back hit something. Squeezing his eyes shut, he dropped his head back. “Useless. Stay out of my way…”

Ataya jerked away from the touch, teeth grit and bunched fingers immediately moving to shove the hair out of his own face. After, though, his shoulders sank a fraction, sharp anger softening at the edges to frustration, hurt, and embarrassment. “I’m fine, it’s fine,” he snapped. “I just…it was an accident, nothing is wrong. I’m getting dressed and…” His posture dipped more, the absolute triviality of what had set him off sinking in, “…looking for my hairbrush…that’s all.” He shut his eyes. “Good morning.”

Ataya stiffened. Did he look that infantile? Crumpled on the floor, in a wreck of ice and splinters from a now useless chair, with… He grimaced and reached out, cheeks flaming with shame at the amount of blind searching it took even to find her hand in order to snatch up the brush from it.

“My hands are not broken, sister. I can handle my own hair,” he snapped, shoulders a stiff line as he tugged his hair around and pushed the brush into it. “I’m not that useless…”

He was aware, beneath the surface of his upset in a tucked away part of his mind, that he was being unfair. Lashing out. Irrationally directing his anger at inanimate objects, his sister, the world at large. But he felt trapped, like a small box, confined to its size and shape, with his frustration and helplessness like a mixture of black glop and furious insects shoved into the too-small box, forcing it out as more was shoved in and fracturing its edges to spill over and attack anything in the vicinity when pushed.

After several sharp, jerking strokes, knuckles likely white with the stiffness he applied to his grip, he shoved to a stand, spare hand slapping down to grip the corner of the vanity by which he’d stopped. He hesitated, lingering for several long seconds before grimacing, his next request heavy and thick in his throat, for he shouldn’t have to ask, but…

“I do not…I can’t see my…” His fingers crimped against the wood of the dresser top, frost rippling out and coating it. “I need to dress for the day…if you could…find me a tunic, top, trousers, and leggings…and then leave me to don them.”

Guilt pierced him like a cactus needle at his sister’s first words, but Ataya swallowed back his response. He would already be needing far more help than he ever wanted, let alone wanted to ask for. It felt sickening, belittling, to have to ask, and after she fetched the clothes he requested, he gripped to them, holding them to the vanity and making a mental promise to himself that he would not have to ask again. He would find a way to distinguish his own clothes, organize them appropriately, develop a method…

If his uncle, or another healer, did not fix his eyes.

Ataya frowned as he listened to his sister depart, realizing that he had already all but resigned himself. Despite his highest hopes and best wishes, he put little faith in the ability of subsequent healers to do more than his sister had. He knew, on some level, that she was only a novice, but he felt that the damage went deeper than that. Being fully aware of the surrounding circumstances of his crippling injury, he felt…responsible. It had been his magic, he knew it, that had blinded him. Something had gone wrong, something had broken and backfired on him, and as much as he wanted to believe that someone might be able to repair the damage, a deeper-seated part of him felt all but assuredly that he was saddled with this as his fate.

Punishment, somehow, for his experimentations.

Grimacing, Ataya finished with his hair. Counting a hundred strokes calmed him, in a certain way. The familiarity of it set a base to begin with: this was something he could do.

After finishing that, however, and setting his brush aside, the complications of further progress grappled with him. It was mentally staggering, the degree to which he relied on his vision. The sheer number of simple things which he took advantage of. Like recognizing which piece of cloth was trousers and which a tunic, which an undershirt. Which direction was ‘up’ when it came to cloth with multiple holes and pieces of thread? What was ‘inside out’?

The dressing process took far longer than it should have, and he felt over his clothes a countless number of times after donning them, trying to imagine how it actually looked on him, how it fell over his skin, whether anything was out of place, backwards, skewed. He didn’t know. He couldn’t know, and the uncertainty itched beneath his skin.

Even after dressing, though, he lingered in his room, hesitant in the white space. He stepped around it, fingered over his drawers, seeking out his clothes and pulling out certain pieces, trying to identify what precisely they were. It wasn’t terribly hard in most cases, at least. Pants were easy to identify. But smaller pieces, less so, and his drawers, he realized, were a great mess, giving rise to greater anxiety. He couldn’t ask his sister to organize everything — so, if his uncle and subsequent healers failed, he would have to do so himself.

At length, his stomach objected to his dallying, and Ataya winced, propped against the edge of his mattress and not wanting to leave. Everything was a mess. Everything was empty and uncertain. What if he couldn’t feed himself without making a further wreck of things? Frost, unbeknownst to him, rippled off of him in waves, coating his room, over the extended period of his anxiety, in a thin white sheen of ice so that when he stood again, the floor crackled with it. He frowned. Ice, at least, he could handle. He stepped towards — what he hoped was the direction of — his door.

Finding it, he moved out, step by step, foot by foot. It was a painful process to him, wrought with frustration layered upon frustration due to how easy it had all been but a day before and now…

He shook his head and moved for the kitchen, not entirely certain if any of his family was even immediately about and entirely unaware of the chill he left in his wake. When he made it to the counter, palms flat and shaping the wall and countertop as he went, he reached, looking for bread, juice, and fruit. Nuts. Something. Fruit ought to be on the third cupboard over — one, two, three — clkkk something hit the counter, a sharp crack of ceramic, and he gripped immediately, chilling, but too slow. Steaming tea froze under his fingers, already half spilled across the countertop and he bristled. Surely he could at least, feed himself without—

Ataya bristled, cheeks flaring with his frustration — and embarrassment — as his sister righted his mess and made her offer. He didn’t want to need help for such menial things. Shouldn’t he be capable of making his own breakfast? Finding himself food, dressing himself — these were tasks anyone more grown than an infant could handle, and yet…

In the end, Akara helped him navigate the kitchen, helped him set himself up, and ate with him. Their father wanted contact with the neighboring khehora territory — Malta, in particular, to enlist her aid if — and their mother, of course, wanted his uncle, Lithian, in on the situation. She had left early that morning for that purpose, utilizing the wind as her transport to make the trip faster than their father could. With their uncles being dragons, now, the trip back up took as little time, and all three — his mother and two uncles — arrived by that evening.

Ataya was, at that point, sitting in his room, a book in his lap, open, his fingers laying flat on the pages. Useless.

“Ataya…”

His head jerked up at his uncle’s voice, throat knotting and fingers crimping. “Uncle.”

“I’m going to catch your hand, and then we will walk together to the living room, alright?”

Ataya opened his mouth, fully ready to snap that he wasn’t a child. But instead, as Lithian’s fingers brushed his, he grit his teeth, biting back the statement and setting his book aside with his spare hand before gripping and standing to follow in his uncle’s wake. When they were settled — all the rest of the family likely about, though Ataya couldn’t tell for certain — Lithian spoke again, explaining to him what he would do and what he would try. He asked questions about how the injury had occurred, to which Ataya gave more or less the best answers that he could, though he avoided details on the precise nature of the spell he’d been attempting. Surely it didn’t matter.

At length, Lithian sounded uncertain at best, but set to work.

Ataya felt like a doll on display, brittle and confined as his uncle’s magic searched him. He lost track of how long the man tried, actively seeking out different avenues, attempting to clean or mend or even simply encourage and bolster his body’s own natural want to heal. It all felt like a variety of funnels of energy, each trying to find their way in to sit and do the job they needed. None of which took effect, and with each failed attempt and shift to a new strategy, the certainty in Ataya that what he had done to himself was incurable solidified, chilling and growing ever-heavier in his gut. This, his mind told him, was something he would have to live with. Always.

By the time Lithian let his touch fall away, Ataya’s fingers were shaking. His breath stung in his throat and he dared not open his eyes. He gripped his hands into fists instead before relaxing them — to no avail — and his voice, when he spoke, was hoarse and quiet. Papery thin.

“What’s next…?”

“Ataya…” By his uncle’s tone alone, he knew the answer he would receive. He jerked to a stand, something on the nearby counter clacking over in the commotion and his own posture steadied only by Lithian’s hand as it caught at him. “I tried, Ataya,” he said. “I tried everything I know to do. Eyes are incredibly complex to begin with — so many tiny, intricate details, muscles and nerve endings, all of which must work perfectly together to—”

“I don’t care about eyes in general, uncle,” Ataya snapped, voice rising well above where it ought. “I just want mine to work! How many years have you been a healer?”

“I—”

“You should be able to do this! You close open guts, mend broken bones, repair torn cartilage, remove poisons, fix hearts and lungs, heal deadly fever, sickness, and rot — why can’t you do this?”

“Ataya—”

“Get OFF.” Ataya felt the grip on him, heard the movement of others in the room, and knew, on some level, that he ought to find a way to calm himself. But he didn’t want to. “Get off — don’t touch me—how can you be so useless? This is supposed to be your job, your function, everything your magic does is intended to handle this sort of problem — I need to see! I need to read, I need to walk without hitting walls, to write, and find my own clothes—I can’t not do these things, you don’t understand!” He shoved, jerking against his uncle’s hold and pushing with his magic. He could feel the shadows around him slip and slide as his temple rippled, buckled, and fractured; he felt the shape of the ice unfurling from his fingertips and feet, outwards: over the floor, over his uncle’s skin.

Lithian, however, was having none of it.

Older and far more powerful than him, it seemed to take only a single pulse of Lithian’s magic, warmer and softening, to eat through the new ice, melting it to water and then drawing it away. Where he took it, Ataya couldn’t tell. He knew only that the chill dissipated as quickly as his own magic summoned it and Lithian’s grip was rock solid on him as he held him.

“Ataya…I need you to breathe…before you hurt someone.”

Ataya shook, shaking his head. “I need to see—you don’t understand—none of you understand—I need…” Releasing a shuddered breath, his posture sank, brittleness weakening to something limp and malleable. “Mother…”

Lithian frowned, shaking his head. After a pause, though, and a glance to Akara, he sighed, reaching down to catch her fingers in his and tug lightly to encourage her away from the scene, putting some distance between them and her brother before speaking. Even after, though, he kept his voice gentle and low, meaning the words for her alone and not her already overwrought sibling.

“It is not…a traditional wound,” he said. “Even if it were, as I began explaining to him, vision is an incredibly complex thing. Eyes are difficult to work with, and difficult to save once they have been damaged. In this case, though…there is more to it than that. His own magic has…damaged something, and is interfering with anything I try to do to repair that damage. I don’t imagine it’s a matter of raw power at all in terms of being able to heal effective…I don’t know where I would begin doing something helpful no matter what amount of magic I had to work with. So…no, I do not believe it would help…” Glancing to her, he weighed his words before speaking. “You mustn’t blame yourself, you know…you did everything you could, as did I…and I am sorry I could not do more.”