Quests & Challenges

Resolutions

When we awoke in the morning, there was a new mouth to feed. The last remaining egg was gone, replaced by broken shell fragments and a greyish hatchling. Another boy, this time with purple eyes that marked him as coming from the Tangled Wood. Three different eggs, coming from three different territories. He communicated in a series of squeaks that the other hatchlings understood immediately, but the rest of us couldn’t.

We ate breakfast in a tense silence, the tundras munching on their plants while they planned the next leg of our venture. We were to go east, through the Ashfall Waste, and from there we would be free to make a home in the Windswept Plateau. We would be safe there, although I wasn’t sure what we would be safe from. What were we running from?

After breakfast, we packed the hatchlings into satchels that were carefully lined with scraps of fabric. Abrielle placed them carefully over my head so they were sitting on my back between my wings, where they would be jostled only lightly during flight. We took to the skies, Vaesna at the head of the formation, Redara on his right, Abrielle on the left, and me at the rear. The fan scorpion that decided to follow me through the desert snapped its pincers in irritation at being left behind, and my last glimpse of it was skittering across the sand, trying and failing to keep pace with us.

Growth

The hatchlings came of age when we reached Reedcleft Ascent. Our first few nights were spent in a cave in the cliffs on the border of wind and water territory. Within weeks, we gathered enough materials to move from the cliff to a slightly ramshackle building, which we patched up to the best of our ability whenever we gained new material. I spend most of my time with the hatchlings, ensuring that they were brought up with enough care.

River seemed to thrive being back in his homeland. It didn’t appear to matter that he was hatched in lightning territory. He was the first of the hatchlings to leave the ground, and became a swift and avid flyer. While the rest of us worked, he had all the energy of a spiral. Despite his wildness, he stayed close to the rest of us and became visibly upset when he didn’t get enough attention.

Phoebe stayed as close by his side as she could manage. She didn’t seem to like flying as much, content to stay hunkered on the ground engulfed in her wings and watch her brother fly. As long as they were both on the ground, they were inseparable. When she wasn’t waiting on her brother, she was pestering Vaesna for something to do. She adored him, and fell into our routine when she became old enough.

Squeak seemed to be the very opposite of everything we knew about nocturnes. Unlike his siblings, he didn’t mimic anyone. Where the other hatchlings learned to speak quickly, Squeak continued to communicate by his namesake. He followed tasks easily enough, and he quickly developed his role in the clan’s routine.

As they grew larger, so did our lair, and our stores ran out. I knew with a sharp, biting fear that these nocturnes that I helped to raise from eggs would have to go out into the battlefields.

---

if anyone's reading this, enjoy the double post

[center][item=ambush][/center] [b]Now[/b] The time had come. What started out as a lair had quickly become a small collection of houses. The houses were barely more than a collection of rooms, but they suited our needs just fine. Vaesna and I decorated ours with various trinkets we found by gathering. Redara and Abrielle shared one, and quickly transplanted some herbs at the back so that they had a garden that they could use for herbalism. While not grown enough for their own, the nocturnes all had their own homes anyway. Even so, our clan was growing. At the back of our house, a small clutch of two eggs sat nestled among a pile of blankets and bamboo shoots I brought inside to embrace our new atmosphere. While I tended to the eggs, Vaesna spent every moment of his spare time creating a zen garden to be the middle of our small village. He wanted it to be complete by the time the eggs hatched, he said. Since I could no longer help in gathering for food or supplies, and the tundras were all busy with their own pet projects, it fell to the nocturnes to replenish our supplies. “They can’t,” I pleaded. “They’re too young. They don’t know how to fight yet.” “They have to learn at some point,” Vaesna said levelly. “You can’t expect them to stay here forever.” I looked down from his keen cyan gaze and looked instead to the yellow-green shells of the eggs I guarded and warmed. “Would it make you feel better if I went with them?” he asked. “Let them do as they wish, let them fight as they will. I’ll only be there to make sure nothing bad happens.” I looked back up at him, but his face was as impassive as ever. Slowly, I nodded. “River! Phoebe! Squeak!” he called out, and within moments all three of them were within the den space as though they materialized or had been waiting right outside the door. “We’ll be going to the training fields. It’s time for you three to pick up some of the slack. Do you think you’ll be able to manage?” River’s bright eyes gleamed, and Phoebe grinned widely. Squeak let out a happy noise and ruffled his wings against his body. “Do you really mean it?” Phoebe asked excitedly. “Are we really going to go?” “Of course we are!” River insisted. “We’re strong, we’re good flyers. There’s nothing that the training fields will throw at us that we can’t handle.” I studied each of the nocturnes in turn, as if memorizing their faces in case they wouldn’t come back. “Be careful,” I pressed. “You come home safe. Every single one of you, come back safe. That’s more important than food.” Squeak came forward and nuzzled his cheek against mine and chirped softly before I watched these four members of my family walk out the door. I turned my face back to the nest and let out a quiet sigh. “They’re going to come home safe, right?” The eggs, of course, gave no response.

Waiting is Hell

The four of them left almost immediately after breakfast, and they didn’t return until past midday. Without being able to leave my nest for fear of anything happening to the clutch, every single second they were gone felt like an eternity. I could hear Abrielle and Redara talking distantly, but I’d never felt more alone. I nervously began tending to my pearl, smoothing the black ooze over the orb until it began to solidify.

“What in the gods’ names happened?” Redara demanded loudly, sometime after midday. River and Squeak rushed inside, dropping down satchels full of food and hovered near the main room. Moments later, Vaesna followed with Phoebe leaning heavily against him, her side painted with blood. I leapt to my feet, rushing forward to help him get her inside. Abrielle and Redara trailed behind, the elder flipping through pages of a healing tome and the younger with a basket of herbs.

“River. Explain. Now,” I demanded through clenched teeth. Vaesna put Phoebe on our bed, and Squeak settled down on the floor beside her, resting his head near hers and making soft noises at her.

“We – I – we – I didn’t know that moths could claw,” he said weakly. “The birds were easy enough to take down. We brought some back with us. But the moths and the mice.”

“Moths can’t do anything,” I snapped. “It’s the miths you need to look out for. How the hell did this happen, River?”

“I don’t know!” he shouted back at me. “I don’t know, okay? There was so much happening at once. I tried to lead us. I tried to keep their attention so they’d go after me.”

“Do you have any idea how stupid that is?” The hut was filled with our shouting now, and I was brought back to my senses by a sharp slap on my hip by one of the sisters. “And you!” I rounded on Vaesna, who was doing his best to assess the damage done to the injured nocturne before the sisters could set in to work on her. They worked in an amazing tandem: Redara reading instructions from her book while Abrielle crushed the herbs. “You were supposed to make sure they were safe! You were supposed to make sure that they didn’t get hurt!”

“I’m not going to get in their way,” he said coldly. His face was guarded, impassive as ever. “They wanted the training experience.”

“The training experience!” I shrieked, and a sharp, shaky laugh escaped me. “The training experience! By all the gods, how idiotic do you think I am? I know training experience! I know the battlegrounds! The training fields should not cause this kind of damage to anyone!”

“It’s shallow,” Abrielle said, a hint of panic to her voice even as she tried to dissuade me. “It’s not life-threatening. As long as it doesn’t get infected, she should make a full recovery in a few days.” I huffed with rage, although I could feel it subside ever so slightly. “Maybe you should take a walk, Gaea. You’re not going to be doing anyone good yelling at everyone here.”

I cast one last glare around the room. At Squeak trying vainly to get his sister’s attention. At River wringing his hands as he hovered on the skirts of the room. At Vaesna setting about putting the day’s gathering away. At Redara perusing the pages of her book. At Abrielle spreading a poultice on Phoebe’s shoulder. At Phoebe herself, as she lay on the bed with her eyes closed. Finally, at the unattended clutch of eggs I’d sat incubating for the past few days.

“I’ll be in the garden,” I said frostily, and turned to leave the house.

In the Garden

Vaesna had done a wonderful job creating the zen garden I had desperately wanted. It was at the central point of our developing village, but even so it had a wonderfully secluded feeling. There was no lacking of tall bamboo trees here; we had to clear some of them out to make our houses. He cleared some of them out, and dug a small pond at the center and brought buckets of water to fill it. It was lined with flat stones, and a carved wooden bench made of a fir log that had been found while gathering.

I sat on the bench and looked over the water, wondering how it would be to have a small collection of fish in this pond. I stared into the shallow depths, willing my mind to clear. It hurt, knowing that he stood by while the hatchlings – for I would never think of them as anything but hatchlings – battled on their own, lacking any proper training, and allowed one of them to get hurt. He should have known better. He should have stepped in the moment a single blow was taken by either of them.

A butterfly passed my gaze, but I was too apathetic to allow my eyes to follow it. The sight of Phoebe’s side matted with blood was too prevalent in my mind. Passively, I remembered that her brothers were also dirty, riddled with dust as though they’d dove into the dirt. None of it mattered. Abrielle and Redara were tending her, and Vaesna was acting as though none of it mattered. The only one put off by it all was me, out here, on my own. I, alone, with only Squeak in my corner to know that anything was not as it should be.

I stayed alone in the garden, my mind whirling from emptiness, to Phoebe’s blood, to rage at Vaesna, back to emptiness, until the glow of the setting sun filled the garden. Heaving a sigh, I returned to the house, where everyone was still gathered.

Phoebe, now clean and bandaged, rested in the large bed Vaesna and I shared. He was settled on the floor beside her, his head resting against the edge of it while she slept. River and Squeak sat mildly in the corner, as though they’d received chastisement from allowing their sister to come to harm. Redara sat reading peacefully, and Abrielle shuffled through the jars of collected herbs that filled the storeroom. Wordlessly, I returned to the nest, put my pearl among them, and settled myself over them to keep them warm. As wordless as I was, nobody said anything to me, either.

[center][item=scholar][/center] [b]First Blood[/b] I had lain two eggs, but only had one living baby. A lone daughter, who came strongly from her shell and opened her pale green eyes almost immediately. She was a tundra like her father, any hope for me having another of my kind dashed when I saw her fuzzy down, even as coated with fluid as it was. Redara masterfully worked the other egg open, and I had to turn my face away from the body of what should have been my other daughter. I named them both, even as Redara bundled the dead hatchling up in a blanket and carried the parcel outside. Bonsai, my living daughter, squawked and let out a series of shrill cries until Vaesna came over with some shredded plants to feed her, little by little. Belle, the tiny body within the blankets, should have been here beside her sister. “This happens sometimes,” Abrielle said softly. “Eggrot. The hatchling can develop, but nobody knows what causes eggrot. Sometimes it’s the whole clutch. Sometimes, like this, it’s only one.” “I don’t understand,” I said dully. “What went wrong?” “Nothing,” she soothed me. “You did everything just right.” “How should we take care of it?” Vaesna asked. “What?” I demanded. “I said, how should we take care of it?” He looked out where Redara had exited. “Lightning usually buries their dead. Wind makes kites in their image. Earth entombs them. I know fire is known for cremation. I don’t know much about the funerary rights of any of the other flights. What should we go with?” I paused for a long moment at that, wondering at his words. What should we do? If we’re going to start a clan, as it appeared that we were, we had to be prepared for others to die. We had to have some sort of plan in place for whenever things happened. “Kites,” Abrielle said. “We can bury her, and we can make a kite that’s dyed to match her colors.” “That sounds nice,” I murmured. “I think there’s some ribbon lying around here somewhere.” “I’ll go find some bamboo,” Vaesna offered, and quickly left the three of us alone. Bonsai chirped up at me, oblivious to the fact that her fairer sister was gone. Indeed, I doubted that Bonsai even knew she existed.

Puzzle Pieces

Abrielle crafted the kite masterfully. It was the most basic shape, but she wove the bamboo fibers perfectly. Redara mixed the dyes to match the dead hatchling’s colors as though she’d been dying apparel her entire life. After it was created, we added watching the kite to our daily task rotation. All in all, Belle’s kite stayed in the sky day and night for a full week.

Even with the loss we all felt, we still had a new mouth to feed. On the eighth morning, after we all woke up to eat breakfast, we noticed that our stores were once again running low. “We need to replenish,” Vaesna said, stating the obvious. “Who wants to go today?”

“We can,” River suggested. “We can go to the training fields again. We’ve gotten stronger by now, there should be no problems.”

“Absolutely not,” I protested. “Phoebe doesn’t fully have her strength back yet.” I cast my gaze to the golden nocturne, who had finally gotten all her bandages removed and was appeared to be perfectly well. Maybe she was. Maybe I just wasn’t ready to let them go again. Squeak protested meekly, and we all turned back to our food. “I haven’t left camp much lately. I can go.”

“We’ll join you,” Redara said, speaking for Abrielle as well. “I’d like to see if there are any herbs we don’t already have in the garden.”

“I’ll do some scavenging and foraging,” Vaesna offered. “Most of us need plants, so it can’t hurt to get as much as we can.” I nodded, continuing to pick at the plants in front of me.

“We can go work on flying lessons with Bonsai,” Phoebe said. “I don’t know where he learned it, but Squeak is also pretty good at tracking.”

---

An hour later, everyone split up to go their own way. My tundra clanmates and I loaded up the rest of the plants we had stored into packs, and lifted off to start our flight back to the delta where Vaesna first found me. With a clear mission in mind, and no hatchlings or eggs to weigh us down, we made the flight in what seemed like no time at all. We touched down at the mouth of the river, divvied up our meagre supply of food, and prepared ourselves for the onslaught of battle that would be coming soon.

We fell into a comfortable routine of fighting. Redara and I took turns at taking beasts down while Abrielle darted forward to loot the bodies and pass off healing potions when one of us took a particularly bad hit.

As the sun began to set, we decided to head back to camp. We got a fair amount of loot, and all three of us had packs full of food and new materials. As we began to leave, we heard a cry of pain. Before either of the tundras could stop me, I ran toward the source of the sound. I heard a thundering of footsteps behind me, and we came across a pack of serthis converging on a single young one of their kind. She cowered in fear, unnatural for everything I knew of the beastclan. I launched myself at the leader of the pack, and Redara followed me into battle.

When it was over, the serthis who had been attacked was curled as small as she could make herself and trying to hide from us behind a shrub. “You shouldn’t have done that,” she murmured. “You should have let them kill me.”

“Why?” I asked. “Would you have preferred to die?”

“I’m weak,” she explained. “That’s what we do. Only the strong can survive. We can’t be afraid of anything. They weren’t the only party that will be out looking for me. Another group will find me, and they’ll kill me.”

“Not if you’re with us,” Redara stated. “We’ll protect you.”

“I don’t understand.”

“We keep familiars,” I clarified. “I have a fan scorpion. My mate has a scaleback. If you accept to come with us, I’m sure that Redara could use the help. You’re good with potions, right? Redara is our mage. She dabbles in potions a bit, and Abrielle’s our healer. We could use more hands on deck.”

“Are you sure?” She uncoiled herself a bit, looking at all of us in turn.

“Absolutely.”

When we returned home, we had an injured serthis on our heels and packs full of supplies, and the clan was in chaos.

Crystalline Chaos

When we left, it was perfect fall weather. When we returned, it appeared that snowstorm after snowstorm had fallen over the course of a week. My long-desired zen garden was beneath a blanket of pristine white, and the roofs of the huts were peaked in the arctic powder. Vaesna stood in the center of the village, ordering the nocturnes around. Already, they had most of the center plaza cleared out, and paths cleared to the houses. When Abrielle, Redara and I came back into the village with a serthis on our tails, we were virtually unnoticed.

“This is our home here,” Abrielle said brightly, leading the way to the furthest hut from us. “Obviously, we’re not usually buried underneath the snow. It’s pretty nice here.”

“Thank the Icewarden,” Vaesna mused absentmindedly. “It’s time for the Crystalline Gala, so he decided that it should snow. Everywhere.”

“Even the Ashfall Waste?” I couldn’t help the jest as it came flying out, and he turned just in time to see the serthis’ tail disappearing into the closing door behind Abrielle. “You’ve done a good job here, Vae. Why don’t you all come inside, we can light a fire, and everyone can warm up. There’s a fair bit of food and loot to put up. There’s also someone you need to meet.”

---

That night, we all stayed in the same hut. The nocturnes folded themselves into their wings, tightly beside one another amidst a pile of blankets. I added another over them, hoping it would do well enough to keep them warm. When we built these huts, we didn’t anticipate this bitter southern cold. They weren’t strong enough to sustain the Icewarden’s sudden wrath. This may be his way of spreading the joy, but to the unaccustomed, this sudden tundra was hell.

Redara and Abrielle curled together, huddled against each other in a mass of red fur. Asleep, it was almost impossible to distinguish where one stopped and the other began. I put another blanket over them as well, settled myself between my mate and daughter. Bonsai was fully grown now, and I used my wings to cover both of them and draw them closer to me. The familiars huddled in the corner, an unlikely combination of beasts.

This was our life now. And I was blissfully okay with this.

It's Quiet Uptown...

Winter left as suddenly as it had come in. It seemed that the Icewarden didn't want his blessing to stay around too long. The frigid temperatures returned to normal, but that was the only normal thing left.

Half our clan was now dead. Our beautiful nocturnes, the eggs that Abrielle and I had found together, all dead. Abrielle herself, dead. We now had more kites than we had clan members. There was a rather large willow tree that turned into the marker for our burial grounds. When the vigil kites were finally brought out of the sky, the tails were cut off and tied to the tree.

There were now too many houses, and not enough of us to fill them. Vaesna and I were living in the same house that was originally built. Redara moved from the house she shared with Abrielle into ours, to get away from the bad memories. Bonsai, with the two hatchlings River left her with, had moved into Abrielle and Redara's house, unable to bring herself to live in the house her mate had.

Most of the kites were displayed in the empty nocturne house. Bonsai had River's kite in hers, while the only one we had in ours was Belle's.

I spent most of my time that wasn't spent gathering for supplies in the zen garden. It was the only place where I could be alone and undisturbed. Despite not having anyone to need them, Vaesna spend his spare time building more houses when he wasn't teaching our grandchildren various life skills. Occasionally, we had some wanderers come through and stay a few nights in an empty house, looking for nothing but food and bed for a night.

I'm not proud that I let myself be swallowed by my grief. I knew I was letting my clanmates down. The losses I so sharply felt were by no means solely mine to feel. I couldn't understand how the others could compartmentalize. Bonsai lost the love of her life. Redara lost her sister.

I wasn't proud of how far I let myself fall. But I'd fallen so far, I couldn't see my way back.

The Nocturne House

Slowly, painfully, I came back to myself. In the time I'd allowed myself to grow distant, the nocturne house was turned into something of a boarding house. Vaesna and Redara worked together to build more structures as the need came, but for the most part, we only had passers through.

By the time I returned, our clan had grown. Carlston and Agrius were now grown, and moved into a new house that had been built. I knew the time would come soon for my grandchildren to find mates, and my heart was ready for them to go off on their own. It hurt to look at them, unsure of if they were going to stay or not. I couldn't bear to grow close to them if they were going to leave.

Luckily, they didn't.

The nocturne house was replaced by another trio, this time two faes and a guardian. They were introduced to me as Castitus, Strider, and Regulus. It took me some weeks to grow to remember their names, and by the time I did, I was finally convinced that I wasn't going to lose anyone else I loved. As I grew to recognize this, my confidence returned.

I longed for the closeness we shared during winter. The warmth of our bodies put together, the love we shared, the happiness we shared through our trials. While the spring was welcome, I couldn't help but miss it. I still spent a fair amount of time in my zen garden, soaking up the spring sun. I barely acknowledged Vaesna as he came to sit beside me on the bench one day. He pressed his shoulder to mine, leaning his weight on me.

"We can move, you know," he murmured. "If you're not happy here, we can go. I want you to be happy, Gaea. I don't want anything more than that."

"I miss winter," I whispered. "I miss the way things were before they were gone." He leaned more heavily into me, stretching one wing out to cover me. I leaned into him, dipping my head.

"Let's go south," he suggested. "The Southern Icefield. You miss winter. We can go somewhere it's always winter, if that's what you like."