77th of Spring, 500 AV
Cold stone warmed to the callused touch of seasoned hands, crawling into small crevices that were sewn into the sheer face of the rock Raif periled to climb. It was an ascent he had a cherished history with, riddled by enough holds that it took away the effort of charting a path in his mind and sloped to where a fall did not guarantee death. Inarta like him had perhaps used this surface generations ago to hone their ability, a lack of erosion taking away the dangers that came when trusting the entire weight of a body to a strangled lip that was no more than two inches wide. But after having recorded so many climbs in the past seasons, Raif had found no evidence to suggest that it was still in use by any other feet or hands than his own. This rock was his.
He was an olive speck topped by a crown of red against the wide crust of slate gray earth, an early morning breeze laying tracks of ice through barebacked nerves and clapping against the plain black bryda he adorned. Syna would be rising just over the spine of the world in the next half bell, the earth already warming to the god’s presence as the heavens were wisped by feathery white clouds that bent lazily across the royal sky. Life at these altitudes was pressed to be found, spots of lichen clinging to undernourished surfaces and beholden to the temper of climates. Not even the conifers dared to ascend to these heights, spread in waves of forested earth hundreds of feet below in what looked to be a blanket covering the feet of risen monuments of stone.
The breeze carried the scent of aging pines upon its fleeting back, the only solace one could find to its touch, as the rest felt like the fingers of death torturing his perspiring skin. Raif had brought his bow and hunting knife along just in case the worst of luck befell him, but in his few ages of rising through the ancient banks it was not an encounter with the fauna of Wind Reach he needed to trouble himself with. There were things far more dangerous up here than tangling with a bear on foot, strangely none of which seemed to concern Raif in the least.
His bare skin was glossed by a jacket of glistening sweat, the dark and sculpted ridges of muscle straining with each meticulous bend and lift of his limber frame. It was a practiced method that required little in the way of planning once the body developed a system, a constant shifting of weight from one side to the next while hands guided the path. Every other detail became immaterial in light of this, and all the cares of the world could be washed away in the ascent of one simple climb. It was poetry to the young Inartan, a boy become man who was celebrating his success by visiting a site that was sacred to him.
The tragic Dek caste was one that too often suffered from anonymity and debasement within society‘s ranks. What rights they felt they deserved were torn from them, and the siring of youth was never theirs to cherish. To them it was naught but a duty, and too often that duty was corrupted by predation from the higher echelons of the colony. But Raif’s parents were a special illustration of the norm, their cloaked chevas marks proof of their taboo. While they never had the luxury of raising their only son or two daughters, the parents both felt a connection to the children that compelled them to visit their offspring even when they were both exhausted from backbreaking work and poorly nourished.
It was a clandestine affair that flirted with the edge of unlawfulness, and ultimately had been the reason for their brutal murder in the end. The children had been spared of their own innocence, their gifts far too precious to squander given that all three had displayed some of the highest test scores of their class. To the triplets their parents’ death seemed hardly just, though the alternative was no less compelling given what consequences awaited them. With no last rites bestowed to either mother or father, the bodies had been cast away into the Tomb of the Fallen, leaving it in the children’s duty to remember them.
A hand peaked up over the final ledge, fingers clawing against the pulverized grit of the mountain that had taken centuries to crush into fine powder. Each muscle in the boy’s body was trembling, exhausted from nearly a hundred and fifty feet of free incline. Hauling the rest of his body up in one last grueling effort, a guttural moan fed its way through heaving breaths and past trembling lips. Rolling onto the flat of his back at long last, the boy’s eyes gazed widely at the imperial sky, his chest heaving to draw large gulps of oxygen into his lungs. And then, as if it had been perfectly timed all along, the first stream of molten sunlight crested the furthest ridge and soaked Raif in a warmth that drew out a smile between gasps for air.
Turning his head to the side, sweat sleeked strands of hair covered linear portions of his vision, where not ten feet away two small cairns sat within a small pool of mountain runoff. All around it, patches of moss flourished with life, shadowed by the disheveled structure of an impossibly growing bipard plant. “Mother….Father,” the boy rasped.
