…..:::::|. Has Mountain .|:::::…..

Vicious edges of a flying boulder went crashing down the mountainside. Its sawing serration cleaved her head off like a bloody talon strike.

Halycind violently shook the image from her mind again, for the fiftieth time, there clinging to the side of this mountain. She sometimes cursed how powerful her imagination could be but she had a task to finish now. What she did in fact see, sighing her worries away, were little white cotton sprigs dotting the exhaustively trying stone path upward toward the Gates of ‘The Ladi’.

Most other townships employed great builders, axemen, and even mages to clear out crags and boulders and fallen trees from the major thoroughfares into their city gates, but not Ladi Gru Has.

Her crags and hard ways and steep stone slopes were her main defense from ne'er-do-wells and thugs.

“How is it...” A near harrowed Halycind Carabaan Cashtiel took a very hard panting huff. “How is it…that The Ladi…” her gloved palm slapped at an edgy stone and her still-elegant fingers gripped it sturdy to yank herself upward “...has all these hazards...to keep out thugs...” one of her black-booted feet laced in straps and buckles slipped on loose rocks and sod beneath her. She re-dug the spikes in but part of her rump collapsed into the shoulder of the aging Zadagen Actus Agentem at her rear. With an easy sigh he propped her up by that shoulder. “...yet...the city...is still so chocked...full of thugs?”

“Man will go through great trouble for the promise of arse and gold...mainly gold.” Veygornne replied with a dry patience to his words. He'd been here many times.

He pushed her by the backside up over a husk of a log. So long dead and so rotted out, that the very hint of her weight broke it to crumbles. She huffed as she recovered with grasping snatches at more crag and sod.

"Huuuh, I almost died!"

"You didn't almost die." Veygornne sighed rolling his eyes.

He helped set her footing and scared little grasps as she panted away her fear.

She was huffing, from her near-fall, and staring at the tiny things living inside the husk scattering away in fright. Dead things lay up here so long the overgrowth had hugged them in and under the path they were attempting to follow, so Halycind couldn’t be sure if she was grabbing at the right thing or even going in the right direction. Her guide at the rear seemed certain of their way, however, given his untroubled attitude.

So long the way up to The Ladi was, but he’d chosen a much shorter route than most would have; even though it was closer to a climb than a trudge uphill. He could have chosen the TwoMoon Stairwell, but that, of course, would have taken two moons. Instead he’d chosen for them to travail Has Slope. She now would have rather had the two day trip. They still had another fifty meters to scale until they would see the city’s gates of reprieve.

Sensing frustration in the pup that would hinder his own advancement, Veygornne dug his spiked boots in to climb ahead of the girl. "And how many times have you killed yourself on the side of this mountain in your head, already?"

"A boulder's cut me head off fifty times, Veygornne!"

"And you're going to cry about it?"

A sour pout of anger pursed her lips shut.

He then reached backward to gable her wrist and hoisted her on upward a few meters. He was indeed very much still a strong and powerful man. Vigilant. Aware. Present of mind. A kin to the wolf-spirits they called ancestors, for certain.

He hailed from the massive forest city of her second home, Cashtiel Roams; one of the four kingdoms in the federated country known as The Close Kings of Ashok. He’d been travelling the world ‘in the Service of Kings’ for nearly fifty cycles now as a Zadagen Agent, she'd only just left her home over two cycles ago to train with him before taking her final tests to work as he does. The Elders of Cashtiel Roams bid her to travel, for her curious nature was stifled in the protected space of their forest glades and her young hands were becoming rife with mischief borne out of idleness. Both their decree and her own willfulness pushed her to apply to the Agency’s call for recruits. She’d served as a Den Hunter for much of her puberty but even that had begun to bore the girl. Somewhere in her howling spirit there was a need to fulfill something higher, something meaningful…or just thrilling; she hadn’t been entirely sure herself. She desired, nay, obsessed over climbing to something grander. She looked upward to the steadfast wolvkin before her, he had already achieved that grand station.

Halycind wished she had his fortitude, for he seemed to tolerate the most ridiculous of scutwork, including this climb. His hands reminded her of toil. The beef of his thighs reminded her of power and might. The grey of his hair reminded her of…of Taphsel.

Poor Taphsel.

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Taphsel cared so deeply for her rearing after agreeing to take her from the main palace. He didn't deserve to die alone. Alone in his workshed. No one to defend his life…

Halycind shook the memory from her mind. Veygornne was beckoning for rock and grass tufts to be desperately tended here. Veygornne was a tough old fart and he kept an all too adept pace up these crags. An exhausted sigh leapt from her and her head reeled upward. Anteqwar and Qilla, the two hunter moons whose love knew no end, still hung there as they did during most days, but here she wished they wouldn't taunt her so and just reach their hands down to pull her up this confounded mountainside.

Halycind huffed again.

In her daydreaming she'd failed to notice her half-gloved fingers had started to go numb as they sunk deep into something cold. There was snow falling up here. When had the snow started to fall? Or had they just climbed into it? It seemed as if it had been falling for some days now, so it was likely her latter thought was the truest. She didn't notice if Veygornne had seen any of her tears welling over this trouble and missing the man who had raised her but she choked down whatever old sorrow for Taphsel was tugging at her as she regained some sense of scaling speed. Her adopted father would've been disappointed if she fell off the side of this mountain from a lack of attention to her task. He wouldn’t have promised her the tools she’d always kept latched to her hip if she’d been unworthy of self-discipline. She had to at least live up to that much.

Veygornne's voice broke the soft crystalline silence. “Gru Gate.”

Halycind looked up from her intense grip on the side of the snowy and soddy crags to view his call to attention. A pair of fuchsia and orange banners waved long at the crest of the slope. From what she could just make out, the humongous gate was fashioned from two slightly bowed and very ornately carved grey wooden beams afixed atop two large posts. They had almost made it to relief.

The last fifteen meters were the worst as she stared at the looming gate into town both teasing and welcoming her tired distressed body. She desperately wanted to loose her hair as it was dreadfully pinned up into its traditional style for cadets of the Zadagen Agency. She could feel the pressure of her own blood vessels as they pounded against the metal pins holding it all neat.

Veygornne must have seen her limp grabs and struggle to respite, for he chuckled as he helped her take hold of another rock on their last bit of the way.

“Aaahh, Aphsa-Cashtiel!” A rich manly voice called over the ridge. Veygornne cursed at him and threw up a palm for aid. The one calling over, slapped a strong pale-skinned palm about the wrist of the old man and hoisted him to the crest.

Halycind, alone now, struggled and gripped and struggled some more to reach the lip of the ledge. Where was her greeting and helping hand so she could curse at it too?

She pulled sod one last time to drag herself on to the snowy, rocky, cold, path; collapsed onto her back and huffed a full lung's depth five times over before anyone even acknowledged her presence.

“First time in The Ladi there, pup?”

Still no hand but his voice was as bold and crisp as the air up here.

Hastened swells of breath were her only answers. Everything hurt. Every muscle still felt as balled up as it had on the side of the crags but from the looks of the two men hovering above her now she must have also been a sore funny sight. They twisted smiles of concern into chuckles and the shaking of their heads. She gestured a lewd curse to both of her elders as they laughed away the thought of her in pain.

Two younger faces poked in over above her. One immediately handsome and the other familiar and welcomed. The familiar face spoke first.

“You are going to love the Goldcrest up here. It reminds me of Kago.” She said happily through a veil of messy braids. Why wasn’t this girl’s hair wrapped and pinned as tightly as her own?

Halycind was taken to scrutiny at the upkeep of this one's tress. They were Agency Prospects; their traditionally wrapped wolaenki were supposed to be neat and pinned and adorned at all times. “Uh, you gonna fix your--”

“Wolaenki's on holiday up here.” The bright girl clad in an equally messy collection of colourful wraps and cloths and scarves over her uniform poured gobs of smiles onto her friend.

The handsome one shoved a bluish hand toward her and she slapped at it in a slack gable. Halycind was always keen to impress creatures considered to be more male than female, but if this was to be his first impression of her, she immediately didn't care if he knew the truth. That stupid climb took the coy right out of her.

As Halycind was helped gracefully to her feet, the mess of braids and smiles and bright blue eyes brushed at her wildergear. “You remember Siin, right?”

Halycind looked around the rocky space once then, realizing she meant the handsome young lad she was leaning on, shot him a shocked look.

“Siin Ynggrloch?”

“It's aBn Ynggr now.” His voice was invasively smooth, immediately attractive, and suddenly hormone inducing; even if his first words to her were of a corrective nature. She wanted to hear that voice again…for hours.

It took her a moment to regain some sense of control over her own imagination and urges when she suddenly realized…he said aBn. And a string of fear rushed up her middle. aBn were powerful. aBn were few. aBn were...dangerous.

“You…you…took the rites…Wow!” She gave him a stiff once over, as close as he was, and found him beautiful. “Wow.”

Siin used to wear holey trousers and ripped shirts and keep his hair in an oily blue-black wad on the top of his blue-caramel head as they ran the thickets and groves in Cashtiel Roams. His penchant for magecraft, then, only barely brushed a hair above parlor tricks or pranks. But if he had sworn those talents to the Magi of the aBn Tera Villa and took the excruciating rites within to become a warcaster, then he had truly made more of himself than some wretched subkin pilfering carts along the cobbled streets of their childhood home. Even if his beauty and manner had been assisted by that poison aBn drank.

She sighed and pursed her lips, full now of sour opinion and judgement over his station. “No wonder you look like that. Hopped up on aBn-sauce.”

There was a certain stink on her words. Siin rolled his grey-amber eyes and heaved her toward the gate proper.