A grin tugged at the corners of Raja's mouth as he spotted Vinder slicing through the sky, his silhouette sharp against the pale blue horizon. Every gust of wind, every shift in the air, sparked joy in the Journeyman's face so pure that it radiated from him like sunlight breaking through storm clouds. Without hesitation, Raja called upon the wind, which embraced him as an old friend, lifting him effortlessly. The air rushed past his skin, sharp and exhilarating, filling his senses with flight's raw, untamed power. Vinder nodded happily when Raja met him, then turned away to fly again. Together, they soared toward the jagged, snow-dusted peaks of the Obogor Mountains. Though Raja had flown countless times, it never ceased to amaze him, a feeling as wondrous as the daydreams of childhood when he had watched his aunt streak across the skies above the Grasslands, never daring to believe that one day, he too would defy gravity.

As they touched down on a craggy outcrop nestled in the foothills, the tight band around his chest Raja had been carrying for days seemed to unravel. The stone beneath his feet was cold and solid—a stark contrast to the swirling, boundless air he had just left behind—but somehow grounding. He let out a long, slow breath, his tension dissipating like morning mist. For a brief, fragile moment, he felt the burden of his doubts and responsibilities lift, allowing him to simply be.

Vinder sprawled across the ground, limbs stretching lazily as if soaking up the earth's energy. A broad, uncontainable grin split his face. "The air here—it's alive with energy," he breathed, his voice tinged with wonder. His dark hair, tousled by the wind, fell haphazardly over his brow, giving him an untamed, almost feral look. His bright blue eyes darted around, wide and filled with curiosity, taking in the vast, rugged landscape before finally locking onto Raja's face expectantly.

"I've never flown anywhere else, so I have no comparison." He tried to keep the bitterness out of his voice, but the words felt heavy. The Vale, once a refuge, now felt more like a cage. He had lived a nomadic life since he was a child, and even when he was with Lukas and the People, they had moved often to avoid capture. But now he was stuck, bound by responsibilities he never asked for.

The wind caressed his skin, soft but persistent as if comforting him. Or perhaps it beckoned him—whispering faint, tantalizing secrets of a world beyond the Vale, a world that called to him with every gust. It spoke of freedom, boundless horizons, and places where his heart could roam untethered. It stirred something deep within him, an ache for a life far away from the duties and walls that confined him here.

Vinder tilted his head, studying Raja as if he were some ancient riddle. "It's strange," he mused, his voice low, "to think of you being restless. You're like... a boulder. Solid. Grounded." He smiled softly, the breeze tousling his hair as he turned his gaze back to the open sky, the vast expanse reflecting his wandering thoughts. "You don't seem like the kind of man whose mind gets twisted up in knots." His words were thoughtful as if he couldn't quite reconcile the image of Raja with the turmoil he sensed beneath the surface.

Raja's lips twitched at Vinder's observation. Solid? Grounded? He felt anything but. So many unresolved feelings swirling around in his head, blowing his thoughts to the center of his unease.

"I never wanted to be a father." The words escaped before he could stop them, raw and unfiltered. He didn't dare look at Vinder momentarily, bracing himself for some sign of shock or judgment. But when he finally glanced over, Vin's face was calm, his expression as open as the sky they had just flown through. There was no hint of surprise, no raised brow. It wasn't in Vinder's nature to judge, making him one of the few people Raja could genuinely speak to. "I had no point of reference and didn't think it would be possible."

Vinder's brow lifted slightly, curiosity glimmering in his eyes, but still no judgment. "Because you love men?" he asked, his tone gentle but direct as if the question were no more unusual than asking about the dinner.

Raja nodded slowly, a ripple of surprise passing through him at how easily Vinder had grasped it. "Yes," he replied, his voice quieter than he intended, as if admitting the truth out loud made it more fragile somehow.

Vinder made a soft, thoughtful sound, tilting his head as he considered Raja's words. "That part makes sense. But... the reference thing? I'm surprised. You were raised in the Tribe, weren't you? I figured there'd be fathers all around."

"There were," Raja said softly, his voice trailing off as his gaze wandered toward the distant horizon. The mountains, stark and eternal, stood in sharp contrast to the memories that flickered through his mind—memories of green grass and vast plains. "But mine... he wasn't really there," he continued, his tone laden with the weight of unspoken moments.

Vinder turned his head just slightly, a question hovering unspoken on his lips. But Raja could feel it—could sense the weight of the inquiry pressing against the space between them. He wasn't sure he could explain it. The knot of emotions tightened in his chest whenever he thought of his father. It was too tangled, too layered—like trying to grasp smoke. How could he put into words the mix of longing and resentment, the ache of a boy who had yearned for something that was never fully there?

"He was... distant," Raja answered the unspoken query, the word heavy on his tongue, like a stone sinking into deep water. "Strict. He expected so much from me... more than I could ever give." His eyes followed the slow, lazy drift of clouds above, their freedom mocking the pressure in his chest. As the memories resurfaced, the familiar weight forced him down, like a hand gripping his heart, pulling him back into the cold shadow of his father's endless expectations.

"Well," Vinder said, his voice slow and thoughtful as if picking each word carefully from the air, "at least you've got a guide for what not to do. That's something, right?" His tone was gentle, almost too simple, as if offering a rope to pull Raja from the dark currents of his thoughts. But somehow, its simplicity carried a strange kind of comfort.

Raja smiled faintly. Vinder's logic, so direct and uncomplicated, had a way of cutting through the fog of Raja's doubts, like a gust of wind sweeping away smoke. It wasn't that the doubts disappeared, but they felt a little lighter and less suffocating at that moment.

"Maybe," he muttered, though the uncertainty still gnawed at him. "But what if I make the same mistakes? What if I fail my child the way he failed me?"

"At least you had a father to fail you," Vinder said softly, his voice almost lost to the wind. The words held a strange weight, a quiet sadness as if they carried more meaning than he was willing to unpack just then.

Raja sat up, startled by the bluntness of Vinder's words. He stared at the younger man, whose eyes were now closed, his face tilted toward the sky as if he were already halfway into a dream. The casualness of the statement contrasted with the heavy truth it carried, and it caught Raja off guard like a sudden gale of wind.

"Vin," Raja asked quietly, the question slipping from his lips before he could stop it, "what happened to your father?"

"I don't know," Vinder replied, his voice barely more than a whisper, carried on the breeze like a secret too fragile to hold. "My mother never told me who he was." There was no bitterness in his words, just a quiet acceptance as if he had long ago made peace with the absence of something he had never known.

"So I guess the question is," Raja murmured, lying back down with the weight of the conversation pressed against him, "is having no father better than having a bad one?" He closed his eyes, the cold stone beneath him grounding him as the wind whispered overhead, carrying their shared doubts into the vast, indifferent sky.

"Well, I guess it depends on how bad is bad. How bad was your father, Raja? Bad enough that you would have preferred he not exist in your life at all?" Vin's quiet voice traveled along the breeze into Raja's ears as he imagined his childhood.

Would it have been better without his father? He already didn't have a mother. Would it have mattered?

—

Raja's thoughts pulled him into the foggy recesses of his childhood. The sharp scent of fertile earth filled his senses, as real now as it had been all those years ago. He could almost feel the heat rising from the pounded ground beneath his feet and hear the distant, haunting cry of eagles soaring high above the endless plains.

He was young again—just a barely seven-year-old boy standing alone outside his father's tent. The Grasslands stretched out before him, an ocean of golden grasses rippling in the wind, dotted here and there with the slow-moving herds that his people tended with care. The voices of the Tribe murmured on the breeze, snippets of conversations and laughter that seemed to drift just out of reach.

His father, the Chief of the Inyoni people, stood tall in the distance, a commanding figure against the horizon. Even from afar, his presence dominated the scene as if the land bent to his will. But no matter how close Raja stood to him, his father had always felt miles away, unreachable, emotionally as distant as the mountains that framed the horizon. A figure of strength and authority, yes—but never of warmth.

"Raja, stand up straight!" His father's voice sliced through the air, cold and sharp as a winter wind. Even now, the memory of it sent a shiver down Raja's spine. His youthful hands wrapped around a heavy wooden staff, its rough surface chafing against his skin. His arms trembled from the weight, his muscles burning as he fought to maintain the stance his father demanded. He wanted so badly to impress him, to earn even the faintest glimmer of approval in his father's stern eyes. But it was never enough, no matter how hard he tried—no matter how perfect he aimed to be.

"Again," his father had commanded, watching with those hard eyes that seemed to miss nothing and understand even less.

Raja obeyed, his limbs aching, every muscle in his young body screaming in protest as he struggled to mimic the exact movements his father had demonstrated. His concentration was absolute—each gesture measured, each stance deliberate. And yet, no matter how precise he tried to be, he knew the mistakes would come. They always did. And each one—no matter how small—was met not with scolding but with a silence so deep and oppressive that it felt like a storm about to break. His father's disapproval didn't need words; it hung in the air, heavy and ominous, always there, always waiting to crush him under its weight.

Yet there had been rare moments—so rare that Raja sometimes wondered if they had ever truly happened at all—when the silence between them softened, if only for a breath. He remembered sitting by the fire one night as the cool evening breeze swept across the Grasslands. The Tribe had gathered around, their voices lifted in song, the melodies rising to the stars. In those moments, his father sat beside him, not as the towering, distant Chief, but as something closer to a father. The lines on his face seemed less harsh in the glow of the fire, his presence less forbidding. In those brief, flickering moments, Raja had felt a glimmer of what could have been.

"You did well today," his father had said once, his voice uncharacteristically soft, as if the usual weight of his authority had been momentarily lifted. Raja had been too shocked to respond, too stunned even to question what he had done to earn those rare words of praise. The memory was hazy, the details lost to time, but that feeling—that fleeting warmth—had stayed with him, a momentary break in the storm. He had clung to it, turning it over in his mind like a precious stone, though he knew such moments would never last.

Those rare gestures had left Raja aching for more. A hunger gnawed at him in the quiet moments when he was alone. But they never came often enough. His father's affection had always been like water in the desert—scarce, elusive, and unpredictable. Each drop of kindness was a miracle, leaving Raja parched for something he could never truly grasp. The more he sought it, the more distant it seemed and the more desperate he became to prove himself worthy of just a little more until he finally gave up.

—

Raja blinked, pulling himself out of the memory. The cold emptiness he had felt then lingered, a reminder of everything he hadn't been given. Raja had always tried to prove himself, to earn that approval, but it had never been enough. And now, as he faced fatherhood himself, he wondered if he would be any different. Fear, sharp and suffocating, returned. He didn't know how to be a father because he had never truly had one. All he had were the shadows of the past, the distant echoes of approval, and the occasional warmth of a touch that had never lasted long enough.

"I won't be like him," Raja whispered barely audible words, more a promise to himself than anything else. Yet even as he spoke them, doubt curled dark and persistent in the corners of his mind. He wanted to believe it—needed to believe it—but the fear lingered like a shadow that wouldn't let him go. Could he really be different, or was he bound to repeat the same cycle?

"Good," Vinder said with a lightness that seemed to cut through the weight of Raja's thoughts. "That's settled, then. You will be different." He spoke with such certainty as if the answer was obvious, like the sky being blue or the wind being free. Vinder tilted his head, his gaze thoughtful. "Were there any men in your life who you admired? Men who showed you something better?"

Raja nodded, slowly at first, as if the memories were hesitant to surface. But then they came—faces of men who had balanced strength with compassion, whose discipline had been tempered by love. He had seen them, even if he hadn't experienced it firsthand. Fathers who taught their children the ways of the Grasslands with patient hands and warm hearts guided them with wisdom rather than force. They had been there, on the periphery of his life, showing him what fatherhood could be, even if his own had never lived up to it.

His thoughts shifted to the People—a collection of rebels, outcasts, and warriors who had banded together to resist the Queen's iron grip. In their midst, he had seen all kinds of fathers—fathers from every walk of life, men who had been hardened by battle but softened by their love for their children. Fathers had fought for freedom not just for themselves but for the future of their sons and daughters. Raja had watched them, these men who protected their families with fierce devotion, and he had learned from them, even if he hadn't realized it at the time.

"Yes," Raja said, his voice firmer now, more confident. "I met many good fathers." He could see their faces—men who had shown him, even from a distance, that fatherhood was more than just authority and rules. It was protection, guidance, and love. It was all the things his own father had struggled to give him.

"Then be one of them," Vinder said as though the answer were as simple and easy as breathing. He stood up fluidly as he spoke, dusting off his trousers and flashing a grin before hurling himself off the mountain.

Maybe it was that simple. "Be one of them," Raja echoed softly, the words rolling off his tongue as if he were testing their weight, seeing if they held enough truth to stand on. The air around them seemed to lighten as if the wind approved of the optimism in Vinder's words.

Raja rose to his feet, the wind stirring around him, familiar and comforting. It whispered against his skin, tugging at his clothes and urging him onward. He closed his eyes momentarily, allowing the gusts to lift and carry him upward. The doubts that had weighed him down just moments before seemed to scatter, swept away by the endless sky. He glanced at Vinder, who was already soaring ahead; his laughter carried on the breeze. With a deep breath, Raja joined him, letting the wind take him as they rose into the sky again.

WC2825

Image created using OpenAI's DALL·E, facilitated by ChatGPT.