Chapter One:

“N’stadege! Get back out here where I can see you!” K’cintzena yelled out, as the little girl’s black head vanished behind a gigantic boulder.

Seven-year-old N’stadege peaked her head around the rock and looked guiltily down at her older sibling. She had been climbing the rocks along Sudern Wehr’s waterfront, as she always did when she had the chance. She loved the fact that her home Wehr had the largest lake in the Continuum. Lake Kergesund took up the entire bottom level of the cave complex, and was fed primarily by melting glacier ice far above the topmost level of Sudern. N’stadege also knew that some of the water was routed to the houses in the Wehr, for drinking and bathing, but that was of little interest to her.

What was interesting, in the mind of a seven-year-old girl, was that Lake Kergesund had been a natural reservoir even before Man had discovered it, drained it down to its present level, and begun regulating its water flow. This meant that the lake still lapped up against the vertical stone walls of Kergesund Cavern, eroding strange pits and passages at and beneath the waterline. A century before, the inhabitants of Sudern Wehr had torn down part of one of the walls, creating a wide rocky beach and a gradual slope into the water that allowed for perfect swimming. More importantly, in N’stadege’s eyes, they had taken the leftover rock from that and other projects and pushed it back into the edge of the lake, creating a wide ridge of boulders extending out from the beach, along the right-hand wall of Kergesund Cavern. Wia Drachoni, it was called, literally meaning “The Dragon’s Path”.

One day, N’stadege planned to dive deep enough to explore the new-forming caves under the water’s surface, but until her lungs grew, she was content climbing around on the land. It was drier. Besides, the walls in the cave were brilliantly colored from millennia’s worth of mineral stainings, and those that had been torn down a century ago to provide access to the lake were no less beautiful for being in pieces. She knew that many people – adults, mainly – made their way carefully out onto Wia Drachoni to get an unobstructed view of the lake in its natural beauty. N’stadege had looked out that way before, but she had seen nothing much of interest. Water as far as the eye could see, blending into the distant darkness of the unlit end of the cave was much more boring than pretty, well-lit rocks that she could hike on near the beach. It was so much fun to scamper up and down the uneven ground; to scratch and climb her way through the mounds of craggy, unevenly-spaced boulders that towered over her, as if she was the dragon of the path, herself.

K’cintzena, N’stadege’s fourteen-year-old sister, had no problem with her playing the path dragon, but only if she stayed in sight of the beach, so K’cintzena could come get her if she somehow fell into the water or twisted an ankle. N’stadege knew the rules, just as she knew that she had broken them by venturing around the far side of a rock pile and climbing onto the little overhang as she had. But school had just ended for the week and it was such a nice day for climbing!

“Adege...” warned K’cintzena, crying loudly to make herself heard from her seat on the edge of the beach. The older girl was sitting with a friend on her towel near the edge of Wia Drachoni, chatting. “You’re gonna get me in trouble! Get down here, now!”

N’stadege pouted for a second, but began slowly making her way back down the mound of rocks toward the waterfront. As much as she loved scrambling over the boulders, she knew K’cintzena was right: if their parents ever found out that K’cintzena wasn’t watching her little sister well enough, there would be trouble. They might even forbid the two sisters to go places, like the beach, alone. And in Adege’s mind, that would be one of the most horrid punishments in existence.

“I’m coming, Cini,” she called, making certain to put just enough annoyance in her voice so that her sister realized what a depressing thing coming down from the rocky ledge was.

As she carefully found another foothold across a particularly tricky part, she heard her sister call out in exasperation, “Adege, for the zillionth time, can’t you just call me ‘Tzena’, like everyone else?!” Sound traveled poorly across the large cave, but Adege knew her sister well enough to add in the words she’d missed.

N’stadege pondered the request for an instant. Everybody else called her older sister ‘Tzena’, and Adege knew that K'cintzena was sometimes annoyed to be called by such a childish name as ‘Cini’. But, after a few seconds of serious debate, little N’stadege decided to stick with her own homemade nickname. She wasn’t entirely sure how her two-year-old tongue had mutilated K’cintzena into Cini, but it had stuck, and she liked it. Besides, it annoyed her big sister, which was always funny to watch! “Nope!” she yelled back, giggling as K'cintzena muttered something to her friend that Adege was too far away to catch clearly. The exact words hardly mattered, for the tone was unmistakably clear.

Adege was about halfway back to the beach when her father entered the cave. She was concentrating hard on jumping between two big, flat rocks – just because they were there – so she never even noticed him. It’s entirely likely that he wouldn’t have noticed her, either, as he was just passing through to run some chemical tests in the lower level hydroponics caves, but as N’stadege landed on the second rock, she slipped on a wet spot and let out a high squeal. She wasn’t hurt in the least, but her inadvertent noise was enough to cause not only K’cintzena, but also their father, to look up just in time to watch the seven-year-old land ungracefully at the foot of the slippery rock.

“N’stadege!” roared Begeraldis, recognizing his energetic daughter from afar, even as she shook herself off and stood up, rubbing her behind. “What are you doing over there, you idiotic girl! Get over here now, before you fall in and drown yourself!” He looked around, saw K'cintzena, and strode angrily down the beach and over to his older child. “K’cintzena, you were supposed to be watching her! You’re fourteen now, and you can’t even keep an eye on a scrawny little brat like that? I ought to ground you for your life, girl!”

As N’stadege hurried even faster across Wia Drachoni, she could hear her sister stammering out an explanation about how she had been watching, and how Adege had just tripped and wasn’t actually hurt. But their father wasn’t having any of it. Totally ignoring the fact that K’cintzena had a friend with her, he ordered her home immediately.

When Adege finally made it back to the beach, she immediately ran over to stand next to her sister. Her father glared down at her. It was a long-distance glare, since he was over twice her childish height. “What kind of stupid stunt was that s’posed to be, kid?” he demanded in a menacing voice. His eyebrows knit angrily together under a lock of loose black hair.

N’stadege instinctively took a half-step closer to her older sister, and shivered. She had never fully grasped why it was that her father didn’t like her, but it was clear that he treated her differently than he generally treated Cini, and he had done so for as long as Adege could remember. Even with Cini, Begeraldis wasn’t the kind, loving father that most of N’stadege’s friends had, but at least he wasn’t actively mean to her, as he was with his younger child.

“I... I was just climbing, Dada,” N’stadege mumbled. “Really, I wasn’t doing anything! I swear! I just slipped a little. I’m ok, though!” She tried to give him a little grin, but one look at his face made the smile vanish before it managed to truly manifest itself.

“Get out of here, you stupid kid,” growled her father, pointing his thumb in the general direction of home. “And once I get off work, we’ll talk about what happens when you do dumb things that could get’cha killed.” He fingered his belt buckle pointedly, causing his seven-year-old daughter to shrink even more obviously into her sister’s shadow. N’stadege had felt the slap of that belt too many times to miss the subtle hint. She nodded, wide-eyed, but said nothing.

K’cintzena recognized the threat as well, and frowned. She was old enough to know that this was not how a parent was supposed to treat his children, but didn’t know what she could do about it. Except tell her side of the story to their mother, which she would as soon as she got home. In Tzena’s eyes, Adege had done nothing wrong to deserve more than a yell or two, maybe. Probably not even that. But trying to explain that to their father when he was in a mood like this was worse than useless, as it would only make him angrier. So she, too, nodded, and told him that she would take Adege home.

“Good,” growled Begeraldis, nodding slightly at her. “At least one of my kids has a little bit of sense. Get her out of here. I’ve got another pond to check and then more work to do, to keep you and your lousy sister fed, you know.” And without another word or a glance at his younger daughter, he stalked off to finish his hydroponics work.