The tragedy that occured in Lojatuq darkened a great deal of what Onainat had told her father after returning to Clhen. At the time, she'd been too wounded by her battles to talk of anything else. Her mother had taught her a different lessons from her father, however, and not all of them hurt Onainat. In fact without them, she doubted she'd have survived so long on the road without becoming angry or...dead. Onainat watched her father tend his ocarina and felt guilty for not sharing part of that with him. So much time had passed, so many things had happened, she simply hadn't thought it was important.
He didn't look at her. Onainat contemplated some of the pebbles by the side of her bedroll, but decided they were unnecessary for right now. She didn't want to damage his instrument.
"When we had holiday from our time with the guard, mother would take me south along the ocean. There were great cliffs on the eastern most shores that dropped sharply into the water; she said she was raised in cliffs like those. We camped along the edges of them without a tent. I'd never seen the ocean before and would have slept in the dirt to watch the waves, if I had to, in order to stay there."
Onainat remembered hanging her bare feet off the edge of the cliff, swinging them in the air and looking down the dizzying distance to the waves below. She and her mother would throw rocks as far as they could, sometimes not saying anything to one another for hours. Other times, Minaht told her stories or sang. Onainat had been surprised by her singing, having never been able to imagine her voice until the second her mother gave some folk melody life on those cliffs. Onainat didn't think anyone could replicate that for her, not even by singing the same song in the same key at the same exact tempo…
"I wasn't very good at flying. She seemed disappointed the first time we went out together because I wouldn't go too far from the cliffs. She said that our Clan was made to fly by the sea and through dark weather," Onainat smiled. "And that I‘d gotten away with eating too many raspberries as a child."
There wasn't a sound from her father's side of the camp. She kept going.
"So...one day, when there were clouds gathering over to a corner of the earth that I couldn't see, she took me out over the water. Mother was determined to get me away from the cliffs, but the only way I would go was if she came with me. I wasn't thinking much of storms at the time, but she was. She had an eye for storms. We flew until the cliffs were barely visible and there was nowhere to land but on the water; the clouds crouched right on top of the ocean. I didn‘t have much time to fly around them, the winds were too rough and the waves too high for me to keep low.”
Onainat picked up a pebble and rolled it along the tops of her fingers before popping it up and catching it in her hand. He was using a small tool to clean out the finger holes of his instrument, taking as much care as he had the first time. She wondered why he did it. Maybe as an excuse to keep her from throwing pebbles at him? Or not to have to look at her…
“I had to go straight through. I couldn’t see her, I could barely breathe. Everything smelled like salt and electricity. I was bounced around so much I thought I’d die, until the black clouds spit me out into the water. I was angry, at first, because I thought she’d left me in there. But I was too young to know the dragons of Marmar have sharp wings to cut the wind…and she’d be circling over me the entire time.”