As the golden sun eclipsed the apex of a tall mountain range, it beamed shafts of yellow down upon a small but picturesque dale caught between two craggy cliff faces, stretching down into a narrow basin below. The dale was intersected by a wooded creek supplying fresh waters from the mountains above. The gap between wasn’t considerably wide, only spanning roughly half of a mile wide from one cliff face to the other. However, where it lacked in width, it made up for in length, extending down and emptying off into a lake in the basin.

The dales length was covered in spindly deciduous trees that soothingly rattled along with the morning breeze, where they weren’t stood tall darker ones of a more coniferous nature. Many woodland critters made their homes within the trees, providing plenty of shade and coverage from nature’s harsher elements up to a point, a particular clearing in the trees revealing the handiwork of men. Within the clearing, out of the hollow of the dale, one would see a tiny settlement: Hildenfreide, the Hidden Mountain Hamlet.

Hildenfreide was a lesser-known settlement nearing the outskirts of the Azurellione empire. It resided well within the area of conflict between three rivaling nations, but it received very little attention due to its obtuse positioning and low population. The hamlet had very little substantive value as the cliffs left little space for expansion or any valuable resources worth quarrying. They were also far away from the nearest city, making trips long, arduous, but more importantly, risky and unprofitable.

Despite all of this, to the forty-three peasantry that lived there, Hildenfreide was their sanctuary. The landscape was beautiful and generally safe from monsters. What more, the Azurellione lord presiding over the duchy often forewent levying the town as he knew the costs of sending out tax collectors wasn’t worth what they would make back.

And so, it was that even through a multigenerational border conflict, Hildenfreide mainly remained aloof to the wars happening all around it. The people were happy and prospering in such a way that no other peoples in all three of the surrounding kingdoms would’ve conceived possible. They didn’t have much knowledge or fancy nice things, but they were content and self-reliant. It was the perfect place to settle down after a long life of vagrancy and have a family, or at least it was to Lazarus, a man, and husband of a wife, who, much like him, was quite experienced with a nomadic lifestyle and thoroughly sick of it.

***

The sun was highest in the sky when the scent of freshly-baked bread and meat stew wafted through the doorway and into Azriel’s room, waking him. Him having been so long deprived of the ability to sleep had him often slumbering well into the day, only to be awoken by the other thing for which he had unwittingly craved for eons.

Opening his eyes, he flipped off his bed and jumped through the air, jumping again, halfway to the doorway, having seemingly propelled himself off of thin air. It was a skill called ‘Double-jump,’ or so his father said. It was a somewhat commonplace skill in the lands from which his parents hailed. A land far to the east in the Nubi desert called Nubai.

Before landing, Azriel grabbed the side of the doorframe converting his momentum into a swinging motion that arced him to the right and down a flight of stairs. As he was feet from reaching the bottom, he pivoted midair to push himself off a wall, then double-jumping again back upright and landed safely on the earthen floor below.

Azriel’s mother, Ester, let out a startled yelp at seeing her son landing upright seven feet from where the staircase ended. She shot up from her seat at the table, yelling, “How many times do I have to tell you to stop doing that! Everyone is going to think you’re a freak.”

Lazarus sitting at the table with a spoon in his hand spat out his soup, incapable of containing his laughter. Ester looked back at him with disapproval, sobering his sense of humor within a micro-instant.

Turning to Azriel, she spurned, “From here on out, every time you do that, you aren’t allowed to go outside or read that book.”

Lazarus grimaced, arguing, “Don’t take away his book. Kid’s a genius.”

She heaved a sigh and, with mounting ire, replied, “So what?! If he doesn’t learn how to act normal, everyone is going to think we are a family of witches more than they already do.”

Lazarus exhaled, eyeing Azriel while saying, “I suppose your mother’s right. You have to be careful around the others.”

Standing up from his chair, Lazarus stepped over to Azriel, effortlessly picking him up with his bulky arms and setting him down on an extra tall stool of perfect height for him to eat at the table.

“The folks here don’t know your special, and they’ll be angry if they find out. So, no jumping around like a crazy person, kay’ bud.”

Lazarus smiled warmly, hoping to elicit a laugh from Azriel, who remained just as stoned-faced as ever.

Feeling a tad uncomfortable, Lazarus backed away, saying, “Alright, well… I’m going to head over to Henric’s hut. He said his livestock are sick with something’ fierce.”

Ester smiled at him, inserting, “Also, remember to go check out that cave today. Lena told me her husband saw a pack of wolves in there.”

Lazarus saluted before turning to head out the door.

Ester turned back to see Azriel snarfing down the loaf of bread. His soup bowl was already empty, with the wooden spoon beside it remaining clean and untouched. Clicking her tongue, she watched as he swallowed the last bite of bread without chewing, then glaring up at her with curious eyes. Ester was an incredibly beautiful woman who looked quite similar to Lazarus, not so similar that they could’ve been directly related but enough that even Azriel took notice.

“What is it with you and food?” Ester nagged. “If you keep eating like this, you’re going start looking like nobility.”

Not getting the joke, Azriel tilted his head in confusion. Ester didn’t expect anything more from him; a kid of his age generally wouldn’t have understood a joke without it being made explicitly simplistic and overt.

“Eat slowly, or you’re going to—”

Her words were cut short by the loud coughs of Azriel choking on his bread.

“W-Water,” he groaned.

Ester grabbed Azriel’s empty drinking cup with a look of mild concern and, from a hole in the palm of her hand, slipped a sparkling clear stream of flowing water into the wooden cup, filling it halfway. Handing it off to Azriel, he hastily chugged it down.

Slamming the cup down, Azriel panted heavily; Ester sighed once more, this time in relief. On the palms of her hands, she bore the Mark of The Son, the stigma of the Father God.

In the world of Aarterra, people are born with the skills they have, and those skills are congenital, meaning they’re primarily determined by genetics. This includes the specific skills one may have and the amount they have. The skills people are born with are generally all they’ll ever have, minus one exception: Stigmas.

Performing a ritual to devote themselves to a god, a person can be granted extra skills in return that they follow the god’s tenets to earn their favor and are willing to live with the consequences that the ritual has on their body, that being the stigma itself.

A stigma is an injury one must inflict upon themselves to complete the ritual process that links the person and their god with their body being a vessel for their god’s powers. They are generally permanent, and a person can only have one stigma active at a time. If someone were to do the ritual twice under a different god, the link between the previous stigma and that respective god would become closed off, and they as a vessel would be filled with the spirit of the new god in the old one’s place.

Suddenly, Azriel spoke.

“Your water always tastes so much better than the stuff at the stream.”

Ester looked a bit surprised to hear Azriel speak. It was quite a rare occurrence. Nevertheless, she deliberated, “This water isn’t just any water. It is called ‘Living Water,’ and it comes directly from the eternally flowing waters in heaven. ‘The Father God’ lets his vessels summon it forth from their stigmas.”

Hearing this, Azriel observed the hole in his mother’s hand before looking back to note the lack of one on his.

“Will I get one?” he muttered. “Will I get my own stigma one day?”

Ester smiled, “Certainly if you want one, but not yet. Devoting your life to a god or goddess is a huge responsibility, and it is a decision that you are too young to make.”

Azriel wondered how old he actually was. His body was little more than six years old, but as far he knew, he may’ve been older than all of recorded history. There was a time when he tried to explain that he was reincarnated to his parents, but they dismissed him, reasoning that he was confused and read too much into the stories in his tome. Not to mention, his father had the skill ‘Fighting Spirit,’ which gave him strong resolve on the fields of battle and an inclination to find enjoyment in combat. Though the behavior Azriel exhibited didn’t quite match that of those with the skill, it was not unreasonable to assume that what he had was some kind of mutation in the same vein. Maybe something more closely aligned with acrobatics, which regularly came into being with those in his heritage.

It wasn’t that uncommon for children to have new skills that were offshoots of the ones that their parents or their parents’ parents had. A family of mages with a long line of people with a skill like ‘Fireball’ will also most certainly have those in their lineage with something like ‘Firebolt’ or ‘Fireblast’ instead. As such, Azriel’s parents concluded his odd behavior stemmed from a skill that augmented said behavior.

Azriel backflipped off the stool onto the ground below out of sheer force habit. In seeing this, his mother sternly reprimanded him.

“Azriel! What did I tell you? Act normal, or you don’t get to read your book.”

It took him a second to realize what he had done wrong before he unapologetically apologized while slipping on his shoes and tightening them. He didn’t need the encyclopedic tome anymore, for he had memorized its contents.

Ester gritted her teeth but let it go. She felt disrespected by his inattentiveness or seeming lack of an emotional response but knew she wouldn’t get one no matter what she said, so she settled for what she got, sighing, “Remember to be back by dusk.”

Azriel stood up and silently nodded.

“Also, don’t go too far. If you see anything that doesn’t look human, run right back home.”

Azriel nodded again as Ester kissed him on the forehead.

Gently walking to and out the front door, he turned the corner onto the dirt road. As soon as he was out of his mother’s field of view, he broke into a sprint. He bolted down a route in which nobody walked by at this time of day.

Approaching the forest edge, he jumped off the trunk of a tree, rebounded off another, then double-jumping onto the canopy of an ancient oak. From there, he jumped from tree canopy to tree branch until he came to the face of the western cliff.

The cliff was nearly fifty feet tall, but Azriel was not dissuaded. Without any apprehension, he jumped to a particularly tall spruce tree, quickly scaling it, swinging around on the branches like a monkey until he reached the top. From there, he swung around in an arc with his landing on the pliable tip of the tree. Then, with tension applied to the tree recoiling back into rest, he was sprung forth. Flying through the air, he double-jumped, safely landing at the cliff’s edge.

It only took a few moments for him to recuperate his stamina before he looked back down the gap wherein lied the now ostensibly minuscule Hildenfriede. He traced the creek’s length down to the basin at the bottom, where he saw a lake of significant size relative to it. He loved the variations in the landforms and the world’s beauty as it was. It made him feel strong emotions that few other things could elicit.

He recalled back to that field of grain, the trees, the hills, the same few patterns of clouds which rolled by at the same pace in constant repetition. He remembered every nick and depression in their surface and every tree and every wave of grain. He recalled it all, yet he felt it was odd that he could never appreciate its design in all that time.

“Why?” he idly inquired.

Was it not for the fact he had become so accustomed to seeing it, would he have been able to enjoy it like he had with the panoramic vista before him, or was it for that very reason that he couldn’t feel anything but contempt for that artificiality which had him entombed an indeterminable duration? Was it the landscape he saw that made him feel these latent sentiments, or was it just a breath of fresh air, a reprieve from the repetition?

His knees shook as he fell to the ground soaking it with his tears. In spite of what may have caused this feeling, the effect on him was still the same. So, he did what he had done every day since the start of spring and wept inconsolably while watching the immaculate horizon ebb and flow.