The Atharottae mountains to the far east of the city stood tall and proud, rising into the sky in severe, jagged peaks. With slopes of glacial permafrost and cliffs of plunging stone, these mountains were not hospitable habitats.

The only creatures that eked out an existence here were stubborn ones - rare herbs that grew into the thick ice, leafy lizards that were more plant than animal, surestepped mountain goats that traversed the cliffs with precipitous abandon - and the Atharottan Highlanders.

The white communes of the mountain folk were built of the mountain itself, with bricks of ice and hewn stone that resisted even the wildest blizzards. Highlanders subsisted as herders of cantankerous goats, or herbalists who braved the weather in search of potent medicinal herbs and creatures that only hid in high altitudes. For anything else, they bartered with the plainsfolk village in the foothills

The plainsfolk here could hardly be called that, and were an equally hardy lot. They might not survive high up in the mountains, but they knew how to work the cold green feet of the ranges into lush farms and pastures.

The two peoples enjoyed a close camaraderie built through long centuries of isolation from the world at large. With none to depend on but each other, exchange of all kinds flowed freely both ways - including knowledge and skills.

The climbing lessons were a prime example of their cooperation.

Gyamma must have been four when she scaled her first real cliff. Her training group consisted of two other highlanders, barely toddlers themselves, and five or so plainsfolk children who were all at least twice their age.

The motley class was supervised by Gyamma’s own father, a taciturn highlander man, and a disinterested plainswoman - one from each people, as was tradition. They led the squawking group up in the mountains, to a sheer rock face that rose into the clouds.

“Alright,” said the disinterested plainswoman, “Start climbing, you little imps. The one that gets the farthest up gets this bag of sweets.”

She dangled the bribe enticingly at them. A frenzied race began, but the competition was by no means a fair one.

Gyamma might not have climbed real mountains, but she, like the other highlander children, had had plenty of practice scaling the walls of her ice-hut, clinging to the rough stone of the walls and the roof.

She did what came by habit. While the plainsfolk children ran at the wall, scrabbling and slipping and sliding in excited yells, she simply walked up to the wall and pressed her large, textured palm against the rock. Almost involuntarily, it flattened against the surface, as though an external force was squishing it down. Gyamma replicated the same effect with a foot, and then the other palm, and then the other foot. With the ability to Pin and the extraordinary grip it afforded, she was about ten feet up the wall in seconds, followed closely by the other podgy highlander children.

“Alright, that’s far enough,” her father yelled from below, with a nod of pride, “Come back down now.”

She ran up to him excitedly and stuck a hand out for her reward, but the man shook his head.

“The day is not yet done, little pebble,” he waved at the forlorn plainsfolk children who had all but given up at being beaten so soundly by mere toddlers.

“You’ll need to give them a fair chance.”

The plainsfolk woman looked patiently upon the hapless children.

“Use your Strength,” she said, “Now, watch me - “

She pulled on a thick pair of furry gloves and socks and walked up to the cliff. Just as Gyamma had, she placed a palm on the rock, and with her other hand made an exaggerated sign of Strength.

At the Touch, the glove was squished down exactly as the highlanders’ had. She then moved up in a similar fashion, but each of her steps was slower, and more cautious, with an interruption in between each to weave a sign of Strength, now with the left hand, then with the right. After a few steps, she hopped down and beckoned at the now brightening plainsfolk faces.

Gyamma’s father fished out several pairs of the same thick gloves and socks, specially made by his people. Sewn from thick goat hide, and coated with a coarse paste made of rock and hoof, the furry appendages were made to supplement delicate plainsfolk hands to grip slippery cliffs, as well bear the pressure of being mashed down against hard, jagged, rock.

“Now,” the woman said, “I want you all to watch how these mountain imps move, and copy them using the Strength signs you’ve learnt.”

The competition intensified. Several of the plainsfolk children born with the Touch of Strength, picked up the technique immediately, while the others watched them and the highlanders climb up and down, trying to mimic their holds with awkward Touch-signs.

As the highlander children began to grow bored and whiny at the minimal challenge, their guardian stoically tossed them each a bag of sweets and set them to work on a much tougher section of the cliff that would push even their budding skills.

By the end of that first day, both groups of children were bruised, bumped and exhausted. The plainsfolk had barely gotten close to the instinctive skill of their counterparts, but at least the essence of the technique was no longer a mystery. From here on, it was only sheer practice that could bridge the gap in their abilities.

Pinning, and the plainsfolk mimicry of it, were essential skills in a place where even travel between the two villages involved significant clambering and bouldering. But there was another skill, more subtle and specialized, that every Highlander learnt a little later in life.

The tradition of the Breathing, was not as much a lesson as a rite of passage. It was not taught - it was learnt. In this ritual too there was a sharing, but immensely more restrictive.

When Gyamma underwent her Breathing at the age of six, with several other little highlanders, there was only one plainsman who joined them. He was a grizzled veteran who had all but mastered Strength-climbing and was as good a mountaineer as any highlander. There was good reason for the restriction on outsiders - the ritual was a simple, harsh, dangerous one.

The group was taken to an alien freezing altitude, where the universe was entirely made of rock and snow, black and white. Here, they climbed.

Even with mastery of Pinning, the children struggled up the route, growing exhausted in seconds. Winds and flurries hit them with the force of avalanches, threatening to wipe them off the walls of sharp, cutting rock. Dizziness threatened to overtake their minds, washing over them in black waves. This close to the crown of the mountains, the air was a thin, insubstantial, treacherously insufficient fuel. Without a breath to catch, the highlanders found themselves drowning in nothing.

But as their chests throbbed in desperation, there was a shift within them. Their ragged gasping grew smoother as their lungs stepped in for what was unavailable outside, generating it within - life-giving Breath.

It happened almost simultaneously to each struggling six-year old. In the midst of their snowy climb, with nothing above and nothing below, they looked at each other in disbelieving surprise. From down below, where the elders and the single plainsman awaited their return, peals of relieved laughter could be heard, as the children finally learnt to Breathe.

The plainsman went next. As with the Pinning, his substitute for Breath would be his Touch. As he climbed, he made frantic signs of Air, in an effort to maintain an invisible breathable bubble around his head. With his mind focussed on the severe effort of simply staying alive, he inevitably slipped - and was caught by the team of highlanders that were his guide through his ordeal. While the children learnt in minutes, he persevered for hours.

His would be a lesson harsher than any else. Unlike climbing, this was an ability he would never beat the highlanders at - and he knew it. But at these unforgiving heights, he was willing to learn any advantage he could, however slim.

Of course, it was not only the highlanders that offered their skills to the plainsfolk. Down in the foothill village, knowledge was disbursed in the opposite direction.

The Touch was as innate to plainsfolk as Breath and Pinning were to highlanders, and those born with an affinity to a certain element could wield it with a mere thought.

Those of a favoured element would teach the others to control it through varied Touch-signs and forms. In these lessons too, plainsfolk children would train alongside highlanders in the basic three - Touches of Heat, Water and Strength. The plainsfolk would pick up the gestures with intuitive ease, while this time it would be the mountain folk who experienced the struggle of learning something entirely foreign to them.

Most highlanders gave up on the Touches after learning the essential basics, just as most plainsfolk would never climb anything higher than a snowy boulder even with their accessories.

But Gyamma’s curiosity was not as easily sated. Learning Touch-signs was as hard for her as any of her kind, but it didn’t stop her from exploring deeper into complex forms and combinations. She kept up lessons from both worlds well into her teens, the unique tastes of each lesson mixing and merging in her mind into flavours that kept her asking for more.

She dove into learning Strength forms with zeal, eager to know how this plainsfolk version of Pinning worked. Upon learning how much more flexible those forms were she’d imagined, she was beyond thrilled. She spent months employing both Strength and Pinning to climb, while the rest of her people mocked her efforts as futile. Most of those voices fell silent, however, when they saw her climb. She would weave Strength into her feet and bound across impossible gaps, smacking against the rocks on the other side with a Pin; leaving her fellow climbers far behind in the dust.

A couple of years later, when she’d advanced well beyond the basic three, Gyamma grew fascinated with the use of the Touch of Light. The only use for it among the plainsfolk was the obvious one - to find one’s way in the darkness. Gyamma played and experimented with that form until she perfected Touch-signs to produce bright points of red or yellow lights that could be seen at night from the foothills all the way up the mountain. Using these, she devised a way of communicating between the two village through a detailed code of flashing lights.

However, her experiments didn’t hold the interest of anyone but herself for long, and remained only a minor source of entertainment to the villages. Her climbing innovations were dismissed as too flamboyant for reality. Her language of lights was passed off as an imaginative child’s toy, too complex to learn. The soft-spoken girl was popular only as a zany, if endearing, village curiosity.

To Gyamma’s parents however, she was a genius after Tooryen the Maker himself. They oohed and aahed at every turn of their daughter’s mind, and none could make them say otherwise.

When Gyamma was around fifteen years of age, the harried teacher at the plainsfolk village school accosted her parents with an exhausted look.

“Look master Noppyan,” she told her father, “I’ve taught her all I can. She’s even learnt a Touch of Numbing, and several fever concoctions from our Healer, and even Mannyo the Blacksmith is beginning to complain about her incessant questions about his application of Touch-heat.

“There is no question she is most talented - but It’s time the girl picked up an apprenticeship to focus her mind!”

At hearing this, Gyamma’s father became even quieter than usual, and spent two days in some deep thought. On the third, he packed a large sack of supplies and hired a mule.

“I’ll be back soon”, was all he said before marching off down the hills, towards the south where the great inlands lay.

He returned almost a month later, still thoughtful, but with a look of resolve on his face. Not a man to waste a moment, that very day he took Gyamma climbing up the mountain. At the end of a satisfying route, they sat up on a high cliff, above a sea of white cloud that surrounded them below on all sides.

“Little rock,” he said to his daughter, “It is time for you to consider how you will educate yourself.”

“I was thinking the same father,” Gyamma answered excitedly, “Teacher Anndo at school says she would recommend me highly for an apprenticeship. She suggested Valannya, the village Healer as an option. But I think I would much rather learn under Mannyo the Blacksmith; who better to teach me the nuances of Heat and Strength than she and her furnaces? Oh father, there is so much yet to learn!”

Her father smiled patiently and waved into the scenery.

“Tell me what you see.”

Gyamma gazed into the pristine expanse stretching out into eternity.

“The world.”

“And what do you see down there?” he pointed through a gap in clouds to a barely visible speck in the distance.

“The foothill village.”

Her father’s obtuse message sunk into her, and her face shrank.

“You’re saying it is not enough,” she said sullenly.

“Not enough for you, little rock. What you have learnt so far is just a scratch on the surface of a mountain. But you have a talent rarely seen in our kind, and the mind to use it.

“This means you must aim higher than any before you. Travel to the city, attend the plainsfolk school there. Learn and grow, bigger and taller than the mountains you have lived in thus far.”

Coming from him, the speech was a long and eloquent one. Gyamma looked at him wide eyed.

“Leave here, our home, our people? And in the city, by myself?”

Their two communities had long lived away from the world, and believed in keeping it that way.

The only ones who ventured to seek their fortunes elsewhere never returned, for they were typically wayward, unwanted, chastised youths who wanted nothing more than to leave.

Gyamma’s eyes brimmed at the thought of being similarly cast out, and by her own parents.

“I have travelled to Atharen and back,” said her father, “and the world has moved without us. We here can live happily in our secluded way, but could you, my shining spire? Would you rest at ease here, knowing there is an ocean of knowledge somewhere outside your doorstep, with all the answers you seek?”

Gyamma was quiet.

“But… where would I go, father?” she said in a barely audible voice.

“You have heard the stories of the city - of how our people are treated in the interiors. The travelling merchants say we have no place among the people there. What school would take me in?”

“This was why I travelled to the city, my child. I would not send you into a cruel place without understanding something of it myself. Yes - the city can be a harsh host for one of our kind. It is true - many there view us of the mountains as… not an equal people.

“But you can choose to define yourself on their terms - as an unimportant yokel destined only for rough, unthinking living - or you can choose to seek your own path, not in spite of the world, or against the way of things, but regardless of it. Seeing you grow, questioning, challenging, thinking… this is, after all, a lesson I learnt, from you, my daughter.”

“I will admit it,” Gyamma said with an unsure smile, “I want to explore, to learn, to see the wonders of knowledge I have only heard stories of. But… I am afraid. I am afraid of walking the world alone.”

“Not alone,” replied the old highlander.

“Times are changing, little rock. Our elders tell stories of the ancient ways, when we too were plainsfolk, when we left the plains and built our homes in the icy peaks and glaciers. They say the mountains gifted us our Pinning and our Breath, but took away our birth Touch in exchange. We and the plainsfolk... we were the same once and have much to learn from each other.

“There are many today, even in the interiors, who are beginning to think the same way. And in these times of prosperity, in the great cities where all may find their own selves and purpose, may not all of us live once again in harmony, as our little haven here does? There is a path now for all to realise themselves fully - a shaky, slippery path - but one you must climb!”

Gyamma hesitated. The thought of leaving immediately constricted her throat. And yet… the lure of knowledge tempted her; the delicious taste of using her skills, furthering them, learning and discovering amongst those who might finally understand her thoughts better...

“I will think on this father,” she said.

“Certainly, think,” the old man said, “And as to where you might go, I have a proposal.

“In my travels in Atharen city, I wore the guise of a wandering labourer. Under that pretext I found a way into one of the big schools there - the university they call it. By the luck of the mountain, I met and spoke at length to none other than the head of the school - one Sadguru Venna.

“I found him to be a kind man, and one of those who is open to the world, for he too grew up in a remote town like ours, and he has tasted the free air of the mountains, the soothing waters of the glaciers.

“When he heard of your inventions and investigations, he demanded to see you - in person. You might travel there and learn under his wing.”

Gyamma’s mind whirled.

“Atharen city… university…” she managed breathlessly.

“Forgive me for not taking your permission,” the old man said, a teardrop in his eye twinkling mischievously, “But I believe I know my own daughter’s heart.”

From a coat pocket, he held out a folded letter which Gyamma read once without making any sense of it and then read again. Written in a beautiful official flowing script, and signed by Sadguru Venna, was a letter of invite to Atharen university.

As though for the first time, Gyamma turned slowly to look southwards. Before, all she had seen was the charming spread of white cloud. Now, the world they had long hidden from view beckoned to her to step out of her home for sixteen years.