"Catame! Catame, wake up, you're missing it!"

"Mmmmmm?" Catame rubbed at his eyes, lifting his head from Kaur's thick neck ruff. They'd made fairly good time over the past two weeks, despite all the snow, and they were due to reach Sanctuary today. All Catame cared about was the promise of a warm bed following a hot bath and dinner. Being so ill had left him devoid of what little energy for travel he normally had; he had slept for a lot of the rest of the trip north, snug and secure on Kaur's broad, furry shoulders. Daynoren would wake him periodically to show him particularly impressive sights or share his thoughts with him, and Kaur would make sure he got plenty to eat, but what Catame needed most was rest.

Now, though, Daynoren obviously had something he wanted to show him. Shivering slightly, Catame eased himself to a sitting position on Kaur's back, slipping his feet over both sets of shoulders and digging his gloved fingers gratefully into the thick fur behind her ears. It was very unlike riding a horse to be astride the large daemon, a fact made even more evident as she shifted her arms from holding him gently in place to clutching supportively at his ankles. Catame rather liked it. Having an intelligent, friendly mount was much preferable to even the gentlest horse-- every time he thought so, though, he felt a stab of guilt for abandoning Vale to the end of the line. Vale was a good horse, but he was nothing like Kaur, who was a concerned friend as well as willing transportation.

"Can't you feel it?" Daynoren asked, eyes unusually bright and gaze moving away from his brother to their surroundings. Ever since the half-remembered spell he and Kaur had worked on him, Daynoren seemed stronger and more sure of himself-- yes, somehow it was possible for Daynoren to be more confident-- but Catame couldn't fathom why. Maybe working such a powerful spell as that had broken down some of those mental barriers to magic that Kaur was always talking about, made him understand more of how it worked. Whatever it was, he seemed far more sensitive to magic than he used to be, almost as much so as Catame himself.

"Feel what?" he asked, then yawned widely, covering it politely with one hand. Ever since his fever, Kaur had held his own raw magical senses in for him, as if afraid that he would get overloaded again. Catame didn't protest, but he had found that he missed being able to track the rare, joyful eddies of dragon-magic and deep, slow-flowing streams of natural-magic in the interim while she was still trying to determine if he was somehow damaged by his experience. Thus, right now, he couldn't feel a thing except the vague, subconscious pressure of Kaur's shielding on him and the faint senses of Daynoren and Kaur herself, the closest beings to him.

"The magic!" Daynoren exclaimed. "It's everywhere! Kaur, let up on him, why don't you? It's not fair to not let him feel this."

With a deep sigh that lifted Catame briefly up then down again, and a glance over her shoulder at him, Catame felt Kaur begin to carefully lift her protections. He smiled in a way he hoped was encouraging, reassuring, and grateful all in one, the rest of his sleepiness evaporating into a sudden excitement and anticipation that he couldn't quite explain. Maybe it was just the prospect of being able to finally use all his senses again.

For a moment, it seemed as if he saw the world through a thin haze that made everything indistinct and blurry, as if something were dreadfully wrong with everything around him. Then, with a nearly violent wrench, a SNAP that was more felt than heard, Catame was awash with sensations stronger than any he'd ever felt before, magnified from his previous knowledge tenfold, hundredfold, blinding and deafening him briefly to all else. He reeled, clinging to Kaur's mane as one stable thing in a world suddenly full of fluxing energies, burning stars, and unseen winds. Hands came to steady him, and he blinked furiously, as if by clearing physical sight he could sort out the input from metaphysical sight.

"I feared this," Kaur's voice came distantly through the fog of magic that danced and sang everywhere around him. He felt her as a solid pillar of earth, water, and light, full of the trembling whites and greens of worry. Catame was amazed, sorting what his mind translated into image, sound, even scent and texture.

"Feared what? Catame-- Catame, are you all right?" Catame looked up to see his brother, a torch of fire, air, and light, flaring with fear and crackling with power. How could he possibly have missed all this, before? Something had changed; just regaining "sight" after only two weeks couldn't have made it all so bright and vibrant, could it have?

"Fine, I'm fine," he heard himself say, hollow-sounding as if it were once removed from him, but full of the wonder he felt. "And I do feel it, Day. This is... this is amazing. Kaur, what happened?"

Kaur's rumbling response was still concerned, but her magical tremors were subsiding into a wash of pale relief. "The fever, in part," she said. "The magic, in greater part." He found her face amid the riot of magic and looked questioning. "I do not know. Something about the magic in that cave. It was very strongly grounded, very old, and very strong. It was-- dangerous for me to use, but there was luck with us, and it allowed me to direct it."

Catame frowned thoughtfully, but he simply had too much to think about and not enough space in his head for it all to question further. He could ask and figure out later. As they continued down the rocky trail, Catame barely paid the cold and the bite of the wing any attention it all, and sleep was completely forgotten as he reveled in this new kind of beauty that overlaid everything. The snow was not just white, it was a myriad of colors and textures; the sky was not just blue, it was endlessly deep and clear, full of eddies of dragon-wind that sparkled and smelled of flowers in the dead of winter; the dark, dead trees were not dead at all, but asleep, radiating pleasant dreams and patience. His companions, complex, living beings, were practically incandescent with layers of energy, magic, and emotion.

Then the procession spilled out onto a broad, snow-covered valley, and the view before them caused a pause even in the lady Dana. There, nestled between three massive ridges and melting into the mountain behind it, lay the round dome of the city of Sanctuary. Even without magical sight, it was awe-inspiring: flanked by towers, surrounded by the barely visible peaks of the cathedrals, larger than any structure the southern-born had ever seen or imagined. Flashes of color darted around it, disappearing and reappearing, diving out of sight seemingly into the stone of the dome itself. Dragons. To Catame's eyes, the city glowed.

Dana, taking in the amazement in the faces of her three charges, smiled proudly. "And that, my children, my friend," she said, "is Sanctuary. Our home."