Baxlean had all the earmarks of a great lord. He was born to a strong Holder family, second born but first boy, and had a good education to back up his sharply focused mind. He had two younger brothers, twins, who made life entertaining for him and his sister - and predictably difficult for their parents. Life was good, the crops of the Hold were steady, tithes were easy to meet, there was a guild hall being built for the Weavers and would soon be open.

And then, the floods came. At first it wasn't much - several years had distant rainfall which flooded the neighboring Holds, but that only meant there were more people depending on theirs for a living. However, those distant rains led to dramatic snowfall in the mountains, and the hot summers beat down on the sides of those hills just as much as the lowlands.

In one sticky, overwhelmingly hot summer, everything that Baxlean knew was destroyed. The water was the least of their worries - and it swept away the entire Holds' worth of crops, plus several small buildings and their inhabitants. It drowned numerous animals. But worse... the land was sodden, soaked and there was no place for it to run off. It didn't drain. Instead of looking down from his carved window at the farms and ranches below, Baxlean saw only a shallow but ever present shimmer of water. Trees stuck up, the thatched roofs of the village... and there were things floating on the water's surface.

Those things, he knew, were bodies. Hundreds of dead beasts. The sickening smell came up from the ground, it was death. Millions of pests filled the air within a sevenday. Feeding on the corpses, breeding in the warm water. Those who had escaped the water itself, now housed in the Hold proper, were starving and sick by the water itself. Boiling the water only made the air more miserably moist and hot.

It was soon apparent that they would run out of food, clean water and any medical supplies that they had within days at this rate. Baxlean's father had to make a horrible choice - who to exclude from meals, who to leave out of care. Their Hold was isolated enough now that the other villages and smaller cotholds had also been wiped out, that it was already difficult to communicate with the rest of the world. Sadly, no one was left with a fire-lizard to send word out, their owners being killed or slowly wasting away, the flitters themselves fleeing of their own accord.

And of course, travel through the now murky land was all but impossible. The runners could barely keep their heads above it, burden beasts were floating belly-up and bloated. Any carts or wagons were out of the question, and the cliffs along the top of the Hold's carved structure were never intended for travel: they led to an abrupt and now broken mountain wall. If anything, that mountain might come slopping down on the whole Hold burying it entirely.

Baxlean was seventeen, his sister ... his sister would have turned ninteen in the next few weeks but she'd already succombed to the pest born illness, as had one of the twins. They kept the bodies in the cold-chamber in the Hold, there was no food left there anyway, and it would be more dignified than letting their bodies drift into the muck outside.

Baxlean was still healthy, though his mind was creeping with fear. No one would live in this place now, he had no Hold to inherit, he had... nothing. He spoke quietly with his father, who helped him pack what little supplies he could afford, and their entire savings of marks. There was no point in lingering, there was no point in good-byes. Baxlean took the tallest and strongest of their still-living runners, loaded what he could onto his back, and went up the difficult trail onto the top cliffs.

It was still horrible and hot, as he traversed carefully over the ledges and crumbling hillside. He went east, onto higher ground slowly but surely. The runner almost lost its balance over one precarious cliff, but thankfully nothing was lost, no lives, no supplies. Baxlean knew how to hunt, had plenty of arrows and a good bow ... and only random tunnel snakes to hunt. It was as if the flood had stopped everything for miles around, just killed it all off either by its force, or by attrition.

For at least two sevendays, Baxlean led the runner, sometimes able to mount up but more often just walking slowly ahead to make sure the ground was stable. At long last, he reached an overlook that showed him a thriving township in an area which had not been flooded. He rode in, exhausted and silent. He could hardly speak without worrying that he'd burst into tears. The locals coaxed the story out of him, and they immediately sent word to the Weyr.

The dragonriders who came back to this Hold had grim expressions, Baxlean knew what they were going to say long before they said anything. His home, his Hold, his family and friends... The land itself was lost. So diseased were the few survivors that they literally begged the riders to dispatch them so they didn't have to suffer any longer. Baxlean's father had lasted long enough to see his wife and other twin son die, and apparently took his own life leaving a last message to his son - delivered by the riders, detailing how proud he had been, how sorry he was.

"The world had other designs for you, son." The brown rider said, handing the letter off. "And so do we. We're going to bring you to the Weyr, see if you'll be chosen by a dragon. Your time as a Holder may be done, but your life is still just starting."

Baxlean found that to be of little comfort, but he left his runner, took his marks and what little there was left of his life with him to Dragonhope.

They found him to be a withdrawn, sullen boy. But he learned well, he learned quickly. Distracting him was the key to his very life now. Though the riders didn't say whether they'd properly Searched him or not, it was clear that Baxlean would make a good, observant rider. He needed to open up, he needed to somehow be shown that life goes on.

There were others among the riders as well as candidates who had experienced these losses, some whose whole family had perished in fires or worse. The strikingly pretty Elaaki had lost her parents as riders, and I'den became a rider after his wayward family was lost to sickness. They helped him out of his funk, but nothing could really replace his losses.

Not until standing. At Dark Moon Weyr, he had a strange feeling that he'd be leaving there much richer than he already was.

***

The shivering of the sand pile uncovered a few of the eggs, just in time for two to burst open, revealing a brown and blue, both medium in color. The blue, apparently an adventurous type, tried to scramble down the mound and ended up falling end over end the short distance down to the waiting Candidates. A tall male Candidate rushed forward at once to help the little blue right itself.

"His name is Eqeuth!" Baxlean announced to the crowd, with tears glistening in the young man's eyes. B'ax now, his heart pouring into the lovely blue's mind, they shared wonder and sadness. Eqeuth was determined to help his rider become happy - happier even than he was, when he was stuffed full of finely chopped meat!

Color: blue
Color Size: blue
Length: --
Height: --