Gaia

Chapter 1

 "Lick my face!" Maha spun around as if ducking a bullet but saw nothing except a yellow lizard scuttling out of sight behind a mound of sand, sending particles trickling down. This happened often, but the ridiculous things people shouted still managed to surprise him. He lowered his head and kept walking down a well-trodden path at the foot of a medley of humps and crags on the edge of a wide desert. The brown mountain range rising to his left was called the Camel's Back, and was so labyrinthine and mysterious it always managed to fascinate him with some new revelation. Today, he barely squeezed through a crevice at the conclusion of a spacious, naturally pillared cave in order to make it onto a small platformed opening in the face of a tall cliff. The vista of the Gheleb Sands this platform afforded him was enough to take his breath away, but he was further delighted to find an upright slab of rock with an inscription that read:

"Where I have traveled hitherto has not bestowed my eyes with beauty of such kind; were I to take a different turn I know the other sights would never fully satisfy my mind. How many grains of sand are buried in this desert? Someday, the coins of gold will fill my vaults in equal measure. Just like the savage beetles that had chased me, relentless thirst will be my guiding star." -Graham the Merchant.

Maha was overawed to find surviving traces of the Great Merchant in this remote crevice. He imagined Graham made this inscription before building Gardia, the colossal merchant city wedged into the Camel's Back at the head of the Gheleb Sands. "On the contrary, that was probably the exact moment Graham got the inspiration to build it," Maha thought and grinned like a little boy upon receipt of an exotic new toy.

Maha's hair was white and curly; he wore a cream-colored button hoodie with brown sleeves, the same color as his long plain skirt. Even though he was in the dessert at high noon, he wore a loose, cotton folded-brim hat of the same coloring scheme lined with round, green stones. The outfit never made him feel hot, until today. The heat crept up unexpectedly, like a gentle maiden wrapping her arms around his brain and squeezing harder and harder with each passing minute. The unfamiliarity and sudden appearance of the sensation made him blunder toward the city as if he was trying to escape an assassin at a busy market. Breathing hard and dropping his gaze, he bumped into a rainbow-colored bat flying from the opposite direction. When it scratched his face with its claws, Maha was so startled he yelped and almost fell backwards. His silver staff with a crescent moon on its tip wasn't the best weapon to use against the bat, but it did help him block a few of its blows.

Just then, a girl with wavy red hair falling to her shoulders ran up to him and yelled petulantly, "Hey, disengage! That's my mob!"

"Oh, sorry." Maha disengaged so readily it startled the girl. When she came to, she quickly pulled out her daggers and started fighting the bat in his place without a second thought.

"What the heck are you doing!?" another girl with blue hair falling past her shoulders fumed as she joined them.

"Who, me?" Maha pointed at himself with a startled expression in response to her glare.

"Yeah, you! Who does it look like I'm talking to!?"

Despite feeling feverish, Maha couldn't help but notice the girl's fancy outfit. She was wearing brown boots, black pantalets and a cropped, short-sleeved, black jacket held together by a red ribbon tied in a bow over a purple, long-sleeved bodice dress with a short skirt. Something like a white undergown peeked out of her skirt, sleeves and raised collar of her jacket. Most of the outfit was trimmed with gold patterns, and her boots had gold emblems on them.

"N-nothing, I was just walking," Maha justified himself quickly.

"Walking!? You just let that gold-seller have one of the rarest Notorious Monsters in the world!" she tightened one hand into a fist and pointed at the red-haired girl with the other.