Ataria remembered last year.

Thin layers of frosty ice covered leaves during mornings. The biting winds and hailstorms killed crops. Collectors struggled to find prey when animals fell into hibernation. By the grace of the Mother, they had kept their own animals warm in the stables using tons of phoenix feathers.

They had only gotten through it with enough food for all mouths because of the other three villages in the Peaks. As always, the four had survived together by sharing and trading what they had.

Still, some were lost to the cold. Illness wasn't common, but Eagle-People thrived in temperate, warm climates. Like phoenixes and dragons, they depended on heat, fire, either their own or an outside source.

Most deaths were children and elders. One day, they just couldn't get up anymore. Their bodies became stiff, stiffer, and stiffer until they fell asleep and didn't wake.

It was the closest they had gotten to getting snow in their area of the Peaks. Ever.

There had never been snow before at the height the villages lied. Although there had been a thin layer of ice over the peaks themselves, a few times.

The peaks were the original reason why the Fire Peaks mountain range was known that way. Although the true meaning of it came from their origins as volcanoes.

What was most interesting about their territory, wasn't even the natural fire magic in the land, or the phoenixes. It was the humongous, sharp rock formations that rose for kilometers from the ground.

No one knew how they had formed. They were simply part of the mountains, as trees were part of the earth. Irregular and asymmetric, the peaks varied in height and warm hues.

She remembered that winter, when her sister was born atop one of those rust colored peaks.

Wind had bit at her skin and carried away her mother's pain. The peak she had chosen to give birth on bore the full brunt of the winter chill.

Ataria shivered in her brother's arms. Inside the tent, her mother shouted and clutched at her father's hands.

Winds howled along with her mother for long hours. She and her brother stood vigil on that peak, as they were supposed to. Orwe wrapped his wings around them both, shielding her as much as he could from the cold.

They waited and waited. She fidgeted in his arms, shuffled her feet, staring at the tent.

Something warm and fuzzy tightened her chest. Would they make it? Babies were so small and fragile. So vulnerable. So many had been lost already to the chills. What if her sibling became a stiff corpse before they could even extend their wings?

They held their breaths when their mother stopped shouting. Tension rippled in the edge of hope and fear, a painful moment of silence.

Then a sharp, high-pitched cry shattered that silence. Orwe hooted in joy and light filled Ataria. The tent flap slid open, and out stepped one of the village's weavers.

"I'm pleased to inform you of your sister's birth."

Orwe guffawed and jumped. He wasn't disappointed by the announcement in the least.
Ataria's own grin split her face painfully. "May I see her?"

Tetra, the weaver who had chosen to be the midwife for this birth, smiled. "Go on. I'll inform others."

Tetra hurried off the peak and the two siblings slipped inside the tent quietly. Her parents' phoenixes perched on a stand for them, probably already having taken their fill of the baby.
On top of piled blankets, their weary mother rested, covered in furs. Her sparkling eyes hid her strained body's exhaustion as she looked at the small bundle in her arms.

Their father beamed up at his older children, proud tears streaking down his bearded cheeks. He sniffed beside their mother, one arm gripping her shoulder. "Come greet your sister Rhona."

Ataria crouched beside her mother, careful. She leaned over and looked at the bundle.

An unbearably small face hid in the fur blanket. Tiny features scrunched in a scowl, small lips pouted. Her red head bore no hair at all, except for her long lashes and thin brows, like Ataria's. An auburn wing slipped out of the bundle as she squirmed, twitching.

"Hello there my adorable little sister. You'll get wrinkles if you scowl so much."

Orwe's dazzling smile when Rhona twitched and scowled harder brightened that flimsy tent. The winds quieted and Ataria could only hear her family's happiness, the joy in her parents' eyes, her brother's immediate enrapture with the minute being.

She could ignore the cold that crept inside the tent. All her attention was grabbed by the hand that wrapped around her finger.

The world shifted and yet nothing had changed at all. She decided in that moment, that nothing would ever stop her from protecting her sister.

"May I hold her mother?"

/

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In a world no longer welcoming to the Eagle-People, what can they do but adapt as the world changes around them, or worse; a threat comes knocking down their doors.