Naekit was on an errand. Or rather, he was returning home from an errand. This was still part of the errand, of course. A bundle of sleeping lightning bolts slung over his back, Naekit was pacing himself but no less eager to return them to the old woman at the village and see the look on her face.

She wore no mask, so one could see how bright her eye would gleam in tomorrow’s sun. Naekit liked watching eyes gleam with happiness almost as much as he liked snow. Almost.

There was also something that Naekit was eager for; but to be long lived was to be mysterious, so he wouldn’t admit it. Naekit always thought that sleeping lightning bolts were beautiful when you woke them up. Sleeping lightning bolts were branches of light trapped in stone. Wrapped up in a bundle, it looked like Naekit was carrying kindling for a campfire. Waking up a sleeping lightning bolt involves firmly tapping the bottom of the stone branch with a seashell wrapped in cloth soaked in charcoal water. The problem is that Naekit was not very good at doing this. Every time he tried, the lightning would just fizzle out of the branch.

One time when he was small, he saw the old woman, whose name was Dazeska, wake a sleeping bolt on her first try, and she caught the lightning in a glass jar. It glowed on the chain around her neck when she asked him to get her some more sleeping bolts. Here in  the Snowed, Naekit found some extra bolts hoping to ask that she make another necklace for him.

In between the Snowed and the Dusted was a stretch of coarse grassland. Everyone Naekit ever met had a different name for it, but the Calm was the one he liked best. In the middle of the Calm was Dazeska’s village. A few mere huts staunchly resting on a hill overlooking a river; it was a home, but just barely. The ground could bear fruit, but it couldn’t bear flavor. The bitter, chalky taste of the ripened berries that were offered to Naekit on every visit always stuck to his mouth for the rest of the day. He hated it.

One time, the man who grew the berries asked Naekit if he wanted to stay in the village. “There’s enough fruit for another to feed”, he would say. “It’s no problem at all.” Naekit kind of wanted to stay. By that point the man who named him had disappeared, and he missed having someone to talk to. He missed having someone else make the fire to sit near every night. He missed a soft bed of straw to lay on. But he worried that he would become like one of the berries and stick to the village forever.

And Naekit could not stay. A few years ago, at around this time, there was a cold and cruel winter storm, and Dazeska insisted he stay the night. Naekit liked the soft bed to lay on, but when he slept very little, an he was overwhelmed with a sense of unfamiliarity and uncertainty. It was the same kind of feeling as the many times he woke up in the wilderness, where it made sense to wake up feeling this way.

He realized then that he did not know what it meant to be home.

Naekit shifted the weight of the bundle of sleeping bolts from one shoulder to the other.

Even now, while he contently trudged through the snow with his bundle of sleeping bolts, Naekit didn’t know what home was. It might have at one point been curled up under the matching cloak of the man who named him, but those days are gone. For now, he would explore the lands, and hope that he would find his home.

Naekit pulled one of the sleeping bolts from its bundle to examine it. His excitement to see it burst into branches of sparkling light kept his feet warm in the snow. “Perhaps,” he thought, “this feeling is what home is like.” Naekit did not count the number of times he thought that exact sentence to himself whenever something pleasant happened to him, but he would be very embarrassed if he had ever been told. Thankfully for him, mind readers were only found in folk stories.