Cades was ten years old.
His family had taken it's first vacation on another part of the country since the birth of his sister, with his sister finally having developed the inherent airborne traits of the ehetrians that allowed her to be light as soon as she was in the air for a certain amount of time, a magical property in relation to the digestive system of the ehetrians and their bones that seemed to basically hollow out, also affecting the rest of what they had due to subconscious natural magic.
She was five years old now and Cades was nine, both still small and weak, and his parents had taken a long time to prepare, in the end even renting a small home, only a single room to be exact, one that had enough to be called a home however, for a reasonable price.
However, after they had spent their first night there, having bought some candy from a shop downtown, just a few dozen minutes away with their wings, a shop that sold falsely made wares with errors for a significantly cheaper price, four pounds of candy to be exact, intending to go on a long walk, something ehetrians did rarely but sometimes did do when it come to beautiful places of nature and some smaller forests that often consisted of trees that came from other worlds, they found out that the hotel they had been staying at was nowhere near as perfect as they had imagined it.
The place had been full of a blood-sucking insect called 'Droru', and an exorbitant amount of that, so much so that Cades himself had about seventeen in total, a lot more than the others who mostly had about seven to twelve, aside from one of them who seemed to have only two.
So, before they could really go into the forest to have some fun, at least as the parents had claimed, the children didn't really like walking and wandering after all, they prepared things like reading, stories and other stuff, they had to do something against the rash caused by these Drorus that had seemingly been there because the place they had been sleeping in was situated right above a stable for horses, a species that was wide-spread across all worlds and dimensions for some reason.
They walked there in about half an hour, also getting some food so they could cook in the hotel that came with a miniature kitchen and not being willing to heave all that stuff with them while they flew, the dad already having to carry the sister who was still a bit too small and not ready to fly all the way, and finally got into the store, a medicine store for utilities in relation to hygiene and co.
After about a quarter hour they had the medicine, a ointment, cooling and helping with the small circular rashes that remained from the stings of the Drorus, but while walking home they began to talk, something that was easy to do without any electronics like in our world, without any other entertainment aside from what was around oneself, and aside from many other distracting things, so basically just everything that is in our world, all the adverts, all the wild colours, all the businesses that want attention so they can earn money, but they were in a rural area with calmer colours and had to walk far just to get the ointment, and they had no such thing as a phone, neither could they read while walking, so, despite having a small figure with which Cades had been playing at first, he got interested when they were talking about a kind of competition that he had been rather interested in back then.
They were talking about how many stings each person had, joking about it and laughing about who had the most delicious blood, invoking the pride of all of them who began to bolster with their bloodless husks of bodies and their dried arteries, though, in reality they were nowhere near that stage or anywhere near actual danger, it was only itchy, with them even being prepared against the diseases that the insects often carried with a injection that they got when they were young, even Hecir.
Now, at first they didn't believe him, saying that they had all won, well, at least the two kids who were bickering all the way for about a few minutes, but once they got home and checked they saw who had more, well, at least according to the children who separately told their parents after they checked themselves, also requiring help to apply the ointment on their backs as they couldn't reach it, partially due to their wings being in the back, a flaw in ehetrian physiology.
It was a fun, little game, a competition to make them stop thinking about scratching themselves, something that would've only made it worse, and something that the two parents knew would happen if they were bored as they were, after all, only children, and not even children that were especially special, aside from a certain intelligence that they had probably inherited from the two, mainly the mom, but in some ways also from the father who was fairly smart in history, mapping and even swordsmanship.
In the end they went on their walk through the forest, something that Cades wasn't even certain had happened a few years in the future, but this story, that he remembered.
His mom and his dad had managed to turn a nuisance, something clearly negative, something annoying, their blood being stolen from them and exchanged for itching red spots on their bodies, into a game that they had even played some years in the future when they had been stung in other places, but still by the same insects, just other hotels, other houses, other stories.
Yet, it was still fun.
They had turned probably the worst part of the trip into something that they would always remember, be it only in the back of their minds, something that they had fun with, and something that they could always repeat when they were stung again.
It might not be that important, but to Cades, it was one of the memories that he would always remember, even after all that had happened, and all that was destined to happen.