Vell quickly abandoned his path of waves that led him to the fog island. He skimmed to the top of his final wave, released his glyph, and hung in the air for a long moment. Hopefully, it would be enough time to think of a way out of this.

The sea beast’s presence on the surface of the ocean broke apart any readable paths from before. It’s sharp bladed fins cut through the water like a sword, disrupting the flow of the waves.

Vell rode the wind as long as he could, but had to make a choice quickly, or the ocean would swallow him long before the sea beast did.

Three clear path of waves opened to his shaman’s senses. Two paths led straight toward the fog island. A quick calculation of distance, the winds, and the remaining sacred breaths he could summon informed him he could make it to the island and still have some glyphs left over.

But, the sea beast darted through the waters behind him with increasing, inexorable speed. It’s shape below the water was no longer a simple murky shadow. The sunlight reflected off the sea beast’s scales, glimmering all colors of the rainbow. It would have been a beautiful sight, save the monster’s head broke through the surface of the water.

The beast roared triumphantly as it devoured the distance between it and Vell, revealing tens of rows of fangs, each the size of a grown man’s arm.

Vell’s years of mental training steadied his growing nervousness. Despite his peak physical condition and ability to summon glyphs, he did not have the strength or experience to fight a sea beast on his own.

He made his choice.

Vell summoned a glyph and rode the third path of waves. It led backward toward his home island.

Although his mouth was closed to lock his sacred breath, he made a mental prayer to his ancestors that his family could not see him returning back to the island. It would not be a full return, if things worked out. The haphazard plan he formed would cost him four or five extra glyphs, but it felt right.

The wave banked hard, curving his glyph backward. Vell gritted his teeth, hoping it would work.

From this distance, no human, not even a shaman, should be able to see his figure among the titanic waves. That was fine with Vell. Shamans relied on much sharper senses than sight alone.

The sea beast halved the distance between them as Vell changed direction. No matter how efficient the path or quick the waves, a shaman could not glyph-skip faster than a sea beast could swim. It was why the ancient, metal skiffs left behind by the ancestors were considered sacred. They were the only viable links between neighboring isles.

Vell expelled three more glyphs and changed paths of waves ten times, but never losing momentum as he surfed back toward his home island.

In that time, the sea beast rode in parallel to Vell.

He frowned, realizing then how intelligent the water-creature was. If it had followed him from behind, the mere act of opening its mouth would have created enough of a tide to push Vell outward. Vell could have used that extra tide made by the beast to get away at the last moment.

Instead, by swimming parallel to Vell, it could gain more speed and cut him off.

Vell realized then it was his first time seeing the creature outside the leaf-drawings he read. It’s silhouette was just like the drawings - tubular, scales that reflected the light in a way that made it shimmer with all colors, wild eyes the size of two men, and its monstrous mouth that could devour half a village.

Despite the sheer visage of terror that swam at an incomprehensible speed, it somehow made Vell grateful that such a monstrosity of nature could exist. The sea beast was a predator, but a real, living thing that many people rarely lived to tell the tale of. And here Vell was now, doing his best to race it, but knowing he would eventually fail.

But Vell did not expect to outpace the monster.

The sea beast gained enough distance ahead. It turned in the water at sharp angle, cutting off Vell’s path. The beast broke its head through the water, opening its jaws with a triumphant, terrible invitation to doom.

Vell exhaled as rode the glyph to the tip of the wave, soared in the air, and hung above the beast’s open mouth. He grinned. They were now closer to his home island than to the fog island, once again behind the halfway mark.

Fifty glyphs the color of pure gold erupted like small suns between Vell and the sea beast’s open mouth. Vell landed on one as the others turned midair and sped down toward the beast. He jumped off the glyph and searched for a new path of glyphs that would lead back toward the fog island.

The golden, scintillating glyphs sank into and then through the sea beast. Vell took a moment to admire the beautiful glyphs. Each seemed to emanate with the purest, strongest spiritual energy he’d ever felt.

Blood splattered the surface of the water before the glyphs vanished once more. The sea beast broke apart into dozens of pieces, scattering beneath the surface in salt and blood.

Vell found a new wave, and summoned his own glyph to continue his trial. He made a silent prayer of thanks to the sea beast for interfering in his trial. If it had not tried to eat him, Vell would have never seen the power of Master Fron’s master of glyphs up close.

He extended his senses, and calculated he would barely have enough to make it to the fog island. It would be enough.

Twenty more minutes passed. Vell used up most of his glyphs, but had found himself close enough to the fog island that he could see its silhouette. He felt his eyes widen at the sight of it.

The fog island wasn’t just several times larger than Vell’s own, but tall in a way that seemed impossible. It was as if the island were pillar of fog that held of up the sky. The air grew opaque, and the winds more turbulent.

Vell’s senses were heightened to their highest degree. He needed every advantage he could to read the waves properly. Nothing in his training prepared him for this.

Paths of waves seemed to vanish every few seconds, forcing him to change waves constantly.

As he got closer to the fog island, the atmosphere grew darker around him. The island’s fog scattered the sun’s rays. Vell had to rely on his senses other than sight with each new wave he surfed.

Then he finally saw it, the island.

At first, it didn’t even register to him that what he was looking at was an island at all. There were no sandy beaches he could skim on to. Instead, all he could see was a wall of dark grey stone that seemed to stretch infinitely to the sky. The fog was so thick, there was no sky to see.

Vell gulped. He only had a few more glyphs left. To complete the trial safely, he would have to find a place on the island he could glyph skip to.

He surfed from one path of waves to another, now glyph-skipping sideways along the island to find some sort of natural phenomena that could act as a harbor. Two glyphs and several minutes later, he was dismayed to find that all he could see was gray, endless wall and fog.

Was this even an island? Or was it some sort of pillar the ancestors had left behind as a testament to their folly?

Gloom and Gloam! Nothing in his wildest imaginations could have prepared him for a this, an island that wasn’t an island at all. Only his years of mental training kept his sacred breath in his lungs rather than expelled as a scream of dismay and confusion.

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His skin felt warm. Vell blinked.

It wasn’t his entire skin, but just the areas where the sacred paint his mother had so laboriously ground for him touched. The blue paint seemed to heat up. What? Had she accidentally mixed in something?

No. That wasn’t possible. His mother may have seemed rash, but she was their matriarch, diligent and wise. The recipe for the paint had been passed down generation to generation ever since the fall of the ancestors. His mother must have followed the recipe perfectly or else the water from the ocean would have wiped it off. The paint was incredibly resistant to erosion from water. Only the natural oils his body produce would slowly erode the paint over time.

And yet, the paint on his skin grew warmer and warmer, as if responding to something he could not see. Vell could only feel bewildered. Nothing in the scholar’s leaves even hinted at something like this happening. Was his body somehow rejecting the paint?

But why only now, when he was near the island of fog?

Vell’s thoughts were interrupted as his senses flared a change in the atmosphere.

The air shifted. Every path Vell saw that led to and around the fog island vanished. It was as if something massive swallowed the waves. No training prepared him for this.

Vell spent years taming the fire of his emotions. Fear, desire, and even hate, were under his control. Despite that, the sudden absence of all path of waves filled him with a terror so primal, that his training did not matter.

Despite the growing heat from the paint on his skin, he shivered, and not from a sudden change of temperature..

Something was wrong.

His wave folded back into the ocean, but Vell could not find another viable wave that gave him a clear path. He chose a random wave, and glyph-skipped onto it.

His glyph shook hard, wobbling under his feet. Vell felt his balance threatened and he extended his senses downward.

He could not extend his senses far like Master Fron, but he did notice how the spiritual energies of the ocean here were not singular and turbulent under a single wave. Instead, they raged within a swirling torment, like claws of shredding at his glyph.

Vell’s sacred breath weakened faster than he could ever imagine, as if someone had sucked the air and energy out of his lungs. Without panicking, he jumped in the air, and released his sacred breath earlier than he expected.

If he had not, the glyph would have shattered, and caused a backfire. He could not afford that now, of all times, when the paths to around fog island were now completely cut off to him.

With a quick inhale, Vell secured a sacred breath.

A new glyph sparked beneath his feet, and he skimmed across the ocean water. To his surprise, his momentum increased, but seemed to curve. Surfing required going with the flow of water and the ocean’s spiritual energy, but this curving motion beneath his feet felt unnatural.

The ancestor’s letters painted in blue on his sky grew hot. It took all his mental fortitude not to panic.

Vell did his utmost to ignore the heat on his skin as he rode the wave. Then he realized he wasn’t surfing a wave at all. It did not curl upward into the form of a wave like many before. Instead, it kept curling inward.

All the hairs on Vell’s body stood up. He felt his eyes widen as he turned his attention toward the end of the curve.

This was no wave. It was was a whirlpool. If he reached the center, it would only mean death for him. The ocean would swallow his body more easily than any sea beast. It’s raging undercurrents would tear him apart until he dissolved like a bar of salt.

Vell cursed inwardly, and he extended his senses down into the waters.

He could feel spiritual energies pushing hungrily against his glyph. Though the water-manna curved along with the shape of the whirlpool, they bounced chaotically beneath the surface.

Vell could feel his glyph wobbling as the spiritual energies of the ocean battered against it.

He pumped his legs and jumped toward the edge of the whirlpool. Vell exhaled and he quickly sucked in a new sacred breath. A new glyph sparked beneath his feet.

Vell felt a moment of quick relief before it was washed away by the sudden realization he was once again surfing in a curve.

The whirlpool was growing in size and strength.

This made no sense. Vell should have seen the signs of such a phenomena from hundreds of feet out. How had he missed something so monstrous and foreboding?

There was only one answer that made some sort of sense. The whirlpool had formed instantly.

Vell’s skin itched under the now blistering heat of the paint. And yet, the paint had not signs of peeling off. It was if he were in some sort of nightmare. He was stuck inside a whirlpool that grew faster than he could jump out of it. On top of that, he might even burn by overheating from the heat of the paint on his skin.

The paint seemed to shimmer, which made no sense because there wasn’t enough direct light in the fog to reflect off it.

By all his calculations and heightened senses, he was doomed. He only had a few more glyphs left in his lungs. The idea of surfing toward the center of the whirlpool and using the momentum to sling up out of it came to him. He quickly dispelled the thought, not wanting to see first hand how powerful the center of the water-maelstrom was.

The thin sound of a whistle caught Vell’s attention.

He focused his attention to the source of the sound.

A streak of thin, warm air pushed up from the center of the whirlpool. It carried with it a faint aroma of plants and soil. The smell was so fragile against the overwhelming scent of saltwater from the ocean that Vell doubted it was even there for a moment.

But if there was anything he learned to trust after years of arduous training, it was to trust his instincts. The energy from the whirlpool eroded Vell’s glyph much faster, the closer he was to the center of the swirl. He slingshotted himself from the apex toward the very edge of the whirlpool in a futile attempt to escape its grasp.

The glyph threatened to break, so Vell extinguished his sacred breath before the break rebounded against him.

He leaped in the air and created another glyph, surfing it as close to the edge of the whirlpool for as long as he could. Soon, the violent energies of the ocean water would break his glyph once again.

Vell needed to make a decision, and fast.

And yet, he could not help but question why there warm air pushed up from the center of the water-maelstrom.

Acting on instincts more than reason, he extended its senses outward.

Not all the threads of spiritual energy converged downward in a constant, twisting hunger. A single thin little stream of warm energy pushed outward, confirming his senses from before

That air releasing from the whirlpool wasn't one from the mouth of a monster. He was certain of that.

The breath of a living thing, whether fish or beast or man, had a rhythm. Only the now extinct wyrms which the ancestors rode into war had no rhythm of breath, according to the leaf scholars.

This warm stream of air had no rhythm. It was constant and fragile. It could have been some unknown volcanic phenomena or a hundred other unknowns. That thin reed of warm air flow did not give Vell any good ideas to escape the monstrous energy of the whirlpool. But it did give him a sort of hope.

Vell found himself twisting closer to the center of the water-maelstrom once more. The spiritual power in his glyph dwindled almost to the point of breaking. His sacred breath dwindled.

He could create another glyph, and try to slingshot out of the whirlpool again. But escape from its clutches would not guarantee survival. The waves were too large, too powerful, even for a trained shaman.

On top of that, the fog of the island was so thick, he could not guarantee he would find a beach he could glyph-skip onto. The first hint that the fog island contained any soil came from the stream of warm air. Even though many islands of the world were completely different from one another, soil usually meant life.

Except, Vell’s only sign of getting out of certain death came from the very center of the whirlpool. He grimaced.

Then he recalled the first time Master Fron spoke to Vell. The first lesson.

An odd calm washed over Vell, like clear rain on a humid night, evaporating any tension in the air and in himself.

He recited the first lesson as he exhaled, releasing the sacred breath. “Surrender.”

His glyph vanished beneath his feet. Vell breathed in, but not a sacred breath to secure the manna in the atmosphere to form a new glyph.

In that moment, Vell trusted the only person he trusted more than his father, his mother and even his brother.

Without a glyph to ride the waters, his feet sank below the surface of the ocean, pulling the rest of his body under.

He crossed his arms, prepared to die and folded his limbs in like a flower closing at dusk. The force of the whirlpool battered at him from all sides. It was a power unlike anything he had ever faced.

But Vell trusted his Master’s first lesson, using every ounce of his will to keep his body relaxed. He witnessed the chaos and terror of the ocean. A shaman did not close their eyes in the face of death, even one who could not complete their trial of forty steps.

He saw salt foam, undertides folding into each other in a chaotic rhythm even he could not read. As his body tumbled down and sideways like a leaf in Master Fron’s pond, he spotted a blue light past the turbulent waters.

Then suddenly, the pressures of the ocean that attacked him from all sides released, as if he had suddenly been plucked out of the ocean. His wet skin plunged into warm, humid air. He caught the distant scent of soil and grass.

Strange blue light filled his vision.

Vell crashed into something harder than stone, and the world was darkness.