Drowsy morning sunlight warmed my family’s room, golden and alive. It fell obligingly onto the table where I mended a stitch in my shirt, and I looked up just as my best friend cast his shadow across the work.

Oman rapped the window with a knuckle, then stopped and squished his face into the glass. His nose and upper lip smooshed until he looked like a peka’ri rodent-pig. “Ren!” he whispered as loudly as he could. My name fogged the pane. “Ren, wake up!”

I set my sewing kit next to a half-eaten bowl of breakfast rice and crossed the room to whack the window with the unfinished shirt.

Oman pulled away, and I heard him spit the taste of dusty glass from his mouth. The smeared stain from his lips remained. From somewhere in the yard he yelled, “half of the morning is gone, let’s go!”

I smiled. There were worse ways to spend the final day of childhood than with a best friend. I dressed, grabbed my slingshot, and dashed outside quick enough to find him still cleaning his mouth of the glass’s flavor. I’d barely lifted a hand in greeting before he dropped the wooden training swords he carried and gripped me in a hug.

“Happy birthday,” he said.

“Fifteen at last,” I managed through the squeeze.

We raced each other to the woods beyond Eiden. We always raced each other to the woods. That was one of the many reasons we were such good friends. He never asked me why I needed to run; he just joined me as if giving chase was simply what one did when one’s friend took off.

The squat, stone-and-timber huts of Eiden fell behind us in no time at all. The sun soaked into my skin like an infusion of kavi magic, and I stayed ahead with ease. We made it to the Pebblewood in one go, flushed and gleaming with sweat.

Our hearts raced on, fast as footfalls, as we walked off the exertion beneath the palms, pines, and bananas. The fronds overhead offered little shade until we were out of sight of the village. A few chittering bugs, the occasional snap of a distant branch falling, and the calls of birds and flying reptiles accompanied our stamping feet in the dreamy silence of the forest morning. Above it all loomed the Pebblewood’s famous towerwood trees, rising over the smaller trunks like grey-green guardians.

I counted nature spirits as we walked. Green kavi hovered among low flowers, ferns, and fallen towerwoods flecked with lichen. Golden kavi floated high in the airy treetops while blue kavi marked hidden pools and rivulets. Each felt like a little, hidden symbol of good luck; the more I could spot, the better the day would be.

I found nine before Oman broke our contented silence. “Still want to see the world?”

“Well, yes. The island isn’t so big, I’m sure I could see it all in a lifetime.”

“It’s getting harder to travel, you know.”

“You sound like your mother,” I said. “Look around! When in all the four Ages would it have been safe to be out here, alone and unarmed?”

“We’re just lucky, Ren,” Oman said, lazily swinging a training staff in front of him in wide, whooshing arcs. “New kro’daka are popping up constantly. Small at first, but no less vicious, and they just keep getting bigger. My dad says soon there’ll be more monsters than in any other Age.”

“Well, that’s what I’ll have my sword for,” I said with a grin.

“Yeah, okay, Dero,” Oman sneered, referencing the famous hero. “You go ahead and face down a giant monster with nothing but three feet of bronze in front of you. See how you do.”

A meadow opened up before us as the trail turned left toward flatter ground. The grassy field seemed a still, oblong lake of green, and at one shore sat a group of three massive boulders mottled with lichen.

Insofar as we could claim anything in the forest, that cluster of grey monoliths was ours.

I jerked my head toward the boulders. “How about a bit of practice, then?”

“You’re not worried about tiring yourself out before your rite of passage tonight?” Oman asked. He handed me a training sword anyway.

“I get a real sword tonight. We’ll hardly be needing these anymore.”

Oman sucked in his breath. “We’re not sparring with real swords.”

“I mean, we’d guard the edges, obviously, and –”

“Swords aren’t meant to bang against each other. They were for fighting skogg, as backup weapons or self-defense. They’ll get all bent and chipped.”

“Oh,” I said. I kicked at a fallen seed cone.

Oman tossed his belt-pouch atop the three boulders, out of the way of scavenging jungle fowl, then took my offered slingshot and set it with his. He handed me a short training staff and I gave it a few practice swings.

“I know you admire Dero the Dark,” he said, “and he was certainly great in his time, but things are different now.”

I shrugged as an impish grin twisted the corners of my mouth. “At least Dero the Dark was a real person. You drool over characters from theater like –“

Oman lunged at me, sword-first. I snapped my own training weapon up with a yelp and stumbled backwards. The wooden staves clacked against each other hard enough to numb one of my fingers.

“Sorry,” Oman sneered, “didn’t quite hear you!”

“I said –” I stepped backward, fending off a blow aimed for my shoulder, “—that you fancy— “

Oman pressed forward, swinging with powerful, but telegraphed, two-handed blows. He was bigger, taller, stronger. I had no choice but to tire myself out avoiding his powerful strikes.

I backpedaled, unable to get in a physical attack of my own. “You… fancy… Ms. Tanamari… but… she’s… not even… real!” I goaded. Before I could laugh, my heel thumped against a fallen branch. I tripped backward, landing hard on a decaying bed of fragrant towerwood needles.

“Which do you believe in?” Oman laughed as he looked down at me, “fate, or En’s intervention? I didn’t even have to say anything back.”

Our tribe’s god had more important things to be concerned about. I scuttled backward anyway as Oman advanced.

He thwacked the earth near my legs once, then twice, before I tumbled backwards into a crouch. I immediately swept my sword low, forcing him to leap aside or have his thigh turn purple. He chose the latter. I was rewarded with the satisfying slap of wood against muscle, and a yelp of surprise from Oman.

“Good one,” he breathed.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

I used the opening to attack again. I favored quicker, one-handed strikes to his powerful two-handed swings. With enough speed I could harry him from different angles until I got under his guard.

Yet no matter how fast I whipped my staff, how quickly I changed angles, his weapon waited for me after every strike. It lashed out occasionally at breaks in my form, rapping me on the hip, the forearm, the calf. I gained bruises, but I couldn’t return them. So it went, bout after bout, until my attacks grew sloppy and slow.

“Wait a second,” I said, breathing hard.

He paused, an eyebrow shooting up.

“I realized something. You just watch The Ballad of Tanamari and Ru because the girl that plays as Tanamari in the spring is – “

He roared, launching himself at me.

The barrage that followed demanded all my focus. He changed tactics, his weapon blurring; Now, he cared less about touching his sword to my body and more about bludgeoning the wooden training stick to pieces in my hands.

“Usually you want to save the goading for when you have an advantage,” he growled, ever the teacher.

“Making you mad is the only advantage I have!”

I deflected a heavy, overhand blow and then turned my sword aside, swinging for his bicep in what I hoped was a clever maneuver. My aim was clumsy, and he intercepted it. Our swords locked. Oman set his jaw as I pushed at his staff with mine. My arms shook with effort.

Before I could pull my sword away for another swing, he flipped it out of my grip with a powerful flick of his wrists.

The weapon vanished into the bright, young grass of the meadow. A shimmering blue kavi floating nearby vanished as if in surprise.

Oman bumped me in the shoulder with his sword. “You’re getting pretty good. Might even beat me someday soon. Maybe if you focused more on the fight than being clever?”

I huffed, then extended a hand. “Nice fight.”

“It’s always fun when you give me a reason to beat the spit out of you,” he said, slapping my waiting palm. “Another?”

I nodded and retrieved my weapon. We fought a few more bouts, resting longer between each one, but lethargy overtook me long before Oman ever faltered. When we finished, we rested atop the three boulders, the shaded stone cool against our hot bodies.

We planned nothing, did nothing. It was the stuff nostalgia was made of.

For a while, I did little more than watch the clouds of tiny insects overhead. They swarmed below the crowns of the towerwoods, a hundred strides away from the earth. Every now and then, a cluster would drop down to hover about the tops of the palms, then shoot back up to the vast empty spaces between the massive trees where golden sky kavi passed by on currents of wind like racing canoes on invisible rivers.

Oman took to shooting at the insect clouds with his slingshot and grumbling about his careless little sister. I tried to knock his shots out of the sky with my own, sending seeds, rocks, and dates sailing past his own bullets. I only managed it twice in twenty shots, but our cheers swept through the forest as if I’d never missed.

Later we watched for travelers and local hikers passing by the meadow. Our voices dropped to hushed whispers, our glee at being able to observe passerby in secrecy fueling the discussion of mischievous, but unrealized, pranks.

A solitary Oru tribesman with soft beige body feathers saw us despite our stealth. His scaly hands signed good afternoon to us in Islander hand-speak. We were so startled we didn’t answer; He had found our hiding place almost as if he had assumed someone would be sitting upon the rocks.

An excellent spot, he signed from the trail, and we signed back thank you, and safe travels. He continued on, smiling in Oru fashion with little more than his eyes over a small beak.

Young children from Eiden ran by, too, though they did not know of our three boulders. We saw them later – a Keléri and two Enlings like us– on the far end of the meadow, chasing green and blue spirits.

They held their hands out to the kavi when they got close, no doubt trying to entice the nature spirits with offerings of pretty leaves, pristine seeds, or spherical mushroom caps. The forest was full of small treasures a kavi might like.

I watched them while Oman foraged about for snacks. I smiled, watching their amusement and reminiscing about that age as though I were not still a child myself. I never had much luck capturing kavi, and it looked as though the young tribesfolk did not either. Maybe that was why famous swordsfolk like Dero the Dark drew my admiration, rather than powerful spirit-wielding heroes like Vazira the Flame.

Still, who didn’t want to feel the magic of a kavi leaking into their body, veins humming with potential?

Vazira the Flame was a Paragon, one of those once-an-Age individuals who became bound permanently to a captured spirit. Instead of a single burst of magic, they could use their kavi’s power over and over, breaking the limits of what the world knew spirit-wielders could do.

I rolled onto my back and looked again to the yellow spirits overheard, imagining I flew among them, unbothered by anything that wasn’t the wind, air, or sky. There had never been a Paragon who had become bound to a kavi of the sky.

I imagined myself with unlimited golden magic, the first in the world. I imagined the island from high above the earth, flying over Kol Viri like it was a map on a table.

I would follow other yellow spirits as they guided the cold winds from the eastern shores of Kol Viri and across the entirety of the Elethan Plains until I found the western forests of Lorelai and the Keléri homelands. I’d see all the wonders of the world like Dero or Vazira once had, not in a lifetime but in days. I’d even look out across the great lake of the Var’ra people, sprawling across the middle of the island until it lapped at the shores of the Lo’pango Jungle or the fens of –

I bolted upright, eyes flying open, as if I’d been slapped. “Oman! Did I fall asleep?”

My friend looked up at me from the meadow and lowered the wooden sword he had been holding mid-stance. “I guess so. Why?”

“I was dreaming, and then…” I trailed off, disoriented. The other kids were nowhere to be seen. I looked up and squinted at the patch of sky above our clearing. The sun had sunk well past its zenith.

“Oh, Shepherd take me,” I said, hopping off the boulder and shaking flakes of lichen from my hair. “I’m not supposed to be gone all day!”

“You could probably use a little sleep, honestly. You’re not going to get any atop the mountain tonight.”

“But my Dad will be wanting to prepare for the rite of… of…Hey, do you smell that?”

“What? Dirt and trees?”

“No,” I said, nose tilted into the air. “It was… bitter. It’s gone now, but it was definitely there. It reminded me of…”

I paused. The faint, astringent odor had been at the very edge of my dream, just before I awoke. But the dream was gone, and in its place I thought of my mother working the garden in her summer skirts, or taking me on a walk to the other side of town to see the peka’ri rooting for grubs in their pens.

“…it reminded me of my mother, I guess.”

“In a bad way? Like a gross hair balm she used?” Oman made a face. “My mom tries any new trend she hears about. I swear she’s never been better for it.”

I shook my head. Maybe it was just a lingering sensation from the dream. “It’s gone now. Come on, I need to get home.”

“Wait,” Oman said, holding a hand up. “Is that it?”

The air smelled as it should. Oman beckoned me closer and my eyes went wide as the breeze carried the faint scent of something poisonous.

“That’s it!” I exclaimed. “What is it?”

“No idea. Doesn’t smell good.”

“It’s like – “

I remembered my mother smiling down at me, squeezing my hand, and the soft caress of her voice. I remembered a strange man – a figure in sleeveless silk robes, standing in the trade street – and talk of purple spirits. Purple spirits, kro’daka, doom, and –

And the smell that had lingered in my mother’s breath after she had kissed me, a reminder that though she smiled, she had been very sick.

“Oman,” I said slowly, “it’s blight. There’s blight in the Pebblewood.”