I didn’t know the name of the Dur Tolo foothill overlooking this region of the forest. I didn’t bother asking Elani. Udoro was somewhere near its base, and that was enough. The sooner we reached the town, the sooner I could distract myself from the kro’daka we had killed.

Well, the kro’daka Elani had killed. I had only watched, useless. Worse than useless – if I had killed it when Elani stunned it with her first kavi, she wouldn’t have had to waste the second one just to retrieve my sword. We were lucky her fire spirit was able to stun it at all.

The weight of the sword at the small of my back pulled at my thoughts, as though the kro’daka’s corruption still lingered. Its blood had tarnished the bronze, and now in turn my thoughts. Even the vivid yellow-green of the forest around us seemed shaded and dim.

The weapon had already killed a monster from legend, and I hadn’t been the one to hold it. I could not say that empathy, or even pity, had stopped me from killing the monster, forcing another into the deed.

The blight had overtaken the tiny, porcine rodent and forced it to flee in pain and confusion from its home, and in that way I related to it, but the truth was I had been afraid. I hadn’t even given the beast a proper burial out of respect for the creature of Gala it had once been. Elani and I had left its poisonous corpse to rot.

If I’d asked her to stop, to help me bury it, what would she have said? “And let its poison seep into the forest?” Or perhaps, “I thought you were in a hurry?”

I laughed soundlessly through my nose. She always knew better, always had some way to put me down or remind me who was really in charge.

“Why do you resent me so much?” My voice was low, as though I were merely thinking aloud, but when she looked at me questioningly, I repeated it with the full strength of conviction.

She stopped to face me, then blinked once. “I don’t resent you.”

“Then what is it?”

“What is what? What are you talking about?”

“You haven’t said a word since you spat your disappointment at me two hours ago. You’re constantly acting like your better than me – like I’m just a kid who doesn’t know anything. What am I doing that makes you so sour all the time?”

Her ears flattened and she had the grace to at least look embarrassed.

I continued, speaking faster as if they would keep the welling tears at bay. “I’m thankful for your help – really, I am – but it feels like every other conversation you get nasty, like it’s my fault you’re tagging along with me. Do you think I’m purposefully withholding the kavi from you?”

“No.”

“Then what? Why do you act like I’m so unpleasant to be around, like I’m some burden?”

“I just…” she paused, took a breath, continued again. She kept her eyes on the grassy road. “I just don’t like taking care of people, that’s all. That’s why I never stay with my mother and siblings, why I’m always traveling. So I can be alone.”

“Well, my spitting fault for causing you inconvenience.”

“But you know what?” She lifted her eyes to meet mine. “At least I’ve been honest with you. You’ve been lying to me since we met. You’ve lied about your sickness, about that sword –”

“I didn’t lie about that!”

“—and for all I know you lied about the spirit, too.”

“Well then, so what? What if I had been lying – this whole time, lying – about everything. Why do you care?”

“Because I thought you were better than that,” she whispered.

Frustration choked off my words. My chest burned and my eyes stung.

“I thought,” Elani went on, “that maybe you never pried and never pushed on a sore spot because you understood what it was like to not trust others. Maybe you were a loner, too, used to being misunderstood even by people who are supposed to love you.

“But you’re just a kid who’s in way over his head and has to depend on others for everything.”

“You’re right, Elani. I am in over my head. I tried to do the right thing and destroy the blight threatening my home. I failed. I ran away so I didn’t have to re-open old wounds my mother left in my father when she died to the very disease I had just given myself. I panicked. Then, I found out I had not only discovered the seventh spirit, but I had captured it besides.

“I used to think I wanted to be like Dero the Dark, or any of the other famous heroes, but I’m scared, and more than anything I just want to get back home. Not even finding the seventh spirit can make up for the hardship I’ve put upon you, my father, my best friend – everybody.”

Elani signed I do not resent you, then dropped her hands back to her sides.

I brought a corner of my shawl up to wipe at my eyes. “Well, whatever. Come on. The sooner we get to Udoro the sooner we can get this over with.”

“Fine.”

~*~

Poro Udoro had been only a few miles away, giving us plenty of time to stew in our private thoughts. My anger eased, and the silence stretched between us grew taut for want of reconciliation. Yet neither of us said a word until we arrived in the garden village.

Ahead, the telltale clay-like structures of the Durim tribe jutted out of the ground like so many desert termite mounds, each ringed with several painted bands in lively blue or white. None of them were so big as those in Amaranza. Actually, most of them were half the size of even the smallest of Eiden’s buildings.

I eyed one structure that looked as though they’d tipped over a gourd the size of my family’s room in the Eidenhall. Three small, chimney-like pipes stuck out the top in a line, and the walls swirled and flowed with textures like a sand-garden.

“They can’t possibly live in these,” I commented. The statement was neutral, safe. A way to ease back into friendly territory.

“Most of these buildings are just entranceways. Durim usually live underground,” Elani said.

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

“Are the shops underground too?”

“Some.”

I nodded, satisfied I’d broken the silence. It was a start. A moment later I pulled the hood of my chest-length shawl over my head. There wasn’t much chance anyone here would recognize me, but if my kavi did appear unintentionally, the less people knew of me, the better. Besides, the sky looked ready for a light rain.

“You look stressed,” Elani commented as we entered the town.

“Just preparing for bad news, I guess.”

“It’s just a quick stop, remember. Forest’s End is the main goal; we’re just hoping to get lucky here.”

The road flowed into the main street, and I distracted myself with admiring the view of the encroaching forest on the southern side of the main road. The villagers had tended to it like a garden and encouraged its growth right to the edges of the small town like a living fence. On the northern end of the road, the mountain ended in a cliff that supported several storefronts built into its face.

The closeness of the cliff, combined with the proximity of the woods, gave Udoro a sheltered, cozy atmosphere. The first gentle drops of warm rain falling on my shoulders enhanced it further.

Elani had never been to Udoro, nor had she taken this route to Forest’s End before, so we asked a local for the location of the general store. They pointed us toward a structure shaped like a squashed wicker basket of light-colored wood squatting on the cliff-side of the road. A round, gazebo-like feature stuck up from the top. Not an entrance to underground rooms, but a full structure for above-ground trade.

“I guess the shopkeep is Keléri,” I said to Elani. She raised an eyebrow at me.

We pushed the curtains aside and let ourselves into a circular room. A few bright orange birds chirped at us from the roof above, where the ceiling opened to admit light and cool air without any of the rain. Shelves rimmed the walls, facing inward toward a circular counter adorned with bowls of nuts, candies, and pitchers of tea and juice. At the counter, a middle-aged Durim man was trying to coax some of the orange birds from their perches overhead.

“Boro?” Elani and I exclaimed.

He turned, already beaming a wide Durim smile. “Elani and young traveler Ren!” How surprising! “Welcome, come in, yep, and help yourself to some tea, of course. But mind the guests!”

I glanced at the complimentary carafe of tea seeping on the counter. A small swarm of soft green bees buzzed near it, busy with a saucer of syrup Boro had left for them.

“So this is your shop. I’d always meant to visit one day,” Elani said, reaching over the counter to grasp one of his larger pairs.

“Yes, yes, this is where my travels always return to. Pesha is at home, down the street. Welcome! How was the Festival? I saw the glow in the distance, yep, but no fun bangs or booms. What brings you to Poro Udoro?”

“We’re looking for some bluemoth elixir,” I said. As she spoke, she signed her gratitude for the tea.

“Nope!” Boro said with a sigh. “Ran dry at the source a month back or so. Not as many moths around to get the powder from. I hope that gets cleared up; more people are starting to need it, not less!”

“That’s what they said at Amaranza,” I said, frowning. “Did you happen to ask what was causing the scarcity?”

“Nope!” he said again. “I didn’t ask! Figured it would get resolved in its own time, as things do. And I don’t know much about moths!

“…But then they told me anyway. Yep! Spiders, they said. The big slow ones. They’re extra hungry lately. Eating all the moths. None of their usual slow appetites.”

Elani held up a hand, signing wait. “Lorelai spiders are docile. What do you mean, they’re eating all the moths?”

“Fickle creatures – who knows? But, very unlikely anyone carries that elixir right now young Ren. Anything else I can get for you while you’re here?”

I shook my head and thanked him for his help. I felt the sickness welling in my chest and, hoping not to embarrass myself in the calm of store, excused myself with a hurried good to see you again. The hurried good-bye, though, ended up doing exactly that.

Elani watched me go and called out, “I’ll meet you at that shaded bench we passed by the road earlier! I’ll grab us some food, too.”

Outside, I ducked out of sight of the road and coughed until my insides ripped open. It subsided just as gracelessly, so I stumbled to the bench Elani had mentioned. Two palms shaded me as I dropped to the waiting stone platform.

I waited, managing my breathing until I found a rhythm that didn’t feel like I was pushing knives against my ribs. Elani emerged from Boro’s shop and found an awning where a Durim-Enling pair cooked for passerby, and I realized I smelled something like roasting meat on the air.

My stomach grumbled, and I looked away. To distract myself from the hunger and pain in my chest, I watched a woman from my Tribe step out from a tiny Durim structure to water a garden at its front despite the lazy rain. Nearby, a small team of Durim worked alongside a Keléri man and an Enling individual on a structure covered in scaffolds and pulleys.

My gaze wandered until it fell upon a cleared space between several dwellings against the cliff. It looked like one of the peace-gardens the desert-dwelling Oru Tribe sometimes made. Manicured grass ringed a small pool of pristine white sand. At the center of the circular garden was a single, doorway-sized, grey-white menhir, like one of the karst spire-mountains rising out of a calm ocean. A godstone.

Udoro had probably been built here due to the stone’s presence, I realized. The godstones seemed to radiate well-being, like an aura of vitality and safety. They were sacred. Even kavi sometimes swarmed around the menhir.

It was easy, sometimes, to forget that most everything on Kol Viri had been built by the Ancients, our gods. The enigmatic godstones, scattered around the island and marked each with a single rune in our Kolu language, were like the signatures of those creators stamped on the landscape.

See what we have wrought, they seemed to say. Look at what we have built for you here.

An unusual sensation pricked at the back of my consciousness as I rested my eyes on the stone. It was familiar, like a dream I had forgotten about and only just now remembered enough to examine.

“Ren,” Elani hissed, dispelling the sensation. I hadn’t noticed her approaching.

She held two slices of bread covered in a pale pink paste. Her large eyes were alert, and she was glancing nervously along the main street as she hurried toward me.

“What?” I asked.

“Your kavi!”

I whirled around. The familiar sprite was a hand span from my shoulder, a small mote of light the size of a cherry, glowing a rich purple. A wispy layer of haze formed in the air around it.

“Elani, I think I was using my spirit!” I said, growing excited. “I felt it! But not for an actual spell, more like – “

“That’s great, now get rid of it!” she spat through her teeth. She dropped the food on the bench, then shrugged out of her backpack and moved to stand between the spirit and the road.

Then she whirled, shoving me from the bench before I could so much as find my tether to the spirit.

I grunted in surprise, then landed in the soft grass. The violet spirit drifted into view beneath the twin palms, followed by Elani standing over me. She shrugged out of her backpack and placed it on the bench in a weak effort to hide me.

I pulled on the thread connecting me to the spirit and it vanished through my shirt as though retreating to a hidden pocket.

“Well that didn’t help,” I said through a cough. My voice scratched and caught in my throat.

“Were you trying to use it? What happened?”

“I don’t know what I did.” It wasn’t a spell, since the kavi was still here. So what was it?

“Kavi have a passive effect while they’re bound to you that doesn’t end the contract,” Elani explained. She came around the bench to help me up rather than apologize. “That’s probably what you felt!”

I thought of the godstone again, summoning up the unusual sensation as best as I could remember, but the memory slipped away as my chest burned hotter like a volcano welling up with poison gas. My concentration fell away, a tide receding before the unstoppable rush of a tsunami.

“What was it like?” Elani’s words raced with excitement. “The latent effect? I’ve tried most other spirits’ effects, sometimes they’re more useful than the spell itself. They’re different, so – Ren?”

The tsunami rolled over me. I twisted onto my side and crumpled into a ball as my lungs tried to force themselves inside-out.