We hunted for nearly an hour. The chemical odor hid itself in the breeze, and even then it was faint. We moved upwind, sniffing until our noses were dry and choked with dust.
“My dad says blight can wipe out a whole forest if left unchecked,” Oman muttered.
“Mountains, too. And lakes. Maybe even the whole island.”
“Tsh. Sounds like you’ve been listening to the stories people tell in your tavern after they’ve had too much palm lily beer.”
“It’s drawn on the temple murals, Oman,” I said. “The gods themselves wrote it. The Stranger implied the same thing.”
“Oh.”
We’d barely searched for five minutes before the blight’s odor was strong enough to be detected without the wind. The birds had quieted, and the insect swarms thinned. We spoke less, and only in whispers, as if the blight might ambush us like a zotani asp from beneath a palm frond. We were close.
The poisonous odor intensified as I approached a fungus-speckled towerwood. Nothing stood out among the roots. Again I thought of ambushing vipers, and my heart beat in anticipation. I rounded the trunk and froze.
A fungal ooze had spread across a small section of the forest floor in a bone-white mat, blotched with grey where it had begun to harden. I stood so close I could see the thin, dark streaks running like veins across its surface.
Two ferns were already dead. Sparse shoots of young grass around the mold-like slime had withered into a lifeless yellow-brown. Soon, the sickly white substance would reach the towerwood.
“Om—” I started, but my voice hitched like I’d inhaled cinnamon from a cup of chaka tea. I bent over, coughing and unable to speak.
Oman came up behind me as I backed away from the blight. I thrust out a palm to warn him away.
“Oh, makodo,” he swore.
I pointed breathlessly to the water skin he wore at his hips, and he handed it to me. He pulled me further away from the blight as I fumbled with the plug and filled my mouth with water.
“Smells horrible,” Oman said, wrinkling his nose. “Sharp.”
I nodded and returned the water skin. I’d never seen blight before. The smell was worse than I could have imagined.
The toxic odor tore at the inner flesh of my nose. Faded memories came to me as if unearthed by the pain. I remembered my mother again, in her summer dress. My father loved that dress – she’d told me once, her voice muffled from the cream-yellow cloth as she pulled it over her silky black hair. She said that’s why she liked to wear it.
My vision blurred, and I wiped at my eyes with the back of a finger.
“I’m sorry, Ren,” Oman said, turning to me and putting a hand on my shoulder. “Let’s get you home. I’ll tell Chief Pan’ro. We know where it is, now.”
“No,” I said, clearing my throat. “Not yet.”
“What? Why not?”
“My Dad. If he knew there was blight in the Pebblewood, he wouldn’t let me on my rite of passage.”
“Maybe that’s for the better,” Oman said, glancing sidelong at the ugly mass.
I looked too, and my stomach quivered at the mucus-like growth; I thought of Beloka’s coconut pudding before she decorated it to look more appetizing.
“It’s nowhere near the trail,” I tried, “and we can warn the town after the rite. I’ll tell everyone I saw it on my way back.”
“Ren, I don’t know. You’re seventeen; everyone in town knows you’re not a kid anymore, rite or no rite. The sword will be proof enough, no?”
“Well, if you can’t wait for me to get back,” I said, “then at least wait until I leave before you warn anyone.”
“Ren… I can’t. This is too big. The longer we wait, the more time it has to spread. It’ll start turning things into kro’daka, or killing the Pebblewood. Probably both.”
I opened my mouth to argue, but the fumes were making thought difficult.
“Fine,” I said at last. “You’re right.”
Oman’s eyebrows popped up. “I’m – I’m right? You’re admitting I’m right about something?”
“Yeah, yeah. Now come on, before Dad starts asking Auntie where you ran off with me.”
“Stinks here anyway,” Oman said, lobbing a fist-sized rock into the blight with his foot.
It landed with a slapping sound, then sank slowly as if into putty. I imagined it sizzling, burning, devoured as though by lava from the island’s volcano.
We found our way back to the trail, emerging from the wilderness just past the fallen towerwood bridge. Oman marked the spot with a small cairn. Eiden was only two miles away.
I watched the trail as we walked, my thoughts wandering while my gaze jumped around the pits and mounds in the flattened dirt like a lizard. I listened privately, again and again, to Oman’s suggestion that the rite of passage didn’t matter, that it was just another holdover from another era. As irrelevant to the world today as a sword.
His father was a skilled fighter in the rangers, and Oman had succeeded at following in those footsteps since he was young. His body had built out in all the right directions for physical prowess. He had honed his skills to a fine edge with half as much practice as it took me. He was seldom clever, but he was determined and capable.
Oman loved the rank-and-file of the rangers, the grit and rigor of it, even as I chaffed at the prospect. He didn’t care for glory, even as he marched steadily toward an illustrious career in an admirable profession. I craved that, yet I was the son of a botanist and a tavern-owner. The skills I’d cobbled together made me a messenger at best – a runner, a speaker, a listener. I was hardly a cook, and an unlucky gardener.
Not a monster-slayer, but a bartender.
Oman was right, though. Swords were the tools of heroes and heroines, but those days were in the past. Rangers still carried them, but they were just symbols now. When it came to slaying the blight-warped monsters we called kro’daka, spears, ranged weapons, and even magic worked better.
I shook my head and took a deep breath of clean air. The bitter scent of the blight had soured my thoughts, and so I was glad Oman said nothing as we walked. I did not need to poison his mood, too.
We arrived at Eiden before sunset. The work day would be ending soon, the rice-farmers and beekeepers returning from the fields, while the craftsfolk and traders closed their shops. Dad would want to talk to me about the coming rite, to present me with the ceremonial torch I would carry to Mt. Tasa’s windy summit, beyond the Pebblewood. He would want to wish me luck and confide in me his pride at my coming-of-age.
That future had felt so real, so inevitable, yet the blight seemed determined to keep changing the course of my life. There would be no rite of passage, not until we could eradicate the blight and Dad knew for certain that it could not take another of his loved ones away.
“Do you want to come with me to warn the Chief?” Oman asked, pulling me from my gloom. His voice had deepened from an hour of disuse.
I shook my head. “My Dad will be expecting me. We have a lot to talk about, I think.”
“Don’t look so defeated,” Oman said, bumping into me with his shoulder and nearly knocking me over. “It’s just some stupid tradition. I think some of the other tribes don’t even have a rite of passage.”
“But of all the things to happen today, why blight?” I said.
“Maybe En is testing you after all, just in a different way than you think.”
I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t optimistic about the possibility, nor did I think En had much to do with it. Oman’s family adhered to an old tradition within our tribe. They attributed much to En, and seldom voiced prayers to the other gods. If any of them were involved, it seemed more likely that I had angered Tesamet, the Lady of Luck.
We strode down Eiden’s main street side-by-side, grubby from the woods. Our news felt like a secret stamped on our skin, hidden just below the patina of dirt. If anyone looked closer at us, they might see it.
We stopped at the place where Eiden’s two roads met in a T. The Eidenhall waited at the corner, shaded by large soapberries and manicured palms. The sun simmered low in the sky beyond my home, an hour or two from setting. The afternoon light saturating the heavy, golden air had an overripe quality to it. Here and now, the day felt finite in ways it never did in the Pebblewood. An entire Age had come and gone since this morning’s freedom.
“Good luck,” Oman said, smiling. “I’ll let you know how it goes.”
We hugged and parted ways. I trudged home to the Eidenhall, a knot in my stomach stretching up so high it seemed to wrap around my throat and reach into my lungs. I did not believe in En’s infinite machinations, but I did believe in omens. Blight in the Pebblewood could not have been more portentous.
But, it was not the day’s end that made me so melancholy, I realized. It was the end of an era. Oman and I had spent the last hours either of us would ever have of childhood in the Pebblewood, and now that I was back home, apprehension at the coming changes wormed its way into my heart.
The clear waters of my life were turning murky ahead – I didn’t even have the trials of passage to guide my first steps into the transitional stage of adolescence.
I paused at one of the Eidenhall’s two thresholds, looking up to the canopies growing just above the inn’s thatched roof. Mama had spent countless hours building an understated garden of soapberry trees and ornamental palms around the Eidenhall, and the trees seemed to whisper words of comfort to me with voices made of wind.
I stood, physically and mentally, in a liminal space. The way behind me was closed forever and the way forward was uncertain. Even the sun seemed caught between worlds as day crept toward night.
What if the Pebblewood grew irreparably sick? What if Oman and I kept growing up, growing apart, our childish games replaced by ever-growing responsibility and maturity? What if these were the last good days, and I became as beaten down and weary as some of the other villagers who had never left the Elethan Plains?
I set my jaw. No. Oman had asked me if I meant to see the world, and I still did. Earning a sword might not be the first step in a long, heroic career like I daydreamed about, but that didn’t mean the achievement was pointless.
I lifted a hand to the door and pushed. The door swung open and the antechamber spilled heat and noise from the common room into the cool evening air. The smell of grilled meats and vegetables, simmering stews, and fresh rice made my stomach lurch with hunger. I hadn’t smelled so much from our kitchen in ages.
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I rounded the corner into the dining hall, and a wave of applause and cheering washed over me.
I stood blinking in the common hall’s threshold. A moment later, Oman’s younger sister, Adena, slammed into me. She clung to my midsection like a coconut squid wrapped around a palm trunk, and managed an impressive squeeze despite her small size. The warmth of the welcome embraced me; Adena’s 7-year-old enthusiasm threatened to strangle me.
A dozen of my family’s closest friends and neighbors had assembled in the Eidenhall. Many of them wore simple facepaint, or had put flowers in their hair. A handful of unadorned travelers staying at the inn for the night joined the cheering as if they’d known me all their life.
“Boy! You should have seen the look on your face!” cried Beloka. The Isvir tribe giantess shoved her way over to me, enthusiasm glowing on her dark face like a kavi-lantern. She stood two heads taller than anyone else in the room, even without the pair of curving horns atop her head.
“He’s not a boy anymore, Beloka,” chided Auntie Jeni. “Adena, sweetness, you can let Ren go now.”
Adena released me and scampered back to her mother, only for Beloka to scoop me up in an embrace of her own. She still smelled like fruit and sweet dough. “You ready for your big night, kid?” she said, squashing me.
I gasped. “If I don’t get crushed first.”
Beloka let go of me and stepped back, only so a third person could grab me from behind. The sharp musk of dried sweat and the subtle perfume of dirt and crushed leaves meant it could only be one person.
“Oman? I thought you left to–“
“Figured I would wait a minute to tell the Chief,” Oman mumbled into my ear. I could tell he was grinning at the deception. “Didn’t want to spoil the mood for a party like this.”
“What about the blight?” I asked under my breath when he finally released me.
“I don’t know. Later.”
“Hey, Gerek!” Beloka shouted, moving to the kitchen behind the bar in search of my Dad. “Get out here, Ren showed!”
I whispered as quietly as I could. “Well, you can’t wait until I leave, or Chief Pan’ro will wonder why we waited so long. It’s pretty big news.”
He frowned. “Should I go find her now, then?” His face dropped as he looked past me, and mouthed, “oh.”
A voice like a towerwood spoke from behind me, imperious and strong yet generations old. “So, your day has come at last,” Chief Pan’ro said.
I turned and saw our town’s leader hunched before me. The Enling woman dressed in robes of elegant blue, her gnarled, soft, brown hands clasped behind her back. Her eyes belied an inner strength, clear and resilient, despite her aging body.
“You know, your father makes some of the best chaka this side of Kol Viri. Your mother’s recipe, I hear, rest her patient soul. But, that legacy pales compared to what they have in you. Congratulations, young Ren.”
I bowed my head. “Thank you for coming, Chief. I’m honored.”
“Nonsense,” she said flapping a hand. “I think of you like family. Go, get some chaka for your trial tonight. It’s only good hot.”
I tipped my head again and left Oman with her, privately signing good luck to my friend behind the Chief’s back. She always seemed to know when we needed to talk to her about something.
I grabbed a plate of food on my way to the bar. There must have been a hundred pounds of rice piled in mounds beside countless cooked vegetables and insects, fresh fruits, and dried meats, all arranged on broad leaves covering our long tables. Sauces, stews, and gravies of nearly every color in the rainbow simmered in troughs warmed with heated stones. Chaka waited in a steaming cauldron, though many guests opted instead for the wines made from rice or honey.
Even before the rising price of food in the wake of the blight, it must have cost a small fortune. Guilt dropped like a weight in my stomach, and seemed to sour the thought of eating anything.
“Oi! Ren! What’re you standing around for? Come, sit!” Beloka called from the bar.
She slapped the empty spot on the log bench adjacent to her as I approached. Torth, the doughy husband of a peka’ri farmer at the edge of town, kept her company. They smiled encouragingly as I set my food down beside Beloka.
“Island’s not gonna feel so big when you got a weapon in your hand, eh boy?” the Isvir woman said.
“I figured I was just getting taller,” I quipped.
She laughed more than the joke deserved. Though, two jars of honey wine stood empty nearby. Torth gave a tight-lipped smile and looked back to his own drink.
“Ahh, bit of an outdated tradition, if you ask me,” my Dad said, coming up to us from the other side of the counter and pushing a steaming mug toward me. He had put on an earring of gold, as he always did for celebrations, though he still wore his working apron. A vivid hibiscus from mother’s garden beamed from his wavy black hair. “Little use for a sword these days.” Good thing, he signed.
“Your whole life before Eiden hinged on people gettin’ whacked, didn’t it, Gerek?” sneered Torth. “I’d think you’d appreciate people usin’ swords on each other!”
“I still get plenty of practice patching you up every time your sister gets the better of you,” Dad countered, earning a cheer from Beloka and I. “Can’t say I’ll miss the work when she leaves for Amaranza tomorrow morning for the festival. Maybe those little piggies you live with can still rough you up for me?”
Torth huffed. “I’ll be going with her. Anyway, with that Red Moon in the sky, feels like anythin’ could happen. Might be some bandits out in the woods, or some new kro’daka that’s set up its den nearby. People should be armed, just in case. For their own protection.”
Beloka snorted into her mug, then whirled on Torth. “You’re one of them Red Moon doomsayers then? Ha! Scary omens in the sky makin’ people turn to banditry. Honestly, Torth!”
“We don’t even have kro’daka here,” I added. “And, if we did, a sword’s the least effective weapon.”
“Kro’daka are poppin’ up everywhere, bigger’n ever,” Torth said, casting a quick leer at Beloka before leaning forward to address me, “and the blight’s only gettin’ worse. Don’t think you’re safe just because we live in a quiet part of Eletha. Oh yes, we get kro’daka here, too. Where there’s blight, there’s soon to be monsters, and more blight is croppin’ up all the time.”
I opened my mouth, then closed it. I imagined the blight I’d found twisting a hapless bird into a monstrosity the size of a hut, diving on unsuspecting travelers from a hidden lair atop a towerwood, talons crooked and sharp.
Beloka shook her head, teetering on her creaking stool. “The Red Moon’s been sitting up there doing nothin’ for well over a hundred years now. I’m sure a-a-any day now Vala Makodo is gonna open up and spew forth legions of skogg and drown the island in blight, right? Soon, all of Kol Viri will be covered in white goo!” She clapped a hairy hand on the bar top, rattling the cups. “White goo, and extinct trolls!”
The others didn’t laugh with her.
“The Red Moon has doubled in size since I was a kid,” I muttered.
“Aye, and the kro’daka haven’t been so big — or so common — since the Second Age ended,” Torth argued. “The blight didn’t even exist back then! You remember that from your history lessons? That’s all connected, Beloka.
“It’s all connected, and it starts with that damned Red Moon. At least those Follower folks’re tryin’ to do somethin’ about it, even if that masked oracle fellow’s been casting a few too many spells.”
Torth spun a finger in a circle at his temple and crossed his eyes, then turned and spat on the ground. It splattered on the rough wooden floor of my family’s inn, and he winced. He tossed my Dad a mumbled apology and spun on his stool to wipe it away with his sandal, but I ignored it.
“You don’t really believe the Stranger can bring the Ancients back to Kol Viri, do you, Torth?” Beloka jeered.
I saw Torth’s jaw flex in anger and jumped in before their argument could turn into a fight. “Dad thinks the Followers aren’t really a problem. They’re not very many people – just a few weird enough to gossip about. We hear about them a lot lately, especially later in the evening.”
“And pretty soon,” Dad added, flashing me a wink, “the novelty will die down, and we won’t be hearing about them much at all. You’re reading the winds wrong with this one, Torth. If one finds a use for a sword these days, it won’t be that Red Moon’s fault. It’ll be because people don’t trust each other like they used to. You can’t trust your neighbors anymore, let alone a stranger.”
“Keth take me if that ain’t the truth,” Beloka muttered to me, breath thick from liquor. She relaxed into her stool and signed a quick phrase in her lap as though it was a ward against evil. What a shame.
Torth huffed, then knocked back the rest of his mead and stood up. “Blight it, I’ll think what I want. You all know the island’s changin’, but don’t got a clue why. I’ll see you all when I get back from Amaranza. Congratulations and all that, Ren. En guide you all.” He clapped Beloka on the back, gave me and my Dad a curt nod, and left.
No use for a sword anymore, Dad had said, unknowingly echoing Oman’s own words from this morning. They were right, of course. Swords weren’t practical against kro’daka, and completely useless against blight. The era of sword-wielding heroes was over.
I hung my head, then swore under my breath. I’d never had time to change – I was still covered in grass stains and smudges of dirt and dust from the Pebblewood. I sniffed at my collar and groaned.
I excused myself, but the etiquette went unnoticed; Dad was too distracted entertaining Beloka’s musings over whether Torth’s husband preferred him or the peka’ri they tended.
I saw Oman at a platter of fried insects and made a detour. “What did Chief Pan’ro say?” I asked.
“Nothing,” Oman said. “I made up an excuse to not talk to her.”
“You lied to the Chief?”
Oman gave me a helpless, chagrined smile. “Happy birthday! We’ll tell her tomorrow.”
“You realize that means I still get to do the rite, right?”
Oman laughed. “Right-right. You seemed pretty disappointed in the woods, so, consider it my birthday present to you.”
I shook my head and wrapped him in a quick hug. “Grab some more food,” I said, gesturing at my stained shirt. “I need to go change. See you in a minute?”
“I can’t stay. I have to take Adena home soon.”
“Well, we can meet up tomorrow. We can pretend to find the blight in the morning, first thing.”
“Just save me some of this, yeah?” Oman said, grabbing another handful of snacks. “And good luck tonight. En guide you.”
I thanked him again, then slipped into the private room my Dad and I shared across the antechamber from the common room.
The room was small for most families, but it served us well. The room had a partitioned space for bathing, as well as Dad’s bed, my sleeping pallet beneath the window, and a round table for us to play cards or eat quietly together. A soft mat of treated plant fibers covered part of the floor, where Mama used to share stories. A few of her paintings – hibiscus and fruit doves and her hometown of Renda’vel — still hung from the wall, as well as a small shelf for some of my belongings next to my pallet. A plush kavi toy shaped like a character from “The Ballad of Tanamari and Ru” lay propped against my pillow.
I pulled my slingshot from where I’d stowed it at my waist and placed it on the shelf. I glanced out to the setting sun through glass stained by Oman’s spit. I thought of that morning, how bright and full of life it had been, as I ripped off my top.
Outside, the sky had turned a deep blue like the World Sea on the eastern shore. It was almost time, then. I would be starting my journey within the hour. Soon, Chief Pan’ro will present me with the ceremonial torch and wish me luck on my overnight vigil atop the mountain.
I used a foot to nudge open the footlocker of clothes I kept near my pallet. I pulled on a shirt that would leave my arms and midriff bare, and a pair of baggy pants that stopped at my calves. Over these I donned a hooded shawl, thinking of the chill from the eastern winds atop Mt. Tasa’s peak.
I smiled, privately thanking Oman yet again for his change of mind.
The party passed quickly after I re-emerged. I spent half of it wondering how to thank my dad for the dinner without badgering him over the price of the food. At one point, Beloka paraded me around on her shoulders, pretending to jab me with her curving horns while I reached for the rafters.
Then, Chief Pan’ro announced it was time. We gathered outside, where she presented to me the ceremonial torch. As I felt its sturdy weight, the Chief explained to me, in practiced ceremony, that it would extinguish itself every hour. Failure to keep the flame burning meant failure to burn the wood away from the metal rod within. If I did not return the rod free of its outer layers, then my vigil would be incomplete.
I bounced on the balls of my feet as she reminded us of the torch’s historical origins, the difficulty of the task ahead, and of the importance of the sword the torch rod represented.
“Adulthood is a ways away yet, young Ren. But soon, childhood will be behind you. Are you ready to begin your trial?” she finally asked.
By the time I had touched the flame of my torch to those of the remaining spectators, my legs were buzzing with anticipation. I might have been the only person to run the entire way to the mountain.
Eiden fell away behind me. The Pebblewood beckoned to me with shadowed boughs as the sun set on the last day of my childhood.