I ran heedless along the Pebblewood trail. My torch sputtered and danced, flaring with every swing of my pumping arms. I passed the three boulders in the tree-rimmed meadow where Oman and I played. I dashed across the fallen towerwood bridge and still I didn’t slow.

I continued past the fern where Oman had hidden the rock cairn, marking the place where the blight festered in the wilderness beyond. The blight’s stink carried even to the road, now. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up, but I grit my teeth and pushed myself forward.

Torth’s words whispered through my thoughts, emboldened by the darkness of night. Where there’s blight, there’s soon to be monsters.

Well, if Dero the Dark could brave haunted caves and monster-infested swamps, then I could handle the forest I grew up in. The only monster in the Pebblewood was busy killing some grass and a few bushes.

“I am Ren of the Eidenhall,” I mouthed. “I will climb the mountain.”

The shadow of a fern skittered from my approaching torchlight like a spider.

“I will burn the torch.”

A family of featherbats burst from their roost with a screech of alarm, but I carried on.

“I will return.”

Lanterns lit for night-traveling hikers waited for me at a fork in the path. To the right ran the long road to Meisi’s Rest, the village bordering Eletha and the lands of the Isvir tribe. To the left, the path to Mt. Tasa’s summit. I turned left.

“I am Ren of the Eidenhall. I will climb the mountain. I will burn the torch. I will return.”

I whispered it again and again. Once, twice, a dozen times, then two dozen times.

I didn’t stop running until the trail’s incline steepened. I climbed the path in long, panting strides, and soon I could look out behind me and see the tops of the palms below. The towerwoods met my gaze as equals.

The mountain grew steeper as I gained back my breath. My legs quivered from exhaustion, and my chest ached worse than it ever had before. Yet each switchback took me higher into the sky, closer to the night goddess Tesamet. Did she watch me ascend, or was she dreaming away her fabled sorrow in the halls of the night-moon?

The stars were out in full by the time I reached the summit. Granite stones dotted the grassy peak like hunched spectators sitting to admire the view. Eiden was a small glow in the shadowed plain below, a single ship surrounded by small forests like dark islands on a darker sea. The great Nebula, like a titanic kavi of emerald and amethyst, draped itself through the sky in tranquil counterpoint to the ominous Red Moon in the east.

Even should my torch extinguish, I would need no light to see beneath the glow of the night sky.

Before me, at the extreme tip of Mt. Tasa’s grassy peak, stood a godstone. No stone-carver in the world could hope to match the precision of the single rune carved into its surface; the gods themselves had placed it here.

The Tribes of Kol Viri held the godstones in high regard, the land on which the gods had placed them considered sacred. Kavi favored the godstones, as if the monoliths were places they could rest or meet with one another.

I respected such things, but this one above all others I truly appreciated. All godstones had a rune on their face, but this one – a bow opening upwards with a single dot above it – was called ren in our Islander tongue.

Sky.

The wind found me as I admired the artifact, rushing through the open space of the peak and blowing the hood from my head, whipping my hair, and making my pants billow like loose sails. Golden kavi dotted the summit, chasing the currents of air through the open sky. They were like stars that had come to the island to play.

I left the spirits to their silent games and sought out the cairn of mossy rocks stacked on another end of the summit. Centuries of soot from past trials blackened the top of each jagged, shelf-like stone. A year before, Oman’s own torch had left its stains here.

I stuck my own torch in the slot and stepped back. After all the fanfare of the ceremonies in Eiden, this part of the trial seemed almost a letdown.

There was nothing left to do but kill time. A lot of it.

I wandered about with my slingshot, firing small chunks of gravel at the tops of trees. I found a stick further down the trail and switched to practicing sword stances and maneuvers. I checked on the torch over and over, but time stretched slowly, and it only needed relighting twice.

Later, I discovered a talisman someone had hidden. The owner had carved Tesamet’s rune on it, a symbol for luck. I ran my thumb over the symbol etched into its surface, a diamond with a swirl spiraling inward. Perhaps Tesamet was watching after all, I thought with a smile.

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I returned it to its hiding place and walked back to sit against the godstone. Above, the night-moon was nearly at its zenith. Almost midnight, my vigil half complete.

The blight would have spread to the nearby towerwood by now. It would disintegrate the bark, eating into the tree’s heartwood and seeping into the earth to rot the shallow roots. I imagined the towerwood finally crashing to its resting place, morning mists swirling in its wake and the blight covering it like a grave shroud.

But there was nothing I could do. I was earning a sword, a symbol of adolescence. I was earning the right to begin the journey into adulthood, whatever that meant.

I looked down at my hands, then blinked in surprise. They glowed with a faint, but noticeable, lavender light. I flipped them over, then realized it wasn’t me glowing, but something above me. I scrambled to my feet and turned to the godstone. My mouth fell open.

A single, deep-violet mote of light floated above the grey monolith. It was no larger than a kiwi fruit, and the glow came from a misty veil of lavender luminescence swirling around it.

It looked for all the world like a kavi.

Yet for a nature spirit, it was unusually still. It did not spin and twist in the air like the golden spirits of sky that appeared on windy days. Nor did it dance around in erratic patterns like red kavi, as chaotic as the flames they inhabited. Some green spirits were calm, but they were not motionless. If not for this one’s subtle bobbing and shimmering veil, I might have thought it was a vivid star that had fallen out of the night sky.

Like all Islander children, I knew the six varieties of kavi by heart. As a child, I had tried catching them so I could ask them to perform magic, or to trade them away for toys or gifts. I was horrible at it, but then, most people didn’t catch more than a couple until they were older. I had never caught a single one.

Yet for all their variety, they were never purple.

I remembered the oracle, and his soothsaying. “Look for these on the full moon,” he had said, “past midnight. Bring them to me, and I can show you true wonders.”

And here it was. Midnight, just as he’d said, and all the moons beaming brightly.

I approached the bizarre spirit in a low crouch, as though it were a nervous peka’ri and I was large and intimidating. Some kavi could be skittish and vanish without warning.

It remained in place, so I bowed reverently, on hands and knees. I did not entertain the thought that this might be a demon in some new disguise. If it was, I would probably be dead already, or worse. There were no hallucinations, either. Damp grass soaked through my pants beneath my knees. The breeze brushed past the bare skin at my lower back and on my arms. This was all real.

I straightened and sat back on my heels to study the spirit. It hadn’t reacted. An idea came to me, and I prostrated once more.

“Thank you, Great Spirit Tesamet,” I murmured. “Thank you for sending me this omen of good fortune. Please, if this is a spirit of your making, show me one more kindness. Please, watch over Eiden, and my Dad. Keep the blight from destroying us. I can do so little.

“Please, if you can hear me, I ask this one favor,” I finished.

I had little to offer, but it was enough to believe Tesamet watched over me and had blessed me with a sighting of a spirit my people had been seeking for a decade. It was like she smiled at me, and me alone.

So, I placed my slingshot beneath the spirit as a token of my sincerity, and scrambled to my feet. I bowed to the spirit once more, then left to check on my torch.

The torch had guttered out, recently enough that it still smoked. I struck at a chip of flint the Chief had given me until a spark caught, and the flame stretched back into the air like a peka’ri emerging from its burrow.

The flame gave me an idea. Maybe I could do something about the blight.

A minute later I was running back down the mountain. My chest still ached from my earlier sprint, but downhill was easier than up. The cairn Oman had built waited in the moonlight’s shadows, pointing me into the Pebblewood’s wilderness. All I had to do now was follow the acrid stink of blight.

Tesamet willing, I could help save the Pebblewood.

I had climbed the mountain in a rite of passage that would guide me from childhood to the liminal adolescence before adulthood. I had given up my slingshot so that I may be seen with a sword instead. Yet all these markers of the coming changes paled in comparison to the real test awaiting me in the undergrowth ahead. The rite was just a formality, but the blight was real.

I stopped at the tree I’d found with Oman and covered my mouth with the shawl. One of Kol Viri’s three dooms lurked on the other side of the trunk. I took a deep breath through the fabric of my shawl, then stepped carefully around the doomed tree.

The blight’s mass had doubled since Oman and I had last seen it. The forest watched in silence while the tree disintegrated, splinter by splinter. I imagined it falling, heavy as a thousand pines.

I’d dreamed of earning a sword that was more than a ceremonial relic. This torch was a symbol of that sword, but it was about to be more than that. This torch would be a tool in ways a sword never could be.

I lowered the tip of my flame to the white mass. The ooze shrieked like a living thing as the heat touched its surface. It took all my willpower not to plunge the torch further into the cancerous growth like a sword into a stunned kro’daka.

The stench intensified as small splatters of white goo shot from the slime like startled flies from a corpse. The torch flared, feeding off it. White clouds of toxic ash billowed from beneath the flame. The ash choked me and forced me away.

I squinted through stinging tears at my progress. Instead of destroying the blight, the fire had only hardened it, the blight forming a hard grey shell as if to protect the living mass below.

I coughed again and retreated. The smoke raked my throat and clung like nettles. I stumbled back to the trail, wheezing with every breath.

I had thought the purple spirit was a sign from the goddess of luck. I thought I was supposed to find the blight on the day of my coming-of-age, a true test beyond mere tradition. To honor my Mama by saving the Pebblewood from the very thing that killed her.

But I failed.