I remember a figure in sleeveless silk robes standing in the trade street.

He wore black despite the wet season’s midday humidity. His skin was a light grey, as if the gods had drained him of color. His bone-white mask looked like a real face, but its eye sockets were deep, its lips thin and dark, its nose small. We called him the stranger.

I would have distrusted him, but for his sonorous voice. It warbled with an accent I’d never heard before. Like the voice of a king, I thought, come to my island home from a land far away. But there were no such places.

He spoke of things that would come to be, and so he also earned the name “oracle.” He did not offer a name of his own. He told us an evil would fall upon Kol Viri.

He said the blight – that vile, fungal ooze that suffocates forests, strangles rivers, and sours the air – would proliferate like never before. The monsters we call kro’daka would multiply. The crimson moon in the sky would creep closer and closer until it bathed our island in bloody light and drown Kol Viri and the Six Tribes beneath the World Sea’s tides.

Demons, diseases, and slow destruction would be our way of life.

I looked to my Dad and asked him if he knew what the stranger was talking about. He shook his head, so Mama squeezed my hand. “Worry not, my Ren,” she said, smiling.

We share the same gods, the oracle said, and he knows their ways. He told us that our knowledge of the world and its magic amounted to drops of rain before a monsoon. He fixed his hollow gaze on me then, and I suppressed the urge to squirm.

I remember how, when the figure standing in the trade street lifted his bare arms toward us, the nature spirits he summoned from within his robes swirled around him like he was a sorcerer from children’s stories.

If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

Kavi, we called the spirits. I’d never seen someone cast magic with so many at once.

The kavi twisted and blurred in the shimmering midday heat. A half-dozen green spirits darted into a soapberry tree, vanishing as the tree grew fresh leaves and swelled with new bark; It stretched into the sky like an old man straightening his back.

A trio of fruit doves burst from the flourishing tree in surprise. The stranger threw a grey spirit into the flock, and the soul kavi disappeared into jungle-green feathers. The enchanted bird wheeled away from its companions and flew to the stranger’s waiting arm. Beneath the mask, his eyes glowed blueish grey.

“There will come another,” the stranger said, interrupting the awed crowd’s whispers. He spoke as if to the bird on his arms, but the wind carried his voice to us. I leaned forward.

“Another spirit. They will be a deep violet in color. Look for them on the full moon, past midnight. Bring them to me, and I can show you true wonders.”

I was a young boy then, only 5 or 6, when he visited our trade street in Eiden. I never met the stranger again, though I sometimes heard of his wanderings. His premonitions had been unimportant to me, but the adults seemed to gossip of little else. The red moon grew larger each season, everyone was certain. Rumors of kro’daka in far-away places became commonplace.

And then there was the blight. Farmers sacrificed entire rice paddies while whole orchards of coconut and banana turned to rot, faster than the Six Tribes could muster safeguards. One day, Mama had come home with a cough, sick from her visit with a distant friend. In my memories, I do not remember if she was sick for months or for days.

Dad says it took only two weeks for her to succumb to the poison choking her lungs. Then, she was gone, leaving only memories like ghosts haunting the things she touched, the places she sat, and the people she loved.

I remember when the world was still glad and beautiful, and I remember the day that changed. I remember that figure in sleeveless silk robes, standing in the trade street. I wonder at how he looked at me in the crowd, and I wonder if he had known of the trials that awaited me as his portended dooms came to pass, one by one.

I wonder if the only shred of optimism in his prophecy, the purple spirit of midnight, was a myth.