The sun was just crawling back into the sky, its light chasing away the last of the night and painting long gold streaks across the eastern ocean.
Far below the cliff's ledge, the water shimmered endlessly, so vast it seemed to swallow the horizon whole.
Grey stared down at it.
"So we're gonna die first?"
"No, you dummy. No one's dying." Lysa didn't even look at him when she said it.
"So how does it work then?" He shifted his weight, the stone edge crumbling faintly under his heel. "No one wants to tell me anything."
"That's your fault." She finally glanced at him, expression somewhere between pity and irritation. "You skipped every lesson to go play with animals."
"They keep coming to me. It's not like I go looking for them."
"A baby deer followed you into Elder Maren's house last spring."
"She left the door open."
"You left the door open."
Grey opened his mouth and closed it. "...She left the window open too."
Lysa stared at him for a long moment, then turned back to the ocean without another word. That was somehow worse than being argued with.
He let the silence sit and looked back down at the water. People usually took his deflections at face value, which was convenient.
Being the strange and ignorant kid who liked to play with animals was a role he had learned to wear comfortably. It drew less blood than the alternative.
The village children had spent years treating his lack of family like an open wound they were entitled to press on, and somewhere along the way he had figured out that a well-timed joke was better armour than anything else available to him.
The ignorance though was genuine. He had missed those lessons. That part was not a performance.
"Seriously though," he said. "I heard Daven's older brother say something about going through a tree. Is that true?"
"A root node. An arch made of roots. You walk through it, you end up somewhere between places, and a Spirit Beast either finds you or it doesn't."
"And if it doesn't?"
"Then you come back out and you're not a Beast Mage."
A pause. "What if something tries to eat me in there?"
"Nothing is going to eat you, Grey."
"You didn't answer the question." He was sceptical.
"Nothing will eat you," she said firmly, and turned back to the view.
Grey decided not to push it. The slight hesitation before she answered was enough. He filed it away and said nothing.
From behind them, a horn rang out, long and low, rolling over the hill and through the treeline. Down in the valley, the village had already come alive. Smoke rose in thin towers above the huts, and even from here the smell reached them, something sweet and ceremonial baked into the morning air.
"It's starting. Hurry up or they'll kill us." Lysa said, already moving.
Grey stared down at the water one more time.
"So we are really going to die."
"Just run, Bird Brain."
He cursed under his breath and ran after her.
---
They came down the hill fast, bare feet finding the familiar grooves in the dirt path without needing to look. The trees thickened around them as they descended, roots knuckling up through the white sand on either side.
"Will you at least tell me what to expect?" he asked, slightly out of breath. "So I'm not completely useless."
"You're already completely useless."
"Lysa."
She sighed without breaking stride. "I just told you. Walk through, wait and see what finds you."
"That's it?" Grey was sceptical.
"That's it."
He ran in silence for a moment. The honest truth was that the closer they got to the village, the more the gap in his knowledge started to feel less like a personality quirk and more like an actual problem.
He knew almost nothing about what was about to happen to him. He had missed those lessons not out of laziness exactly, but because the forest had always felt more real to him than anything taught inside four walls, and animals had never laughed at him for not knowing the right answer.
He was beginning to think that trade-off had not been entirely wise.
"What if I retained nothing and bond with something embarrassing?"
"Like what?"
"I don't know. A slug."
Lysa actually paused at that, just for a step, before continuing. "Slugs aren't beasts, Grey."
"You don't know that. It could be a large slug."
She didn't dignify that with a response.
---
Seaside came into view through the last of the trees. Mud huts, white sand streets, smoke threading upward from cook fires burning since before dawn. Small by any measure. Impoverished, if you were being honest. But the people who had built it here on the eastern coast hadn't chosen this place for its comfort.
They were fishermen, and the sea here was extraordinary.
The villagers of Seaside could catch things other settlements couldn't. Not through magic, but through generations of hard-won knowledge passed quietly from parent to child.
These particular currents. These particular depths. It was the one thing that made larger, wealthier villages buy from them despite the distance.
Grey had grown up watching the boats go out every morning and return every evening sitting low and heavy in the water. He understood, in the way children understand things they've never examined directly, that the sea was the heartbeat of this place.
He just preferred the forest.
They hit the edge of the village at a jog and slowed as the streets filled around them. Adults moved with purpose, small children darted between legs, elders watched from doorways with the patient satisfaction of those who had seen this day many times before.
Grey and Lysa wove through the crowd until they spotted the group near the largest hut. Thirteen kids, all around their age, all wearing that particular expression of nerves held carefully in check. Grey and Lysa slipped in at the end of the line.
One boy, stocky with a scar across his chin, stepped out and stood in front of them.
"You're late," he said, eyes on Grey specifically.
"We're not late. The horn just went."
"That was the second horn."
Grey blinked. "There were two horns?"
"There are always two horns." The boy stared at him. "Where have you been?"
"The cliff," Grey said simply.
He kept his expression easy and his tone light, the same way he always did when someone was winding up to say something unkind. Give them nothing to grip. He had learned that early.
The boy opened his mouth to push further when the hut door opened, and suddenly nobody was looking at Grey anymore.
The man who stepped out filled the doorframe without effort. Broad-shouldered, bare-chested, a white cloth at his waist and a necklace of shells at his collarbone. His hair was black threaded with grey, his face deep with age and weather, and when he smiled it reached his warm, brilliant blue eyes.
Chief Aldric. There was never any question about who this village belonged to.
He let the crowd settle before he spoke.
"Today we have gathered again, as we did two years ago, and two years before that, back to the days of our fathers." His voice rolled out unhurried. "We are here to celebrate our children coming of age. To watch them take the first step toward what they will become."
His gaze moved across the group of twelve-year-olds, briefly pausing on Lysa then moved on.
"Some may bond with powerful beasts. Some may not bond at all. There is no shame in either. Whatever happens in that temple today, you come home as ours. Now, without further ado let us begin."
He turned and began to walk.
The crowd followed in silence. Tradition demanded it. No music, no talking, just feet on sand and the distant sound of the sea. Grey fell into step beside Lysa and lasted about twenty seconds.
"Did you know there were two horns?" he whispered.
"Yes."
"You didn't tell me." He grumbled.
"I assumed you knew."
"You just told me I know nothing—"
The nearest kids turned with expressions that could have curdled fish. None of them acted on it, but the stares carried weight regardless. The Chief's fondness for Grey was an open secret, somehow even more pronounced than his feeling toward his own daughter, which had always been a shield Grey was quietly grateful for even if he never said so.
He went quiet and kept walking.
---
The Tree Temple stood at the very centre of Seaside, and it looked nothing like the rest of the village.
Where the huts were humble things of mud and dried palm, the temple was constructed from the hardest wood the forest offered, its walls so smooth and white they looked closer to stone than timber.
Colourful vines climbed the exterior, flowers blooming in reds and purples and deep yellows that had no right flourishing this close to salt air. The whole structure breathed, or seemed to, at a frequency just below what a person could normally detect.
Grey had passed by these doors hundreds of times. He had never once seen them open for a child.
Two enormous carved panels, each etched with a great tree, roots at the base, branches at the top. He stared up at them and felt something move through him. Not fear exactly. Something that sat lower than fear, something closer to the feeling of standing at the start of a thing that could not be undone once it began.
The Chief climbed the steps and turned to face them one last time.
"If you are not eligible, there is nothing to be ashamed of. Out of ten, only half might qualify and even among those, not every bond will form today. Give it your best. That is all."
At that moment, then the doors to the temple opened inward.
Three figures stepped out, all cloaked in green, hoods drawn low, moving with the calm prestige of people who had done this in many villages and would do it in many more.
The one in the middle raised his voice.
"All those selected for today's ceremony may come forward."
The children filed up the steps immediately. Grey went with them, walked through the carved doors, and stopped just inside the threshold.
Whatever he'd expected, it definitely wasn't this.