Priestess Kim set the bowl down on the altar for the final time.
She turned to face the group and when she spoke, the murmuring that had been building since Grey walked back to his spot cut off immediately.
"Now that everyone has been assessed, it is time to enter the Heartlands and find your spirit beast. You will have one week inside, which equals twenty four hours in the outside world. After that time, you will be returned automatically whether you have bonded or not. If you return without a bond, you may try again in three months."
She paused to let that settle.
"Low ranking beasts will generally approach on their own if they are drawn to you. Higher ranking beasts are different. They may test you first, through combat or a trial of their choosing, to decide whether you are worthy. Be prepared for that possibility and make your choices wisely."
One of the male elders stepped forward carrying a smaller bowl made of wood. Inside was a thick paste, dark grey and herb-scented, made from ash and crushed plants. He dipped a brush into it and moved down the line, pressing a careful mark onto each child's forehead.
"This will allow you to move freely without being attacked by other spirit beasts," Priestess Kim explained. "Only those interested in forming a bond with you will approach. It also draws your spirit out of your body, which is the only form that can exist inside the Heartlands."
When the paste touched Grey's forehead, something shifted immediately.
A lightness spread through his entire body, starting from the mark and moving outward to his fingertips. It felt oddly familiar, like standing at the edge of the cliff back home with the wind coming off the water.
That sensation right at the boundary between standing still and falling forward. Like the ground would simply let him go if he asked it to.
"One last thing," one of the Priests addressed the group. "Every human can only bond with a single Eidos regardless of their power or status. Choose carefully. Spirit beasts do not truly die, which means if you bond with one, you are bound to it permanently. A poor choice today follows you for the rest of your life."
Grey heard that and felt it land somewhere in his chest. There's only one chance. No corrections.
He thought briefly about the years he had spent avoiding every lesson that might have prepared him for this moment. He decided not to dwell on it.
The root node was already activated. A deep hum resonated through the stone floor, felt in the chest and teeth more than heard. Faint whispers threaded through it, sourceless and fleeting. The six children moved closer to the archway and saw it properly for the first time.
The roots were enormous, thicker than the oldest trees in Seaside's forest, twisted together in a knot that formed a perfect arch about ten feet tall.
The bark was deep silver grey, iridescent in the temple light, etched with veins of glowing emerald green that pulsed in slow steady rhythm. The flowers and vines that decorated the rest of the temple also grew on the arch, but more vivid here, more alive, blooming and shifting as though the node fed them with something richer than ordinary soil.
Within the arch, where the far wall of the temple should have been visible, there was only mist. Swirling, opaque, shimmering with emerald light, pulsing with that same slow heartbeat.
Grey stared at it and felt a pulling sensation again. He had grown up around animals his entire life and knew how to read the quality of attention something directed at you.
The children who had not qualified were escorted out quietly, the heavy doors closing behind them. Only Six remained.
Priestess Kim gave a single nod.
One by one they stepped forward and disappeared into the mist until only Grey and Lysa remained.
Lysa turned to look at him. She was quiet for a moment in the way that meant she was deciding something.
Since his flame had burned gold at the edges and then vanished, she had not said a word about it. He had not brought it up either. They had stood side by side through the rest of the instructions in a silence that was slightly different from their usual one.
Then she smiled. Small and genuine, the kind she didn't hand out often.
"Good luck, Bird Brain."
She stepped into the mist and was gone.
Grey stood alone in front of the arch.
He let himself have a moment. The temple was quiet. The emerald mist pulsed in front of him. He thought about the two flames he had seen burning in the bowl. White and gold.
He thought about the fact that he was about to walk into a place he knew almost nothing about to find a creature he had not prepared for in any meaningful way.
The honest truth was that he was nervous. Not cliff-ledge nervous. Something deeper than that.
But underneath the nerves was something else. Something he recognised from the forest, from those moments when a new animal appeared at the tree line and held his gaze and neither of them moved and the world went quiet and waiting.
Curiosity. Real and bone-deep.
He wanted to see what was in there and he stepped forward into the mist.
Within the mist Grey could feel a palpable energy field emanating from it. Passing through felt like stepping through a wall of static-charged, cool water. A slight resistance, then a sudden rush of tingling sensation.
A moment later, he found himself floating through a colourful tunnel, images he couldn't comprehend appeared from time to time. An invisible force carried him through the tunnel at an incredible speed.
The tunnel came to an end without warning. Light hit him all at once and he shut his eyes.
When he opened them he was standing on the crest of a mountain, and for several seconds he simply forgot to think as a stunning scenery came into view.
Trees, impossibly vast, their trunks wider than houses, their canopies vanishing into a sky that was not a sky. Above him, was an endless mesmerizing visage of swirling colourful auroras that rolled across the heavens in slow rivers of green and purple and burning gold, moving with the weight of something enormous and alive. The sun seemed to be absent and yet it was as bright as midday.
The atmosphere shimmered around him in an unnatural gleam and fog permeated the air but he could still see perfectly. Glowing, liquid-light streams and rivers meandered through the landscape snaking their way across the world unopposed. The smell of petrichor and ozone hung in the air.
Grey stood on the mountain and looked at all of it.
"So this is what I was missing," he said quietly.
He noticed he was alone up here. The others had been scattered to separate corners of the Heartlands. No Lysa. No familiar faces. Just him and a week to find something worth bonding with for the rest of his life.
He could work with that.
After taking in the scenery, he pondered on what course of action to take - or at least tried to - when he heard a cawing sound.
A shadow suddenly covered him and he looked up to find more than a dozen birds soaring across the cloudless sky and tearing their way through the harmless fog. As if on cue, the sounds and cries from several beasts resounded and appeared, running about as though they were suddenly let loose.
They all seemed different from each other and Grey couldn't even identify any of the creatures he was witnessing, however they looked similar. The Eidos appeared as semi-corporeal, luminous forms of the beasts they once were, but idealized and more archetypal.
Their forms were translucent, with their internal structure visible, a swirling core of energy that pulsed in rhythm with their temperament. Their size also differed from small, darting orbs of light to colossal forms capable of causing destruction with just the flick of a tail.
Grey watched them from above, then started climbing down. It took only minutes to reach the base, he felt lighter and faster than ever before.
He jogged across the valley floor toward a flock of bird-shaped Eidos that had settled in the distance.
He was still a good way off when every beast in his line of sight turned to look at him at exactly the same moment.
It wasn't threatening, but it was certainly unnerving. Dozens of luminous eyes tracking him steadily, patiently, as though they already knew something about him that he didn't.
Grey slowed to a walk.
However, the gaze on him intensified and he was starting to feel nervous.
He veered toward the wide river to his right and crouched at the bank, partly to think and partly because he had a growing suspicion he wanted to confirm.
He looked down into the water.
His body was translucent, internal structure faintly visible through his skin, something like slow light tracing the lines of his bones. He raised a hand and watched the glow shift with the movement.
And at his core, burning quietly, were two flames.
One white. One gold.
The white one he understood, or at least could place within the context of what had happened in the temple. But the golden one sat beside it burning with exactly the same size and intensity, in a colour he had never once encountered in any fragment of any lesson he had half-attended in his life.
He sat back from the bank and stared at his own reflection.
"What the hell is this?" he said.
The Spirit Beasts that had been quiet all along watching him suddenly moved.
Grey looked up. Every beast he could see, on land, in the air, moving through the fog between the trees, had stopped looking and started moving. All of them rushing towards him at breakneck speed that the ground rumbled under their feet.
Grey quickly stood up and turned around to face them. He didn't know if spirits could feel heat but at this moment, he was sweating buckets.
"I told her that we were going to die. Goddammit!"