The subtle smile on the Chief's face was not hard to miss. Old, stern-faced, smelling faintly of smoke and herbs like always.
But there was something different in his eyes today, relief so deep it looked almost like pain.
Grey was glad to see it. The Chief smiled rarely these days and it suited his face when he did, softened the weather-beaten lines of it into something warmer.
Grey opened his mouth to say something and found his face heading toward the ground instead, his legs giving way beneath him as he slammed chin-first into the hard stone floor, pain spreading through his skull like wildfire.
'What is going on,' he screamed inwardly, vision swimming.
The Chief moved fast for a man his age, crossing the distance between them before Grey had fully registered what had happened. Warm hands gripped his shoulders and pulled him upright with a steadiness that suggested the Chief had not entirely forgotten what it meant to be strong.
"Are you alright, Little Grey?" His tone carried worry he wasn't bothering to conceal.
Grey grabbed his own head with both hands to stop the spinning. "Y-Yeah. I think so. Just a little vertigo. My brain thinks I'm still in spirit form."
Aside from the splitting headache he wasn't bleeding, so it was probably fine.
He could already feel the difference between what he had been and what he was now. Heavy and real again.
The ache in his knees, the roughness of the stone under his palms, the dryness clinging to his throat. Physical sensations rushing back all at once like a tide after a long drought.
Even the smell of the temple incense felt sharper than it had when he first walked in this morning, more present, more insistent.
Had it really only been this morning? The cliff and Lysa and the horn and the procession through the village and the temple doors opening inward and the spirit flame test and the root node and all of it?
It felt like a different life.
'It basically was,' he thought.
"Let's go," the Chief said softly, steadying him with a hand at his back. "Everyone is waiting. You took longer than the others and we almost started without you."
Grey blinked. 'Right, the celebration.' He had forgotten all about it.
Feasting and drums and the whole village gathered and loud about it. He wasn't usually drawn to that kind of thing under any circumstances, and his circumstances right now included a splitting headache and a Great Titan sleeping somewhere behind his ribcage.
He had a strong feeling the Chief would not accept any version of him trying to disappear quietly. Not tonight.
He pressed his hand briefly to his chest before standing. Kaz was quiet inside him, curled in the small warm space behind his ribs, the warmth of it steady and real and unlike anything he had ever felt before.
'It actually happened,' he thought. 'All of it.'
The horde and the forest and the chasm and the chains. Every single ridiculous thing that happened today was real. And now there's a two-hundred-metre bat sleeping inside my chest like it owns the place.'
Which, technically, it did.
The Chief pulled him gently to his side and wrapped an arm around his shoulders before Grey could think of a polite way to object.
Together they stepped out of the temple doors and into the evening air.
The whole village erupted.
Cheers. Laughter. Shouts overlapping from every direction. Drums pounding somewhere near the cooking fires, deep and rhythmic, the sound of them rolling across the square and bouncing off the huts on the far side.
The smell of roasted meat, wine and burning wood filled the clearing all at once, overwhelming him after the deep quiet of the temple hall.
Grey squinted against the sudden noise, the warmth of all those bodies and voices and fires pressing against him from every side.
Every child who had gone through the rite stood in a loose line in the center of the village square, each one glowing faintly with fresh spirit energy, the new bond still bright and visible at the surface of them.
Parents cried openly. Old women clapped rhythmically with the drums. The younger children jumped and shouted like this was a festival rather than something sacred, which Grey supposed it was.
Both things at once.
The Chief raised Grey's hand high. "He returns!"
More cheers, louder than before.
Grey winced. He had never liked being the center of attraction and a head wound was not improving the experience.
'One day,' he thought, 'just once, I would like something to happen to me without an audience.'
The other children descended on him the moment the Chief stepped away to speak with the elders.
"Grey! What did you get?"
"Did you almost die?"
"I saw a fire wolf!"
"I bonded with a river eel!"
One by one they showed off their beasts, tiny shapes formed of mist or faint light hovering above their palms like proud little trophies.
A chubby stone tortoise that blinked slowly and looked deeply unimpressed by everything.
A bright-tailed flame lizard that kept singeing its owner's sleeve.
A long transparent eel twisting through the air like it was still underwater, trailing sparks of pale blue light behind it.
Each child grinned like they had swallowed the sun, performing for every set of eyes close enough to watch.
Grey smiled along with them.
He had nothing against any of them personally, not really, not when he looked at it honestly.
Most of them had spent years treating him like a punchline, but standing here in the square watching them glow with genuine happiness, the particular uncomplicated joy of children who had done something real and knew it, he found he couldn't summon much resentment.
They were twelve years old. They had earned it tonight. They were allowed to be proud of it.
Besides. He had a Titan sleeping inside his chest. He could afford to be generous.
"What about you?" Toma asked, eyes bright and slightly competitive. "What did you get?"
Grey hesitated for just a moment. The truth was out of the question. Even if he wanted to explain it, which he didn't, he wouldn't know where to begin.
The beginning involved falling off a cliff into a realm beneath the Heartlands, befriending an ancient imprisoned bat god, breaking a divine covenant, and promising a mysterious green-haired woman imprisoned in a mountain that he would come back to free her too.
None of that would land well at a village celebration. None of that would land well anywhere.
"A sound bat," he said. "Elite beast. A small one."
The lie came out smooth and uncomplicated, the kind that sounds true because it is almost true.
He shaped a tiny echo of Kaz's presence into a flicker of shadow above his palm. A small bat silhouette, just dark enough to be visible, that fluttered once deliberately and then dissolved.
The children gasped. A few of the parents nearby turned to look. Elite beasts were rare enough to be impressive without being so extraordinary that anyone would start asking the kind of questions he wasn't ready to answer. It was exactly the right size of lie, not too small, not too large, the kind you could carry comfortably.
"Lucky bastard," Toma muttered, with genuine feeling.
Grey laughed weakly. His chest was tight in a way that had nothing to do with Kaz. If they knew the truth, if any of them knew even a fragment of it, the celebration would turn into something considerably more complicated than drums and roasted meat.
So he kept smiling.
The night deepened around the square. Drums maintained their rhythm.
Elders told long stories about their own rites from decades past, embellishing freely and competing cheerfully for the most dramatic version of events.
The new Beast Tamers were given garlands of woven leaves and a smear of ash across the forehead to mark the beginning of their training, the same ritual performed in Seaside for as long as anyone could remember.
Grey accepted the garland. He held still for the ash. He ate something someone pressed into his hands without registering what it was.
He laughed when people laughed around him and nodded at the right moments and responded to things said to him with enough accuracy that nobody noticed he was only partially present.
But his attention was somewhere else entirely.
On collapsing mountains and a voice that had sounded like wind through broken reeds.
On green hair lifting in a wind he couldn't feel and eyes the colour of leaves after rain.
On a promise he had made to someone he had known for less than an hour, in a place that was never supposed to exist, to do something nobody had ever done.
'I'll come back,' he had said. As if it were simple. As if returning to the Heartlands after bonding was something with a known method and a reasonable success rate.
He had no idea if it was possible. He had missed the lessons that might have told him.
'Of course I did,' he thought.
He also thought about what Kaz had said right before the world faded. The only human alive who remembers the truth of the Heart's Abyss.
He didn't know what that meant in practical terms yet, didn't have the context to measure it against anything concrete.
But he understood what it implied. Whatever was coming, it was coming for him specifically. And it would not knock politely and wait to be invited in.
The drumming grew louder. Someone nearby let out a long triumphant shout and the crowd answered it. A child chased a flame lizard across the square while its owner ran after both of them apologising.
Grey watched it all and smiled.
When the noise finally became too much he slipped away, quiet and unhurried, with the practised ease of someone who had spent years becoming easy to overlook when he wanted to be.
He knew exactly where to go.