Morning in Abonia was never woken by sunlight. It was smothered awake by a humidity so thick it felt almost solid.

  Rohan lay pressed into a deep mat of humus, his nose buried against the cold, wet black earth. The smell of the soil — a mingling of sweet decay from rotting leaves and the raw, metallic tang of unseen insects — bored its way deep into his lungs. Above him, the great Dipterocarp trees rose like enormous green umbrellas punching through the clouds, shredding the sky into fragments of deep, unsettled ash-grey.

  The moisture here had weight. It hung like an invisible, half-transparent gel, pressing down on every living thing. Rohan could feel tiny beads of sweat creeping slowly down his spine, blending with the insect-repelling herbs and oils smeared across his skin into something sticky and itching — but he did not move.

  He was waiting. As a hunter, Rohan knew well that in Abonia, patience was deadlier than any blade.

  About thirty paces ahead, beneath the sprawling roots of an enormous camphor tree, a young moon bear was absorbed in its work. With black claws curved like iron hooks, it tore frantically at a length of long-rotted, blackened deadwood. Hidden inside were the fat, pale termite larvae it had been after — and the soft crunching of its feeding rang out with startling clarity in the dead silence of the jungle.

  Rohan's gaze locked onto the pale marking on the young bear's chest. It was the sign that the god Aruan had left upon his messengers — a crescent of milky white, like a moon pressed into fur. In the legends of the Ezan, the moon bear was the Eye of God, wandering the forest. To hunt one alone and take its hide was the highest mark a young Ezan could earn: the passage from fledgling to hunter.

  "Don't rush, Rohan. Wait for it to lift its head. Wait for it to offer you that crescent."

  His brother's voice murmured inside him, low and steady as the monsoon wind that swept across the sacred mountain Aru Abaru. His brother — the man the tribe called Iron Mountain — had always been able to see, at a single glance, the restless impulsiveness running through Rohan's blood. In his brother's eyes, Rohan was quick and able, but still lacking the deep-rooted stillness of an ancient tree.

  For this day, Rohan had lain hidden along the border of Ali Antan for three full days. He had endured the needle-like bites of bloodthirsty insects, and the kind of solitude at night that could drive a man to madness. He had not dared to light a fire, surviving only on bitter wild fruit.

  The young bear stilled.

  It seemed to have caught something wrong in the air — a faint disturbance. Its round black ears twitched with sudden alertness, and then, slowly, it reared up onto its haunches, exposing that milky crescent fully to the thin thread of light filtering down through the canopy.

  In that instant, the pale marking blazed. It was as though a solitary moon had risen in the depths of this dark jungle.

  Rohan moved.

  He made no cry. He did not even crack a single dry leaf. He was like a shadow launched from the darkness — his movement so fluid it seemed impossible. His toes gripped the earth, each step landing precisely on solid root. Years of training had made his body act before his mind could think: hips dropping low, weight shifting forward, the plain iron blade in his right hand carving a cold pale arc along the line of the wind.

  The young bear spun in panic. In its black pupils, it saw the reflection of a figure daubed in grey tree-sap.

  The smell of death.

  On instinct, it swung a heavy left paw, dragging a gust of rank air. Rohan dropped impossibly low, sliding almost flat against the ground, and his battered blade found the tendon behind the bear's left hind leg with precise and brutal accuracy.

  "HRAAAUGH—!"

  The short, anguished cry had barely escaped when Rohan was already rising, his left hand wrenching a grip into the coarse fur atop the bear's skull, his hunting knife darting like a striking serpent — up through the gap beneath the jaw, straight and vertical, into the creature's brain.

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  The strength went out of it all at once.

  The young bear's heavy body hit the mud with a dull, wet crash, sending a ring of black sludge spreading outward. Rohan did not cheer. He drew back his blade and retreated several paces, watching in taut silence. Only when those round ears had stopped trembling entirely did he let out a long, slow breath, and allow his lungs to drink in the copper-thick air.

  "I give thanks for Aruan's gift. I give thanks to the sacred mountain for receiving this soul."

  Rohan knelt beside the body and murmured the words with bowed head. For the Ezan, a hunt was a sacred exchange — a ritual of atonement for the sins of their ancestors. He had taken the life of a god's emissary; now he was bound to carry its essence to the gods as an offering.

  He drew his skinning knife with practiced ease and pressed it carefully along the edge of the bear's chest. This required absolute concentration. If he severed the crescent marking, the offering would lose much of its worth. With a soft, tearing sound of skin parting from flesh, he lifted a complete hide from the carcass — milky crescent intact — and held it in his hands.

  Rohan raised it above his head. The wild pride of a young man broke across his face.

  "Brother… you have to admit it now, don't you?"

  He spoke to no one, his eyes burning with a hunger for recognition. He could already picture it — walking back into the great Longhouse, crossing the wide communal veranda, laying the crescent hide before the chieftain with every pair of eyes on him. He could already see the envy twisting the faces of the boys who had always mocked him for being reckless.

  But most of all, he thought of his brother. That man built like a mountain, who always said Rohan's eyes still carried the lightness of wild grass — that he had never seen real blood. Well. Blood was in his hands now, warm and thick.

  Rohan worked quickly, sectioning the bear meat and binding it in tough lengths of vine. He shouldered the heavy load, tensed his legs, and began pushing fast through the dense jungle.

  On the way home, his heart was so light it nearly lifted him off the ground.

  He passed through the secret mountain trail choked with parasitic vines, leapt across a churning stream. In his mind, he sketched the evening ahead: the Abonia River would be painted sacred orange by the sinking sun. Smoke would be curling from the Longhouse, men sharpening their spears beside the hearth-fire, women weaving rattan baskets along the veranda, talking over the harvest season.

  Perhaps his brother would, for once, let him have an extra bowl of Tuak — that potent rice wine, fermented and sharp as fire going down, and yet it made you feel as if your very soul had taken to dancing on the winds of the sacred mountain.

  "What will he say?" Rohan imagined his brother's sun-bronzed face. "He'll frown first — checking whether my cuts were clean. And then… he'll put his hand on my shoulder. Yes. He'll press that calloused, heavy hand on my shoulder and tell me: Rohan, you are a man now."

  The thought quickened his pace. He didn't even notice the ache building in his ankles.

  But when he crested the last ridge, the one hidden beneath enormous Tree Ferns, and the view opened wide before him — Rohan froze.

  His toes dug hard into the mud. Every hair on his body rose as though struck by lightning.

  The wind.

  The wind of Abonia always carried the coolness of the forest, the fragrance of the earth. But in the wind now was something else entirely — something deeply, sickly wrong.

  The sweet-rancid smell of fresh fat scorched at high heat. The sharp crack of dry timber splitting in a fire's roar. And the scent that Rohan, in all his years of hunting, had least wanted to ever know — dense, unmistakable, impossible to ignore.

  Fresh human blood.

  Rohan wrenched his gaze up toward the valley floor.

  At the bend of the Abonia River, where the great wooden Longhouse should have stretched along the bank like a sleeping dragon — it was burning. The Longhouse of the Ezan, built upon hundreds of great ironwood pillars, raised across generations by countless pairs of hands — it was groaning, and falling, slowly, into the fire.

  No laughter. No smell of Tuak.

  Only the sound carried on the wind, shredded as it reached him — the wailing of voices, and the bright, brittle clash of blades.

  "Brother…"

  Rohan's voice broke. The crescent hide — his treasure, his proof — slipped from his numb fingers and dropped into the black mud below, instantly fouled.

  He stared at the burning wreckage, eyes blurring. But in the instant before he ran, something almost animal seized him. He bent sharply and wrenched the wet, mud-soaked hide back out of the mire with a rough, desperate hand. It was his gift for his brother. It was the iron proof of his passage into manhood. Without it, he felt, he was still only the child who needed protecting — unfit to enter that field of slaughter.

  He drove the muddied hide under the vine cord at his waist, pressing it hard against his skin. The cold mud soaked through immediately, cold as a dead man's hand.

  Then Rohan dropped the heavy load of bear meat from his back, and like a beast finally unchained, he tore forward — branches slashing his face, a cry tearing from his throat — hurtling toward that burning hell below.

  And in his eyes, once clear — the last trace of a boy's innocence, stained along with the crescent marking, went out.