The rains came harder the following season.
Not in fury, but in weight — endless days of water, of soaked ground and swollen rivers. The Ayruam longhouses grew dark and musty, their reed walls heavy with damp. Children played in mud; hunters returned with empty hands. The sound of the rain became a second heartbeat for the village, a steady, relentless rhythm.
Inside the longhouse of the chief, the fire hissed against the moisture, refusing to burn strong. Ma'kua sat cross-legged, sharpening a bone blade. His eyes were distant, fixed not on the blade, but on something deeper — a thought, a memory.
Iwame added wood to the fire, her hands chapped from the cold water.
"He's not ready," she said, not for the first time.
"He is more ready than I was," Ma'kua replied.
Outside, Arã balanced barefoot on a slippery log, guiding younger boys across a flooded path. He moved with calm, issuing no commands, only leading by step and glance. He helped the smallest boy over, then turned back without hesitation.
"He watches," Ma'kua said. "Even when others sleep."
"He feels too much," Iwame said quietly. "I see it in him. The pain of others—he carries it."
"Then he must learn to carry it in silence."
She said nothing more.
The next morning, the elders lit the fire-pit beside the sacred mound. Smoke mixed with mist as boys from five longhouses were called.
The mothers did not speak. The fathers did not comfort.
Only the elders spoke, their chants old and sharp, like flint striking bone.
One by one, the boys were given a clay token. On each, a different symbol: claw, fang, feather, flame. Arã's token bore a swirl — the mark of wind and unseen paths.
Takarê lifted it before the crowd.
"This child walks where others do not."
The elders echoed: "He walks where others do not."
Arã stepped forward, feet sinking into wet earth.
No words were given to him. Only the path.
Through the reeds, past the hanging moss, into the grove where the old trees leaned in to whisper their secrets.
And behind him, the storm began again.
The grove was older than memory.
Massive roots twisted up from the earth like sleeping serpents, forming thrones for the elders and a prison for the wind. Light barely touched the ground, filtered through thick layers of vine and leaf. The air smelled of sap, blood, and something older — a silence that listened.
The boys stood in a line, their torsos bare, mud smeared over their arms and chests. Their breath misted in the cold air. A few wept quietly. One retched behind a bush. No one mocked them. Fear had no name in the grove — only echoes.
The elders circled. Each carried a pouch of sharpened fishbone needles. Their fingers were stained from decades of marking flesh, and their faces bore the very scars they now prepared to give. Their chants were low and steady, vibrating in the bones of the listeners.
Takarê raised his hand. "Begin."
A drumbeat — slow and hollow — began in the distance. Each beat marked the passage of a life once known, the birth of a pain not yet forgotten.
The first boy stepped forward. He knelt. An elder crouched and began the work. A line across the chest. A curl around the shoulder. A downward point between the ribs.
He gasped. He screamed. He was carried away.
Another boy followed. Then another. The grove bore witness to suffering as a mother watches a storm: unflinching, unmoved.
And then: Arã.
He stepped forward like a shadow. No trembling. No noise.
He knelt.
The first prick of bone into his skin was slow, deliberate. Blood welled and smeared. An elder hesitated — just for a heartbeat — then continued.
The design was unlike the others. The elders did not confer, but each seemed to know: lines like wind chasing itself, spirals like birds in descent. The shapes mimicked no clan totem, no warrior crest — only storm-signs.
Arã did not cry.
The chants deepened. Smoke rose. The grove thickened with the scent of burning resin. Insects whined in the shadows, as if drawn by the blood. Still, the boy sat.
A second elder joined, then a third. They worked in silence, hands practiced. The patterns crossed his chest, curved along his ribs, and curled behind his neck like a coiled serpent waiting to strike.
When the patterns were done, the bark was brought forward. Shredded from the pain-tree, soaked in the black-sting sap of the uraká.
A test not only of endurance — but of stillness.
The strips were pressed into his wounds.
The burn was immediate. It seared down to the bone. One of the younger boys had bitten through his own tongue under the same torment.
Arã exhaled — once, long and slow. The pain danced in his veins like fire spirits.
Takarê leaned closer, whispering something not for the others to hear.
The boy did not respond.
But something in the trees shifted.
As if the forest had heard its name.
Then, for the first time in generations, a branch fell from the sacred tree at the grove's center — dead wood, dropping into living earth.
The elders stopped.
Takarê only nodded.
"Let the pain mark him," he said. "Let the grove remember."
Each stroke of the bone needle told a truth. Not a spoken one, but a truth etched in blood and will. One elder whispered as he worked:
"This is the line of your path — uncertain, but chosen."
Another elder, his hands steady despite age, pressed a spiral near Arã's shoulder.
"This is the eye that sees beyond — even when shut."
With every mark, Arã felt the pain settle not just on his skin but deep within — like fire stitching lessons into flesh.
The air grew heavy with incense, a blend of crushed flower resin and powdered bone. The chanting of the elders swelled and sank like a tide. They spoke in the old tongue, the one only the grove knew well — older than war, older than the tribe's name.
The other boys groaned in their sleep or murmured feverishly, their dreams tangled in the agony of the ritual. Arã remained silent, his hands resting on his knees, his breaths measured.
One by one, elders stepped forward to add a single line, a single wound. It was rare, almost taboo, for so many to mark one child — but none questioned it.
The lines on his body were beginning to resemble a map.
A map not to a place.
But to a storm.
The bark strips came next. Dipped in a mix of crushed ants, roots, and sap from the yakurá tree, it seared the skin when bound.
The assistants wrapped the first strip around his chest, pinning the wounds closed. The second went around his arms, where the nerves ran deep.
One elder reached for his face — hesitating, for the cheekbone mark was not taken lightly. Takarê nodded.
With a blade of obsidian, blacker than the night sky, he made the shallow cut.
A stormline.
"This," he said softly, "is not for strength. It is for memory."
As the sap soaked the wound, Arã's vision blurred. Not from pain. From something else.
Images — not of spirits, but of fire. Of thunder on dry stone. Of a shape in the smoke.
He blinked, and it was gone.
Night fell.
By the dim torches set around the grove, the elders chanted.
"Bone breaks. Bark burns. But spirit stands."
And Arã stood.
He stood longer than any before him had.
When the ritual ended, no horn was blown. No fires were lit.
The boys, now cloaked in new scars and silence, were led away to the shadow huts — a place beyond the village's center, where those in pain went to heal or remember. They lay on palm-woven mats, eyes wide, limbs still.
But Arã did not sleep.
He sat beneath the open lattice of the shelter's roof, his head tilted toward the trees. The sky above was clear for the first time in days. Stars blinked through the canopy like watching eyes.
Something moved beyond the treeline — too large for a monkey, too slow for a cat.
He did not fear it.
The pain in his limbs had become background. The fire in his skin had merged with something deeper. A rhythm. A pulse. Like thunder beneath earth.
Takarê appeared without sound beside the shelter's post.
"You feel them now, don't you?" the elder asked.
Arã did not answer. But his gaze was fixed on the dark.
"They watch all who bleed in silence," Takarê said. "But not all are watched back."
A moment passed.
"Why me?" Arã finally asked.
"Because you did not ask to be chosen," the elder replied. "And still, you are."
The wind passed through the grove again, but this time it did not whisper.
It sang.
In the morning, the village gathered to receive the boys.
Each stepped forward, displaying their wounds, now covered in sacred ash and bound with woven bands. The tribe chanted their names. Their mothers offered food. Their fathers clasped their shoulders.
But when Arã stepped forward, the crowd fell silent.
The patterns on his body were not just marks. They were language.
And no one, not even the oldest among them, could read it fully.
Iwame wept softly.
Ma'kua said nothing. He only looked to the sky.
Where a single black hawk circled.
Alone.
And far above the storm.