Eleg followed Aizl and Ovvet, glad to be in motion, and glad to be walking with Aizl. She wondered how much Ovvet had intuited about her desire to see the fire. For Eleg, insight came in short flashes and incomplete information. It was probably the same for Ovvet.

He didn’t act worried about Eleg wanting to observe the fire, though, as she suspected most adults would.

Her cousin Zott skipped beside her. The Pavilion Plateau touched the front of Urmetten, their village, and the hill it was built into, from the north.

From there, the children followed an eastward path into a narrow ravine. It was filled with towerlike rock formations that Aizl loved to climb.

As they approached the ravine from above, they had a view of its twin stony walls zigzagging into the distance, and between them, irregular rock pillars growing like stalks out of the ground.

Another few steps, and they were in the cool, craggy depths with the clear sky above and a network of paths ahead, among the bases of towers. The quiet dialect of the ravine creatures surrounded them. Eleg should come here more often. Maybe with Aizl.

There wasn’t usually much reason to come to the ravine. Its hardy denizens survived without any particular tending from the Urmettians. Nearly everywhere else, the villagers studied the soil, rock, and the water, gleaned insight about the health of their continent, Ervu, and offered whatever service a plant may want from their human hands.

And the gatherer parties didn’t favor the canyon for foraging when richer groves were a short walk away. Gathering for the kitchens was one of the few activities that pulled Eleg away from her hiding places.

“This is the best place to practice climbing!” Aizl said. She dashed ahead, her wavy hair bobbing, pointing out towers she’d scaled and the challenges each posed to even a skilled climber.

Eleg smiled at her enthusiasm and quietly hoped there weren’t too many good climbing towers ahead of their destination. The shapes in the fire wouldn’t wait for Aizl, even if Eleg wanted to.

Ovvet walked more slowly, his long robes dragging on the rocks, and looked back to check that Eleg and Zott were keeping up.
“This is the one!” Aizl rested her hand on an imposing tower, both taller and wider than its neighbors. Its lumpy shape formed natural steps. “Best to climb from this side.”

They scrabbled up with Aizl’s supportive guidance. Ovvet boosted Zott the first step. Eleg stopped on the second to adjust the drawing materials strapped to her side.

After a short but invigorating climb, they sat on the smooth top and gazed out across the expanse.

Aizl spread her arms. “Isn’t it marvelous?”

They were above the surrounding stone pillars, and each was sliced cleanly by the early-afternoon sunlight into a bright section and a deep shadow cast by the canyon walls.

Behind them were the vast hill ranges, with decorative stonework marking the entrances of the carved rooms that made up Urmetten.

On the Pavilion Plateau, which abutted it, small figures were still hanging art. The sacred river of Paclellic, lined with chirp-filled amber-and-yellow foliage, meandered into the valley. Along its banks, groups of visitors to the village made their camps, resting before entering the pavilion for the feast. A distant herd of goats made its way across the grassland, rippling the green around it.
And beyond it all, that fire, looming over so many lives with its tower of black smoke and stark flames. It was partially obscured by the mountain range that it intertwined.

Where it wasn’t obscured, its base was ringed with dead earth and black ash, and gray and yellow liquid leached into the earth in fine rivulets.

In the flames, the jagged shape Eleg had seen was still there, unlike in any of her previous sketches. She unrolled her drawing paper and looked over her shoulder at the others. They were looking the other way, toward the village.

Eleg followed their gaze. The air that filled the canyon was shimmering and changing. Thin tendrils formed, like corn silk blowing in the wind, but made of light or mist. The tendrils drew closer to each other in a bundle and began to cohere in an image.

“Look, it’s Puvvel!” said Ovvet, pointing out the image to Zott. The tendrils formed a cloud with a faintly recognizable expression—not quite a face, and yet it left the sense of looking at one. The expression was of playful excitement.

Zott took a look. “He looks like a cactus today!”

Eleg gave Zott some of her paper and charcoal to draw what he saw. Ervu’s Messengers looked a bit different to everyone, but Zott was still learning his plants and probably hadn’t actually meant a cactus. Aizl reached out a hand toward Puvvel, as if coaxing a butterfly to land on it.

Eleg took a deep breath. The visible presence of Puvvel must mean Ervu’s patterns were especially understandable to humans now—a brief moment of clarity, insight, and connection.

More often, when a Messenger didn’t appear, the land’s signals were mixed. Even then, the village scholars’ gentle lives of peace and study sharpened their ears, trained their eyes, and deepened their understanding, creating a sensitive perception that reached across Ervu and into her perennial workings—through the vibration of the earth, the ripples of the river, and the currents of the air.

It fell to the Urmettians to use their understanding to tend to the ailing land. They led the efforts of Ervu’s many peoples to beat back the fire and evade its effects, to replan their walking routes so they weren’t choked with smoke, and to heal landscapes when they were ravaged by ash.

The village youths had years of study ahead of them to develop their perceptual reach. But Eleg couldn’t wait that long—not when there were questions to be answered about the fire now.