The boy fell to his knees, gagging on the pain. His hands insisted on working, however, and drew the blade around in an arc through his innards.

He fell forwards.

When he came to, the perfect pitch-black and dark teal dawn was shattered into a million clouds in a cornflower sky. They hung low, each its own separate entity, but still very close together. They littered the blue, interrupted it, destroyed it utterly in their whiteness.

He closed his eyes a moment, took in a shuddering breath. He had failed again.

His hand groped questioningly across his skin, unmarred aside from the sticky dried blood where the knife blade had bitten.

But no mark left itself on his skin. Not even a partially healed wound. Not even a raised scar, newly healed.

He shrugged on his shirt, the blood still wet enough to stain the inside of it with red blossoms. He didn't know any more than anyone else might. Even Envisionment had not been able to understand when he had first explained the vision, the compulsion to follow it, and the utter failure.

Beneath him, three monument lions circled, prowling, their smooth coats flecked with black points rippling over hardened bones and half-starved muscles. They prowled in circles around the pedastol he had climbed, weaving in and out and around each other. He stared down at them, wondering how he would get passed them.

And then he noticed it.

Hidden in the bushes growing scraggily up through broken pavement lay a single tawny paw. The boy followed what appeared to be a twister's path from where he sat perched to the crumbling wall behind the paw and bush. The splatter of blood shot up the wall for at least five times his height. He stared up at it, scratched at his scalp under the matted cords of hair growing out of it.

That wasn't nearly as strange as the crows and ravens and buzzards that were mysteriously missing from nearby. He stared out into the sky, which swarmed with butterflies, sporting ragged orange and black wings.

Several were sipping the blood from the wall.

He stared around. The wind had somehow cleared debris and rocks, shifting them largely from how they had been the morning he stabbed himself. All around him, the dust was pushed far, headed away from the pedastol on which he sat perched.

He was trying to figure it out, trying to understand, when en masse, the butterflies swarmed away in a loud flapping. They danced around him for a moment, brushing their tattered wings up against his sunburned skin. He stared at them as they swarmed him, seeing the wings so torn that he could not understand how they flew.

He watched them, hundreds of them, and was wondering where they lived, where they were headed, except that a series of whooping screams erupted from the alleys. The monument lions startled, and a pack of youths, the hunters of one of the tribes of the city, rushed them, killing them all within seconds.

"We'll feast tonight!" they shouted, binding the paws of the lions to sticks which they carried between them. "Heroes, all of us!"

"Hey!" one of them shouted, pointing up at him. "Come down now, it's safe!"

The boy stared down at them. But they were elders. He had no choice but to obey them by tribal ethics.

One threw his arm around his shoulders when he climbed down. "Alright, boy?" the man asked.

The boy nodded.

"They chase you up there?" he asked.

"I climbed up this morning. At dawn."

"Vanger's balls!" one of the other hunters cursed, coming upon the paw behind the bush in a search for any tracks of an escaped monument lion. "Come look at this!"

Everyone moved over to look. The boy didn't particularly want to see, but the hunter's arm around his shoulder guided him over. What was left of the monument lion lay behind the bush, a hundred million little stones embedded in its flesh, its skull caved in, bones obviously broken, and a huge cut across its body that spurted blood onto the tangle of wall behind it.

He stared in awe. A portion of him wanted to be ill.

The hunter's arm fell from his shoulders.

He ran.

His breath burned in his throat, and he staggered to a stop beneath an arc that had once, probably, been an old doorway. It seared through the solid wall that had sprung up from the ground.

His breath choked down his throat, and he stared around. He wasn't sure why he had bolted so quickly. He had no reason that he knew. The dead lion had not scared him so much, but something in his chest had incited him to run regardless. Just now, countless miles later, did it incite him to stop running.

He collapsed beneath the arch, perching on a fallen stone, staring around.

His vision swam, the brown and grey colors swirling and bleeding through the cornflower and fluff sky. He was sitting still, but the horizon lept and jerked about endlessly. He gasped for breath, his tongue dry, parched, swollen.

He felt the heat of the sun drain from his face. He drew in deep breaths, struggling, heaving every breath through his lungs.

His hearing buzzed, filled with the sound of rushing wings, whispered, broken voices. They swelled into the audible range and then fell deep beneath the sound of the wings.

He saw his own hands crushing the poison, saw his own hands gripping the mortar, the pestle. He saw the leaves, saw the poison soar across his own hands towards his face.

He choked, gagged, and vomitted. His vision settled significantly.

He felt tears in his eyes, and he wiped them away with the back of his grimy hand. He wiped at his mouth, his tongue singing in the bile. His breath came shuddering, and he stared around, listening.

Nothing.

He heaved and staggered to his feet. He stared up at the sun, around at the shadows. If he was where he thought he was, he had plenty of time.

He staggered off into the streets. Plenty of time to get unlost, to get back to the tribe, back to home.

Envisionment had sought him out, and why, he couldn't begin to know. The boy stared at the hunchbacked form of Envisionment, keeper of all the ways of Tyler, keeper of childhood and life and exuberance and joy. He watched the old man, such an irony of position, lean on the old knotted wood of his staff. The feathers and baubles jangled in his cords of hair, and the missing teeth stood out no more than the ones that still remained in his blackening gums.

He was a different animal in the daylight, the boy realized. Outside the cave with its low light with the impression of mysticism and right by deceit, he was a man as any other, if a bit more a child at heart than any other.

Tyler was the patron of all children before they completed their coming of age. He guided them through it, via his shaman, Envisionment. Youths from all across the city would journey passed the monument lions and the subway bears to become men and women according to his law. And afterwards, his sway on them was spent.

"You failed again," Envisionment told him as he approached.

The boy stared out across the city. He was always climbing, always striving to reach higher, for some reason he knew not. "But I have my next task."

"I can give you an easier one, boy," the shaman told him. "I can tell you to murder a lion, to watch tattered wings take flight. I can give you a thousand riddles to solve in an instant."

The boy considered this. He received no name until he became a man. He would be 'boy' forever after if he continued to fail. What shame, at earning sixteen years and failing forever your duty to your tribe.

But his duty to his tribe would lead to his death. Reason shouted out beyond blind faith.

Did the shaman know his doubting heart? Did the shaman plot to kill him?

Then why, why could he not die? He was using every conceivable manner of the Old Ones for the death of self, and he failed every time, destruction rising up in one form or another.

He was just now beginning to see the pattern. Every time he killed himself, he survived, yes. But every time, seven, now, something else lay in ruins besides himself. He survived. Largely unscathed.

His fingers traced the small faint blossoms of blood that had seeped through his shirt.

"No other riddle would be worth solving," he said quietly.

Envisionment laughed, a high cackle, as befit the representative of a trickster god. "Well spoken, well spoken," the shaman insisted. "I seek the answer as eagerly, as hungrily as you, boy."

The boy said nothing. Inwardly, he mocked the shaman. No one seeks the answer more eagerly than I, he thought bitterly.

Envisionment left him. The boy stared out across the city.

Once, when he first knew the doubt in his heart for what it was, he wondered what would happen should he die before he became a man. Dead children went to Tyler for the safekeeping of their souls. Dead adults were sent to the domains of their deities. Vanger for the warriors and hunters. Madison for those who provided food to the city. Livish for the mothers. And a thousand others, depending on the season of birth, the season of death, the age, wherever. And the shaman of the deity of choice presided over these funerals.

But if one doubts them all, then surely, surely one goes somewhere else when one dies.

Or does one go nowhere?