When he had come to, he felt sated in the appetite, and no different than before. He had brought the herbs to the shaman of Kursh, deity of the plants, and the shaman had confirmed their toxicity.

He drowned himself.

The ropes untied themselves and he drifted to shore, only to be awoken by a gull tapping on his head.

He stabbed himself in the heart. He came to, covered in butterflies.

He arranged for himself to be crushed, standing under precariously perched boulders and pulling them down on himself. He awoke on top of them, not a bruise to show for it.

Other youths of his own age were given their coming of age ceremonies. They became men. He remained a boy.

The other boys, now men with names, but none whom the boy cared to know, danced around the fires into the night. Envisionment, relieved of their difficulty as he passed them to their own patrons, their own duties, had time to talk to those who still remained under his wings.

He approached the boy after talking to several family units, several loners, and several clusters.

The loners should have provided company for the boy, but the rule of loners is that they must keep alone, to themselves. Otherwise they became clusters.

Besides, the boy could think of nothing he would say to any of the other loners. They had all probably abandoned their family units long ago, preferring instead to scrape a life by, living hard and dirty and alone.

But perhaps it was his turn to be lectured into hurrying along his rite of passage. Envisionment staggered towards him, took a seat on the cold and hard ground beside him.

"I have been thinking, boy," he said carefully.

The boy said nothing. He waited to hear Envisionment out.

"Obviously, Tyler doesn't want you. The question, therefore, that remains to be answered, is this: Who does?

"In all my life, never have I known something like this to have happened. And never have I known Lighteyelike to have experianced anything of this sort."

"That's reassuring," the boy answered quietly. "At least I'm not alone in my insistance in remaining perplexed." There was not a hint of irony or sarcasm in his tone. Every word he said, he meant.

He stared into the fire. He hadn't had a vision for burning himself in months. Soon again, perhaps.

Envisionment, however, refused to let him get lost in thought. He hunkered down beside the boy. "Any other child, any other man, such actions would have killed. You, time and again, survive. Somehow."

"Yes," the boy agreed. What's your point?

"I've been thinking on your duty. And I have been consulting the records. Tyler's shaman knows all the duties, all the requirements of the shamans of the other deities. All three hundred and forty-three of them, the shamans of Tyler memorize, keep well-versed in their minds, for every generation, a new one is born to replace the old ones. The duties of these shamans are endlessly more difficult than any other youths'. Even the warriors, who must kill and clean and become a subway bear by themselves, even they have easier duties than the future shamans."

The boy stared at Envisionment. "And?" he asked quietly.

The shaman leaned over to touch his lips the the boy's ear as he whispered words from his gnarled face. "Just what do you think is harder than killing yourself if you refuse to die?"

The boy turned to the shaman, stared at him a long time in the flickering firelight. The new men and women of the tribe were dancing around the blaze, a rite of passage into adulthood. He, however, was still here, still a boy, still sitting it out. "I'm not a shaman," he said quietly. "Tyler is simply playing a trick on me, because I no longer believe."

Envisionment laughed quietly, but it was still a harsh and degrading sound. "You are not the first, boy," he said quietly, watching the dancers around the fire. "All shamans except those of Tyler lose their faith. Every. Single. One. When they know which god has called them, then and only then does their faith return to them."

The boy stared at Envisionment, watching his gnarled face in the flickering of shadows. "And how will I know which god calls me to service?" he asked, testing the waters of this revelation. It couldn't be too wrong. It felt more right in his blood than the thought of being a teacher or a hunter for his days. Still. It was too much to even think of. He was no shaman.

"Leave the city. Think about things for a few days. Abandon your duty to Tyler, and think more on your duty to whatever god calls your name. But be warned. Sometimes the call is merely a whisper."

The boy blinked a moment. "I'm no shaman," he said firmly. "Shamans have magic, they can reach out and twist the world with a thought. I'm not a shaman."

Envisionment laughed again. "Not all of them," he said. "I can only hear your heart speak. I cannot lift you to the air as one of Engel might, nor can I bleed a lion in an eyeblink, as one of Vanger. However, no shaman gains his powers before he passes the deity's tests. It would be too dangerous, having a disloyal flaunt a god's powers. Too dangerous, too messy. No. Powers come after, and never in the way or time that one seems to expect. Trust me, boy. Leave the city. Tell Wisdomful you're to go missing by my command, and when you come back, you tell me what god calls you."

The boy was about to protest further, but Envisionment hobbled to his feet, threw his arms wide, and shouted for one of the other youths at the ceremony to come greet him.

Alone again, he stared out into the fire. It was obscured, time and again, by the dances of those now old enough to be named. And he, he was told, commanded no less, to leave the city, to think about things, to abandon his duty.

There was nothing quite so shameful.

It was dark, and he lay curled around another boy, probably no more than half his age. It was how all children slept, after they were old enough to look after themselves. The teachers kept them until they became called to become adults. When the calling came, the lessons were done, and they focused their entire days and nights to the fulfillment of their duties. And then they returned again to the common caverns of the children, where they kept each other warm through the cold nights on the stone floors.

The child who had nestled next to him for warmth made a smallish noise and wiggled before falling back into a deep sleep.

The boy stared around the darkness. He wondered why he was awake. He would talk to Wisdomful tomorrow to alert him that he was leaving the city. He wasn't nervous, he wasn't scared.

But what was it? Why had he awoken?

Had it been a dream? Had some vision come to him?

He considered this. No. No vision had come to him. No dream had chosen to communicate its message to him.

What, then?

In the silence, among the slumbering breaths of the other children, he heard the beating of wings, the distant scream of a beast.

And then he felt the thunder as the earth shook beneath his reclining body.

He pushed himself upright, and the child who had nestled next to him turned over in his sleep. The boy picked his way, tiptoe, through the sleeping children. He pushed aside the flap of skins, and he stepped silently into the bitter night.

His teeth chattered in the cool breeze, and his feet screamed at the chilly dampness beneath them.

And in the distance, far enough away for him to see all of it clearly, a dragon was screaming up at the moon. Two other dragons circled in the sky, blocking out the moon with their silhouettes. One of the flying dragons clung to the tower which had, until the other week, presented the face of Tyler for all the city to see.

And now, dragons were invading the tower.

He was no protector. He was no hunter. He was no warrior.

He ran back inside. And he picked his way clumsily over the sleeping chlidren, and he huddled himself between a tight knot of them.

He closed his eyes, and he willed the dragons to go away.