She put so much effort into creating the world! Dancing around among the stars being born and seeming to radiate herself, Arianne was basically exploding with excitement. She was now an Aufandre, meaning she had a universe all to herself to play with. When she finally calmed down a little bit, she relegated the rest of it to her lower levels of consciousness and set to work creating the perfect planet. Arianne threw a couple islands here and there, and then a big continent that she would make sure was only hospitable around the outermost edges to all but the most hardy creatures, and her residence would be smack in the middle of that, a heaven in the center of hell. After creating a perfect little self-contained ecosystem there, she wandered around her world watching the sun rise here, tweaking a forest there, and when intelligent life developed, she walked in their midst: she had missed having someone to talk to! But soon enough she would be able to dance across all the multiverses again.

The Chief Elder would lead the boy deep into the woods, with four other elders and the boy’s mother and father a few paces behind. The mother carried hairs from the head of the girl he was to marry, and the father carried a small boat or other icon to represent what form his son’s career was to take. The Chief Elder carried a dagger, which would be used in the ceremony and then presented to the boy upon his return.

Brendan was very nervous, and so he was hiding curled up on the mat behind the curtain which served as his room. Boys were not allowed to be nervous, or at least show it. Well, maybe boys, but not men, which was what he was getting so emotional about. He wanted to scream, cry, kick something, throw up, speed up time, and was filled with excitement and anticipation all at once. His Passage Ceremony was fast approaching, the day when he would officially become a man according to the customs of the small fishing village he lived in. As the day quickly approached, he noticed more and more that he would miss about childhood, everything from the freedom to play with anyone, or just the freedom to play, to the kind of food that was eaten. Everything would be so structured and definite after his Passage Ceremony!

But what Brendan was really worried about was the fact that adults were all so boring! He remembered his older cousin’s Passage Ceremony, just shy of a year ago. After being gone for five skypaints, he returned the perfect example of an adult in the community, extremely boring with no real aspirations other than to do his job, get married (he proposed less than a month after his return; the longer you were unmarried after becoming an adult the more disgraced you were, but there was no memory of man not proposing for more than two months after the Ceremony; a girls’ wedding was her equivalent of a Passage Ceremony) and have as many kids as possible, and he refused to talk about it. No adult ever talked about it; if it was mentioned they immediately changed the subject or pretended not to hear you. What happened to you during the Ceremony?!

As with every Ceremony in the little town, and the whole world considering how few intelligent life was as yet, Arianne came to oversee it. This boy, Brendan, was one that she had been watching for a while, he interested her greatly. He thought so much, he had so much compassion for everything, he was so interested in everything! She could not let the standard Passage Ceremony be carried out on him, he would be torn apart, probably lose his will to live and commit suicide in some form or another. So she made sure she would be there at his Ceremony, not an unknown observer as she had been for the past couple melinnia but an active participant, as she had been when these creatures first crossed the threshold of intelligence.

The dagger was of deep significance. A man’s dagger was the symbol of his manhood, proof that he was higher than any woman. He depended on it daily, no matter what his job was, for everything from gutting fish to splitting bamboo stalks for musical instruments. And the dagger was used in all of the village’s rites: to carve the Circle in the ground that protected sleepers outside their homes, stuck in the ground and knelt before when asking the Goddess for help, or any of a number of other spells and such that had been passed down by tradition.