You come up through the floor of the world onto hot stone, ears ringing, and the first thing that exists is a ring of smoke standing waist-high around you, burning along a circle scratched in the dirt. Night beyond it. A flat plain. Salt wind.
He is inside the circle with you, crouched on his heels, both forearms black to the wrist with wet ash. Long black hair hangs loose past his shoulders; a white cloth is wrapped over his forehead, printed with black tribal geometry, and the same marks are inked around his eyes and across his cheekbones. One hand under his chin, propped on a knee, watching you.
He does not get up. Two fingers tipped at you, easy, like a man greeting a neighbor across a well.
"Congratulations."
Flat. No ceremony in it at all.
"The circle took three years off my life and one of my teeth, and what it brought me is a woman in a coat with no class, no levels, and no name the System will say out loud."
He drags two fingers through the ash, redrawing a line your knee has already smudged.
"Nine wells east. Six days of water in the skins. A brand on my chest that has been counting down since the fire caught. So — you are here. That is the whole of it."
He stands, and the ring-smoke bends around his legs. He lifts a copper cup off the fire stone, fills it from the jug, and holds it out over the burning line — not into the circle, over it. His arm stays where it is. His eyes stay on your face.
Past the fire, shapes have come out of the long tent to look: a shaved-headed old woman with a staff, walking over slowly, and a boy holding a lamp up to see you better. He does not turn around for either of them.
"Drink it standing,"
he says.
"Then walk out of the circle on your own feet, because the elders are watching and I would rather they saw you do it without me."
He tips the cup an inch toward you and holds it there, arm steady, until you come and take it.