Perhaps the first thing Denholm had come to learn about life was that there were very few things everyone unanimously agreed upon. When he was a child, this had made the world seem murky and unknowable. As he grew into his teen years, nothing changed about the world.

  But everything about the way he looked at it did.

  The forests surrounding the Glade were dark even in the daytime. Ever since he could remember, adults had been relentlessly cautioning him against venturing into it. That wall of forest surrounding their thatch and cob town had once felt like a den of beartraps waiting to ensnare him should he so much as lay a single toe into it. It still seemed so, in a lot of ways. But the cautionary tales of the gods that wandered within them, which had once been the source of his greatest terror, had, at some point, flipped and become his greatest curiosity. No one ever left the Glade. It was the only town in existence as far as its residents were concerned, and yet there was an outside. There must be. If there was ground to walk on, the only thing that remained was to walk on it.

  There was only one problem that had held him back until now. No matter how often Denholm fantasized about it, everything always came back full circle to that very first fact he had learned about life. People, no matter how much authority they were supposed to hold individually, could never collectively agree just what was waiting for someone out there if they were brave enough to leave. They could agree on some things, though. Two very specific things, actually. Though in Denholm’s mind, they were deeply connected–even if those who he told as much seemed to think he was crazy for it.

  The first truth all in the Glade knew was that it was far too dangerous to leave because of the wandering gods that… well, wandered around out there. Even if they were not all evil, if you were to stumble upon an evil one only once, there would be no twice. The second truth seemed to be less believable even than the first, and that was saying something when it came to so-called ‘common sense’ truths about the outside world spoken by those who never left the Glade. It was that if you could fool a Trickster–the other being known to live out there–you could earn the ability to steal the power of any god you met out there for yourself.

  Both of these truths were more common knowledge in the sense that the story of The Shattering was than water being wet or mud being grimy to the touch. It was known, but no one actually knew. They said they knew, but no one had actually gone there to find out. Denholm had met a few people that claimed they had, but the fact alone of their wildly varying versions of what the Darkwood was like told him all he needed to know about the reliability of those stories.

  No one had ever done it for real and come back. Or if they had, they certainly weren’t talking about it to nobody. Denholm was going to change that. He was done with working hard for little praise. He was done.

  Eleven days it had taken him to prepare enough that he felt he was finally ready–a lot longer than he’d expected. At first, after that last incident with the baker–his fifth job he’d been kicked out of–he had thought he would pack all night and leave the next morning.

  Turned out there was a little bit more to preparing everything you needed to survive as a thirteen-year-old all alone. If he was older and had more experience cooking what food he might be able to find out in the wilderness, maybe he wouldn’t have needed to pack so much food that was ready to eat as is. Most of it was bread–stolen bread, mind you–but there were a few strips of fruit jerky he’d been saving as a gift for Silvi. But that didn’t matter now. There would be a much better gift he could find for her out there, he was sure of it.

  The second order of business after stockpiling all that food had been to steal a pack big enough to carry it. Easy enough, was what he had thought until the leatherworker–who Denholm had also worked for at one point–had caught him by the arm seemingly out of nowhere, appearing from a dark spot in his workshop like some damn phantom. After that, Denholm had been forced to resort to more self-made means. A few of his old shirts, the shoelaces from his mother's walking shoes, and some rudimentary knife-work later, and he had a more or less functional sack to carry it all in. Then, there had been the next big problem. He’d planned on stealing one of the butcher’s huge knives so he had something to defend himself with out there, but news had gotten out after the leatherworker’s fat mouth had got to talking, and after that, there would be no more stealin' from folk who were expecting it.

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  Which all lead to now.

  Denholm, six days after losing his sixth and last job, standing on the edge of the Glade, staring into the Darkwood with less than a third of the items he was pretty sure he needed to survive alone, and no way to procure the rest of what was necessary. No time, either, since the bread would spoil by the time everyone's guard lowered back down. Even the fruit jerky would go bad eventually, but he’d leave that for last. He was smart like that.

  He sighed. Probably would be his last sigh in the Glade for a long time. He took a second to look back at it all so he had a proper memory captured before he left. The midday sun lit up the rolling hills of tall grass like waves on a windy day at the lake… but green. A vibrant green that was inviting to the senses in every way. And tucked within those beautiful grass-covered hills was a quaint clustering of thatch roofs with chimneys billowing thin streams of smoke that were conveniently always being swept away in the ever-present breeze that made it so no one had to breathe it in.

  It was funny, he had been so sure the Glade was a prison up until this moment, when he was actually leaving it. Now it all looked, well, it looked like a place no one with good reason and a calm heart would ever have any reason for leaving. Denholm turned to face the other direction. The trunks were just spaced out enough that he felt like he could move comfortably through them, yet the further he looked, the more they overlapped until everything closed in on one another and it became a wall of brown tree bark.

  There was a time when he would have called himself crazy for even thinking about it, a time when he was just as calm-hearted as the rest of them. But now? His heart beat faster with every passing moment. He needed to see what was out there. Even if just to see it and come right back so he could tell everyone that there was really something out there. If he was honest–and he usually wasn’t, but right now he was feeling so much of everything, the honesty was scared right out of him–the truth was that all he wanted was to have done something people would be proud of him for. He’d tried it the normal way, but no one liked a worker who got distracted all the time. He’d tried it the way the stories told by the old masters said you should if you wanted to be a hero, but the closest thing to monsters the Glade had to slay were toads, and all that had gotten him was yelled at by the old lady by the lake who said she liked the sound of their croaking of all things.

  No, he needed to try something else. Some part of him had always known it would come to this.

  Scared or not, he couldn’t help but feel giddy he was finally doing something his way. Only his. No one else's idea but his own. This was the job he was meant for, to have the courage to embark on a journey no one else was brave enough for. Maybe he couldn’t be a good worker, but he could look his fear in the face and smile at it like no one else could. The voice of Silvi in the back of his mind told him that he shouldn’t go, because his mom would miss him and she would too. But he dismissed it. They would understand once he brought back what he was looking for. They would be proud of him then.

  All he needed to do was find a Trickster.

  Now, Denholm wasn’t sure what a Trickster actually was, since he’d never actually met one, and no one he’d met had ever met one–so far as they were willing to admit, anyway. Wanderers, he supposed, he hadn’t met either. But everyone knew what the wandering gods were: powerful, scary, capable of anything! Maybe.

  The details didn’t matter. The only thing that did was staying true to what little knowledge he did have.

  Because there were only two truths everyone in the Glade could agree upon about the outside world. One was that it was full of wandering gods, and so no one should go there–unless they were as brave as Denholm, that was. And two, which no one had been smart enough to realize was the real key to overcoming the first, since they just weren’t quite as sharp as Denholm, was that if you could manage to trick a Trickster, you could win the boon of being able to steal the power of one of those wandering gods. So even if he wasn’t quite so prepared as he would like to be, it wouldn’t matter so much once he could just fly back home as quick as a bird… or something similarly godly like that.

  With a smile on his face, Denholm took his first steps toward greatness.