As the shamans wove their way through the seated young men and their attendants, the smoke from the incense they carried began to fill the chamber with a slight haze. One by one, the shamans bayed each group to take a single night wasp and place it into the clay cups filled with water provided to them, rendering the wasp flightless, uselessly flapping their wings while they floated awkwardly in the water.

  Before Banon’s group was chosen, he noticed a common theme among other groups. Each of the three young women in each group had their own clay cup, because they would each take turns feeding the man water during the trial to come. However, there was but one nightwasp given to each. This was resulting in some… mildly amusing disputes over who from each group would be the one to take it.

  As one of the shaman’s approached Banon’s group, he noticed there was one cup already held high. Iala.

  “My mother is a healer. I am a healer. This part should be done by me.” She side eyed the other two as if expecting retort, but neither made one. Goija’s eyes were forward, face impassive. The one who Banon still did not know the name of seemed far too timid to make any kind of objection, so it went to Iala then.

  The shaman stopped in front of them, opened a small door in the wicker cage, and reached inside as if the rabid insects were of no worry to him. He plucked one, holding it between the two body segments to prevent it from being able to bend far enough to sting him.

  “Stop,” Banon said, just before the man could drop the wasp into Iala’s cup. “I want that one.” Banon pointed towards the wasp of his interest, one whose attempts to sting the cage had resulted in the black stinger being pushed so far through the whicker that it could no longer retract it back through and it had now become stuck.

  The shaman narrowed his eyes, but did as he was told, returning the first wasp and coming back out with the one Banon had asked. He deposited into the water, careful not to let go until he was certain the wings were waterlogged enough that it would not simply fly away. The insect was larger than some bird species. Its head, legs, and wings were black as the night, while its largest body segment glowed with such a rich yellow it could be mistaken for a piece of the sun that had fallen and somehow grown a body around itself. Even after it was clear there was no escape and that it was stuck, the wasp writhed with its pincers gnashing and its probing stings occasionally scratching the edge of the clay cup.

  After the shamans finished handing out a wasp to each group, they returned to the front of the room and lined up, shoulder to shoulder with one another, facing those who would imminently take the night wasps into their bodies. The shaman standing in the center took a step forward from the rest, his face shrouded almost entirely by the headpiece of his swamp lion pelt cloak. “The next generation of protectors sit among us in this chamber now,” he said with a voice like smoke and stone. He then looked up to emperor Poh, who nodded.

  The shaman turned back his attention to the young men. “Your first trial proved your might and prowess as warriors. In the next stage, you will be forced to fight monsters of a more internal nature, testing your will and sense of self instead rather than your braun and wit. Quick thinking on a battlefield is one thing, but a Kothai is more than a fighter. They are not a piece, separated from land and from their brothers. They are a part of it. All of it. This stage of the rite will separate those who fight for their own gain from those who fight for all Ooura.”

  While the shaman paused, gazing out over his subjects, something within Banon wavered. Was he really fighting for the good of all? At every step, he told himself he was, even when he had been taken to the well of souls. Though… at a crucial moment back then he had shown weakness. Once confronted with the full weight of the expectation all of the souls within the well had for him, he had faltered, so much so he had been forced out of the vision. Would this trial finally give him the answer? Could one ever truly know the difference unless they were separated completely from themselves? Was that even possible? Not just to be separate from their senses, but even from their own minds, their own self. The night wasp ritual was notorious for breaking down the weak minded, but could it really split the difference between such closely aligned features? His own glory would certainly benefit many others.

  The shaman took in a long breath from the air that was now thick with smoke which stung the eyes and made weary the mind. “You each have a cup filled with water, and a live nightwasp. Upon the signal to begin, your women will feed it to you, and you will swallow it whole without damaging the wasp. If you do this correctly, the wasp will continue to survive inside you, floating in a bath of water and bile in your gut. The glow should remain visible through the flesh of your stomach. From there, those behind me will begin playing a rhythm. Upon the last beat of every chorus, each of your women will take a turn feeding to you a sip of water. Only a sip. You will not gorge yourselves in hope to drown the night wasp quickly. We will know if you try to cheat, or fail to keep it alive, because the light will go out once it is dead inside you. During these next several hours, you will receive many stings inside your body, filling you with the venom that brings sight beyond what your eyes are capable. You will see many things. Do not hide from what the venom will try to show you. It will only result in more strife. Do not move from your seat. Do not fail to drink along with the beat. Do not fall asleep. Stay awake so your mind may remain able to direct itself through the visions you will experience. There is only one way that you will certainly fail this rite: If the glow within your stomach disappears before the first light of tomorrow hits this chamber, you will fail, and will not be named Kothai.”

  There was a short pause while the chamber itself held its breath.

  “All torches in this chamber will be snuffed out so that we may see the glow through the flesh and be sure whether or not you have drowned the wasp and failed,” the shaman said.

  All torches inside the chamber were accordingly snuffed out. All… except for the Pyathens at the back of the chamber, if the blue glow still emanating from behind him was anything to go off of.

  A short, terse suspense while the shaman glared towards the offending light sources. “All lights in this chamber will be put out. Now.”

  A short argument ensued, starting with the princess issuing out a hurried order in her own language. There was a delay until the torch bearers understood what was being asked of them since the princess was apparently the only one of them who spoke Ooura and had to translate for them. After that, their hissing voices got louder and louder as the princess argued back and forth with them. Eventually, a compromise seemed to be made. The six torch bearers, rather than snuff out their flames, were escorted out of the main chamber by an equal number of ordinary Pyathen soldiers to keep their guard.

  That done, the chamber was left in relative darkness, only a few slivers of orange light leaking in through the woven walls from the many bonfires down below where families feasted upon their sons quarry.

  “On the emperor's word,” the shaman said, “you will each swallow the night wasp.”

  “Actually,” Poh began, voice soft spoken but carrying clearly even still, “I would ask that our guest gives the declaration that allows us to begin. They are here. Why not participate? She does speak our language, after all.”

  Banon glanced back over his shoulder, curious. The princess glanced around the chamber, uncertainty in her eyes, but eventually she stood. “You may begin.”

  All at once, the chamber filled with strained gurgling as each man swallowed his wasp whole, desperately fighting back the urge to spit or vomit them back out. Loud groans sounded as stingers pricked tender flesh on the way down. Iala didn’t rush it like some around clearly had. She held the cup in only her left hand and placed her right hand on the back of his head, guiding the two together. Banon accepted the cup. Water streamed into his mouth along with a prickly mass of insectoid legs and chitinous body segments. He exhaled through his nose as pincers clasped tight around the base of his tongue. He tried to swallow but the wasp held on desperately, as if it understood this was the last moment before its fate was sealed. Banon groaned as he felt the stinger worming in the back of his throat, piercing anything it could and instantly filling his neck with a burning sensation. His eyes teared up, and it took everything he had to resist spitting it out. Clenching his teeth through the pain, he pressed his tongue into the roof of his mouth forcefully enough that it caused the wasp to lose grip and slip back down his throat.

  Banon swallowed it and hurriedly wiped the tears from his eyes.

  “Are you alright?” Iala asked, though before he could respond, something else drew his attention.

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  The man next to him, coughing and sputtering, his wasp floundering on the floor of the chamber. One of the man's three attendants grabbed the wasp on instinct, but shrieked and retracted her hand when it stung her. Banon leaned over, darted his hand out, caught and crushed it before it could become any more of a problem.

  The lead shaman was already approaching the failure.

  “Wait! No!” he pleaded, still clutching his throat and gasping for air. “Give me another! I can–”

  The shaman beared his teeth and hissed at the young man, cutting off his words and bathing his face in fear. “You will dishonor us no more with excuses, or your presence. Leave.”

  Reluctantly, the man did as he was told.

  Banon, though he was mostly focussed on the horrible pain in his neck, managed to notice the sounds of one other somewhere behind him who had coughed up his wasp, immediately sealing his fate. Besides that, it seemed the rest had successfully begun the second stage of their rite. Banon was impressed by that, considering how close he had felt to failing in those first few decisive moments where the wasp fought with everything it had to stay in his mouth rather than be swallowed.

  Before Banon could linger too long on his pride in his fellow men and his abrupt uncertainty in himself, his eyes were drawn to the dimly lit silhouette of a man heaving. Haeran. Haeran’s body lurched as it tried to expel the wasp. He could be heard heaving, though by sheer force of will it seemed he kept his body from finishing the motion and throwing up. Until Banon heard it. The bubbly sound of guts being brought up from the stomach. However, keen eared as he was, he noticed there was no wet plop indicating the vomit had breached his lips and hit the floor.

  Haeran swallowed with a grunt like a wounded Orux. From the front of the chamber, Tema rumbled his approval in the back of his throat. Even in the darkness, Banon could make out Haeran’s head turning, and his eyes by their slight glint, looking right at him.

  Banon smiled, trying desperately not to look as weak as he felt with his mouth and throat closing up. Leaves of the mother tree. This will never be over, will it?

  Inside Banon’s gut, a dull burning sensation was growing rapidly in intensity. The stings could not be felt quite as keenly as when it had still been lodged in his mouth, but they were there nonetheless, and worse, they were not stopping. Peirce after peirce, and hotter and hotter the fire burned with each additional one.

  After the two failures were escorted out of the chamber, the lead shaman again stepped in front of the drummers. Behind his dark silhouette, the quiet ambience they had been playing died off completely. The shaman began to raise his hands, outstretched to the sides.

  The chamber was silent, until slowly a new rhythm began to build, starting low and loose, but growing more erratic and warlike overtime. At the peak of the chaotic drum notes combined with the unnerving scraping caused by the women drummers dragging their bamboo clusters across stone slabs, all of the sudden every man on the hide drums slammed down their batons as one.

  Goija took the initiative, holding her cup up to Banon’s lips first. She was not half as gentle as Iala, and perhaps gave him too much water, but got the job done nonetheless. Next was Iala, who gave much less than Goija had, perhaps to compensate, and then he sipped from the cup held by the one who he did not know, whose hands quivered so much she ended up spilling more than made it into his lips.

  Banon tried to empathise with her, but he could not ignore how poorly she was handling this. The whole point of merging this ceremony with the courting of a wife for Kothai was to have assurance that they could support their husband under such pressures as he was enduring now. Because if she could not remain composed while he hallucinated and fought back against his own inner demons, she would never be able to cope with the strain a man being sent to a real battle put on a family.

  Banon tried not to panic but every breath was more difficult than the last.

  The visions to come were the important part, yes. But with how much pain he felt now, he was beginning to understand this stage of the rite was also yet another layer of reassurance that those given the name of Kothai were able to transcend their minds beyond bodily pain. Kothai were expected to be the kind of men that when losing a limb in the midst of battle, would sooner use it as a bludgeon to complete the revenge killing of whoever took it than panic and flee.

  As the ceremony wore on and he began to get used to the pain, however, Banon was forced to confront the other purpose of this. Choosing a wife. Most of the women not chosen by Kotahi here today would go on to marry outside of the warrior class. As for the Kothai, despite this part of the rite being designed around taking a wife, it was also not uncommon for warriors to claim wives even in addition to their first one later in life. If Banon had any say, he would rather avoid starting a family this early in his life.

  Someday he would have done his people proudly, brought back their name to the same prominence as both Pyathen and Enka. Then, and only then did he feel he would be worthy and ready to reward himself with a wife.

  It was taking real restraint, however, to convince himself this plan was the right course of action in the moment. He had little interest in Goija, despite what mighty children he knew the two of them would produce. The other two, on the other hand, were showing him things he had not known he could have. All his life he had felt his status and lineage put people on edge. Yet now, the one whose name he regretfully still did not know was feeding him water from her hands instead of the cup and laughing when he spilled it out of the corners of his swollen mouth. Iala smiled every time he met her eyes, and had a kind of calm, self-assuredness in her demeanor Banon felt he could get used to.

  His father would no doubt want him to take one. He could tell that easy enough by the probing glances the emperor was shooting his way. As much as Poh had chosen to indulge Banon’s warlike tendencies, and his new ideas for warfare performed unlike that of their ancestors, he was still trying to reign Banon in at every turn. He just preferred to do it subtly. Banon’s mood began to sour somewhat at the thought that the laughing one of his might have been encouraged by either Poh or her own family to play into it. What if her family had been promised something behind the curtain? Goija, at least, he could be sure that was not true for. She was cold and calculating, and obviously not interested in pretending otherwise. Iala already had status, though being married to a son of the emperor would elevate her even further.

  Banon found himself staring down at one of his crossed legs instead, and not for the first time, he found himself questioning whether it would have been better to be born not the son of an emperor.

  Banon was never sure he was seeing people for who they really were. How much of Iala’s admiring eyes was for his name and not him? How much of the other’s giggles were performance instead of genuine?

  It was then that a hand placed itself upon the knee which he had been staring down at. Her tiny palm partly cupped just a portion of his boney kneecap.

  She gestured for him to look up, and when he did he saw Iala smiling. Banon put on a polite smile to her, as she quietly remarked about how silly his cheeks looked all swollen around his nose like two wasps nests cradling misshapen mound that had become of his nose.

  He nodded politely again at her joke, and looked around to gauge how the rest of the young Ooura men around him were doing. Few were as swollen as him, to his displeasure. He tried not to allow himself the luxury of fear, since it was known that some had severe enough reactions to the venom that it left them either crippled or dead by the end of the ritual, but he could not ignore the reality that, on the surface, he was clearly responding worse to the venom than most.

  Banon turned his focus internal, ignoring the other men, ignoring whatever the giggling one was giggling at this time, just focussing on slowing his entire body down, and in doing so, lessening the negative reaction. His eyelids fell closed. He started with his breath, moving it to a slow and even pace without even taking a break between the in breaths and out breaths to pause. After a few minutes of that, it became easy to keep up without conscious effort.

  He then turned his first mind to his muscles, envisioning their tightly bound coords loosening, even forcing their underlying fibers to stop the irregular contractions caused by the venom coursing through him. Several minutes after that, he felt much better, and upon opening his eyes no longer had the haze of panic hanging over everything. The beat of the drums was getting close to the point where he would be taking another round of drinks.

  The first sight he was greeted with upon emerging from his meditative state was Iala, leaning in slightly and studying him. “Good,” she whispered with a small nod. “Slowing down is the way.” Had Iala been watching him through that entire time? Waiting to make sure he didn’t fall asleep, perhaps? Well, there was some comfort in that. Banon did feel the first waves of something coming over his mind that he felt would soon put him at risk of that. The visions would start soon, he was sure of it.

  Goija looked no different from when he last saw her, but when the third one noticed him opening his eyes again, she reacted in a way that made him certain his hunch about her was correct. She jumped, when she noticed him looking, and then instantly switched her expression back to that wide smile, and started giggling again. She was faking, and in more ways than just her demeanor. If he didn’t know any better, he might suspect she had been trained from birth to be the perfect bride for an emperor's son. Her hair held together without a single tangle, every speck of plaque had been picked from her ivory whites, but not too roughly since her gums were not receded either. She was unscarred and unmarked by anything but the tiny creases the corner of her eyes had when she smiled–which was almost constantly. She had been groomed for this day, designed and fashioned into being as appealing as possible. Her family had no doubt put immense effort into presenting him this facade. Shame, then, that the effort would all go to waste.

  Banon took a deep breath, and sighed his frustrations into the fragrant festival air.

  “Not happy about something?” Goija asked, hardly even looking at him.

  “What is there to be happy about?” Banon asked, voice muffled from the swelling.

  The faker put on her fake laugh, Goija ignored him, and Iala merely readied her cup for the imminent drum beat.

  Again Banon drank. And again, the chorus of war began anew.