The World Walk ceremony had not changed in six hundred years, which was either evidence that the tribe had found the right form early and seen no reason to revise it, or evidence of the conservative inertia that characterizes all institutions that have been doing something the same way for long enough that the way becomes indistinguishable from the thing itself. Luc had attended it four times as a witness, standing in the gathered crowd while older children stood in the center of the standing stone ring and received the formal words of departure and blessing, and he had watched those children walk south and had filed away his observations about what the moment looked like from the outside, because he had known, even at seven, that the time would come when he would need to know what the moment looked like from the inside.

  The morning was clear in the way of early spring mornings at this latitude, where clear meant the sky had been scoured by the previous night's wind into something intensely blue and close, the air carrying a cold that was still real but had lost the malice of deep winter. The standing stones, as always, said nothing and held their positions, which was what standing stones did and was, in its way, a kind of presence.

  Luc stood in the center of the ring beside Sven, who was the same height now after several years of catching up and was going to be taller within the year, given the trajectory his growth had been on. Both of them in their travel gear, already packed, already wearing the weight of what came next. The tribe gathered in the outer ring with the particular quality of a community observing a transition — not festive exactly, not solemn exactly, but present in the way that people who have given years of themselves to two people's development can be present when those people depart with what has been given to them.

  Elder Maren spoke first, as the eldest and as the person whose particular relationship to Luc gave her words a weight that the standard ceremonial language alone would not have had. She spoke the traditional passage — the formal acknowledgment of training completed, of the tribe's gifts carried forward, of the expectation that the Walker would return changed by what they found — and then she spoke a sentence that was not traditional and that several of the elders registered with slight surprise.

  "The outside world does not know what you are yet," she said, looking at both of them but with her gaze settling on Luc in a way that was unmistakable. "This is an advantage. Use it carefully, and don't waste the window before it closes."

  The other elders spoke in sequence, each delivering the traditional blessing with whatever personal inflection was characteristic of them. When it came to Borath, he stood with the usual compressed quality of a man who has a specific relationship with public speech — which was not that he disliked it but that he applied to it the same economy he applied to everything, and the economy meant that what he did say carried weight precisely because he had eliminated what he wouldn't say.

  "Twelve years ago I looked at this boy's world and called it boring," he said. The crowd was quiet, because this was not standard ceremonial language and Borath saying anything unexpected was an event. "I was wrong about the boringness. I was not wrong about the difficulty. What he has done with Builder Ants, in a Realm 1 world, with the emotional stability required to sustain the scaling those ants demand, is not boring. It is the result of doing something unglamorous with complete commitment for a very long time, which is rarer than any of the dramatic alternatives." He stopped. "Go. Come back worth the story." He stepped back.

  Luc looked at him across the circle and bowed, formally, which Borath received with a single nod that communicated several things at once.

  ?

  The family part came after the formal ceremony, in the space between the stone ring and the village edge where the crowd thinned and the departures became personal.

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  Sigrid held him first, and she held him the way she had always held him when he needed holding — entirely, without any of the reservation that sometimes makes embraces a performance rather than a reality, with the full, uncomplicated fact of it. When she pulled back, her eyes were dry because she had decided they would be, and this decision had cost her something, and he knew it and she knew he knew it and neither of them said anything about it.

  "For the first night you're somewhere strange," she said, pressing a wrapped packet into his hands — oiled cloth, the careful wrapping of something worth preserving. "Home food. Don't eat it until then."

  "I won't," he said.

  She looked at him for a moment with the expression she had been wearing since he was two weeks old and she had first held him, the expression of someone looking at a thing they are proud of in a way that exceeds any specific achievement and is simply about the person existing. "You've always known where you were going," she said. "Even when you were too young to say it. I always trusted that." She stepped back. "Trust it now."

  Fen shook his hand. A proper adult handshake, the kind between people who have decided to be equals in the specific way that parents and children eventually must become equals if they've both done it right. The grip was exactly what it had always been — steady, complete, communicating everything it needed to without any of it requiring words. Then he said four things, which was approximately three more than his average for emotional communication.

  "I'm proud of you," he said. "Come back when the work lets you. We'll be here." He paused. "The house will be quieter."

  Luc had not expected the last sentence and it landed with more weight than the others, because Fen did not mention things that were only true rather than useful unless they were important, and the mention of the quieter house was not a complaint but an acknowledgment — I will feel your absence, I am telling you this, it is the most I can say and it is true. He looked at his father and understood that this was, for Fen, the equivalent of the kind of speech that other people made long and dramatic, and that it meant exactly as much.

  "Thank you for everything you never said," Luc told him, which was also more than he usually managed, and Fen's face did the small, controlled shift that meant genuine feeling had moved through him.

  Then Lira.

  She was eight years old and she had been preparing for this for weeks — he could see it in the set of her chin, the controlled quality of her expression, the determination of someone who has decided what they are going to be in this specific moment and has been rehearsing the being of it. She stood in front of him with her arms at her sides and looked at him with her full attention in the specific way she had been looking at things since she was two — not glancing, looking, and not just at the surface.

  "You promised," she said. Her voice was steady.

  "I'll write," he said. "A lot. Not just when things happen. When things don't happen. When I have something to tell you that you'd want to know."

  She nodded. Then: "And when you come back — when you come back you'll teach me everything you learned that I'm old enough to learn."

  "Everything I can," he said. "And what you're not old enough for now, I'll save."

  She reached up and hugged him then, with both arms and without warning, in the fast, fierce way she had been doing things since she was mobile, and he held her in the hug the same way he held everything she gave him — completely, because she deserved it. Her voice, against his shoulder, was quieter than her public voice, the private one she had that was less about decision and more about what was actually true.

  "Be careful," she said.

  "Always," he said. And because she was eight and he was leaving and the simplest true thing was the one to say: "I love you, Lira."

  She pulled back with the composure she had been building all morning, looked at him once more with the clear blue eyes that had been watching him since she could walk, and said: "I know. I've always known." Then she stepped back to stand beside Sigrid and she held herself straight and she watched him go.

  He looked at his family one last time. At Maren at her observation distance, watching without expression but watching. At the standing stones that had received his secret fourteen years ago and kept it. At the tribe in their gathered blue-haired familiarity, some warm, some neutral, Borath already walking away because Borath did not do extended goodbyes.

  He turned south. Sven moved beside him, without waiting to be asked, because Sven never waited for the obvious thing when the obvious thing was clear. They walked to the village edge and then through it and then beyond it, and the Frostpeak cold came with them for a while and then didn't, and the path that began here extended south into everything that was waiting to be found.

  The Eternal Hive hummed at 91% stability in the growing realm, and in its center chamber the walls held the precision of a hundred non-elemental crystals absorbed correctly, and in its deepest section the library the ants had built was full of patterns that Luc had not yet fully decoded, and the mystery of the next advancement was present in the structure if only he looked carefully enough.

  He would look carefully enough. He always did.