Once a year the sun goes out for a full day. In Galmar they say it is the two moons: Amla the bright sister, and the Dark Moon, who steals the sun and keeps it for a day so that the world must remember she is there.

She always gives it back. Always.

Across Caldrith people stay indoors on the Longest Night, cook, mend nets, tell stories, and keep a wax candle burning in the window. You have to keep tending the light, they say, to let the world know that even in the darkest of times we are still here.

It is also the one night of the year when the wall between this world and the Veil goes thin, and so it is the only night the Tethering can be performed.

“You have to keep tending the light.”

* * *

The Tether Test

Every youth in Caldrith is tested in their eighteenth year. A smooth grey pebble is placed in the left hand to hold the tester in this world. A pendulum of fine silver thread with a green-blue gemstone is held in the right. A tooth of the kingdom’s beast is passed beneath it three times. If the pendulum turns a circle, the child will go to Evarra. Almost none of them do.

Bonded, and Tethered

To be bonded is to have the link. To be Tethered is to have finished the ritual and the link made permanent. A soul that is bonded and not Tethered is being pulled in two directions at once, and the body knows it: headaches, a ringing in the ears, nausea, a doubling of the sight. They call it bonding sickness. The only cure is to finish what was started.

The Ritual

It is held at Skyveil, at the base of each kingdom’s animal statue, inside a ring of lanterns. The sorcerers chant, the censers swing, and the Tested start the ritual by crossing the boundary between this world and the Veil. In the Veil they must call their beast, and offer it something, and hold in mind one anchoring memory to come back by. Above all they must not speak to anything else that lives there. Those who succeed come home champions. Those who fail come home mute and shaking. And some do not come home at all, and no one has ever found where they went.