The Choosing

The Choosing happens at dawn, and I have spent the whole night planning not to be there. It is not a complicated plan. The Caldera village sits in a bowl of black rock, and the bowl has exactly one road out, and the road is not watched, because in eleven generations no one chosen as Hearthkeeper has ever tried to run. They go up the mountain proudly. They go up the mountain weeping. They go up the mountain, is the point — and so the road stays empty, and an empty road is an invitation, and I packed my bag three days ago. I am at the road's mouth when the sky goes the color of a struck match. That is the first thing the dragons do, on a Choosing morning. They light the sky. It is not fire exactly — it is the look of fire, spread thin across the whole eastern rim of the world, a heat that has decided to become a color. The whole village wakes to it. And I stand at the road's mouth with my packed bag and watch the dawn turn the shade of a forge, and I understand, with a sick lurch, that the dragons have already chosen, and that the sky is not an announcement. It is a summons. And it is pointed at me. I know it the way you know a hand has closed around your wrist. There is a pull, low and certain, that did not exist a minute ago — a line drawn taut between the center of my chest and the top of the mountain, and the line does not care about my plan, and the line does not care about the empty road. The line only wants me to come up. I do not come up. I am Wren Astor and I have wanted out of this bowl of black rock since I was old enough to understand it was a bowl, and a tug behind my ribs is not going to undo nineteen years of wanting in a single morning. I run. I make it perhaps a quarter mile up the road before the pull becomes pain — not sharp, nothing so honest as sharp, but a deep wrong ache, as though the line between my chest and the mountain has begun, very gently, to be wound in. Each step out costs more. Each step out costs *more*, and I understand what the eleven generations understood, the thing the proud ones and the weeping ones all learned on this same road: you cannot outwalk a Choosing. The dragons do not chase. They simply make every direction but one unbearable, and then they wait, the way a mountain can afford to wait, for you to choose the bearable thing yourself. I sit down in the middle of the only road out of my life and I am furious enough to cry and too furious to do it. The village comes for me, of course. They are kind about it, which is worse. My mother holds my face in her two hands and tells me it is the highest honor the Caldera can give, that a Hearthkeeper keeps the whole valley safe, that the flame at the mountain's heart must be tended or the mountain wakes and the mountain waking is the end of everything we are. She says it the way you say a thing you need to be true. And the village walks me back, gently, all of them, down the empty road and up toward the bright and burning sky. I do not go proudly. I do not go weeping. I go the third way, the way no song about Hearthkeepers has ever bothered to mention, because the songs are written by people who got to stay in the valley. I go up the mountain *angry* — and somewhere above me, in the hot dark heart of the rock, something young and enormous and just as trapped as I am feels me coming, and is angry too.