Lagi kept his eyes calmly closed, waiting in anticipation for the cheers of the crowd as Kaipo placed the crown on Samaria’s head. It was taking longer than he had expected, he thought to himself, and then, suddenly the gong rang. The gong never rang before a proposal was made.

Lagi’s eyes shot open, and he saw Kaipo’s broad body whisking past him, on his way to his place of honor for the feast. Looking back to Samaria’s friends, Lagi found that she was still with them, plopped down in the middle of their pack with her arms folded and crownless head turned down to the sand. Who had Kaipo proposed to if it hadn’t been Samaria?

Kaipo had no bride by his side, and in scanning the rest of the crowd, Lagi could not make out a single woman with a crown who had not had one before. It -- it could be? Had his proposal been denied?

Very few proposals had ever been denied in the known history of the tribe. Lagi himself had only ever seen one, and it was to a scrawny and awkward man, pathetic as a warrior and even worse as a hunter (he couldn’t even kill his own boar for the feast). Kaipo, however, was the best the Ahi’ahis had to offer without question. No one, not even Samaria, Lagi thought, would turn down his offer.

“Can you believe it?” A woman was heard whispering behind Lagi. “A denied proposal.”

“And to Kaipo,” her companion chimed in. “I would have never guessed someone would do that, not even Mari’sa.”

“Yes, it’s incredibly unexpected.”

Lagi moved forward, trudging across the sand away from the women, suddenly worried what they would think if they realized he was eavesdropping. He circled the fire twice, looking to Samaria then back at Kaipo, then back at Samaria and her friends, then back at Kaipo and his friends. Kaipo had taken his share of the boar, and now, all the tribespeople were lining up to take their own cut.

At first, he couldn’t accept that this was something that was actually happening. He had believed in his whole body that Samaria would be wed tonight, and to cast away that belief was the equivalent of being asked to cut off his own leg. But as the thought sat inside him for a while, festering in his belly like the heat that was festering again in his chest, he came slowly to realize that this was true reality.

He stopped his circling and stared into the fire. The smoke which birthed from it blew with a wind into his eyes, but he did not blink, did not waver his gaze, did not change his expression in the slightest.

He let the sounds of the drums and the chatter of the people and the first notes of the songs that were beginning to be sung echo in his head, as if they were bouncing around between the bony walls of his skull, increasing in volume and in pitch until he couldn’t hold them inside anymore, and they burst from his mouth with a fiery yell.

Arms tensed, at his sides but open to the skies, eyes closed so tightly that the tops of his cheeks touched his brow, he roared into the fire without a conscious thought as to what he was doing. He felt the heat escape from his palms, and at once, the noises of the party stopped.

When he opened his eyes again, he noticed that everyone was looking at him, blank faced like the face of a boar as it is dying. Peering down at his hands, he saw they were dripping in flames, and he lifted them to hold them right before his eyes. It was real. This was fire, which he had created, a gift from the gods bursting from his skin. His first fire.

And then, in an embarrassing twist of circumstances (as Lagi would later recall), his vision left him, and he fell brutally to the ground, muscles limp and fire extinguishing as it hit the sand.