I followed my father from the creche. It wasn’t the first time I had left the creche—I had sneaked out to look at the unusual surroundings of my new world multiple times—but I had never gone very far.This time, I was being led away from the tent I grew up in, away from the tribe as a whole, further inland. And I wasn’t the only one.Since Uli were monestrous, all the boys of my cohort across the other creches had come of age today, and their fathers were leading them away from the sea as well. I glanced around at the other males of the tribe, both coming of age and grown.My father was already intimidating, but with more of a basis of comparison: Uli were downright frightening.As it turned out, my father wasn’t even a particularly big specimen when it came to Uli, or at least the other Uli of our tribe. He was actually on the smaller end, with the largest of them re-contextualizing my understanding of our species physiology. Some of the bigger ones I saw were over a head taller than my father and bulging with even more muscle, and they were absolutely covered in those tribal tattoos.The children being led by these men ran the gamut of expressions: fear, excitement, confusion, anticipation. My own face probably reflected my curiosity, as my father decided to answer an unspoken question.“Today is the ritual of First Blood,” Daru said. “You boys of age will be tested, and those that succeed will begin to unlock their power.”Testing and success implied that there would be the potential for associated failure. Given the fact that it seemed like male and female Uli were born in a fairly even ratio, but adult males each had multiple female mates, I suspected there wasn’t room for failures within the tribe.As the ocean and our tribe receded from view, we came upon an area cleared of scrub and large stone. The makeshift arena was surrounded by adolescent (...)