Toma — The Boy with the Wild Red Moon

In Ashango, everyone knew Toma. No one knew where he came from. He arrived at the village home as an infant, wrapped in little more than a burlap blanket. There was no letter tucked beside him. No family symbol. No frantic parent searching the village by morning.

Just a baby.

His appearance offered few answers. Toma's skin was lighter than most people in Ashango, warm and sun-kissed. Tiny red freckles scattered across his face, and little curls of brilliant red hair covered his head. His eyes were an unmistakable green. He looked like no family anyone could remember. There were two other peculiarities. His ears came to the slightest point, and in the center of his forehead was a small birthmark shaped like a triangle.

For a while, people wondered. Travelers were questioned. Elders searched their memories. Stories were compared. Eventually, life continued. Because babies don't particularly care where they came from when they're hungry. And Toma was very good at being hungry.

Toma grew up in the village home alongside other children who, for one reason or another, had no parents raising them. That didn't make him a child without a community. This was Ashango. There was always somebody correcting him, feeding him, teaching him, fussing at him, or asking exactly where he thought he was going. Usually, the answer involved Kairo.

The boys became nearly inseparable. They explored, competed and challenged each other.

They occasionally made decisions that seemed much better before an adult discovered what they were doing and like the other children of Ashango, they trained.

They learned to move, defend themselves, understand their surroundings and use the skills generations before them had considered necessary. There was nothing unusual about it.

No one was preparing them for some great war. No one told them they were destined to save Nduara. They were children being raised according to the traditions of their village.

And when the elders told stories about ancient battles, strange powers, the Spirit Realm, or legends from long ago, Toma and Kairo listened about as long as two curious boys could be expected to listen. There were far more interesting things happening outside.

Kairo and Toma were different boys. That was probably why the friendship worked. Where one excelled, the other pushed harder. Where one hesitated, the other challenged him.

Sometimes Kairo won. Sometimes Toma did. Sometimes they both ended up on the ground arguing about who had actually won. Neither existed in the other's shadow. Their friendship was something closer to iron sharpening iron. They were becoming stronger because they had someone beside them who refused to let the other become comfortable. Neither understood how important that would eventually become. For now, Toma was simply Kairo's best friend. And Kairo was his.

As Toma grew, the little red curls grew with him. Eventually they became an enormous, floppy mass of red curls that fell across his forehead, hid the slight points of his ears and sometimes covered enough of his face that his green eyes seemed to be peeking out from beneath them. Most people who met him later would never know about the triangular mark hidden beneath his hair. To Kairo, none of it was particularly remarkable. Toma had always looked like Toma. But there were moments near sunset when the light coming through Ashango caught his hair just right. The red seemed to burn against the sky. With the curls surrounding his face, Toma looked like a wild red moon wandering through the village.

It became difficult to imagine that the strange little baby wrapped in burlap had ever looked any other way.

There will come a time when Toma's world becomes much larger than Ashango. There will come a time when people follow him. There will be battles he never imagined fighting and responsibilities no child could have understood. His path and Kairo's will not always travel beside one another. They will grow. They will change. They will build lives beyond the friendship they formed as boys. But some paths are meant to cross more than once.

And when Nduara eventually requires more than one hero, the boy with the wild red moon will have his own part to play. For now, though, he doesn't know any of that. He's Toma. An orphan. A child of Ashango and Kairo's best friend. Somewhere beneath that enormous red afro sits a small triangular mark no one has thought about in years.

Some mysteries do not need to be solved when they first appear.

Sometimes they simply need time to grow up.