I remember trying to hide my first period. Because I knew if the adults were made aware, I would have to go through the ritual. I wanted to at least wait one more year. I would have gotten away with it too if it weren't for that pesky thing they call a conscience. I admitted to having lied about it. Two months later, long into the night, my parents took me to the temple of Sirânis. I was left there with 16 other children, boys who had just had their first pubic hair and girls with their first period. Locked in a series of connected rooms, chambers that formed a closed loop. So that you could go all the way to the last room, pass through it, and end up at the beginning.  

The priest locked the one real doors out of the loop. There were plenty of other locked doors, but they didn't go anywhere — opening to nothing but a solid wall. We all gathered around the statue of Sirânis, a huge thing taller than three adults standing on each others' shoulders. Made from deadwood gathered from the forest, animal parts sowed together, as well as the bones, teeth, and flesh of dead priests. She had a maw stretching diagonally across her torso, instead of eyes she had two additional jaws, and instead of a mouth, she had one big eye between her lips. From her back, spider-like appendages extended, some ending in hands, others in claws. We all insulted the statue, claiming that the death goddess couldn't catch us. That we would never die.  

Then we walked into the next room, starting to loop the series of rooms. If anyone of us managed to go around 80 times, she or he would win. There were twelve rooms in total. It was dark down there, but we didn't need to see much. We just continued straight on through the marked doors (all the locked ones are unmarked).

It typically happens between the second and fifth loop, participants don't notice it directly, but they're no longer really in the temple. They've been transported to a pocket dimension. For us then and there, the transportation was suspected due to indirect observation, by members of our group disappearing one by one, and then I suddenly found all the missing ones walking next to me again — as I joined them in the new place. A place made out of ectoplasm, what experts refer to as an ectoenviroment, constructed to at first be identical to the temple, but as the loops went on, I noticed differences.  

I started to hear someone banging on the locked doors. As I passed the statue, I notice that it has shifted slightly in its pose while no one was looking. I felt someone watching me, and heard echoes of sobbing.  When I passed through an especially darker segment, while none of the others were looking at me directly, I felt a slender appendix across the back of my neck. I turned around, nothing was there. Whatever touched me starts snickering in your ear, biting me a little.  

Occasionally, the doors took me to another path. It looked the same, but for a longer period of time, all the others were missing. I walked through additional rooms only available to me, I went through one identical to my childhood bedroom. During these early segments of being alone, the unseen stalker hung on my back. I couldn't look directly at it, it moved too quickly for that, but it did allow me to touch its face as I walked. It felt misshapen, like someone with untreated tumors across its body, it had more teeth than it should have had, and in more places than reasonable. Parts of it were sticky, leaking some type of bodily fluid. When I joined up with the others again, it was gone. No one got a look at it. Some say that's it an avatar of the goddess herself, others say it's a "perchta". Perchtas are supernatural servants of elven gods, similar to angels in service of Yahweh.  

Once I was back with the group, I didn't see my childhood bedroom again, it being a temporary thing arranged for me, but we all noticed that other rooms had been added permanently to the loop. One by one. A courtroom came first, then a cell, after that a room meant for execution, a slaughterhouse with half-eaten elven dead hanging on meathooks. I can't remember all the additional spaces, but for each room added the loop obviously took longer to finish.    

The stench of rotting corpses was steadily increasing, and the light grew dimmer. During this phase, the tempo was low but the situation tense. We even stopped to rest our legs for a while, then the banging on the doors increased in strength. The first one of the unmarked doors broke, behind it, wasn't a wall anymore, but a mass grave. Rotting corpses, filled with maggots and other insects, crawled out of it. They carried the scars of having been executed or murdered. I don't know if they were ectoplasm shaped to resemble dead bodies, real reanimated corpses, or something else — what we did know was that they wanted to hurt us. That's when we started running.  

I had been told beforehand that they wouldn't kill us, but they would hit us, bite us, pull out hair, force living insects and grave dirt down our throats. And after all that, they'd pull you out of the game. If you're caught early on, then you'd get away with a few bruises, the more loops you've passed, the worse the violence would become. We're talking broken legs and injuries that could have you falling into a coma for weeks. It was a gamble, I could give up relatively early and risk little, or keep going. More than half of our group didn't run, at least not for long, letting the dead take them. You could hear them scream in panic and pain for a short while, and then they were gone. Somehow taken back to the priests, in the real temple, who would look after their injuries. With the supernatural powers of elven clerics, stuff like broken bones could be fixed in a few moments, after they sacrificed an animal or two to perform the ritual. Quick fixes afterward, didn't mean it hurt any less while they dead were having their way with you, however.  

As the loops continued, more doors were broken through, the dead steadily increasing in number. More and more of us lost energy, the dead catching up to them. More and more rooms were added to the loop. A concert hall, a parliamentary chamber of some sort, I think one was a toyshop as well.  

Our team was falling off one by one, there were only three of us left when the statue came alive. The avatar screamed in pain, and cried, as she hunted us. Riping the dead around her into pieces as soon as any one of them got close to being in her way. When she opened her diagonal maw, three barbed tongues stretched out.  

Then I passed through one of the doors again, and it was all over. I had lost count of the loops, but I had somehow managed to reach the final one. I was back to normal reality, collapsing from exhaustion. Like all winners, I was given an artifact especially blessed by Sirânis, a staff capable of driving of demons and undead.  

I can agree with critics that our transitional ritual to adulthood is harsh. But so is life. We of the Peris faith know that. We also know that in order to become truly adult, children need to learn that they're frail and mortal things in a dangerous world. Not only that, not just the winners, all who go through the ritual are provided a powerful blessing from Sirânis. A protective aura against dark magic which can't be achieved otherwise. Due to the way religious magic works, the more effort or suffering a ritual demands of you, the greater blessing the gods are willing to give out.  

My firstborn is close to puberty. You bet your life I'll be taking him to Sirânis' temple when the time comes.  

 —Excerpt from the biography of Nuala Sytrika, a famous advocate of the Peris faith.