Chapter 4: Rock, the Cradle

I woke up in a cocoon.

I could see, through a gauzy film, Warup, or another of his kind, crouched over me. I had to fight back the urge to vomit when I realized the creature was spitting a cloudy white liquid across my wrapped form. It must have been visible in my eyes, because the spitting stopped and spoke. It was Warup, unless they all had the same voice.

"Do not panic young sir. We are dissolving the healing blanket we placed around you. It is a process you are unfamiliar with, and we sense your discomfort."

"River?" I asked.

"She is being removed from her blanket as well."

I reached out with my senses, and found her across the room.

<Sparrow?> I thought.

<Mat!> Came her thought in return.

We were freed of the wrappings in short order, but it took some time before we were feeling well enough to do more than sit up. I felt weak and hungry. Suddenly I heard River's stomach grumble from clear across the room.

"I think we're hungry." I said.

"You should be." Warup said. "You spent eleven days in the middle of the sea. You were both incredibly close to death when you finally broke through."

We spent three weeks underground, tended to by the Kirikk, Warup's people, who were one of the many sub-groups among the Shar. They were amazing healers, and that was why we had been brought to them before we began our trial in the Deep Stone Sea. Trial might not be the right word. Tempering was closer to what the Shar saw it as.

We were expected. Our eventual existence was foreseen even before the Dragons left Arbor, and when Dad arrived on Arbor and assumed his role as Weaver the Wizard, the Shar begun setting things into motion based on things that the Shar overmind had kept in their memories since before the beginning of history.

I had some real problems with being considered an agent of destiny. Especially when every Shar I spoke to tended to capitalize the phrase. Of course the fact that I was really only speaking to one mind, no matter who I was speaking to, did mean it was really a viewpoint of one, not many, but the one was the Shar. I was a McKesson. I was supposed to be comfortalbe with the touch of Destiny's hand

We left the city on the side of the cavern, again riding the smoothly silent ship/creature that had ferried us here. The pool where we had started our journey wasn't the final destination this time. Warup had accompanied us, and we walked with him for almost four hours, slowly moving up one sloping corridor or tunnel after another. Here we saw many more creatures, all moving purposefully here and there, or gathered together working on some task.

"Here." Warup said finally, approaching a large flat stone covered in a spiraling circle of runes and drawings that ran inward in an ever tightening, ever shrinking script. "This is an Ur-Stone. Its Magic is ancient and powerful, and it is mostly a ward against the Ur, and the evil that drives them. But it is also a transport spell of great effectiveness."

"Will it take us home?" River asked.

"It could, but we will us it to take us somewhere else." Warup explained. "You will be able to take yourselves home from there."

The somewhere else turned out to be an amphitheater, nestled high in the sharp, black peaks of the Spine of the World, where they reared like the back of a Ridge Boar out of the dark stone crust of Sharhom. It was open to the elements, but the swirling snow and cold air seemed to be held back over the rings of stone seats that surrounded us on the platform where we arrived. I looked down and saw another swirl of runes carved into the stone beneath us.

I did not fail to notice, nor I'm sure did River, that the amphitheater was full, and the occupants were so varied and different from each other that it was difficult to comprehend the number of different species we were seeing. The sound of them, in their thousands and with their thousands of different voices, was like listening to thunder booming across an avalanche. It was amazing and incredible and then it was suddenly gone as the crowd grew instantly still and quiet.

<<THE SHAR ARE ONE VOICE AND MANY.>> Came the words into our thoughts. We weren't hearing someone speaking for the shar overmind this time. This time it was the overmind itself we were hearing.

<<SELDOM DO WE FEEL THE NEED TO SPEAK IN CONCENSUS WITH THE INDIVIDUAL SOCIETIES AND SPECIES THAT ARE THE SHAR, BUT THIS IS ONE.>>

River and I gave each other a glance. This sounded serious.

<<ANCIENT PROPHESIES ARE BEING FULFILLED. THE DAYS HAVE COME THAT MARK THE RETURN OF THE DRAGONS. HEAR THESE WORDS AND HEED THEM, FOR THEY ARE PROPHESY.>>

The words that followed were spoken aloud at the same time they came into our thoughts.

<<"EARTH AND SEA WILL RAISE THEM. THE SUN AND THE SKY WILL AID THEM. THE DRAGONS WILL RETURN, BORN BY THE WIND.>>

"The Dragons will return!" Came the sound of thousands of voices, in a thousand tongues, but of one mind. Warup reached out and touched us each on a shoulder.

"Time for you to find your own way home, but I have the honor of whispering the last words of the prophesy, as it was foretold." He said, leaning in. "Seek the Sun first. The Lady of Echoes will mark the beginning of the path."

When Warup stepped back, the barrier to the Light which had been there all this time was suddenly gone. The universe reoriented itself around me and I felt complete again. I linked minds with River so she could sense what was happening, nodded to Warup in appreciation, and jumped us back to the Tower of the Wind.

A little more than four tendays we had been gone. We discovered the next morning that so much time without sunlight meant some adjustment was necessary. I was able to use a little Light work to speed it up, but it still took several days before our eyes were able to stand full daylight. We may have been well enough to be be prophesied over and then sent home, but we were still not at full strength.

More shocking than the length of time we'd been gone was the fact that my family was gone, off Arbor completely, and they had taken Trunk with them. Plank and Opal didn't know where they had gone, exactly, or just when they would be back. We spent the time resting, recuperating and getting reacquainted with Grinder and Spark.

We meditated every morning, and as part of that, we worked on reinforcing our new lack of barriers. We were content at first to do this on our own, and once we were no longer wincing at the light of day, we would have considered moving our activities outdoors. Winter was definitely in full swing though, and the usual locations, and especially the Neck, were buried in ice and snow. We had to settle, if you could call it that, for Master Jo's classroom, but to 'pay' for our use, he ran us through his own evaluation. We were sweaty and freshly bruised when it was done, and Master Jo took pity on us and made tea.

"I have been here, on Arbor now since before you were born, and it has been a miracle, and very frustrating for me, all at one time." Master Jo said as we sipped our tea. "Your Aunt Serenity found me, and brought your father to me, and the two of them healed me, and gave me back a life that was almost gone. But the life they gave me was a new life, a different life. For many years I missed the chanting of the priests and the new acolytes every year, coming in for their first lessons. I missed these things, and I was sad."

"I'm sorry." I answered. "I never considered what you gave up in coming here."

"What I had to give up was lost to me already." He answered. "I would have died within a day, perhaps two, if your Father and Aunt had not chosen me. On the world I once knew of as Omara, in a language I haven't spoken in almost twenty years, some sects professed a belief in reincarnation, but I did not, and do not, yet. But the Gods of Temple were distant and demanded little. Here on Arbor, I eventually learned to hear the Spirits when they spoke to me. Now they make their wishes known as they do to all Arborians.

"What is reincarnation?" River asked. Master Jo told her, in general, and more specifically what the reincarnation sects of Temple believed.

"What purpose would be served by reincarnation for the likes of me, who has been brought back from the edge of death and had his youth restored by Weaver and the Wind? What I have gained in this second life far outweighs what I left behind in my old one. I had seen ninety two summers when I met your father. I am fifty years younger now than I was that day, and slowly growing younger still."

In the eight days we spent at the tower waiting for everyone to return from wherever they had gone, I spoke more to Master Jo as a fellow Arborian than I had in the rest of my life. We still had our teacher/student relationship, and if anything, he pushed us even harder than I remember ever being pushed. In fact, he insisted we push ourselves against him until we had to draw on our Transformed talents.

"We are pushing my limits as well as yours." Master Jo would say.

He had a lot of limits to push. Neither River or I had the speed to match him, even with our initial boost of speed and power. We had to amp it up a second notch to get past his defenses, and that was with both of us attacking at the same time.

"Master Jo, you are amazing." River said as the three of us sat, breathing hard and cooling down after one of those sessions.

"More amazing than I used to be." He answered. "I never had that kind of speed in my other life."

We sat later, over tea, discussing our training, and Master Jo confessed, in a way.

"I think there is more speed there than what you have forced me to show so far. If you keep pushing me, I think Arbor will finally finish altering me to suit her, as it does to most who comes here."

"I know how it has changed me, and the rest of my family." I said. "Have you seen other changes?"

"Very little, but some. There are only the guards to see change in, and there have been some, but in most, none at all."

"Why do you think that is?" River asked.

"Change comes to those who open themselves to the Spirits." Master Jo said. "Those who cannot or will not listen do not change."

"Who has changed among the guard?" I asked. I had never noticed any of the guard displaying any sort of Arborian talent, minor or otherwise.

"Tem McArat and Zho are the two I've seen it in." Master Jo said. "They both have displayed a minor talent. Tem can talk to birds somehow, he sees what they have seen. It comes in handy on patrol, I would guess. Zho finds gems. They have to be close, within inches of the surface, but if they are there, she is drawn to them. I see her walking the river on her days off looking for stones."

Those days at the tower, on our own, we connected with Plank, Opal, Winter and Snow, Fleet and Iris, all the native Arborians who lived and worked in the Tower. I realized it on my own, but it was Opal who said it out loud.

"Obsidian McKesson, I love your parents, and they have adopted Arbor as their home and the Spirits have accepted them and made important places for them here, but they are not 'of' Arbor. You, young man, are very much 'of' Arbor."

"That is probably the very reason it is left to me to accomplish this goal that the Shar have set, and not my parents." I said.

"There are reasons for everything." Plank said. "Arbor always has reasons, for your quest, for your parents coming here in the first place. There are always reasons."

"Then there has to be some reason, beyond our getting to have tea every day with Master Jo and wax philosophical, and bonding with the residents of the Tower that caused your Dad to take this trip." River said out of the blue. "What haven't we done that might be left to do before they return?"

That did catch me off guard. Was there something to do, or someplace to go that I hadn't thought of? I looked at River, at Master Jo and the Durmiters. They all looked back at me expectantly. Of course there was someplace to go!

"River, we need to go back to the pool at the focus and revisit those things we couldn't do, before we moved our barriers."

"Coral's warning!" River said. "That's right!"

We considered getting Grinder and Spark ready for the ride across the river to the hidden stairs beneath Feather Falls, but while the road itself seemed to benefit from the Wind's edict prohibiting snow to fall on it, the forest between it and the falls was another story. The cold and the deep snows would have made it cruel to ask the horse's to even try. Instead, we took the stairs up to the top of the Tower. Even with the Wind away from Arbor, the snows were not allowed to collect on top of the Tower, and the winds, icy and fierce here in this northern valley, were kept at bay.

A Light jump, for someone who can do them, is always easier to make when you are revisiting the focus of that facet. Its like running with the wind at your back. The focus welcomed us back with a pocket of moist, warm air, warmed by the pool and fountain, to the point of being lush and steamy in mid winter. It was also free of the biting wind that ran through the rest of the valley, due mostly to the northern edge of the cut that the pool was nestled in, which acted like a wall, blocking the wind almost entirely. Was there a little Magic involved as well? This was a facet after all, things worked differently in them, even on facets without Arbor's Magic, or magic of any other kind.

Master Jo came with us, just in case we needed someone to pull us back from whatever we wound up doing. If we needed pulling back from going somewhere, He wasn't likely to be much help, but maybe it was more a matter of needing a witness.

Sid brought us to the pool, and like the previous visit, I felt the pull of the rushing water immediately. A queasy feeling of vertigo swept through me, and my sense of balance was momentarily lost. I stumbled, but Sid was there, and he wrapped an arm around my waist and looked down with a smile.

"Easy there, precious." He said. I felt a comforting mental reinforcement accompany the words. I opened my mind to his and we were almost instantly nestled within each other's thoughts.

"Sorry." I said.

"Its okay, I'm feeling it too." He said.

"I think those barriers we knocked down somewhere in Sharhom had been thicker than we knew." I said. "We're not going to have to actually touch the water or the stone to work with it, are we?"

"Perhaps we should sit in the cool, soft grass and seek our centers. We can open ourselves and let the Magic and the Spirits show us what we are here to see?" Master Jo suggested.

So that was what we did. Sid and I stretched out our thoughts until we could feel Master Jo's, somehow managing to dart, light and quick, around our own. We let them grow as close as they could get before we each reached out, me to the flowing water and Sid to the stone that carried it to us, and we let the power and the Magic bloom within us.

As the Magic grew, the strength of the pull from the point where the water spouted out of the bare rock wall of the cliff grew stronger. It was only in our minds, but we seemed to drift closer and closer and the pull grew stronger and stronger, and then, with a whisper of sound, the ringing of stone on stone and the sound of water gurgling through rocks, we were pulled into the Magic, and suddenly the world went black and green, then black again as my senses failed me and I lost consciousness.

I think of it now as like being sucked through a straw, an impossibly long and convoluted straw that found its way from the fountain were our bodies rested, to ... what? Where? I'm not sure I understand it still.

I woke from the darkness that had overtaken me, and I found myself laying on a bed of soft moss. There was the smell of flowers in the air, and the chirp of birds. As my eyes focused, I sat up slowly, looking around as my eyes finally began to focus. I was in a small clearing, beside a pool of water, but I was not at the pool at the facet above Feather Falls. A large black rock sat in the middle of the clearing, but no sign of Sid or Master Jo. I moved to the pool, wanting to splash a little water on my face and clear the last of the fog from my brain. As I leaned over the waters I saw my reflection in the still waters of the pool. I wasn't me!

Long, deep blue hair, straight and fine, cascaded around my face, a face that was translucent and wavering in the reflection. I held my hands out in front of me, and saw that the pool didn't lie. My body glistened almost transparently, and seemed to flow within itself. I reached out to the pool to draw some power and clear away these strange changes, but when I reached out, there was nothing there!

"Hunnh!" Came a noise from behind me. Then the sound of stone breaking. I spun, and saw the large black rock that had been in the clearing with me had moved, was moving!

"River? Is that you?" Came a voice from the rock. The rock stood, and it had arms and legs and a head. The Rock was Obsidian! My Obsidian!

"Yes, Sid, are you okay?" I asked.

"I think so. You look different."

"So do you." I answered. "Hold your arms out in front of you and take a look."

"Spirits!" He said.

"Exactly." I answered. "Try to reach out to the rock."

"I can't! He answered. "I can't reach it at all."

"Me either. No contact with the power at all."