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already made of the Light, within and without.
    The flat weight in my hands was cool, solid under leather, two and a half, perhaps three inches wide as it covered my palms. It felt very, very familiar.
    “This is yours,” Cort’s voice was low and solemn. “It will carry and cut between worlds. Use it only in the coolness of your mind, never in rage. There is a difference between rage and righteous anger—and that difference will burn you.”
    I swallowed and nodded. It wasn’t heavy, yet, but I could feel the beginning, the very start of the pull in my shoulders.
    “Your lesson today, and for the days that remain until your initiation, will start and end here. Hold that position as you move between levels. Get used to the weight, Wielder, it’s yours by right, by blood, by the promise made before you were born and the one you’ll make again in short time. This has a history older than you know, but more importantly, it was once your grandmother’s,” and his voice thickened, grew hoarse, “before it was Logan’s—your father’s.”

    *

    During their initial sessions on the Astral, she had been encouraged, after becoming familiar with certain landmarks, to explore, either with Cort or on her own, the valleys and plains, to meet the beings that inhabited them. Some she recognized, recognitions that came from dreams she’d had since she was a child, others from a life different than the Material one she led. Some were people she had yet to meet, and more than a few were beings who hadn’t been incarnate in ages as humans measured time and wouldn’t be for ages more to come.
    There was a flexibility there that simply did not, could not, exist in the Material world. The fixed form was traded for function—wings that beat with power and strained the muscles of a very physically felt chest, arms that became legs and hands, paws beneath which the ground sped by with satisfying solid thumps, making her eyes sting.
    While there were occasions when the actual physical body would be represented, the rigid structures of the flesh could be changed—male, female, human, non, at will. She enjoyed that, the freedom of it, because her body was whatever she wanted it to be, whenever she wanted it, and most of the time all she was aware of was its strength, its capabilities and potential.
    Today, tonight, whatever time it was in the eternal twilight, she walked through a grassy field beside Cort. When they had first started working together, if she could have described herself, she would have said that she was slender but strong, not quite finely featured but discernable as female because of the curves that rose on her chest, the hair that flowed halfway down her back, not much different at all than her physical self.
    Now, though, as her abilities had progressed, she had lost some of that definition, color; she walked in a body composed of light that became more and more featureless as she grew in her command of craft, in her comfort level outside of the Material.
    “Every bit of matter has a frequency, a vibration,” Cort told her as they approached a place she’d not seen before. “Flesh, blood, rock, water…they all have energy.”
    She nodded. She had learned some of this already.
    “The higher the vibration, the less muted by interference, static if you will, the purer the energy,” he continued as they crossed a ridge. “That higher level of vibration will allow you to cross to other levels of the Astral.” He stopped and gazed before him and she followed suit.
    They had come to a valley of mixed woods and plains, where even the wind in the twilight carried the scent of near spring.
    “Except for Star Bridge?” she asked, remembering her first visit.
    He put a hand on her shoulder. “When you are free, completely free of the Material, of the lower vibrations emanating from the flesh, then and only then can you cross that bridge.”
    Affection flowed from him to her, an affection she returned as she stared