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around you,” he said and watched as she did.
    It was a simple line she drew in the grass with the tip of the blade, a line that glowed with the Light that made it, defined it.
    “No matter what you see, no matter what you hear,” he began, and gestured about them as she stood within it. A shiver ran through her, setting her teeth on edge even as she controlled it, composed her face, her stance. “Don’t engage, and don’t leave the Circle.”
    And then…they came, came as if called. They threw images at her, taunted her, called her by a name she didn’t recognize, threatened her, and still she stood in the bright band that surrounded her, guarded her, kept her safe. “You cannot be forced out,” Cort’s voice sounded in her head, “and you must not allow yourself to be drawn—unless they violate your guard—and that must not happen. This is your first test.”
    She knew he guarded her body, monitored it with his sense, a floating of hands above her to check her pulse, to ensure the clarity of channels. He heard and watched her heart beat, her blood flow, and if the need arose, he had the ability to envision and affect the very cells of her body. And he’d promised that she’d learn that too. Once she was sworn.
    But to get there, she had to pass through the gauntlet, the testing, and this was her first challenge: to maintain her stance in the circle, to resist the temptation to fight. She instinctively understood the necessity of this first basic test. To master fear was to control anger, to allow the higher function of the mind to rule. This was the foundation of discipline, of law and order, of civilization. She could be of no use to the Light if she couldn’t first master her own darkness.
    Then came the sendings: visions, images, tactile, visceral, filled with smoke and blood and fire and pain…images of lives already lived, of possibilities that could yet become realities, threatened promises. The first image was another life, a mountain, a woman, herself, Nina, older, different…there was a sound like thunder and it ripped through Ann’s chest, and cordite stung her nose and eyes even as she felt the hard smack of a wood floor on her back. There was a child taken, another tear of pain that dug deeper than the bullet had. There were men and women in furs with spears, exotic figures with eyes that glowed, emeralds, opals, flashes of nickel silver, beautiful mouths that drank human blood, sucked on human feeling, and she watched it move through their bodies in sluggish eddies of gray light…energy…force…and she recognized them for what they were: soul eaters.
    There was more, snatches of bits through time: she was male, female, shifting from one life to another, different times, different bodies, different lives and all of them hers.
    She watched her father die, and die again, a blaze of angry orange and billowing black, the smoke choking her with hands that wrapped around her throat, the blistering heat blinding. She heard the raw laughter that followed his death, and it felt like her own body would melt with tears.
    The death of her mother: the heart that had stopped, the lungs blocked by blood, her father’s heartbreak. And what they, the carrion and the life eaters, wanted her to do was to fail her test, turn her back on the Light, and join them. All it would take was her intent. And they showed her what they would do, should she not fail.
    They promised her a violent, painful death, a life that would make her beg to die should she continue through to her sealing.
    It wasn’t real, it wasn’t real, they were just images of a past already done, unchangeable, of a future unknowable, she assured herself, she was in the circle and—
    Yes, they howled back, that was true, it wasn’t real, at least not for the moment, but as above, so below, they mocked, a high-pitched and windy whine, the scrape of stone on stone, and the muddy, sucking sound of sludge.
    These sendings, these images on the