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it could be, but somehow the sky was bright enough to cast shadows, to make me out of a darkness deeper than night. I lay beside my body and under it, and I was tucked into the crook of my knees and elbows and the folds of my garments, and I hid under the hair at the nape of my neck.
    Because it was a dream, I knew what to do. I seeped into my body through the soles of the feet, and as I flowed through the dreamer, I gathered my darkness to me, shrinking and thickening until I was a tiny homunculus. I followed the breath out of one nostril and stood on the upper lip.
    The night had quickened with shadows, nothing but shadows, wantonly joining and parting, flickering, rising. I never knew that darkness had so many colors, all of them black. I strove to make the shadows into trees, but things had escaped their edges and lost their names. The harder I looked, the more baffled I was.
    I saw something from the corner of my eye that vanished when I looked at it straight. I stayed just so, glancing sideways, and saw it again: a tree with berries like sparks. The tree caught fire, growing leaves of black flame, and one of the flames made a bird, and the bird began to sing. I turned toward it again and bird and tree disappeared. They could be seen only askance.
    I saw all this on one in-drawn breath. When the dreamer exhaled the wind went through me and I faltered. I lost the certainty that gave me shape. From breath to breath I hung suspended. I was too tenuous to be called a thing. Without weight, how could I stand? I rose like smoke; another breath and I might smear into the wind, dissolve into the other shadows and become nothing.
    But the bird began to sing again and this time I could see the song itself. It gave off a silver flicker, it was like a string on a dulcet, trembling under the player’s touch, shaking sound into the air. Being thin as air I felt it shiver all through me, and I saw it shining through my darkness.
    It was not so hard then, after all, to relinquish my fear, to drift upward; the song was a tether to my sleeping self, to the body below me, which seemed to be no more than glimmers and streaks. But I’d learned that shadows were mutable; I could make something of them by seeing. From the corner of my left eye, the dreamer became a fallen tree, splotched with lichens and moss. I turned my head and from the corner of my right eye, I saw a fist of cords and sticks clutching a sheepskin cloak, a mouth filled with shadow, hair stiff with mud and twigs and leaves. A puppet of wood, no more a part of me. A song bound me to it, a song spun so fine it could break, and there would be silence.
    I drifted. I almost flew. But the dreamer twitched. Eyes shifted under her eyelids. I began to feel sorry for what I’d done, for I saw how I’d remade my flesh into something wooden and numb; I’d been altogether too willing to die. But there was still a single coal of the body’s fire, an ember under soot and feathers of ash. I breathed on that coal and a flame crept out, and heat with it.
    I don’t know how many days and nights the fever burned in me. I was melted, cast, beaten on the anvil of the tree’s root, and drawn to a point. Quenched at times, so the chills shook me, and then heated and pounded again. The pounding kept time with my heart. The heat purified instead of scorching, burning away the dross.
    I awoke to a daylight world where shadows kept their places. The sheepskin was sodden under me, and the smell of sweat was strong. I’d bled from the nose and the blood had dried in a crust on my face and neck. I was weak as a newborn filly and just as thirsty.
    I knew then that I’d been between Ardor’s hammer and anvil. The god had come in the avatar of the Smith to temper me. I took a thorn and made a libation of blood to give thanks to Ardor for letting me live. And I took Firethorn as my name.

    When one of the gods chooses you for a tool or a weapon, you may go on,