and not the stumbling, mind-to-mind talk he had gotten from her aforetimes. He willed his hands to still their trembling and nodded. 'I think I can understand how you feel,' he replied.
'We are not mages, either, we Shin'a'in. That, we leave to Her.' She dropped her eyes from his hungry gaze. 'I wanted-I wished to be with you, in as real a way as I could,' she said, slowly. Then she looked up, and there was no mistaking the expression she wore, even though her 'face' was little more than air and power. It showed a hunger and a desperation as great as his own. 'I am not dead. I'm just-different, and I wanted to be like I was, for a while.' He had never wanted anything more in his life than to take her hand; he reached for her, shaking a little, stretching one hand across more than a gulf of physical distance-And she reached toward him.
Their hands met-one of solid flesh, one of ephemeral energy. He felt a gentle pressure, warmth-and it was enough, almost. So, they could touch, for just a moment, letting touch and eyes say what words could not.
He withdrew first; she brought her own hand back and set her face in a mask of calm, although longing still stood nakedly in her eyes.
He did not know what to say to her. 'I am not only here with you for my own sake,' she said after a moment of strained silence. 'I am here-my teachers tell me that I must speak with you. telling you what I have learned because I can see things anew, being what I am now.
Things they did not know, and could not see. Maybe that is why I became what I am-not quite in the spirit world and not quite in the material world.' He nodded and set his own feelings aside; this was the first time she had said anything like this, the first time that she had given any hint of what Kra'heera wanted to know. Not that he had not asked her questions, for he had. Until now she had shown great distress when he had asked her those questions about her current state, so he had stopped asking them. He feared she might stop coming to him; he was afraid he might have frightened her with all his queries.
Apparently not. But then, she was a brave woman, and I do not think that she has ever run from what frightened her.
'When you started asking me questions-I didn't want to think about them, but I had to anyway,' she told him slowly. 'Like this, there is no sleep, no dreams to run to. Once I started thinking, I started asking questions myself...' She stared off somewhere above his head for a moment, and he held his breath, as much to try and still the pain in his heart as in anticipation of what she might say next. She could say she had to go, leave him forever, for the Goddess willed it so.
This was far from easy for him. He had dreamed of this woman for years, ever since becoming a man. Since he had been initiated as a shaman, the dreams had more power. He had known in the way of the shaman even then that this woman was his soul-partner, and yet he had never seen her. When Kra'heera had asked him to stay and learn of her, he had thought no more of it than any task the Elder Shaman had set him.
Until she had first come to him on the Moonpaths, this Dawnfire, this transformed Tale'edras. Until he had seen her face, and not the hawkmask of the Avatar.
Now he knew who and what she was, and after the initial joy of discovery, the knowledge was a burden and an agony to his soul, for she was untouchable-out of reach-not truly dead, but assuredly not 'alive' in the conventional sense. There was no way in which she could become the partner his dreams had painted her as. How could his dreams, the dreams of a shaman, which were supposed to be accurate to within a hair, have been so very wrong?
'There are threats and changes on the winds,' she said, finally, bringing his attention back to something besides his own pain. 'Terrible changes, some of them-or they have the potential to bring terror, if they are not met and mastered. One is a lost man of your own people, whom we have faced once already. No Shin'a'in, no Tayledras, no Outlander has the answer to these changes, only pieces of the answers. ~) He groped after the answers that her words implied. 'Are you saying that the time for isolation to end is at hand?' That in itself was a frightening thought, and a change few Shin'a'in would care for.
'In part.' She did not breathe, so she could not sigh, but he had the impression that she did. 'It is easy for me to see, but hard to describe.
All peoples face a grave threat from the same source, but three stand to lose the most; the Shin'a'in-'
'For what we guard,' he completed. That was a truism, and always had been.
She nodded emphatically. 'Yes. The Tayledras, also, for what we know-and the Outlanders of Valdemar, for what they are. And somehow those threats are as woven together as the lives of the Outlanders and the Sundered Kin have become in these last few days.' She shook her head in frustration. 'I cannot show you, and I do not have the words that I need; that is the closest that I can come.' But Tre'valen understood; what she said only crystalized things he had half-felt for some time now. 'This is no accident, no coincidence, that things have fallen out as they have,' he said firmly.
'It is less even than you guess,' she responded immediately. And that confirmed another half-formed guess- that it had been the careful hands of the gods that had worked to bring them all here together.
Him-and the Outlanders. 'This path that we are all on was begun farther back than even our enemies know. I can see it stretching back to the time of the Mage Wars. There were cataclysms then that are only now echoing back to us.' A cold hand of fear gripped his throat at that, driving out other thoughts. 'What do you mean?' he asked, carefully.
She searched visibly for words, her gaze unfocused as though she were watching something that she tried to describe for him, like a sighted woman describing the stars to a blind man. 'Neither Urtho nor his enemy were truly aware of what they unleashed upon the world. It is as if what they did has created a real echo, except that this echo, rather than being fainter than the original catastrophe, has lost none of its strength as it moved across time and the face of the world. And now-it returns, it sweeps across our world back to its origin.'
'But what has this to do with us?' Tre'valen cried. 'Those were mages of awesome power-what has this to do with us and what we can do? Surely we cannot counter their magics! It is all we can do to hold them away from those who would use them!' She shook her head dumbly, at a complete loss for an answer. 'I can only tell you what I see,' she replied, slowly, unhappily. 'You asked me of the past and present, and this is what I see. The future is closed to me.' He was at as much of a loss as she, and slowly lowered himself to a: stone within arm's reach of her translucent form.
They sat together for a long and painful moment, as he tried to think of words to give her; something with a bit of meaning to it.
'This, I think, must be what Kra'heera sensed when he charged me with remaining here,' he said, finally. 'He is my senior in much. Perhaps he can give us an answer; perhaps Kethra can, or one of your own people. I shall speak with Kethra and my teachers; I shall relay this to the Kal'enedral... '
