Light swirled in the stranger's eye as it did from her own. A silver tendril drifted towards her, tentative at first. She murmured encouragingly, inviting the connection as if she were trying to coax a skittish kitten to come inside. The strand of light grew larger in her sight as it writhed into her own eye.

The room turned cold. Lhani shivered and looked at her mother, who had a quizzical expression of concern on her face.

“Anything?” she asked.

Lhani took a blanket from the couch and draped it around her shoulders, then shrugged. Something in the room had changed. A weight, or a gloom. Something oppressive, but unseen.

“Show me?” Lhani asked out loud.

In the distance she heard squawking. Chickens? Yes. She could smell their pungence on the wind.

Wind? In Gerard’s cabin?

Her mother had said that the stranger’s mind seethed. To Lhani, it seemed almost imperceptible. Like trying to find a particular shadow on a forest floor filled with dappled light and shade.

Show me? Lhani asked gently, with thought instead of voice.

The silver light intensified and became daylight. Ramparts of gray stone and endless mountains surrounded her. Guards kept watch while farmhands and merchants bustled about. The detail stunned her. So real! Not hazy like the snippets she'd gleaned from Arrad's mind.

Thinking of Arrad caused the vision to fade for a second. Arrad sat there in the lodge, half in her sight, half covered by a snowy rampart.

Be only a feather in this mind, Lhani reminded herself.

Lhani's vision swam as her head jerked forward. Arrad and the lodge faded away. She walked a gravel path between weathered walls. Well, not her, of course: she still sat in Hiehaven. The stranger whose memory she inhabited stepped carefully, gauging each footfall with a focus that exhausted her. Why didn’t the boy just walk normally? The unfamiliar cadence of his footsteps made her stomach churn.

He came to the top of a rampart and the ground dropped away. Miles below, a glacier spawned crags of stone that lanced into the heavens. From this vantage point, the mountains looked like the skeletal maw of a dead animal. In the glacier, Lhani saw a twisted remnant of a tower. It had the bearing of an ancient tower; a relic of the Elderkin.

A man in a brown robe walked before her. The stranger followed, stepping haphazardly with no pity to spare for Lhani's vertigo. Lhani's stomach lurched as he skidded down the treacherous slope as casually as if he were strolling through a market plaza.

The man turned and scowled at her.

“Am I boring you with this? Would you rather work the goat pens?”

“No, Master Willow. Though I do not understand the bridge essentiæ.” The resonance in her chest and the tenor of the voice she heard surprised Lhani. Strength and suspicion. Ferocity and fear.

“No one understand the bridge essentiae, you clod! That is what I'm trying to get through that thick skull of yours. It hardly matters. Douse and Inspire have died out anyway. Only women have the ability to become that powerful.”

This conversation made no sense to Lhani. But the stranger had recalled it for a reason. She could sense his mind wondering at the memory just as she was. As if he were as much a passenger in the recollections as she.

Lhani sensed tremors, just as potent as those she’d felt in the ground. Not physical tremors, but mental. As if the skittish kitten of the stranger’s thoughts were preparing to pounce.

The scene shifted. The stranger walked through brown grasses along a farm path. She felt him halt a splash of water, just in time, from the bucket he carried. Two buckets, in fact, joined by a wooden staff that spanned his shoulders.

The movement caught the brown-robed man’s man's attention. He turned in annoyance.

Lhani felt the boy's muscular thighs tense as he set the sloshing buckets down. For just a moment, before he looked away from the water, she caught a reflection of one dark eye and one white eye set inside a young face. Fourteen years, perhaps?

“When fighting against a Mage, defend against your environment too. I will show you. Are you ready?”

“Yes, Master Willow.”

“Good. Water the hens.”

The boy walked up the path towards a wooden coop. Sheep grazed on hills with patches of brownish grass and yellow weeds. Lhani felt the boy's heart beating fast. Not her own heart, but she could feel it, and it was scared. Lhani became scared, too, when the plants writhed and leapt at her. Leathery wingbeats thrummed the air as strange butterflies attacked the boy.

The sky reeled in Lhani's vision as the butterflies beat the boy to the ground. In the distance, she could see farmhands laughing, congratulating Master Willow.

Lhani burned with anger at the cruelty. She'd learned to ply Æolia her whole life, and no one had ever attacked her in this way.

Her outrage broke the connection. Lhani's own sight replaced the vision as the stranger's mind retreated from hers. Gerard's lodge returned. Lhani stared at an older version of the face she'd seen reflected in the water. Wisps of silver light disappeared into his crystalline eye. Lhani blinked and looked around the room at the expectant faces of her family and friends. How long had she been standing there?

“He is from a village atop the mountains. An old fortress. His tutor Master Willow was cruel and unsympathetic.”

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Gerard cleared his throat. “What is this young man’s name?”

“I don't know. I'm curious about that myself.”

She turned to the stranger, whose mind she had so intimately shared. His eyes were still glassy, unfocused, and his movements stilted.

“What is your name?”

The stranger said nothing. She guided him to a chair at a table, where he sat, unmoving. His eyes met hers, and for only a moment she saw a flicker of awareness. Lhani heard a cacophony of screams in her mind before dullness clamped back down over his eyes. The screams faded. Lhani gasped and took an unsteady step away from him.

Tomyko caught her elbow.

“Take care, sister. What of the danger we face now?”

“I saw no sign of it in the vision. Though Master Willow did have the ability to warp animals. Perhaps he is responsible for this?”

Lhani thought about the screams she'd just heard in her head and swallowed. She did not want to say the words she uttered next.

“I will try again.”

Lhani sat at the table and took the stranger's hands. A writhing mist of light moved from his eye into hers. Her vision zoomed through the mist.

Gray clouds blotted out the sky over a stone tower with no obvious entrance. Lhani felt the stranger raise his hand to his throat. He'd grown taller and stronger, though his breath came ragged in his chest, as if he'd been running.

She felt his throat move, but no sound came out. He tried again until his throat ached. Lhani felt a sob of terror, or perhaps frustration, catch in his chest. He pounded his sword’s pommel against the stones.

Twin potted vines crept up the wall and pried stones apart, forming a portal in the stonework. Lhani sensed something break inside the vines as they rose. Disgust roiled in the stranger's gut as the brown-robed man walked through the portal. Master Willow scowled as he emerged.

“Glim? Where in blazes have you been?”

Glim. The stranger's name must be Glim.

“Enspelled, eh?”

Glim followed his teacher. The tower overwhelmed Lhani with its strangeness. Pots of herbs grew as she watched. Opulent carpets and furniture mingled with tables full of odd equipment and bits of glowing rock. A fish swam through air in front of her eyes, but Glim's hand batted it away. To him, none of this seemed remarkable.

Master Willow drew a dagger and brought it up to Glim's face. Lhani flinched involuntarily. Her host did too, but went a different way that she would have. The discrepancy in the movement she attempted and the movement she experienced gave her motion sickness.

“Hold still, you clod! I need some of your hair!”

For the first time, Lhani noticed a raven in a silver cage. A cage worth all of Hiehaven’s resources combined. Yet the man used it to hold this animal prisoner without so much as a blink of concern.

Master Willow cut a lock of Lhani-Glim’s hair and fed it to the raven.

The bird became panicked, thrashing around it its cage. Given what she’d scryed in Arrad’s mind, Lhani half expected the bird to morph into something and slay Master Willow on the spot. Instead, it croaked words. Somehow, those frightened her even more. Not only for her own fear, but for the desperation she sensed within Glim.

“A candle raised in frost's breath, bearing the eye of Algidon, shall wake the Faa-wthers. A candle awakens the unhearing. The unhearing flee. Squawk! The unhearing hear no more.”

Master Willow stumbled to the floor, arms raised. He looked terrified. Lhani honestly could not blame the man. Her own skin had goosebumps. Master Willow fled like a coward while the bird squawked and begged him for help.

The scene wavered and daylight arrived.

Glim bounded stone steps to a watchtower. Lhani cringed, for its stones seemed ancient and fragile, but to her surprise they felt solid.

“Summer storms are the worst,” she overheard two guards say. “Not seen one this bad since I was a lad.”

Atop the watchtower, black hair whipping in a stiff breeze, stood a pale man with dark eyes and hawkish features. Deep dimples ran like gashes down each of his cheeks. He seemed puzzled by Glim's silence, until the raven kicked up a fuss.

“A candle flickers in frost's first breff. The eye of Algidon meets the eye of Algidon. The candle speaks only breff!”

She tried to be a feather in Glim’s mind, but could not help wondering where these memories were headed. So when owls with snakes for tongues flew against the wall, she stiffened and paid attention. Whatever came next in Glim’s recollections might also be coming for Hiehaven.

A sob ripped inside of Glim's cavernous chest. Lhani felt tears sting his eyes. Glim set his sword on the ground and stepped on it while the raven croaked from his shoulder.

“Fawther. You cannot fight this. We are lost. All of us, lost, if you do not flee now.”

A wall of storm fell over them. People fled, taking few belongings and mounting horses. Lhani was gratified to see the help Glim extended to others. She knew his own terror, and saw him thwart his own desire to run time and time again.

He is a good person, whoever he is.

The gate opened, but Lhani-Glim could not see the path. As their horse galloped, Lhani heard screams and a sound she could hardly fathom in the sky. Her mental link with Glim could not convey it. Whatever made that sound is what she’d come to learn.

And Glim was deliberately keeping it from her. She could feel that, too; every time his mind drifted closer to the answer, he steered it away.

Glim released the raven into the whirling sky and turned his horse around. Lhani smelled death on the wind. A shadow fell from the sky. What could be that large? Glim cast a swarm of person-sized ice shards at the sky. Lhani gasped at the magnitude of his essentiæ.

Glim's father stood in the path of the ice. Lhani tried to run to him, tried to yell, but she was trapped in Glim's memory and could not affect the outcome. Glim’s father crumpled. Lhani recoiled in sorrow and empathy.

The wind settled. The shadow in the sky loomed closer. Lhani strained to see the horror that threatened to emerge, but Glim forced his eyes away. He turned his horse and set heels to it, galloping into a wall of white, as outrage rumbled in the sky.

The white dimmed and became Gerard's lodge. Everyone in the room stared. Lhani heard a scream reverberating through the room and realized it was coming from herself.