He could hear his father asserting with that overwhelming aura of true knowledge, You're a Historian, Jindigar. You've never belonged to Aliom.

Trembling, he leaned over and placed his hands on the worldcircle, feeling for the vibration of this world, the stamp of its individuality. His hands were dark shapes against the whiteness. The pure flowing energy shimmered and blurred around all fourteen of his fingers, the distortion showing that he, unlike Krinata, was holding himself away from Phanphihy. At his level of the priesthood he should be superficially attuned to the world he was on at all times.

Why am I holding myself from Phanphihy rather than leading the community to attunement?

A chill clamped at his heart. In his fear of fighting the dysattunement battle he had overlooked how vital his personal attunement was, not just to his Oliat but to the community. Perhaps he, himself, was the disruptive source of all their errors. The act of Inverting the Oliat function, as he had done when he sent Takora to her death and as he had done so often to save Krinata from ephemeral death, produced a disruptive backlash in the Invert's life—so that a period of errors, disasters, and bad judgments ensued. Was that the source of their problems? Simply Inversion splashback? If so, there was no cure but to ride it out, taking care not to Invert again. And

But Inversion wouldn't cause a loss of the Priest's attunement to Aliom the way omission of his priestly duties could. That omission could be the real reason he couldn't make a Center's decisions properly.

He knew what he had to do—unknowingly Darllanyu had said it. He must Emulate a Dushau. He must do the most basic of a Priest's exercises,, the Emulation of himself at his own induction, in order to attune himself and all who resonated with him, to Phanphihy.

Despite all of Raichmat's zunre's careful plans, he was the only Aliom Priest who had yet made it to Phanphihy. Only he could do this for them—and he had not done it in all the time they'd been here. True, he could only do the Inactive Priest's Induction—the rest would have to wait. But even that—even that, he had avoided. Why?

The others didn't know of his omission—they didn't know there was anything to be done. Very few of those who elected to learn Aliom and train in Oliat ever became Priests. An Aliom Priest forsook all other disciplines, for Aliom filled the whole of life–in Renewal and between. One had to be very sure one could attain Completion in Aliom; one had to sense shaleiliu between the self and Aliom before taking that drastic a step, because the dedication, once made, could not be forsaken.

Jindigar had made that dedication gladly and had never regretted it. Then why—why had he neglected this duty?

As he struggled to frame that question a pall of lethargy sapped his will, damped his thoughts to stillness, immobilized his body. This inability to move or think was his species' method of hiding from predators. But this predator was a thought —a danger to life, perhaps, but still only a thought.

lie fought his own will, wrestled with instinct, and won glimpses of what he feared: Krinata time and again wrenching control of his life from him as they fled the Empire; Ontarrah invading his family, inadvertently wreaking havoc among those he loved, Takora making him choose between Inversion and Incompletion-death. And all of them were Krinata. Icy fear transfixed him, fear of Krinata. What if she really is Takora?

Well what if she was? He gazed into the white of the worldcircle and knew why he had neglected his disciplines. What if I reach for my priesthood and find nothing–because Aliom ix an illusion–because Krinata has forced me to see through that illusion? There was only one way to find out whether Aliom still held anything of value for him.

With it tremulous sigh he farfetched back and back into menu try, threading his way around the familiar scars of pain that littered his experiences, and found the day of his induction into the Aliom Priesthood. He Emulated himself at that moment, integrating his young self with his present self.

He became young again, just past his second Renewal. He kneeled down in the worldcircle of the Inactive Aliom Temple in Therdiv. None of his immediate family had come to witness this most solemn moment of his life, still insisting he'd return to Historian's training. But his young self was brashly confident that he had found his own straight path to Completion. What if I was wrong? He had been wrong about one thing. It had not been so easy or so straight.

The thrumming of a hundred whules echoed in the vaulted hall. The white-clad Observing Priests surrounded him. The Senior Priests made a double line before him, a pathway to the eastern portal of the Temple around which were arrayed the symbols of Aliom: the lightning flash, the hand whose fingers were generated by lightning, and whose palm held life, the Oliat X balanced on the point of an arrow.

Through the portal behind the X came the Complete Priests in Oliat formation, dressed in black over pure white, each wearing one pure color of the spectrum. As they marched forward to surround the worldcircle he stretched out prone. They arrayed themselves in spectral order. The young Jindigar had not been instructed in what to expect—only to remember it always so that he might learn its meaning.

Four of the Senior Priests, those just short of being Complete, took hold of his limbs and pulled until he was spread-eagled into the form of the Oliat X. They suspended him above the white worldcircle, facedown above infinite white.

And then the whule music ended. The silence, despite the packed Temple, was profound. He'd imagined that the induction would be another formal questioning where he'd publicly declare his allegiance to Aliom, or perhaps another grilling where they asked seemingly superficial questions that required deep, abstract answers. But this—it was silly.

Perhaps that was the test—to see if the candidate had any common sense? He tried to raise his head to tell them that he'd gotten the point and they could stop now—but his eyes were glued to the whiteness beneath him. His initiation robes hung from his body, fluttering as if in a breeze—but not a breath of air stirred. His body was overheating. He couldn't squirm– his limbs were numb. And there was nothing but whiteness that invaded his senses and possessed his mind.

A sudden, piercing panic thrilled through him. They were doing something to him, something that would change him forever. He'd said he'd wanted it—but he'd no idea it would be done to him, not something he promised to do to himself.

But he would have done it to himself if they'd given him the tool to do it with. He'd decided that, though at the time he'd thought in terms of the other initiations where the candidate did something symbolic to himself, such as nicking the flesh to draw a drop of purple blood or blindfolding the eyes to sharpen other senses or binding the will with an oath.

His older self balked, no longer confident that his elders knew what they were about. But the memory played on relentlessly as he surrendered to his captors, letting the whiteness swallow him. Emulating, Jindigar could not prevent the youth's confidence from becoming his own again.

And then the colors started. Braids of rainbow hues stirred through the whiteness–as if he were looking down on the tops of clouds touched just so by the sun, stirred by the winds, and wafted into rainbow swirls.

Suddenly he was looking down a long tunnel—falling up it—racing along it—falling out of the universe—into the heart of Dushaun. In one mind-searing flash he was part of the complex of forces generating life out of the elemental stuff of the planet and its sun, generating the star and its planets out of the plasma of the cosmos.