Shuddering with the cold, he tried to stand and was grateful to find that the blow that had knocked him down hadn’t broken his ankles. The voice whispered, and he turned toward it.

His unseen tormentor knocked him sprawling in the snow with a hard thump to the chest. He clawed and missed again.

Whatever was abusing him, he couldn’t fight it weaponless and blind. The cultists surely didn’t expect him to. He was just supposed to persevere and get past it.

He crawled toward the whisper, enduring the freezing discomfort of wallowing in the snow. Because if he wasn’t standing up, his adversary couldn’t knock him down.

But it could shove him down onto his belly. Suddenly something big and heavy pressed on his back and smashed him into the snow, like a foot squashing an insect.

It was crushing him. And there was no air to breathe, just snow filling his mouth and nostrils.

He struggled, but couldn’t break free of whatever was holding him down. Terror screamed through his mind.

You’re fighting the dragon in your own soul, whispered the voice, finally saying something besides his name. The dragon nature you have always scorned. Claim it and all will be well.

With the words came a sense of something stealthily prying at his mind, trying to open it up like an oyster. Apparently the idea was that if raw fear alone didn’t convince a fellow to yield to the voice’s demand, a touch of enchantment might tip him over the edge.

Yes! Balasar thought, I accept the dragon! Meanwhile, he tried to hold his deeper self clenched tight against the Power seeking to penetrate it.

He could only hope it would work. He was no mystic, and no one had ever taught him how to feint or parry on a psychic battlefield. But he’d always been a good liar, and he was stubborn by nature.

Both forms of pressure abated. The dragon’s foot, if that was what it was, lifted off his back. The sense of influence faded from inside his head. As he floundered back onto his knees, spat out snow, and gasped in breaths of frigid air, the phantom voice called his name. But it was only a whisper, no longer a force trying to breach his soul.

Hoping the harassment was over, he rose and stumbled onward. After a few steps, the snow under his feet disappeared and the wind stopped screaming and shoving him around. He groped and found walls to either side. He was back in the corridor.

I was right, he told himself, it was all an illusion. The thought was reassuring, but not enough so to quell every trace of his anxiety. For all he knew, a person could die in a dream if it was a magical one.

Suddenly the air was humid and smelled of rotting vegetation. His lead foot plunged deep into muck. He waded onward. The slippery, sucking ooze was even harder to traverse than the snow had been.

A prodigious roar jolted him. Then liquid sprayed him from head to toe. It clung to him and burned.

He dropped to his knees and ripped up handfuls of mud and weeds. Using them, he tried to scour the corrosive slime off his body. Gradually, the worst of the searing pain subsided.

But by that time, he could hear the pad of the new dragon’s stride. It was coming at him.

Something pierced his shoulder from both front and back. Fangs? No, claws. They lifted him into the air and tossed him. He crashed into what might have been a tree. As he slammed down on the ground, something-broken twigs dislodged by the impact? — pattered down around him. The wyrm advanced on him.

The punishment continued in the same vein for a while. Balasar endured it as best he could, holding panic at bay by insisting to himself that none of it was real, nor was it meant to harm him.

Finally, the voice spoke. You despised the dragon inside you, and so you are afraid. Accept its gift of courage and all will be well.

He responded much as he had before. Then the second dragon allowed him to pass.

Next came a sandy place and a hammering storm that erupted in an instant. The wyrm in residence blasted him with a crackling something that made him dance an excruciating, spastic dance in place. He had to accept his inner dragon’s gift of strength to pass through.

After that was a place where the rocky, uneven earth groaned and rumbled, and the hot air stank of smoke and sulfur. Its drake seared him with what he took to be flame, and he promised to accept the gift of rage.

Then he entered a place where the air was cool. Something that might have been fallen leaves rustled beneath his soles. Unlike the other environments along the way, this one wasn’t immediately unpleasant. Was the nasty part of the initiation over?

Something hissed, and agony seared his nose, mouth, throat, and the inside of his chest. He collapsed, coughing and retching, trying to expel the vileness. But the vileness was in the air. It was all he had to breathe, and with every inhalation he sucked in more of it.

The dragon in your soul and the dragon deity are one and the same, whispered the voice. Embrace the deity as your own and all will be well.

I do! Balasar replied. I embrace him! Meanwhile, on a deeper level, he thought, never. Never in this life or any other.

The burning air didn’t clear. Perhaps it started to, but then the hiss sounded again, and afterward the floating, burning poison was thicker than before.

The sensation of psychic pressure intensified. The voice whispered its requirement once again. Evidently, this time it wasn’t satisfied with Balasar’s response.

Fearing that he was on the brink of passing out, Balasar repeated his assurance with all the vehemence he could muster. He did his best to mean and not mean it, believe and disbelieve it, at the same time-in much the same way a fellow pledged undying love to a female he wanted to seduce.

Enormous talons gripped him, but without piercing his hide. The dragon dragged him out of what must be a localized cloud of poison. Once he was clear, it permitted him to lie there, cough, and clear his lungs in peace.

The voice whispered, Balasar. When he felt able, he stumbled after it. He stretched out his hands so he wouldn’t bump into a tree.

Other hands took hold of him. They weren’t rough, but, his nerves frayed to tatters, he strained to break free anyway.

“Easy!” Patrin said. “It’s over. Let me take the helmet off.”

Balasar did. After being deprived of sight, even the soft amber glow of the magical sconce made him squint and blink.

He was back in the pentagonal chamber, and he wondered if he’d ever left it at all, even to the extent of fumbling his way down a passage. He seemed to be free of frostbite, blisters, bruises, scrapes, and all the other injuries that his ordeal, had it been entirely real, would likely have produced.

The cultists had removed their silvery masks, and Nala had at some point arrived to preside over whatever festivities remained. She had brown hide speckled with gold, and a pale puckered scar on the left side of her brow ridge. It was where she’d carried her piercing before her clan cast her out for the sin of adoring wyrms. She wore a vestment made of platinum scales. As she swayed rhythmically and ever so slightly from side to side, traces of other colors rippled through the folds of the garment. A glint of blue, a shimmer of red.

“Welcome, brother,” she said. “You’re one of us now.”

“Thank you,” Balasar said. His response felt too brief and matter-of-fact for the occasion, but he was too spent to come up with anything better.

“Let us pray,” Nala said. She raised her hands and recited in a language Balasar didn’t recognize. He caught the name Bahamut but nothing more.

Whatever she was babbling, there was magic in it. He felt a hot sting of Power in the air. As it in some measure possessed them, the other cultists-all but Patrin-started to writhe from side to side like she was.